HI | "J sive theft Baoks
I J for .'- 1 fit. 1 1 n- . ' u i el.fir. " '} CoIony"\

¦YAHJEWKniVEIRSinnr- DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

Men of the Bible,
Their Lives and Times.

Edited by Rev. J. S. EXELL, M.A.
Author of The Biblical Illustrator

"We commend the volumes of this series as
useful contributions to the popularization of the
results of Biblical scholarship— a tendency and
movement of our time of the utmost interest
and promise.'1 — Xcw Knglandcr.

17 Volumes, 12mo, cloth.
Price reduced to 75 cents, each, postpaid.

Abraham. By Rev. W. J. Dean, M.A.
Daniel. By Rev. H. Deane, B.D.
David. By Rev. "VV. J. Dean, M.A.
Elijah. By Prof. "W. Milligan, D.D.
Ezra and Nehemiah. By Rev. Canon Rawlinson.
Gideon and Judges. By Rev. J. M. Lang, D.D.
Isaac and Jacob. By Rev. Canon Rawlinson.
Isaiah. By Rev. Canon Driver, M.A.
Jerohriah. By Rev. Canon Cheyne, D.D.
Jesus Christ the Divine Man. By J. F. Vallings,
M.A.
. Joshua. By Rev. W. J. Dean, M.A.
Kings of Israel and Judah. By Rev. Canon
Rawlinson.
Minor Prophets, The. By Rev. Dean Farrar, D.D.
Moses. B"/ Rev. Canon Rawlinson, M.A.
Samuel and Saul. By Bev. W. J. Dean, M.A.
Solomon. By Rev. Dean Farrar, D.D.
St. Paul. By Rev. Prof. Iverach, D.D.
OTHER VOLUMES TO FOLLOW SHORTLY.

Fleming H. Revell Company,
New Yobk : 112 Fifth Ave. Chicago : 63 Washington St
Tobonto: 110 and 142 Yonge St.

ZlDen of tbe Bible

JESUS CHRIST THE DIVINE MAN

HIS LIFE AND TIMES

J. F. Vallings, M.A.
Vicar of Sopley, Hon. Fellow, Sometime Subwarden of
St. Augustine's College, Canterbury

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York Chicago Toronto
Publishers of Evangelical Literature

PREFACE.

If any apology be needed for adding another to the various lives of Christ
already before the public, it may be well to state how far this little book
occupies any independent ground of its own. The object of the writer has
been to make some small contribution to the moral and spiritual history
of the Life of lives, and this in some especial relation to missionary work
and the contact of Christianity with non-Christian religions. "The
ethical," as Prof. Kuenen well says, "is the universal human." Ethical
and spiritual sequences of cause and effect have been especially before the
writer's mind. The Gospel history is " a history, which in every part of
it," as Weiss says, " must be considered in the light of Him whotrans-
cends all history." The superhistorical relations of the historical life have
been touched upon in some of their bearings upon the past, present, and
future of Christianity. Even Keim, from whose point of view the present
writer wholly differs, while gladly acknowledging his great ability and
learning, and not infrequent reverence of tone and enthusiasm of humanity,
affirms of Christ's life that it is " bounded at its circumference by the
human limitations of His age, in its centre exalted above alL" Such
language may imply nothing but hero worship, but it is at all events a
recognition of the incomparable grandeur of Christ's life and character.
While the moral and spiritual aspects of the Life have been placed in
the foreground, every effort has been made to present the physical and
social environment briefly, yet accurately, in the light of modern research.
In this connection the archaeological and geographical labours of the
Palestine Exploration Society have been largely drawn upon, and the most
recent records of travel, especially those of Captain Conder, Mr. Lawrence
Oliphant, and Dr. Selah Merrill.
Upon the whole, the greatest obligations are due to Dr. Edersheim His
wealth of Rabbinical lore, his great theological erudition, his deep sym
pathy with Israel, springing from the strongest of all sources, the fountain
of blood relationship, and his true spirituality of touch, place his
werk, in the writer's estimate, at the head of all the contemporary literature
of the subject. Keim's merits are great intellectually, but it is impossible
for him to sink the negative critic, and to help rewriting, mutilating, and

¦V PREFACE.
disintegrating the Gospels. Weiss Is not five from the tame tendency,
but in the main is on the positive side. His psychological and critical
powers are high.
Mr. Stanton's book on the Jewish and Christian Messiah is one which
deserves more than passing notice. It is the outcome of very patient,
fair-minded study of the pre-Messianic and the Messiamc period. In the
interests of apology, and from the earnest desire to give the naturalistic
school full justice, he seems to err sometimes in the direction of concession.
His estimate of the Talmudic evidence tends to excessive minimizing of its
value. Dr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures are too well known to need
mention, and are beyond praise. Emil Schiirer 's work on "The Jewish
People in the Time of Jesus Christ " is a deep well of erudition, from
which all students of the period must draw. The book is, however, in
debted to many other writers from very different, and sometimes quite con
tradictory, theological schools. Direct quotations are acknowledged in the
notes. In regard to the position taken towards naturalistic and negative critics,
and in all debateable ground, it may be as well to state that controversial
points have not been argumentatively treated. First, because the spiritual
unity, and even the dramatic interest, of the Life is encroached upon.
Secondly, because the space required would be much greater. There is
however no wish to evade difficulties. They are often met indirectly and
suggestively. Conclusions are often stated without elaborate proofs, as
the result of carefully formulated opinion, and of some labour. Scholars
know where to look for the pros and cons of debateable questions. The
general reader satisfies himself with the results of technical investigation.
The writer cannot pretend to treat the Divinity of Christ as an open
question. He writes as an humble adorer, and most unworthy Jisciple.
The four Gospels throughout are treated as trustworthy historical docu
ments. The question of their origin, their genuineness, ane* authenticity, is
one far too large to be opened here, and may safely be left by all English
Christian apologists in the hands of Drs. Westcott, Hort, Salmon, Scrivener,
and Sanday.
Jesus Christ, to the writer, is the Ideal Man, the supreme ethical Term
and spiritual Superlative, the Representative Man, the Divine Man, God
over all, blessed for ever. To treat His earthly life in its organic spiritual
unity and moral relations has been in some degree attempted. May the
Blessed One bless the attempt I

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER L
rAoa
Thb Desks or all Nations . ...... i
The life of Jesus the earthly manifestation of the Divine life of
Jehovah — Historical character of that life upon the basis of the
Four Gospels definitely accepted — The doctrine of development
historically applied — The prczparalio Evangelica — The unsatisfied
spiritual desires of nations — The Roman unsatisfied by power,
the Greek by thought, the Jew by Rabbinism, the Buddhist by
Nirvana — The Desire of all nations the fulfilment of unsatisfied
spiritual needs, individual, national ; and His religion alone uni
versal — Jesus the Universal Ideal and Example, and the universal
and only moral dynamic. CHAPTER IL
The Messianic Hope within the Canon . • . • . •

Divine differentiation selecting from the woman's seed a nation,
a tribe — Typical characters and offices foreshadowing different
aspects of the Son of Man — Spiritual and devotional preparation
— The Ideal of the Prophets — The King — The Suffering Servant
of God — Post-exilian hope — The priestly hope — Minor and rela
tive ideals contribute to the fulness of the complete hope — Unique
hope in history — The Divine Man a fulfilment of multitudinous
foreshadowings. CHAPTER IIL
The Post-canonical Messianic Hope ..... 18
Debased period — Hope persistent — In Apocrypha impersonal and
national — In the Apocalypses personal and national — In the
Talmud — Rabbinism — Christ's work to re-create and transform
as well as fulfil the Messianic Ideal — What might have been.
CHAPTER IV.
The Divine Babe  39
The country priest's home— Zacharias in the Temple — The Angel
of promise to the priest — The Angel of promise to the Virgin —
The meeting of the holy women — The spiritual songs — The
journey to Bethlehem — The holy Nativity — The angelic anthem —
The visit of the shepherds.

vi CONTENTS.
CHAPTER V.
na
The Epiphanies or the Divine Infant . . • . • 38
The Epiphany of the Divine Infant In the Temple — The
Epiphany of the Divine Infant to the Gentiles— The flight into
Egypt — The return. CHAPTER VL
The Divine Bot. The Divine Youth • .... ft
Nazareth — Physical environment — Home influence and education
— Epiphany of the Divine Boy — The Father's house — The tender
Plant — The Divine Young Man — The simple home — Experience
of men — Communion with nature — God's silences of preparation.
CHAPTER VIL
The Pbophbt Baptist. The Divine Baptism .... 58
John in the Wilderness — The Great Renunciation — The Cry of
the Kingdom — The Flow of Penitents— Jesus Baptized— Why?
CHAPTER VIII.
The Divine Temptation . ...... .66
Personal Tempter, external and real ; not an internal process-
First offer — Supposed Buddhist resemblance — Second offer-
Third offer — Temptations recurrent — Temptation representative.
CHAPTER IX.
The Lamb of God. The Divine Son of Man at the Social
Feast. The Divine Reformer in the House of God.
The Divine and the Human Rabbi ..... 71
The first disciples — Sense of sin supreme factor — The Lamb of
God — The Son of Man — The Cana wedding ; its promise— First
Messianic passover — The Reformer — The Casuist.

CHAPTER X.
The Baptist's Farewell Testimony. The Saviouk and thb
Samakitaness. The Nazarene 
Jesus on the Baptist's ground — The Prophet's last testimony —
Jesus in Samaria — The Well of Jacob— In Galilee again — Ia
Nazareth again.

CONTENTS. Vii
CHAPTER XL »AC«
The Divtnb Galilean  90
Capernaum — The unknown feast at Jerusalem — Galilee in Christ's
time and now — Galilean labours.
CHAPTER XII.
The Divine Apostle. The Divine Moralist. ... 06
The selection of the Twelve— Organization of the Divine society
— Organization of the life — Code of the New Kingdom in its past,
present, and future relations. CHAPTER XIII.
The Divine Art Teacher. The Divine Nature-worker.
The Divine Missionary  106
Capernaum — Nain — The Baptist in Machasms — The Saviour
and the lost woman — Divine self-assertion — Spiritual industry —
Parables of Divine art interpret Nature — Miracle of power over
Nature — Demonism — Incessant labours — Mission tours — The
martyr of Machaerus — The Feeding of the Five Thousand — The
Bread of Life — The stormy lake — The contradiction of sinners —
Passover retreat — Back to work.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Divine Transfiguration  133
On the way to Csesarea Philippi — The Petrine confession — The
Rock — The Divine sign — The excellent glory — The descent —
The return — The predictions. CHAPTER XV.
The Ascension journey. The Divine Missionary in Perma. 131
The days of going up — Peremptory claims —The Feast of Taber
nacles — The adulteress — The Light of the World — The Shepherd
of Israel — Pastor pastorum — Persean Mission — The seventy mis
sionaries — The Good Samaritan — The devout home scene — The
prayer of prayers — Peraean work resumed — The Feast of Dedica
tion— Return to Perasa — Incarnate energy — Missionary Parables
— Parables of the Unseen World.
CHAPTER XVL
Gathering Shadows  . 148
The resurrection of Lazarus — Back to Peraea — Divorce and mar
riage — The rights of woman — The rights of children — Behold, we
go up to Jerusalem I— Jericho— Zacchaeus and the service of man
— The bhnd healed — The pilgrims in debate — The Sabbath rest
and unction.

viii CONTENTS,
CHAPTER XVIL rAGi
The Messianic Entry. The Contradiction or Sinners . x6g
The Triumphal Entry— The Devil's stand— The Second Temple
cleansing— The barren figtree — The "Day of Questions" — The
Divine Controversialist — The Divine Apocalypse— Jewish Escha
tology. CHAPTER XVIII.
The Divine Sacrifice  tjt
Judas traitor — Wednesday in retreat — The Last Supper — Geth
semane — The arrest — The Divine Prisoner before Annas, before
Caiaphas, before Pilate, before Herod — Judas's end — Before
Pilate again — Ecce Homo ! — Round the Cross — The Seven Words
— The Atonement. CHAPTER XIX.
The Divine Sabbath  187
The marred Body— The Soul free among the dead — Easter Eve.

CHAPTER XX
The Resurrection and the Forty Days  19a
The Resurrection — Magdalena dolorosa— The. Resurrection unex
pected, a Divine must be — Emmaus — Appearance to the eleven
apostles and other brethren — Differentiation of offices — Doubter
Thomas — Messianic critical difficulties — Celsus's objection —
Vision hypothesis — Galilee again — The fishers on the sea again-
All authority — Undetailed appearances— The great Forty Days-
Divine organization — Development of order — Development of
faith — Continuity, both of soul and body — The four distinct
Evangelic reports. CHAPTER XXI.
The Ascension and After ........ mc
CHAPTER XXII.
Thr Character of Christ. Christ as a Moral and
Spiritual Worker  au
Miracles morally conditioned— Jesus Christ a spiritual miracle —
Strength of right will — His originality, negative and positive —
Authoritativeness — Placed humanity upon the throne of the
cosmos, and made moral and spiritual interests supreme — Gave
a moral ideal, and a moral dynamic — Individualism — Univer-
salism — Women — Children — Practical every-day morality — Con
sistency — New virtues and graces — Faith — Hope — Love —
Humility— Truth — Religion of the Body — Unification of religion
and morality — Prayerfulness — Self-assertion of sinlessness.

CHAPTER It
THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS.
" Thirst came upon the worshipper, though he stood in the midst of the
waters" (Rig-Veda vii. 89.4).
Tlaonq Se r^c oucovpevrjc, ijaav (ot irpoiprjrai) dtdaVKakiov Upbv rijg.
xepi 6eou yvtiiaeidc, xai tjj£ Kara ^/w^v ^oXireiag (Athanasius,
" De Incamatione," xii.).
The life of Jesus the earthly manifestation of the Divine life of Jehovah —
Historical character of that life upon the basis of the Four Gospels
definitely accepted — The doctrine of development historically applied
— The prceparatio Evangelica — The unsatisfied spiritual desires of
nations — The Roman unsatisfied by power, the Greek by thought,
the Jew by Rabbinism, the Buddhist by Nirvana — The Desire of
all nations the fulfilment of unsatisfied spiritual needs, individual,
national ; and His religion alone universal — Jesus the Universal Ideal
and Example, and the universal and only moral dynamic.
Jesus Christ is God over all, Blessed for ever. The earthly
life of Jesus was the manifestation in a single province of God's
universe of that Divine life which was, and is, and is to be,
above and beyond, before and after all the universe, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The life of Jesus Christ is a
fragment of a great whole. That whole is the Divine life
eternal, which was seen by men's eyes, heard by men's ears,
handled by men's hands for one-third of a century. The study
of the earthly life of Christ is the divinely revealed mode of
approach to the knowledge, and, through the knowledge, to the
possession of the Divine life. In the work and teaching of
Jesus Christ, the Divine work and teaching were exhibited
under the limited conditions of earthly life. The Divine
character was translated into earthly forms to be seen and read
of all men.

3 JESUS CHRIST.
The appearance of Christ amongst men was the greatest
event in human history ; the relations of God to man and of
man to God and of man to man underwent a change. This
change was not due to any alterations in the unchangeable
character of God, but was the effect of a new approach, long
foreshadowed and prefigured on God's side to man. The
incarnation of the Son of God introduced to man a new
character, a new force, a new example. That character, that
force, that example, were the revelation of the Divine under all
the varying conditions of human life. The Divine Life stooped
down from heaven, humbled itself to the level of its own
creatures, submitted to death for its own high purposes.
Nature is not conquered but by obedience. The self-humilia
tion of God is another illustration of the truth of the Baconian
epigram. To conquer human nature, to lead it in a willing
triumph, the Word became flesh. As the old Fathers have loved
again and again to express it, God became man that man might
become God. The Divine became human and emptied itself
of its glory that the human might be glorified into the
Divine. Reader and writer alike of the life of Jesus Christ do well to
remember that every deed and word and thought recorded in
the memoirs of Jesus Christ are God's. The contemplation of
Christ's life is an act of worship. Worship is the only possible
attitude of the soul as it stands before the mystery of the
revelation of the eternal God. Here, the absolute and the
relative, the infinite and the finite, the unseen and the seen
touch hands. The creature can only apprehend and understand
the Creator under its own conditions. God has made Himself
knovvable, intelligible, loveable, by the works of His hands.
To impart that knowledge to the creature which is eternal life,
tr make the children of men children of God, the Son of God
became, and continues for ever, the Son of Man. To increase
the knowableness of God, Christ.manifested Him under directly
and immediately knowable conditions.
The idea of development is the most important intellectual
discovery of nineteenth-century thought. Under the dominion,
and sometimes the exclusive tyranny, of this thought, all out
historic investigations have been reconsidered. The applica
tion of these principles to every department of life and thought
is an intellectual necessity. And the Christian welcomes the

THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. 3
scientific revefiations, wherever and however misunderstood or
perverted, as an inspiration from the God of truth.
Read in this light the life of Jesus Christ becomes full of
manifold Divine light All pre-Christian history is seen to be
marching from stage to stage to this consummation. All
Christian history is seen to be the gradual development of the
work of Jesus Christ. The life of Christ is recognized as
absolute and unique in itself, but in strict relation to the whole
chain 01 God's eternal purpose. What led up to, and what
followed, that life may be regarded as the natural movements
of Divine causation, supernaturally born in the bosom of God's
thought, and supernaturally conditioned by His will. Then the
manifestation of the Christ is viewed as the personal entry of
the Divine Being upon a scene long prepared and having before
it a long, but unknown, future.
The coming of the Son of Man was not an absolutely isolated
event in the history of mankind. There was a long prepa
ration, a continuous development, a gradual differentiation
through the ages. Prince after prince, ruler after ruler, prophet
after prophet, man of God after man of God, were sent. They
were forerunners : they were types : they were links in the
chain. They all pointed onwards and prepared the way for
the coming Prince, Ruler, Prophet, the Man of God. The
gifts, the powers, the excellencies, the glories of all, were to be
combined in one. He was to be Crown and Flower as He had
been the root of all. All the events in all the ages were
marching forward to this culmination. Conscious and un
conscious prophecy reached its fulfilment ; its partial fulfilment
as the earnest of the higher fulfilments to be.
Roman, Greek, and Jewish worlds lay in the shadow of
death. The old order was everywhere changing ; the birth of
the new creation was at hand ; the world was sick and weary.
Nothing in life could give satisfaction to the human spirit. The
cry of the child of Vedic India, " Which of all these gods will
hear our cry, and be favourable unto us ? Who will come down
and deliver us?"1 was the reverberated wail, or the unex
pressed sigh, of an infinite wilderness of hearts.
The Roman conquest had brought into the field of religion
a number of competitors, none able to hold the sceptre of
* Rig-Veda x. 64. x, quoted by De Pressense, " The Ancient World
and Christianity," p. 187.

4 JESUS CHRIST.
the strongest. The conquest resulted in a fusion of national
gods and religions, a synthesis, not unlike that seen in some of
the developments of the Indian Brahmo Samaj. All religions
were thus put upon an equally relative footing ; and none could
claim an absolute sanction. Religions which may be equally
true will be equally false, and to such a position thought was
actually drifting. The attempt to enforce religion by State
policy inevitably tended to destroy any claim to higher than
human sanction. " Honour the gods," said the Roman states
man Maecenas, " according to national custom ; and compel
others to honour them likewise." *
The only god possible to humanity, when all divinities were
dethroned, was some anthropomorphic attribute, or combination
of attributes. The god of the Roman world was power — his
impersonation the Caesar. He was power and human self-
worship incarnate. His name was deified. His apotheosis began
to take place in his lifetime. But "permanent and habitual
admiration" (according to a modern, but wholly inadequate
definition of worship) of embodied power could not satisfy the
cravings of the human heart for anything but hero-worship,
Still the conception of a Divine Caesar might have assisted
some minds in the Roman world to admit into the shrine of
their hearts a Divine man, who claimed to be the incarnation,
not of political power only, but of moral and spiritual power,
of power over Nature, of power over the heart and conscience,
over the temporal destinies of nations, and the eternal destinies
of men ; and not of power only, which may be worshipped and
dreaded, but not loved; but of love, holiness, wisdom,
righteousness, which constitute what is loveable as well as what
is admirable. A true Roman was prepared to admire Order
and Law Incarnate. And the works of Supernatural Order,
Law, Power, were just those which were set in the Roman
Gospel of Mark for his instruction. The impersonation of Law,
Order, Power set upon a new basis, robed in a different uni
form, the Imperial purple of His own blood, and wearing a
Crown but of thorns, and breathing the new and wholly strange
atmosphere of unspeakable love and infinite humility, was the
new Divinity who claimed whatever of loyalty, of adoration, of
reverence, was left in the debased religion, whose gods were
humanised and whose human beings were deified. Here, as
* Quoted by Pressense from BoUslor.

THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. $
always and everywhere, Christ came to recognize, transform,
and elevate all pre-existent good, as well as to crush and
destroy all pre-existent evil. The disintegration of national
divinities resulted in the integration of Cassar-worship, the
actual religion of the Roman world when Christ came to in
stitute a new religion.
The Greeks of the day were merged in the Roman world.
The worship of the Greek had been anthropomorphic. Plato
indeed had theistic moments. Aristotle had thcistic moments.
But for both God was a bare abstraction. God was the
Thought of Thought, but out of relation, not in relation, to the
object of thought. Ktvei wc tfiuipivov, not <nv« wc efi&v ; i.e.,
He moves the universe as an object of love, not as loving it,
as transcending it and out of relation to it. Such a God could
only be, and was, to the popular mind a negative quantity,
similar to the Brahma of Hinduism.
The real divinity of Greeks was Thought, in its various in
carnations of philosophy, art, literature. But even intellectual
salvation and mental satisfaction had not been reached, and
one inadequate system gave way to another, and left humanity
with the whole head sick and the whole heart faint.
On the moral side, Socrates and the Socratic school had
created a desire for moral ideals, and so far as ethical systems
could gratify the appetite had provided the best of fare. But
talking about virtue could never manufacture h. The moral
dynamic was wanting, and the concrete impersonation of
abstract moralities. Socrates was the nearest approach to the
latter. A remarkable passage in the Symposium of Plato
indicates that his personality had upon some of his disciples
the effect of creating moral self-dissatisfaction, distinct from
the mere jealousy of moral or intellectual inferiority. " When
we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, his words
produce absolutely no effect in comparison. . . . And if I were
not afraid that you would think me drunk, I would have sworn
as well as spoken to the influence which they have always had
and still have over me. ... I have heard Pericles and other
great orators, but this Marsyas has often brought me to such a
pass, that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which
I am leading. . . . For he makes me confess that I ought not
to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and
busying myself with the concerns of tne Athenians ; therefor*

6 JESUS CHRIST.
I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the
only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might
think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does
the same." »
If any of the Socratic school did as much as this they did a
great deal ; they created such a thirst as prompted the question
of certain Greeks, " Sir, we would see Jesus," and paved the way
for those conversions of proselytes to the Israelites, especially in
the dispersion, in the search after a real and righteous God, or
from the synagogue of Israel to the Christian Hellenist.
The Jewish world was self-limited, self-centred, and self-
absorbed. It was, too, in a state of subjection. How could
political degradation but affect the nation, and nullify any
extra-national prestige and influence, even if it were claimed?
And it was claimed but partially. "Be of the disciples of
Aaron (the peaceful) ; loving peace and pursuing peace ; loving
the creatures and bringing them nigh to the Thorah"" — beauti
ful words of Hillel's, as Kuenen justly remarks 5 *' but," as
he asks rightly, "how, when the theory has to be put into
practice, and it appears that this 'Thorah,' with its 'hedge'
raised by the Sopherim, and made yet stronger and higher in
accordance with the seven rules drawn up by Hillel himself, is
inaccessible to the 'creatures' who are to be brought to it?"'
No, Pharisaism itself, which was the Jewish religion of the day
when Christ came, as one says who has done it at least justice
(if not, much more than justice), at " its own most flourishing
period, proclaims loudly and unmistakably enough its own
insufficiency. Within, and still more around it, in the life of
the Jewish people, all manner of phenomena might be noted
which, to any one capable of observing and fathoming them,
could admit of no other interpretation than this." *
Judaism left to itself could never ascend to an international,
to an universal religion. The best proof of which may be
found in modern Judaism, which is the natural development of
unchristianized Judaism. Modern Judaism never extends its
borders, never makes converts, or tries to.
• Symposium, 215, 216, Professor Jowett's translation ; ct Trench,
"Hulsean Lectures," p. 251.
* Pirke Aboth. L 13.
» Kuenen, " National Religions and Universal Religions,'' Hibbert
Lectures, 1882, p. 214. 4 ibid. p. an.

THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. ¦}
If neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Jew, could provide an
universal, a satisfying religion, we need hardly pursue our
investigation far into the Oriental religions. No civilized
nation has ever adopted any of these religions, nor could any
without denationalizing itself. Whatever truths were in
them they had neither vitality nor force to preserve their own
believers from falling into the rear of nations. Nor would it
require much demonstration to prove that all of them, without
exception, had long been on the path of deterioration and
decay, even within the limits of their own obedience.1 One
great Oriental religion, that of Islam, destined to play a great
part in the world, had not yet appeared in the stream of com
petition ; and when it did appear, it was " as a side branch of
Christianity, or, better still, of Judaism."*
Buddhism will be noticed at various points later on. But, as
a satisfaction of the desire of all nations, it pronounces its own
hopelessness by turning away from the world instead of
redeeming it, by expelling desire instead of satisfying it, by point
ing to nothingness as the crown of existence, and the consum
mation of developments. ¦ Confucianism again has little room
for a doctrine of God. " Whatever of this kind is found in
these (i.e., the SM and the Shih) exists only in shreds and
patches " ; 3 and its worship is carried on representatively only
by the Head of the State, unshared by the multitudes of the
people. All religions, all teachers had failed, had vanished in turn.
The Roman, the Greek, the Jew, the Oriental, had made their
several contributions, positive and negative, to the development
of a new faith. The time was come for an universal religion
and an universal Person. An Ideal Man was the secret answer
to spoken and unspoken needs ; an Ideal Man who should take
up, consecrate, and complete all previous moral ideals ; an
Ideal Man who should be universal, not fashioned after
particularist national idiosyncrasies, who was not a Roman, a
Greek, a Jew, an Oriental. He must be a Son of Man.
Nor was an Ideal Man sufficient. He would satisfy the
craving for a moral ideal ; but the standard would be as un
attainable as ever. Example would be a source and centre of
* Taoism is an example after the death of Confucius. Legge, " Religions
of China," p. 179. * Kuenen, p. 53.
1 Legge, " Religions of China," p. 248.

8 JESUS CHRIST.
moral attractiveness. But example in itself had been again
and again tried and found wanting ; and even examples such as
Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Buddha, had never raised others to
their own level after the image of their life had faded into the
dark silence. Power of imitation was required as well as an
object to imitate. And this could only be given by one who
could communicate the power. Jesus Christ claimed to be the
ideal Son of Man, and claimed to give the power to His
spiritual children to become the sons of God, His brothers in
work, in life, in character, in glory. Jesus claimed to supply
moral dynamic ; to heal the inveterate, chronic, universal
disease of enfeebled will, as well as to supply an absolute and
universal standard of character and life.
The Desire of all nations came then to fulfil that desire. He
came to raise mankind to the levels of their own ideals, as well
as first to transform their ideals. He came, the Son of God, in
the uniform language of the Fathers, to make men the sons of
God. He came to spiritualize, to divinize, to deify ; and so to
give the true expression, and the higher conservation, even the
infinite promotion, to all the works and workers of righteous
ness, truth, holiness in all the kingdoms and sub -kingdoms of
thought and life. He came to make men feel they were loved
by the Supreme Love, and must love the Supreme Beloved.
And the earthly scene chosen for the theatre of Divine
manifestation fulfilled the long-ripening process of God which
had differentiated one people and country for Divine purpose.
It was well fitted, too, apart from antecedent preparation, being
the meeting-place of East and West, of many natior s, cultures,
Civilizations, faiths.

CHAPTER IL
THE MESSIANIC HOPE WITHIN THE CANON.
•* E'n now the shadows break, and gleams divine
Edge the dim distant line."
J.H. Newman.
Divine differentiation selecting from the woman's seed a nation, a tribe-
Typical characters and offices foreshadowing different aspects of the
Son of Man — Spiritual and devotional preparation — The Ideal of the
Prophets — The King — The Suffering Servant of God — Post-exilian
hope — The priestly hope — Minor and relative ideals contribute to
the fulness of the complete hope — Unique hope in history — The Divine
Man a fulfilment of multitudinous foreshadowings.
The beginning of the coming of the Christ must be looked for
where there is no beginning, in the eternal thought of the bosom
of God. The Lamb was slain, and, if slain, sent, from the
foundation of the world. The protevangehum, or primal
germinal gospel, is contained in the first word of Divine revela
tion. The gospel of hope is contained in the promise of the
victorious seed of the woman. The gospel of suffering con
quest is implicitly foreshadowed in the vision of conflict with
the Serpent. From the world-wide family of the woman to the
seed of Shem according to the blessing of Noah passes the
first Divine specialization, or selection of grace. From the race
of Shem the Divine finger points to the family of Abraham, the
servant of the Lord. In the father of the faithful a Messianic
person as well as a Messianic nation is distinctly foreshadowed.
Abraham's character forms an important stage in the ethical
development of the Messianic idea. For his faith became the
model of all faith. His character as the servant of God est ib-

IO JESUS CHRIST.
lished a spiritual idea. Such a faith could never die out of the
world for ever. Abraham was justified by faith. The gospel
of justification by faith in Christ underlay, as it preceded, the
law, and was never disestablished. The spiritual forward-
looking and upward-looking faith of the father of the faithful
constituted a moment in the spiritual history of a world,
desiring redemption, peace with God, reconciliation internal
and external.
Moses is the next link in the chain of purposive selection-
The Lawgiver himself is a suggestive type emphasized by his
own promise of a greater Prophet than himself. The Mosaic
legislation is a new departure in the Messianic development.
Floods of light converge upon the Promise of the ages. The
laws, the worship, the institutions of Israel moved towards one
central hope, the Ideal Servant of the Lord,1 the ideal sacrifice,
the ideal priest, the ideal teacher and lawgiver. However im
perfectly realized the Ideal Sufferer was with graduated distinct
ness typefied. Judges and rulers paved the way for a single
ruler, and suggested the heroism, the manliness, the conquering
majesty, which should be finally embodied in the fulness of the
Divine formula, the Son of Man.
Great characters, great national movements, evoke and inter
pret great ideas. As the fortunes and dignities of Israel rose
the ideals of Israel ascended.
From the house of Israel the differentiating energy of the
Lord selects the tribe of Judah, and from the tribe of Judah the
family of David. The prophecy of Nathan is the next landmark
in Messianic development. The hope of Israel is a royal hope.
The person of the Messiah is brightening into a clearer splen
dour. The anointed of the Eternal wears a Davidic crown.
The servant of the Lord is a sovereign of man. The Messianic
idea and the Messianic ideal step by step, subject to relapse
and retrogression, become fuller, more definite, more concrete ;
not shadowy abstractions, nor hazy poet dreams. From first to
last the personal and impersonal elements are interwoven ; the
Messiah and the nation blend in though and feeling never
wholly distinguishable. All Israel is ideally a kingdom of
priests, a holy nation, a Messianic body ; and remains so to the
last breath of prophecy and to the post-canonical vaticinations.
1 Cf. Edersheim, " Prophecy and History in relation to the Messiah *
(p. 187) on " The Ideal Destiny of Israel."

THE MESSIANIC HOPE WITHIN THE CANON. 1 1
God uses every national development to advance spiritual
development. Slowly, but surely, the links in the chain of the
Divine philosophy of history unwind. The spirit of the age is
moulded to His own uses by the activities of the Spirit of God.
The monarchy embodies and accentuates the monarchical aspect
of the Messianic hope. An ideal king, an ideal kingdom,
point the golden stream. Often the kingdom is expected in
the near future, and the kingdom is only a magnified edition
of known kingdoms. Wave after wave of disappointment do
not submerge, but tend to unsecularize the Messianic loyalty.
Psalm rolls to psalm its welcoming " God save the king " to the
music of a royal march. Deeper down in the heart of the
people sinks and waits the royal hope. Even if the psalms
of the directly Messianic royal hope be reduced to but ten or
eleven, there are many latent aspirations and inexpressive heart
vaticinations feeling towards this centre. Unquestionably the
royal portrait of the Messiah was the most popular one to the
end. The higher, the deeper, sacrificial beauties of life, of
work, of character, appealed to the higher and deeper natures
taught of God in the school of devotion and sacrifice. Power and
glory are always worshipped in the world. Habitual veneration
for power and domination is a notable characteristic of Oriental
ism. To this day the not real, but superficial, absence of power
in the ethical portrait of Jesus constitutes a barrier to His
acceptance by the Indian mind.
The devotional wealth and pathos of Psalms, un-Messianic or
unconsciously Messianic, must have gradually uplifted the con
sciences of worshippers. Much of spiritual, as of all education,
comes from unnoticed surrounding and secret impalpable forces.
Worship, rightly used, is a supreme spiritual educator. The
Temple feasts, the private sacrifices, the secret prayers of such
as the seven thousand in Israel who bowed not to Baal, the rich
incense of family devotions, kept alive among the purer the fire
of spiritual worship. The sense of worship reacted upon the
conscience, and all the moral life, filling hearts with awe and
the consciousness of responsibility, the sense of sin and the
need of expiation, to which sacrifices gave the deepest ex
pression. The monarchical ideal remained an unfulfilled hope, a chronic
disappointment, but an unappeasable undying desire. Prophecy
sustained the royal hope through evil report and through good

12 JESUS CHRIST.
report. "Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and
seek the Lord their God, and David their king,' and shall come
with fear unto the Lord and to His goodness in the latter days "
(iii. 4, 5, R.V.), says Hosea, after affirming that " the children
of Israel shall abide many days without king, and without
prince " (i. io ; ii. 23), and he promises ingathering mercy to the
Gentiles. " Behold the days come," said Jeremiah, "saith the
Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and he
shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute judgment
and justice in the land. . . . And this is his name whereby he
shall be called, The Lord is our righteousness " (xxiii. 5, 6, cf. ;
xxx. 9). Ezekiel sung the same song of hope : " And I the
Lord will be their God, and my servant David prince among
them, I the Lord have spoken it " (xxxiv. 24) ; again, " and
David my servant shall be their prince for ever " (xxxvii. 25).
And whatever date be assigned to the remarkable apocalypse of
Daniel the figure of the Prince Messiah is clearly projected.
Even in prophecies less directly Messianic, glowing hopes and
longings find expression, or were characteristic of some whom
the prophet knew. " The day of Jehovah " as early as the time
of Amos had become a definite goal of aspiration. Such
language would take shape and colour in more definite outlines
as the connection of the future age with a single Personality be
came more clearly understood, and would contribute to bathe
His coming with associations of glory and awe.
But a new and more momentous contribution was made by
prophecy to the conception of the Messianic Hope in its
portraiture of the suffering Servant of God. The idea of
the Servant of God, like that of the kingdom of God, per
vades the whole Old Testament. Israel as a people,
Israel's rulers, kings, prophets, priests, were ideally servants
of the Lord. But it was reserved for prophecy to fill in the
colours, and fit on the framework, to preliminary sketches.
The prophets had admittedly contemporaneous relations, and a
historical basis. But the portrait of the Suffering Servant finds
no original before the time of its fulfilment. The germs of the
idea are to be found in the Passion Psalms, such as the twenty-
second. The Psalmist may have, at times, idealized his own
sufferings, but he spake in the Spirit, and his winged words went
* "The older Jews, of every school, Talmudic, mystical. Biblical, gram'
matical, explained this prophecy of Christ " (Pusey, s.l.).

THE MESSIANIC HOPE WITHIN THE CANON. I J
farther than his own horizon, and consciously travelled to
infinite goals. The sufferings of psalmists and prophets, the
sufferings of Israel gave additional intensity of feeling and
vividness of realization to a conception already foreshadowed
in the primal promise, and in the intimation of the Egyptian
bondage of his seed to Abraham, and in that bondage
itself, and in all the pre-Messianic sufferings of the servants of
God. Isaiah * is the richest treasury of Messianic prophecy, and
the largest contributor both to the joys and sorrows of the pre
dicted Messianic life. Isaiah's prophecy of the Servant of God
is complete in its wealth of pathetic detail too familiar to need
illustration. It is an "" archetypal Sorrow," an impersonated
Anguish, which appears before him. Yet his "internal pro
gramme" is gorgeous with triumph, and radiant with victorious
hope. And he sees more clearly than any what Psalmists at
times apprehend, the universal relations of His royalty. " He
will be the rallying point of the world's hopes, the true centre of
its government" (xi. io).* The conceptions of Isaiah foreshadow
a superhuman being. His language attributes Divinity to
Messiah. He is to Isaiah, however far his vision soared
beyond the flights of ordinary contemporaneous aspiration,
"The Mighty God" (ix. 6), as Jeremiah in the passage already
quoted identifies Him with Jehovah (xxiii. 5, 6).
The chastisement of the Captivity touched with a new pathos
the traditional hope. And " while the Messianic ideas were
growing in spirituality, they were also increasing in influence.
This is the most characteristic note of the new age. The
Messianic ideas were popularized. Hitherto they were the hopes
of the prophets ; now they became the hopes of the people." 3
Haggai contributed to the Messianic hope the remarkable
prophecy " of the latter glory of this house " (ii. 6-9). Zechariah
announces definitely : "And many nations shall join themselves
to the Lord in that day, and shall be My people " (ii. 1 1) ; and
identifies the One "whom they have pierced" with Jehovah
Himself. Malachi closes the Canon with mingled promises and
* The question of a second Isaiah, or Great Unknown, need not here ba
discussed. The outlines of the Messianic portrait remain the same, how-
ever many hands may (or may not) have held the brush.
¦ H. P. Liddon, Bampton, p. 84.
s W. F. Adeney, " The Hebrew Utopia," p. 295.

14 JESUS CHRIST.
warnings clustering round the rising of the Sun of righteous
ness, and the mission of Elijah the prophet (iv. i-end).
The monarch, the prophet, brought various lights, and em
bodiments of attributes, to the fulness of the Messianic concep
tion. Had the priesthood of Israel no relation to the blessed
Hope ? Indirectly, or directly, we can trace a priestly element
in the Messianic ideal. Indirectly in the stamp of holiness. To
adopt Kuenen's words,1 without his conclusions. " ' Be holy, for
I, Yahweh, am holy' (Lev. xix. 2 ; xx. 7, 26, cf. 24 ; xxi. 8, 15,
23 ; xxii. 9, 16, 32 ; xi. 44, 45 ; Numb. xv. 40, 41). In these
words the priestly thorah itself sums up its conception of
religion. It is with this demand that it comes to the whole
people and to every several Israelite. . . . The centre of gravity
for him lies elsewhere than for the prophet ; it lies in man's
attitude not towards his fellow-man, but towards God ; not in his
social, but in his personal life." A second mark of the priestly
ideal " may be found in the assumption of worship amongst the
duties of the people consecrated to Yahweh, and of every
Israelite in particular." Such a deeply-rooted feeling could not
be satisfied with anything short of a Priest, as well as a Prophet,
Messiah. But the conception of His priesthood was latent
rather than explicit. The One Hundred and Tenth Psalm, a
Messianic Psalm of David, to which Christ Himself referred
His objectors, declares —
" The Lord hath swom, and wBl not repent.
Thou art a priest for ever
After the order of Melchizedek."
In Psalm cxxxii. the anointed, the Heir of David, the Lord's Ser
vant, " wears not the kingly crown (dtarah), but the priestly
(neser), with its golden plate or flower (tsits)." * Zechariah pre
dicts the Lord's Servant, the Branch, who "shall sit and rule
upon his throne and be a priest upon his throne."
Such conceptions must have prepared the way for the full
Christian doctrine of the Priesthood of Messiah unfolded in the
Epistle to the Hebrews. Nor can there have been wholly want
ing in Israel men like Zacharias, the spiritual forefathers of the
great company of the priests who became obedient to the faith,
1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 160 foil.
* "Church Quarterly Review," No. 51. p. na.

THE MESSIANIC HOPE WITHIN THE CANON. 1 5
men who had risen in some degree to the purpose of the Divine
election, and were recognizably in life and heart as well as ex
ternal communion with God, those " whom He hath chosen,"
those " who are His," who are "holy," whom He " will cause to
come near unto Him " (Num. xvi. 5). Such men could not but
raise the standards of holiness. Such men could not but suggest
an ideal Holy Priest, who should show forth their holiness,
while He transcended and ennobled it. And so the stock of
Aaron would prepare for the Priest not of their order, but
of Melchizedek's. In the wonderful Messianic chapter of Jere
miah predicting the Branch of righteousness, the prophet con
nects the promise of a perpetual priesthood with that of a per
petual throne. Both are put on the same level ; and the former,
the covenant of priesthood is repeated several times. Jeremiah
does not suggest that " David My servant " would also be
" David My priest." But his words must have gone far towards
universalizing the conception of the priesthood, and extending
its functions into the infinite distance.
Ezekiel the priest in his apocalypse of the glorified temple
and service shows the priestly bias and prepares the way for an
ideal worship and priesthood.
The place of worship in the devotional preparation of the
people and in the moral education of the conscience has been
alluded to already. And we may add, in connection with the
development of the priestly aspect of the Messianic ideal, that
"we find from beginning to end the deep impress of a sacri
ficial system which must have been unmeaning and self-imposed,
and is consequently an unexplained phenomenon in history if
it did not lead upward and point onward to the perfect priest
hood and sacrifice of One " * " who hath been made, not after
the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an
endless life" (Heb. vii. 16). That these sacrifices led up to, and
were fulfilled in, the sacrifice of Christ, seems to the Christian
as undeniable as the historic fact that since that one Sacrifice
for sins for ever " the blood of bulls and goats " has ceased to
flow. To the eye of Christian faith the stream of Messianic pro
phecy deepened and widened through the ages. Many con
ceptions, primary and secondary, direct and typical, poured
1 Professor Leathes' " Religion of the Christ," p. 92.

[6 JESUS CHRIST.
into the quickening waters their various and enriching deposits
The figure of the Christ becomes more concrete, more definite.
The Ideal takes up within Himself all the ideals of prophet and
priest and king. Every relative revelation contributed its sub
scription to the sum total. The temperaments of the prophets,
the spiritual characteristics of psalmists, the surrounding con
ditions of the social and religious atmosphere bathed the coming
age and man in a thousand lights, many coloured, and variable
from age to age, and from mind to mind. " But on the whole
there is a wonderful continuity and persistence in the stream
of prophecy which flows down the ages," * and an internal con
sistency. The various elements harmonize in a most complex
and intricate concord of Divine music. Even a modern Jewish
Rabbi ' affirms that "the doctrine of the coming of a personal
Messiah is the purple thread that runs through the writing of
our prophets and historians." And " one of the thirteen funda
mental articles of faith, which every Israelite is enjoined to
rehearse daily, is, ' I believe with a perfect heart that the
Messiah will come ; and although His coming be delayed, I
will wait patiently for His speedy appearance." ' 3 The very
possession of this splendid hope is an unique fact in the history
and literature of nations. Its vitality, its colour, its imperishable
interest, its indestructibility, are evidenced through all the rises
and falls, changes and chances, which embarrassed or assisted
its fulfilment.
And so the Ideal Divine Man was foreshadowed. And the
prayers of the righteous were a factor in the Divine develop
ment no one can recover from the higher side of history, that
of the unseen. " Each victory, each deliverance, prefigured
Messiah's work ; each saint, each hero foreshadowed some
separate ray of His personal glory ; each disaster gave strength
to the mighty cry for His intervention ; He was the true soul
of the history, as well as of the poetry and prophecy of Israel."4
And the ideals, dimmer, but indestructible, outside the chosen
people shed their lustre, or moved moral desire, onward and
upward. Using " sculptors " and " painters " in the sense of

' W. F. Adeney.
* Adler's "Course of Sermons," pp. 123, 126, quoted by Gloag, "Mes
sianic Prophecy," p. 81. 3 Gloag, s. I.
* Dr. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, p. 93.

THE MESSIANIC HOPE WITHIN THE CANON. 17
moral and spiritual art workers, we may adopt the noble lines
of a modern poet :
" All partial beauty was a pledge
Of beauty in its plenitude . . .
The one form with its single act.
Which sculptors laboured to abstract.
The one face, painters tried to draw,
With its one look, from throngs they saw.
And that perfection in their soul.
These only hinted at ? The whole.
They were but- parts of? '" »

• R. B. Browning, " Christmas Eve and Easter Day."

CHAPTER III.
THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPS.
" Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God and the God of our fathers, the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God great
and powerful and terrible, God Most High, who bestowest Thy benefits
graciously, the Possessor of the universe, who rememberest the good deeds
of the fathers and sendest a Redeemer unto their sons' sons for Thy
Name's sake in love. Our King, our Helper, and Saviour and Shield,
blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of Abraham" (Tephillah, "The
Prayer," the first of the Eighteen Benedictions, translated by Bishop
Lightfoot, " Clem. Rom." p. 462).
Debased period — Hope persistent — In Apocrypha impersonal and national
— In the Apocalypses personal and national — In the Talmud — Rab
binism— Christ's work to re-create and transform as well as fulfil the
Messianic Ideal — What might have been.
We enter now upon a different phase of the Messianic develop
ment. It is in some respects retrogressive. The debased
period of Messianic architecture has arrived. But we have the
clearest historic evidence that the hope of hopes had not
withered away. Indeed if it had, we should have found ourselves,
first, in absolute collision with the Gospels and Josephus and
secular historians, which show a very vivid and widely existing
working of the hope in all classes, and beyond Palestine ; and
secondly, in absolute collision with all doctrines of development
which look ifor great effects in the operation of an antecedent
concourse of progressive causes ; so that Christ and His dis
ciples would have first had to manufacture a Messianic idea
and permeate the nation with it, and then claim to satisfy it.
Adequate data are preserved to indicate, not as fully and clearly
as would be desirable, but with sufficient fulness for historical

THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPE 1 9
requirements, the persistence of the Messianic hope outside the
limits of canonical history. The age of the Apocalypses suc
ceeds the age of the prophets. The disintegration of the his
torical life of the nation encouraged supra-historical tendencies.
The imagination ran after ideals when the school of reality
shut so many doors to hope. In a similar way peoples who
have enjoyed a very small measure of political freedom i.tve
sometimes shown an extraordinary tendency to free speculation
and audacities of mental venture.
We come first, for convenience of arrangement, in contact
with the Apocryphal books, Palestinian and Grecian, which
are of very various dates. It is in vain here that we look for a
personal Messiah. Messianic hopes are vague and impersonal.
There is, however, nothing irreconcilable with a personal
Messianic hope. Indeed the Messianic times and a Judaic
kingdom are the undercurrent of all Apocryphal aspiration.
And there are various elements which survive of the older hope,
but narrowed, nationalized, and distorted. The oldest of the
Palestinian books is the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, or
Ecclesiasticus. Here we find glimpses of an everlasting priest
hood, " Moses consecrated him " (Aaron), and anointed him
with holy oil ; this was appointed unto him by an everlasting
covenant, and to his seed, so long as the heavens should re
main," &c. (xlv. 15). So again of "an holy temple to the Lord
which was prepared for everlasting glory" (xlix. 12).
In the Book of Tobit (xiii. 16, 18) we hear of a Jerusalem
rebuilt with sapphires, and emeralds, and precious stone," all
whose " streets shall say Alleluia," and that " all nations shall
turn, and fear the Lord God truly, and shall bury their idols.
So shall all nations praise the Lord," &c. (xiv. 6, 7). In the
beautiful Book of Wisdom placed by some at about 150 B.C.,
which however may be of Christian date, we read ct the
righteous — " they shall judge the nations, and have dominion
over the people, and their Lord shall reign for ever." In
1 Maccabees hints appear of a coming "faithful prophet"
(iv. 46 ; xiv. 41). In 2 Maccabees the dim but remarkable hope
that God, "as He promised in the law, will shortly have mercy
upon us, and gather us together out of every land under heaven
into the holy place" (ii. 18). In Baruch the burden is "Take
a good heart, O Jerusalem " (iv. 30). Alike in Ecclesiasticus
(xxxvi. 1-17), in Baruch (iv.), and in Tobit (xiii. 14), national

20 JESUS CHRIST.
prospects, national exaltation, and Gentile depression, are the
prominent landmarks in the far, or near, distances.
But we have other documents of the post-canonical period
which are much richer in Messianic colouring. The Apocalypses
distinctly pre-intimate a personal Messiah.
In the most ancient pre-Christian fragment of the Jewish
Sibylline verses, a famous passage speaks of the coming of a
king from the sun,1 in ifcXtoio :
" Then shall God send a king from the Sun, who shall cause
the whole earth to cease from wicked war, when he has slain
some and exacted faithful oaths from others. Neither shall he
do all these things of his own counsel, but in obedience to the
beneficent decrees of the Most High." *
And again in the later, but pre-Christian fragment :
" But when Rome shall rule over Egypt also, uniting it under
one yoke, then indeed the supreme kingdom of the King Im
mortal shall appear among men. And there shall come a pure
king to hold the sceptres of the whole earth for ever and ever
as time rolls on."3
In the pre-Christian portion of the Book of Enoch (here, as
before, we refer to the critical editors for the chronological and
textual questions, and adopt only probable conclusions), we find
most important Messianic contributions. Here there is the
remarkable apocalypse of the white bullock :
" And I saw that a white ox was born, having great horns,
and all the beasts of the field and all birds of the air feared him
and prayed to him continually."
In the Book of the Three Parables the Messiah is repeatedly
called the " Son of Man ; " but the expression sounds like a
Jewish Christian insertion.
The Fourth Book of Esdras is supposed by some to be pre-
Christian, but more probably dates from the reign of Domitian.
The Apocalypse of Baruch is also too late to be pre-Christian.
But in the beautiful, so-called Psalter of Solomon we are in
1 Better than as Schiirer, " from the East"'
• Stanton, p. 114. I ibid., p. „7.

THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPE. 21
the presence of undoubted pre-Christian documentary evidence
to the Messianic Hope.
The desolation of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the "holy
people," and God's encouraging promises to them form the
subject of a book, which both in its loftiness of moral beauty and
literary skill " has remarkably caught the tone of some of the
noblest prophecies of the Old Testament."1 The date is
probably the time of Pompey's capture of Jerusalem. The
great Messianic passage is from xvii. 23 to xviii. fin. ; and
herein is found the specific use, some consider the first, of the
term Christ as the title of One to come. A fragment only may
here be briefly rendered from Hilgenfeld's text :
" Behold, Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of
David, in the time which Thou, God, knowest, to reign over Thy
servant Israel. . . . And he shall gather together an holy
people, whom he shall lead in righteousness, and shall judge
the tribes of the people sanctified by the Lord their God. . . .
And there is no unrighteousness in his days in their midst, for
all are holy, and their King is the Lord Christ. . . . And he is
pure from sin, to rule a great people, rebuke rulers, and destroy
sinners in strength of word. . . . Shepherding the flock of the
Lord in faith and righteousness, and he shall not suffer them
to be weak in their pasture. . . . Under the rod of chastening
of the Lord Christ . . - "
The Assumption of Moses, and the Book of Jubilees, of
doubtful date, the former placed by Schiirer at the beginning of
the Christian era, contain no Messianic King but general out
lines of a blessed future.
In the great Hellenised thinker, Philo, we seem to find no
prominent traces of a Messianic King — a possible suppression
of conviction upon political grounds — but a God-sent warlike
hero does appear, though the Messianic hopes find expression
more in a picture of a national restoration of glory and great
ness. Josephus, like Philo, is of the first century A.D. He so far
apostatized from the national hope as to apply Messianic pro
phecies to Vespasian. But his pages overflow with testimony
to the presence and intensity of the hope amongst the people,
and its influence upon the rebellion against Rome.
¦ Stanton, p. 77.

22 JESUS CHRIST.
Jewish works written after the Christian era are coloured by
the violence of the anti-Christian controversy. But they clearly
represen t Jewish traditional views, however modified by the impact
with Christian thought. Mr. Stanton seems to unduly minimize
the evidential value of Talmudical literature. That literature
is so strictly traditional, so substantially self-consistent in spirit,
and so clearly a development of the debased Judaism, that it
is unhistorical to ignore its evidential validity. Very full treat
ment of the Rabbinical expectations must be sought in Eder-
sheim's wealth of quotations. These point to the conclusion
that the Rabbinical Messiah was a super-human man, hovering
between Divinity and humanity, higher than the angels, existing
before the world. They indicate also a "character of finality " "
in His work and office which would assist minds towards a
belief in His super-human greatness, in His essential Divinity.
The contrast upon merely literary comparison between the
canonical and post-canonical literature is striking. Even Jose
phus follows " the uniform Jewish tradition to the effect that the
prophetic succession ceased with Malachi, and marks the time
of Artaxerxes as the limit of the period of inspiration." '
With the ebb of the prophetic spirit had drifted away the
glory and spiritual beauty of the Scriptural Messianic Ideal.
From the rich creativeness, both in literary art and spiritual
science, of the God-gifted members of the goodly fellowship of
the prophets, religious literature sunk for the most part into the
hands of the Sopherim, and religious life under the guidance of
the late-born sect of the Pharisees.
The great fact in the religious condition of Israel at the time
of Messiah's Advent was the dominance of Rabbinism. The
religious post-exilian revival lacked the breath and health of
inspired movement. Palestinian Judaism sank into narrow
legal sectarianism. The letter of the Law became a religious
fetish after the spirit had been quenched. Foreign subjugations
drove the Palestinian Jews more into themselves religiously.
Hellenism, and the intellectual breadth and general culture
which accompanied it, exercised the greatest influence upon the
Jewish dispersion, who formed the majority of the nation, and
especially upon the western diaspora, both negatively and
* Stanton, p. 148.
• "Josephus," in Smith's " Dictionary of Christian Biography," article by
Dr. Edersheim.

THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPE. 23
positively made important contributions to preparedness for the
new revelation. But in Palestine, " the land," as Jewish pride
called it, Hellenism, while affecting commercial life and industry
among the middle classes, while attracting and often altogether
secularizing and half-paganizing rulers of the Herodian School,
and the wealthy and powerful Sadducee faction, made no im
pression upon the dominant and popular religious feeling.
Pharisaism, through its organ, the Synagogue, controlled all the
religion of the most religious of peoples. The Scribes and
Pharisees had succeeded to the spiritual and intellectual
supremacy of the prophets. The priests, under such secularized
leaders as the tools of the Roman Government, who dishonoured
the pontificate and turned it into a source of personal gain and
political and social power, had but little religious influence.
Their lips had ceased to keep knowledge ; and men would not
seek the Law at the mouth of the son of Levi, but at the mouth
of the Rabbi.
The Sopherim, or Scribes, were the professional doctors of
the Law ; they held the key of knowledge. The Pharisees were
their disciples, "who put their theory into practice. If the Scribes
consecrated themselves wholly to the study of the Law and its
application to life, or more truly to the subjection of the life of
the people in all its branches to the precepts of the Law, the
Pharisees are absorbed in its observance and in the realization
of righteousness, regarded as conformity to its ordinances." '
The Scribes sat with the chief priests and elders as judges in
the ecclesiastical courts, both in the capital and in the provinces.
Even in heaven they claimed posts of supreme honour, the
flatteries of the angels, and the eulogies of God. Religion
under their influence became a profession ; the conduct of life
a high art. " To know the six hundred and thirteen command
ments of the written LawJ the incalculable number of the un
written," * was the province of the elect.
When we wonder at the subjection of the common people
(the Am-ha-arets) to the Rabbis we have to bear in mind that
no such thing as individualism could exist, or ever did exist
except among the select few, in any ancient people. The sense
of individual freedom and independence and moral and intel-
¦ Kuenen, p. 208, Hibbert Lectures.
» Wellhausen, " History of Israel," p. 502.

24 JESUS CHRIST.
lectual responsibility is of modern and, above all, of Christian
extraction and growth. The very word conscience is practi
cally speaking of Christian birth and education ; though the
moral feeling it certifies and conveys of course is coextensive
with human nature down to the most degraded types in some
form or other.
Again the material interests of the people followed in the
wake of those of the rulers. This is true to some degree, even
under modern conditions. And the material power and pros
perity of the time lay largely in the hands of the Sadducees and
Romanisers, who for religious purposes supported the Rabbinical
party in opposing a Messiah who made spiritual claims on
spiritual grounds, and exacted a corresponding moral, spiritual
allegiance from the heart and life, instead of ceremonial ad
hesion, or political support. All the material influences of the
time worked against Christ. We see it in the extreme sharp
ness and decisiveness of His own words about the danger of
riches, and the hardness with which rich men entered the
Kingdom of God. It is not always easy now to be true to
Christ, when the kingdoms of trade and industry, the acquisition
and distribution of wealth, material prosperity and social com
fort, and the forces of politics, have bowed to the sceptre of
Christian influence, and always nominally in Christian countries,
and, in part actually, acknowledge His lawful control. It must
have been as hard then when the sacrifice required was most
violent to become a Christian, as it is now for a modern Jew or
high caste Hindu.
Nor were the people intellectually qualified for that indepen
dence of judgment, which is so characteristic of Western indi
vidualism, even without the basis of competent knowledge.
They revered the Law, but could not read a word of it in the
original Hebrew. The Interpreter must translate the sacred
lore from the Hebrew into the vernacular Aramaic. Here he
was dependent upon the current interpretation of the Scribes,
and they upon the tradition which they had accumulated and
formulated with vast labour. So the Mishnah or Second Law,
" which intended to explain and supplement the first," super
seded and overrode it. "This constituted the only Jewish
dogmatics, in the real sense, in the study of which the
sage, Rabbi, scholar, scribe, and Darshan, were engaged."
The Halachah applied and extinguished while professing to

THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPE. 25
interpret the Old Testament. The Haggadah, or popular ex
position, claimed only personal authority. " But all the greater
would be its popular influence, and all the more dangerous the
doctrinal license which it allowed." *
Because religion had sunk into externalism, and moral
interests had been crowded out, therefore the Messianic ideal
had inevitably fallen with religion. Rabbinism had proclaimed
as its watchword devotion to the Thorah. Such an ideal might
have heen nobly conceived and nobly carried out. Unhappily
the Law had ceased to be that of Divine revelation. Tra
ditionalism, while professing to explain, had actually superseded
the Law. Obedience to the Law meant external obedience ; the
righteousness of the Law meant external righteousness. The
result of obedience was merit, and the result of merit sonship.
The Law had thus lost most of its moral content and force.
Legal holiness had degenerated into ceremonial purity, like
that of the Brahmin. The ceremonial law was multiplied into
an infinity of petty pedantries, pressing upon the minutest
details of daily life as an intolerable yoke.
The favoured ideal of the Messiah was now that of a great
Rabbi, who should exalt the Law to its utmost bounds, who was
also a great conquering king who should impose the Thorah
upon the necks of the Gentiles, and the Rabbinical party high
enthroned upon the heads of all in material and social
supremacy. Jesus Christ had to chose between the Scriptural and the
Rabbinical ideals. They were irreconcilable, they were in
capable of mutual concession, of modification, or of transfor
mation. He chose to revert to first principles. He was a
restorer of the old. He preserved the Law by casting off the
parasitic incubus of traditionalism. He preserved all that was
of universal moral validity in the old by transforming it. He
did not merely restore, He renewed, re-created.
If Christ had adopted the Rabbinical ideal, He would, un
doubtedly, have been accepted as the Jewish Messiah. And
the temptation constantly presented itself to Him. As it was,
He had to unteach as much as to teach. He had to destroy as
much as to build up. He was a destructive critic as well as a
constructive founder.
We cannot then admit much force in certain modern
* Edersheim, i. ii, 13,

26 JESUS CHRIST.
apologies for Rabbinism. They have, for the most part,
naturally emanated from Jewish writers, who have maintained
their tradition, and are the modern representatives of the
Rabbinical schools. It is to be regretted that so great a scholar
as Kuenen,* while keenly criticizing some of the more patent
defects, should have done Rabbinism what seems something
more than justice. Whatever may have been the merits of
individual Rabbis, however much better they, or their disciples,
may have at times been than their creed, the damning fact
remains that they were at the head and front of the anti-
Messianic opposition. Although upon the Sadducaic high
priests rest the chief guilt of the national apostasy, consum
mated in the judicial murder of the Messiah, yet it was the
Rabbis who were the sleepless opponents, the malignant critics,
and false accusers, in their consistent hatred of the Messiah and
all His words and works.
The sense of sin, both individual and national, of spiritual
failure and shortcoming, which breathes in all the minor keys
of the Psalter, had amongst all but, it may be, a small remnant^
vanished away. National and individual pride, externalism,
exclusiveness, fanaticism, were the dominant features in the
character of pre-Christian Israel. Some remnant the chasten
ing fires of discipline, the beatitudes of the school of suffering,
had purified and prepared. But they were as invisible in the
general mass as the unseen stars in the unapproachable
heavens. To such the sacred music of the Psalms still spake
in intelligible accents ; the words of the prophets searched
their hearts ; the Temple feasts and sacrifices, and the great
fast moved them to penitential tears, or raptures of thanks
giving ; the worship of the Synagogue and the home stirred
and lifted them to Divine communions, and penetrated with the
sense of the unseen Holy One. Some of this type may have
originated, or appreciated in an extra legal sense, the saying
that " if all Israel would together repent for a whole day, the
redemption by Messiah would ensue."
But, taking Israel as a whole, the question referring to the
Second Advent might have been applied to the first, when
the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth ?
The hard task that lay before the Christ was then twofold
» Vide especially, Lecture V., in the Hibbert Lectures.

THE POST-CANONICAL MESSIANIC HOPE. 27
First, to convince people that He was the Messiah. Secondly,
to convince them that He was not the Messiah of their pre
conceptions, but of Scriptural revelations ; to rehabilitate the
Messiah of the prophets ; to transform their whole Messianic
conception. His task was to change and transfigure their whole
life, with all its wealth of hope, and love and passionate desire ;
and to plant in the torn soil of hearts bruised and broken for a
new seed a living faith in Himself, as the Messiah and the Son
of God. Alas the Messiah was rejected before He came, in His
inspirations and prophecies, types and shadows 1 Had the
Divine light been truly reflected, it would not have shone into
darkness. Had the level of inspiration found a corresponding
height of Messianic belief, height would have answered to
height, re-echoing the Divine Voice, and deep to deep.
Through Him and His Israel, as His ministering servants,
all nations were called to be servants of God ; Israel was
to be universalized. All Israel should have been John
the Baptists. Israel failed their high mission, but their
casting off, because they cast off, did not thwart the plan
of God, and involve the Gentiles in their loss. The
Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the dispersion of
Jewish thought and morals with the Jews, were Messianic
stepping-stones to Gentile hearts. Even now a great future
appears to await Israel repentant ; and their Divine work of
service and place of honour is only half lost and half deferred.
Had but Israel known the things that belonged to their peace !
Had they but preserved the true tradition of the Messianic
prophets, had they but arisen and stood upon their feet, an
exceeding great army, when the trumpet call of the prophet
of the wilderness sounded — then to a people who had been
true to God's call — the Christ would have come. This new
demand upon their faith would have been met with the fervour
of instant and wholesale acceptance. The Christ of God,
acknowledged by His own, would have gone forth at the head
of His people, His chosen, and gathered in, without the slow
long agonies of patient missionary conquest, the fulness of the
Gentiles. On Israel rests the first and heaviest responsibility
for what is and what might have been.
" For of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these ' It might have been.' "

28 JESUS CHRIST.
But, of Israel too, may it be said —
" Ah, well I for us all some sweet hope lie*
Deeply buried from human eyes ;
And, in the hereafter, angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away." '

• J. G. Whittier, " Maud Muller,"

CHAPTER IV.
the divine babe.
" For it was no other God whom the Israelite shepherds were glorifying,
but Him who was announced by the Law and the Prophets, the Maker of
all things, whom also the angels glorified" (Iren^us iii. x. § 4. trans
lated by Keble).
The country priest's home — Zacharias in the Temple — The Angel of
promise to the priest — The Angel of promise to the Virgin — The
meeting of the holy women — The spiritual songs — The journey to
Bethlehem — The holy Nativity — The angelic anthem — The visit of the
shepherds.
The sacred scene opens in the rural home of a faithful priest
of Israel. Most of the priests lived out of Jerusalem ; in
Nehemiah's time about four-fifths of the whole number.1 In
the hill country of Judaea, probably near" the ancient and
priestly Hebron, lived a righteous, i.e., pious and dutiful, priest
and his wife, Zacharias and Elizabeth. Both were aged, both
of Aaron's blood. Zacharias belonged to the eighth of the
twenty-four courses, or "divisions," or "families," into which
the priesthood had been originally divided in David's time
(1 Chron. xxiv. 7-18). Four of these only had returned
from exile (Ezra ii. 36-39), and had been redistributed under
the old designations. One trouble vexed the godly home, and
shaped many prayers. An "heritage of the Lord" (Psa. exxvii. 3),
even the " dower of blessed children "
had been denied them. Like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel,
• Cf. Nehem. xL 10-19 with Ezra ii. 36-39 and viii. 2.
* Not " in," as Keim, for then Hebron would have been mentioned.

30 JESUS CHRIST.
Manoah's wife, Hannah, the most privileged daughters oi
Israel, like her own people " until the fulness of the Gentiles
be come in," Elizabeth was barren.
Emphasizing this fact for its spiritual connection with after
events, the sacred narrative bears us from the hill-side home
into the Temple. As it was October, it must have been the
second time that the course of Abia ministered that year, for
to each course a week of duty was assigned. Upon what day
Zacharias officiated we are not told. The critical hour of his
life had come ; the more abundant answer to all who looked
for the consolation of Israel. One was waiting to be gracious
both to a childless mother's prayer and a Messiahless wist
ful people. In the chain of Divine preparation two homes
formed the last, but not least, links— the home of the country
priest, the home of the unwedded maiden.
The great gates of the Holy Place had been opened. The
three blasts of the silver trumpet had rung through the city.
From before dawn the morning sacrifice had been prepared.
For the third time the priests had met in the " Hall of Polished
Stones " to draw the third lot, to choose the incensing priest,
and the fourth lot,1 " which designated those who were to lay
on the altar the sacrifice and the meat offerings, and to pour out
the drink offering." The coals from the altar of burnt-offering
had been spread on the golden altar. The assistant priests
had withdrawn, and left the celebrant, golden censer in hand,
alone in the Holy Place. It was the sacred, the cherished,
" enriching," moment in the life of any priest. Erect, before
the altar, clad in white linen vestments " for glory and for beauty "
(Exod. xxviii. 40), symbolizing purity, turban on head, with feet
bare, looking towards the Veil which hung before the Holy of
Holies, having the table of shewbread on his right, on his left
the sevenfold flame of the golden candlestick, stood Zacharias,
waiting the signal of the president to spread the incense upon
the altar, and to meet his God (Exod. xxx. 6 ; xl. 26).
When the time had come the " cloud of odours " rose up to
heaven, mingling with the prayers of the people. The whole
multitude without, with hands outspread, bowed down in wor
ship, as with the silence of heaven at the opening of the seventh
seaL The incense offering was the most solemn phase of the
whole sacrificial process, as " gold to stones"3 compared with
« Edersheim, "Temple," p. 137 ; Schiirer i. 294 f. " Philo.

THE DIVINE BABE. 3 1
the blood offerings. Such was the fittest time, for Divin<
revelation to priests. John Hyrcanus, " alone in the Temple,
as high priest, offering incense, heard a voice that his sons had
just then overcome Antiochus." * Farther back, David had been
called and anointed of the prophet at the time of the family
sacrifice. Never before, or after, did Zacharias " burn incense
before the Lord," and offer therewith the representative inter
cession of all the farspread sons of Israel. And this was the
most august burning in time, in manner, in result, ever offered.
For on the right, or auspicious, side of the altar appeared an
angel, and announced to the trembling priest the promise of a
son — the forerunner of the Messiah. Gabriel, the strong man
of God, who had about the time of the evening oblation
announced to Daniel the yet distant march of the Prince, had
now the mission to report His near approach. The interview
must have lasted some minutes, for the multitude waited in
wonder. Zacharias came out to " the top of the steps which
led from the porch to the Court of the Gentiles." But the
multitude left without the triple benediction, gathering from
his signs that the dumb-struck priest had seen a vision, and in
this way were prepared for further signs to come.
Nine months of speechlessness in the retired rural home gave
the priest much time for devout contemplation. Such a shock
would leave an indelible impression and quicken the develop
ment of Messianic faith. A sudden blaze of light had fallen
upon the ancient promises of Divine lore, and the symbolic
anticipations of Temple worship. Faith supplied a key better
than learning. The whole stream of Divine purpose, obscured,
corrupted, and darkened indeed, but less among the Am-ha-
aretz than in the city, must have been lighted up with new
promise and potency of glory. Such influences at work in the
heart of the chosen priest and his wife must have taken effect
on the unborn child, and after his birth prepared the way, and
in some degree accounted for, the fulness and wealth of his
spiritual development, and the depth and maturity of his
Messianic conception. What other home in Israel could have
been the training ground of the prophet ? What more fitting
nursery for a personal force, inspired by and steeped in the
Scriptures, unindebted and indeed hostile to contemporary urban
authority and petrified traditionalism? The prophet did not
1 Josephus, "Ant." xiii. 10. a.

32 JESUS CHRIST:
owe all his originality and unique moral force to himself. Hii
character owed its primary development to the home of a
devout priest, blessed by an immediate Divine revelation, and
living in the light of a recognized Divine purpose.
St. Luke, who must have counted among his basal authorities
the mother of the Lord, or her family and friends, before bringing
together the two holy mothers into the foreground, passes by a
rapid stroke from one home-centre of grace to another. While
Elizabeth waited in glad expectancy of assured promise, the
Angel Gabriel went on his yet greater mission to another high
land home. A poor, but royal born, maiden, betrothed to a
village carpenter, with the common name of Miriam, or Mary,
is greeted by the awful messenger. The record of the
Annunciation is as simple and unadorned as a legend of
Oriental imagination would have been gorgeous and hyper
bolical.1 The details are as few as possible consistent with the
historic preservation of the mystery revealed. Was she rapt
in secret devotion at the hour of morning Or evening sacrifice ?
Was she borne on the soaring wings of Messianic desire, and
" Faint for the naming of His advent feet " ?
There must have been some spiritual preparedness and " ripened
receptiveness"* of the highest order of grace. There is a
Divine fitness of time and place about the Epiphanies of the
Eternal, Divine self-reverence when He would manifest His
mysteries to the meek and pure-hearted " Hail, favoured," or
"graced," one. So was the flower of Israel and humanity
approached. The words recalled the Divine message to such
as Gideon, " the Lord is with thee," and preface the supreme
Annunciation that she is the chosen mother of the Messiah.
The question of maidenly simplicity follows. How? And
supernatural faith, never so taxed in any earthborn before or
after, is rewarded with the promise of the overshadowing
Spirit and power of the Highest. The Son of Mary would be
the Son of God. An unsought sign is superadded, the sign of
Elizabeth, her own kinswoman.
« See, e.g., the legends of Buddha's conception and birth, the whits
elephant entering into the side of Queen Maya as she lay on a celestial
couch in a golden palace, &c, &c.
• Cf. Dorner, "System of Christian Doctrine,'' iii. 343, E. T.

THE DIVINE BABE 33
" Yes, and to her, the beautiful and lowly,
Mary, a maiden, separate from men,
Camest thou nigh and didst possess her wholly,
Close to thy saints, but thou wast closer then." *
" The altar of the Virgin's womb was touched with fire from
heaven."" "Conceived of the Holy Ghost" is an article of
faith on a level with " born of the Virgin Mary." It was the
function of the Creative Spirit to form the human nature oi
Jesus, as by Him " He is always born anew in the hearts of
saints." 3 In patristic language, " this ray of God entering into
a certain virgin, and in her womb endued with the form of
flesh, is born Man joined together with God."4
There is a deep touch of nature in the narrative following,
which is its own evidence of truthfulness. Burdened with a
blessed and awful secret, Mary seeks the home of her who alone
can give and exchange with her womanly and spiritual sympathy.
Her kinswoman, Elizabeth, can verify the angel's annunciation,
and alone in Israel can counsel her with full knowledge of her
unique position, added to the weight of her many years of piety
and henown share in the Advent glory of the Messiah. The
meeting of the two saints, the young maiden, and the aged wife,
linked in closer communion than that of their own blood, was
one of as pure joy, as when two friends meet in the further light.
The mother of the past, and in her the Law and Prophets of whom
the unborn babe was the last representative, rendered homage
to the mother of the future. Affected by the mother's exultation,
the babe leapt in her womb in unconscious homage. Deep
emotion, human and Divine, kindled by the breath of the Holy
Spirit, broke into the greeting of the elder mother, and the
sublime prophetic lyric of the younger. The holy song gathers
up the song of Hannah and many prelusive strains of expectant
Israel into a new and golden sheaf of praise. Poetic power
was, and since has been, a singular gift of the women of Israel.
Apart from its rhythmical form, the Magnificat is " a gem of
purest ray serene." Not Hebrew, not lyrical only, but all poetry
is the utterance of impassioned truth. " Every truth which a
human being can enunciate, every thought, even every outward
» F. W. H. Myers, " Saint Paul." * Bp. Alexander.
3 Without reference to the Holy Spirit, Ep. to Diognetus xi.
* Tertullian, Apol. i. 31, for copious parallels vide notes s. 1. in Oxford
translation.

34 JESUS CHRIST.
impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may become
poetry," J. S. Mill ' has well said, " when invested with the
colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection." " All deep
speech is song ;"' and this ode is deepest song of deepest speech.
Triumphant joy is the dominant note of the Hymn of the Vitgin
Mother. Joy and thanksgiving in the kingdom of God her
Saviour— which in the prophetic cast of the singer's vision has
already come to the help of Israel, in fulfilment of the promises
made to Abraham and the fathers. The exact nature of the
i ncarnate kingdom has not risen into definite proportions. Song
and singer alike looked behind and before, and belonged to both
dispensations. After three months this rare communion was broken, Mary
returned to her own home, and to Elizabeth came her time of
fulfilment. The child was born ; mother and kin and neighbours
rejoiced together. On the eighth day he was circumcised. Un-
forgetful of the angel's promise, the father closes the discussion
about the name by writing down John (Jochanan), and his
long-sealed lips were lit with priestly-prophetic fire. The pro
mised horn of salvation had been raised up in David's house.
His new-born son was to be the forerunner of the Saviour.
The song strikes the deepest gospel notes — salvation, light, peace
to the people of God.
Meantime the condition of his espoused brought painful
questions to the mind of Joseph, and suggested to the humble
conscientious Tsaddiq of Nazareth a private divorce. His trial
of faith ends at the third angelic annunciation, this time in a
dream. Each link in the chain of angel ministries completes
the one " Far-off Divine event"
" to which " unconsciously " The whole creation moves."
Each person within the sacred circle of the two families con
tributes something to the development of the Divine Advent.
St. Luke connects the journey of Mary and Joseph to Beth
lehem with the decree of Augustus. It is incredible that with
all the contemporary sources of information open to him he
should have blundered as the negative critics aver. He was
1 " Essay on Poetry." • T. Carlyle.

THE DIVINE BABE. 35
aware that a census took place ten years later (Acts v. 37), and
could not therefore have confused the two. It has been shown
by A. Zumpt that Quirinius was probably Legate of Syria for the
first time B.C. 4 to B.C. 1, and that this registration, begun under
Herod, was fully effected later during his tenure of office. In
obedience to the law, Joseph went up to the city of his forefather
David to be enrolled, accompanied, as was natural under her
condition, by Mary.
The place is now called Beitlahm, inhabited by five thousand
people industrious and well to do. Flocks and herds abound,
and the vineyards are good and plentiful. Up the two-terraced
limestone hills, girt with figtrees and olives, to the long grey
village, now crowded with travellers, the two poor Galileans
came, after passing the still existing site of the Tomb of Rachel.
Thoughts of the faithful Ruth and the shepherd lad, David,
must have crowded upon the mother expectant, flesh of their
flesh, promise of their promise, the instrument of fulfilling of
David's hope. To any child of David's house Bethlehem was
revered and holy ground. To her, if she knew Micah's prophecy
and had heard of the coincidental Rabbinical tradition, " little "
(v. 2, 4) Bethlehem was the recognized place of sacred travail,
and more than mother's joy. The frowning castle of Herod in
the north-east, looking over to Machaerus across the Dead Sea
would pass unheeded or lamented.
The very inn, which may have been Chimham's (Jer. xii. 17)
was too crowded to take them. No doors opened to the unborn
Saviour. His own received Him not. Here the Divine Babe
was born in the stable. After ages have honoured the place,
and honour and dishonour it still. The Grotto of the Nativity
is now covered by the chancel of the Greek Church, but Mahom-
medans keep guard. The rock-cut stable where Jesus was born
was one of countless such throughout the neighbourhood. The
simplicity, the lowliness of the scene in every tone and detail,
ran counter to all contemporary Jewish expectation and Oriental
pre-conception. The birthplace of the Hero of Christianity is
adorned with the unheroic and the commonplace. "Aufer a
nobis pannos et dura praesepia " was the exclamation of Marcion.
Mythical heroes have very different origins. The birth at the
" House of Bread " * is typical of Jesus' life and character of
* But C. R. Conder, H. G. Tomkins interpret Bethlehem, as the House,
it., Holy Place, of Lakhmu, the Creator, deriving the name irom pre-Hebrew

36 JESUS CHRIST.
lowliness, simplicity, poverty, humiliation, and of its honour ol
the poor and ignorant. The cattle gave the Son of Man a
shelter. He giveth them food and increase, and counts theirs
amongst the groans of created nature. Shall they not partake
of His redemptive blessing, and the glorious, more than re
covered, liberty of the children of a new earth ?
Meantime hard by the Tower, Migdal Eder, now said to be
marked by the ruins of a church built by Empress Helena, the
shepherds were keeping night watch over the flocks intended
for the Temple sacrifices. A sweet heavenly joyance of song
burst over the silent hills. It was the first Christmas greeting
of glad tidings, as of a chime of heaven's own bells, announced
by an angel of the Lord, confirmed in responsive chorus by a
multitude of the heavenly host.
" Glory to God in the highest
And on earth peace among men in whom He is well pleased." »
" Sweetly over all,
Dropping the ladder of their hymn of praise
From heaven to earth, in silver rounds of song,
They heard the blessed angels sing of peace,
Goodwill to man and glory to the Lord."*
It was a hymn of praise which has been appropriated into the
thanksgivings of all Eucharistic liturgies.
Surely unknown of the shepherds the songster angels accom
panied their hurried steps, and did homage before the face of
their Incarnate Lord. All the wondering words of the
shepherds, and those to whom they spake, Mary stored up in
her heart — a psychological touch characteristic at once of the
mother and of the historian. One cannot but wonder whether
any of the shepherds lived to hear the Baptist's preaching.
Hebron lay but a few miles farther south. The devout shep
herds may well have been known to the family circle of Zacha
rias, or have heard of the happy birth which was noised about,
and set pious country folks thinking of a coming Sign. And with
Semitic pagan inhabitants. — " Syrian Stone Lore," p. 33, and Palestine Ex
ploration Society Reports, 1885, p. 112.
* iiSoiciag, R. V. , Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, &c.
¦ J. G. Whittier, "The Dream of Pio Nono," changing "he" to
" they. '

THE DIVINE BABE. 37
the sacrificial flocks they must have often gone the short six-mile
journey to Jerusalem. Some may have witnessed the Temple
cleansings. St. Luke is so careful an historian that he may
have sought information on the spot. But without such local
investigations the memory of the Virgin would have preserved
all, and much more than all, the details he has handed down.

CHAPTER V.
THE EBIPHANIES OF THE DIVINE INFANT.
" May to Him the spirit's kings
Yield their choicest offerings."
Archbishop Trench, "Silvio PelUco.1*
The Epiphany of the Divine Infant in the Temple — The Epiphany of the
Divine Infant to the Gentiles — The flight into Egypt — The return.
The Circumcision of the Infant Christ took place on the
eighth day. He came to fulfil all the righteousness of a true
child of Abraham. The name assigned by the angel, Jesus
(Jeshua), was given to the child apparently in privacy, without
the congratulations of relatives and friends. After the Circum
cision the Child must have been at least forty-one days' old
when the mother went up to the Temple for her own purification
and the redemption of her firstborn (Lev. xii. ; Numb, xviii.
16). It was the first visit of the Infant Saviour to His Father's
house. The Child was presented to the priest, representatively,
that is, to the Lord ; the redemption money was paid, five
shekels of the sanctuary (Numb. /. c), of Tyrian weight,
according to Rabbinic requirements, about ten to twelve
shillings in value.
And now the maiden-mother stood at the top of the steps
which led up from the Court of the Women at the great gate of
Nicanor. She had already dropped the price of the turtle doves,
' the poor's offering," into the third of the trumpets, or the
trumpet-shaped chests ; and as the incense rose in her sight
from the golden altar, such a prayer as only a mother can offer
accompanied it. The Christian "Churching of Women" is

THE DIVINE INFANT. 39
rather a thanksgiving, but the older name was the "ordo ad
purificandam mulierem post partum ante ostium ecclesiae," and
all the spiritual significance of the Jewish service passes into
the richer breath of the Christian.
Perhaps at this moment one who had been waiting for the
Menachem, the consolation of Israel, received the reward oi
patient waiting. Extremes met and blended. The aged saint,
the young mother, the unconscious Babe.
With the Divine Infant in his arms Simeon had reached the
crown of his life. Before the wondering parents he poured out
to the Lord his dismissal hymn of thanksgiving — a life's even
song to many watchers for the dawn. The rapt vision of the
inspired singer extended to far shores and lofty heights of
Messianic expectation. The long musings of silent prayer,
bosomed on Messianic hope, found voice in divided accents,
boding both light to all nations, and strife to Israel breaking in
twain,1 some to rise and some to fall.
" Its voice the wise have understood ;
They cry, ' Thy servants hear ; '
While some shrink farther from their good.
Because it comes so near." <
His own saddened experience of life in the harlot city, his ripe
insight into the unfruitfulness and decay of leaders and people,
his knowledge of contemporary Messianic political religion,
formed the material which caught the spark of the spirit of
prophecy as he spake of a divided Israel, and prepared Mary
for the future of the Mater dolorosa. Such a painful forewarning
of disappointment may have jarred upon a soul unriven with
the reproach of which the Cross was the full and final agony.
But after shepherd acclaims and angel carols it may not have
been unnecessary. Mary must have been like all of her time,
imperceptive of a suffering Messiah.
There is a dim resemblance to this incident in the life of
Gautama in the visit of the old sage, who after his birth pre
dicted that he would be a Buddha, and rejoiced to have seen
him.* ¦ W. Bright, D.D.
' Bishop Copleston on Buddhism In The Nineteenth Century, July,
1888 ; and Professor Kellogg, " The Light of Asia and the Light of the
World," p. 71.

40 JESUS CHRIST.
Another sympathetic saint joined the group. Widow Anna, tha
aged daughter of Phanuel, a member of an unreturned tribe,
long faithful to human love, yet among those
" Thrice blest, whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose love in higher loves endure."
She almost lived in the Temple. The burden of her unceasing
prayer redemption.
Two aged men, one a country priest, the other a dying saint
in Jerusalem ; two aged women, and a poor provincial maiden ;
all obscure in life, in station, things that are not— such are the
dramatis personce when the Divine scene opens. Nothing
could be more out of keeping with the current of contemporary
Messianic expectation, nothing less suggestive of the advent of
a superhuman Being, nothing more natural after the spiritual
order, nothing more flagrantly opposed to the surroundings of
a mythical or legendary prince !
Three circles are now formed as Messianic nuclei. The
circle of the Baptist's parents and friends, a priestly group ; the
circle of Bethlehemite shepherds, a rural group ; the circle
of elect in Jerusalem waiting under the shadow of the temple
for redemption, a Zion group.
After the presentation of the Infant to God in descending
order comes His presentation to the world. The spiritual fit
ness alone would go far to determine the question of the priority
of the former to the Epiphany. In contrast with the consciously
expectant watchers of devout Jerusalem, the representatives of
the unconscious desires of all nations approach the Infant King.
From what province of the East the Magians came is undeter
mined by the sacred narrative and subsequent research. The
name connects them with the priestly caste of Persia, who were
spread widely over the East. In them not the kings of Sheba
and Seba only offer gifts (Psa. lxxii. 10), but heathen religions
which felt after God, seekers after truth in " the far countries,"
and workers of righteousness in every nation. If they were
Persians they came of a gentle race, and one which had often
shown favour to their Israelite subjects, as the Books of Ezra,
Nehemiah, and Esther show.
Was the star which led the Magians on a long and perilous
journey natural or supernatural ? Was it a special providence

THE DIVINE INFANT. 41
or a miracle which lightened their way to the Light of all ? Was
their interest founded upon a scientific or a religious basis ?
The last question may be confidently answered — upon the double
basis of earthly and spiritual science. The former question
is still sub judice, and invites further scientific investigation.
The journey altogether took about two years. The birth of
Christ took place December, 5 B.C. Two years before, the
famous conjunction, discovered by Kepler, of the planets Jupiter
and Saturn in the constellation Pisces took place three times.
When a similar conjunction took place in 1603-4 a bright
evanescent star appeared between Jupiter and Saturn. Such
may have been the star of the Epiphany. Modern believing
thought entirely accepts the principle of economizing miracles.
On a priori grounds the Christian prefers the natural without
giving up a supernatural explanation. That signs in heaven,
however, naturally accompanied the first, as they will the second,
Advent of the Lord of heaven and earth is true in the spiritual
order, whether those signs were ordinary cosmical, but specially
timed, or wholly supernatural.
The Magi were Eastern men of science, in whose minds, as in
much later days, astronomy and astrology were not as yet dis
tinct Their religious interest in the star is partly explained by
that mental confusion, and partly by the spread of Jewish belief.
Jewish prophecy and tradition also, as seen in the Talmud, con
nected the appearance of a star with that of Messiah. They were
virtual, or perhaps actual proselytes of the Jewish faith. The first
question asked by the Eastern pilgrims in the Jewish capital,
was — Where is He that is born King of the Jews ? The question
creates a stir throughout Jerusalem, and Herod the king jealous
of any possible rival, summons a special council, and submits
to it in general terms the question of Messiah's birthplace.'
Scripture and tradition left no doubt as to the answer. The
decisive text of Micah is Targumed, or interpreted, by St. Mat
thew, according to his practice in referring to Old Testament
prophecies, in the light of complete fulfilment. " Such Targum-
ing of the Old Testament was entirely in accordance with the
then universal method of setting Holy Scripture before a popular
audience." *
* yivvarai indefinite present.
* Edersheim, i. 906, u. v, and " Prophecy and History in Relation to
the Messiah,'' p. 116.

%2 JESUS CHRIST.
After his public inquiry, Herod holds a private interview with
the Magians with the secret intention of learning the exact age
of the Child, and any other identifying particulars which would
assist him to its destruction. Once more the bright pioneer
" magnifica lingua coeli," * shone in silent eloquence before the
rejoicing travellers, not to indicate a well-known way, but to
reward those who by faith saw the invisible and obtained
promises. The Holy Family had now found the shelter of a house. The
humble roof is the first Palace of the royal Infant, the Eastern
savants are the first courtiers, and the gold and frankincense
and myrrh (comp. Isa. Ix. 6) the choice products of their own
East, the royal coronation homage. Those who have seen
Holman Hunt's "Shadow of Death" will remember the use
made by the artist of the holy offerings.
Warned by a dream not to return to their false and crafty
friend Herod, the firstfruits of the Gentiles returned to their
own East. The Divine Epiphany had taken place. The
Divine rejection had already begun.
Joseph's hasty night flight into Egypt follows in obedience
to angelic warning. A very large number of Jewish colonists
resided in Egypt, enjoying the rights of citizenship. In the
north-eastern part of Alexandria a quarter was assigned to them
" that they might lead a purer life, by mingling less with
foreigners ; " ' and they had scattered their homes and houses
of prayer in all parts of the city. Among the million Jewish in
habitants Joseph and Mary would easily find friends, and deposit
a germ of Messianic faith which should bear fruit after many
days. Out of Egypt God's Son, first His people, and then their
Representative who identified Himself with them, and spake
long after of His Exodus (Luke ix. 31), was called in due time.
The innocents at Bethlehem are privileged to die for the
Innocent, foremost of the white-robed army. Some score or
more in a small town were sacrificed to Herod's jealous wrath,
unrecorded amidst bloodier massacres on the page of Josephus,
but recalling to the mind of the sacred historian, the lamentation
of Rachel, comfortless mother in Israel, over exiled and slaugh
tered children.
Divine retribution swiftly follows. The blood of thirty-seven
1 St. Augustine. • Josephus, " Bell. Jud." li. 18. 7.

THE DIVINE INFANT. 43
years' reign of murder and crime called for vengeance. Herod
died at Jericho, almost within hearing of the rejoicings of the
people. Another angelic intimation turns Joseph's steps homewards.
Archelaus, the elder brother of Herod Antipas, the nominee of
Herod's fourth will, had been proclaimed king by the army, and
his accession under the title of Ethnarch had already been, or
was afterwards, confirmed by Augustus. Joseph intending pro
bably to live at Bethlehem is by another angelic warning
directed to Galilee.

CHAPTER VI.
THE DIVINE BOY. THE DIVINE YOUTH.
" Love had he found in huts where poor men Ue ;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
Wordsworth, " Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle."
Nazareth — Physical environment — Home influence and education —
Epiphany of the Divine Boy— The Father's house— The tender Plant
— The Divine Young Man — The simple home — Experience of men-
Communion with nature — God's silences of preparation.
Nazareth, the " watcheress " or " protectress," lay white on the
bosom of the surrounding hills. The horizon of the town is
limited to the smooth bare limestone hill-tops. But from the sum
mit of the hill above the eye swept over a wide, a varied, and a
stirring scene of beauty. To the north rose, tier above tier,
the mountains of Upper Galilee, the three-peaked Hermon's
hoary crown ; closer, gleaming Sepphoris, now Seffurieh, some
four miles off, " the city set on a hill," made by Herod Antipas
the capital of Galilee ; and many of the towns of populous
Galilee, stretching to " the hollow bay of Acre with its white
circle of surf." Hard by in the east the cone of Tabor round
which the many coloured caravans would wind ; afar the long
rough ridges of the Bashan mountains and the Jordan valley ;
westward, but twelve miles, the long-wooded reach of Carmel's
prophetic hill, "as seen through a pure atmosphere, almost
within touch," * away over its ridges to the south-west the far
flash of " the great sea" dinted with sails ; southward the rich
* A. Henderson.

THE DIVINE BOY. 45
historic plain of Esdraelon, field of many battles, to the moun
tains of Gilboa on the east, and the hills of Samaria on the
north. Modern Nazareth lies "as in a hollow cup,"' lower down
upon the hill, as is indicated by the position " of the old cisterns
and tombs." * It is a flourishing town, and most of its six
thousand inhabitants are Christian. The Virgin's Fount,
then, as now, a favourite resort of the youth, is the one hallowed
spot. The fair beauty of the women, the bright coloured
dresses of the inhabitants are traits which may be a pre-
Christian survival ; the quarrelsome violence, which is still a
Nazarene characteristic, may have prompted the olden question
of Nathanael. But of buildings nothing remains of our Lord's
time. Nazareth was a town, not a village. Its population numbered,
probably, at least ten thousand.3 From Ptolemais, the port
of communication with Rome, the distance was six hours ; from
the Sea of Galilee, five ; from Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee,
till Tiberias rose into greater importance, one hour and a half.
Nazareth was near several caravan commercial routes, one of
the three which led from Acco to Damascus passed through
it. Merchants and travellers to and from Damascus, the Medi
terranean, the Sea of Galilee, Scythopolis, must have passed
along its terraced way or within easy distance. From Jerusalem
the journey was but three days.
While it was not a mere highland village, neither was it a
great commercial or social centre. It must have escaped the
paganizing civilization of Herod. No theatres, baths, temples,
were there. The atmosphere was Jewish ; the hereditary in
fluences were all Jewish. Under a purely Jewish and Galilean
environment Jesus was brought up. His breeding was un-
contaminated by Greek elements and unwarped by the
dominant Pharisaism of Judaea.
The natural surroundings must have asserted their influence
upon the natural development of the Divine Child. Children
have little conscious sense of the beauties of form and colour,
of light and shade in scenery, little of historic imagination in
places of national interest. But they artlessly delight in the
1 " Cruise of the Bacchante," ii. 675.
¦ Conder, "Tent Life," i. 138 foil.
» Merrill, fifteen or twenty thousand.

46 JESUS CHRIST.
flowered meadows, and the verdurous hills, and their lively
fancy weaves a hundred tales from nature's picture-book. The
charismata of the " living garment of God " can never have
been lost on the sensitive spirit, the observant eye, the dutiful
heart of the Child. How many walks upon the Nazarene
hillsides must have gladdened the young heart ! The bright
spring flowers picked, the red anenomes, the pink phlox, the
rock roses among the commonest, who could count? Many
pages of Jewish history lay an open self-explaining Bible on the
surrounding plains and hills. An intelligent, a patriotic mother
in Israel, like the singer of the Magnificat, could never have
forgotten for herself, or for her child pupil, the histories writ
large upon the neighbouring battlefields. The names of Gideon,
of Deborah and Barak, of Saul and Samuel and Jonathan, oi
Elijah, of Jehu, whispered from the very ground. Childhood
drinks in the sunshine of life, but the dark shadows are hidden
from unsuspecting innocence protected by parental care.
Of all the early factors in His human development the home
influence must have been supreme. The homes of Israel were
the brightest spot, the love of children the tenderest chord, the
respect for women a most honourable mark of Jewish life. This
is abundantly provable from the Talmud." " All the verses of
Scripture that spoke of flowers and gardens were applied to
children and schools. ' Do not touch Mine anointed ones, and
do My prophets no harm.' ' Mine anointed' were school children,
and ' My prophets' their teachers. The highest and most exalted
title which they bestowed in their most poetical flights upon
God Himself was that of Pedagogue of Man." So in regard
to women. "It is woman alone through whom God's blessings
are vouchsafed to a house. She teaches the children, speeds
the husband to the place of worship and instruction, welcomes
him when he returns, keeps the house godly and pure." 'A good
wife,' says the son of Sirach, ' is a great gift of God to him
that fears God is she given ' " (Ecclus. xxvi. I-4).1
1 E. Deutsch, " Remains," p. 147.
* Cf. Saadi, the popular Persian poet, translated by Col. W. Macklnnon— <
» E. Deutsch, "Remains," p. 54.
" A handsome, loving, chaste, obedient wife,
Maketh a man a king, though poor in life ; . • «
Surely God's favour is on him bestowed
Whose wife makes glad and prospers his abode."

THE DIVINE BOY. 47
The love of children breaks through the arid technicalities of
the Talmud like a strain of sweet music. The mother is the
household queen. The reign of motherhood was more sacred
under the Law than elsewhere. Under the old covenant there
were Sarahs and Rachels, Hannahs and Susannas. The word-
portrait of King Lemuel (Prov. xxxi.) cannot wholly have been
an ideal one. The Gospels and Acts are still richer in examples
and types of holy womanhood. Whatever of tenderness and
moral beauty and devout faith there was among the chosen
daughters of Israel must have signalized the mother of the
Lord. Whatever of motherhood that is most human yet most
Divine Christian homes have known, must have been present
in the first and best Christian home. The influence of mother
over child, the responsive love, inexpressible, between the
bearer and the born, must here have attained its full per
fection. Nor must we forget the father, whose especial duty it was to
teach his child the Law, and whose humility and conscientious
ness are apparent under and by reason of the gospel silence,
and whose title to sainthood has been acknowledged by grateful
Christendom. Modern ethical thought assigns a supreme place
to reverence. " Reverence towards goodness, which . . . proves
to be identical with devotion to God." ' " This apex and crown
of human goodness"* cannot have failed to mark the character
of the thoughtful son of the house of David and the nursing
father of Messiah. Believers in the unbroken virginity of the
maiden mother have always seen in the faithful Joseph an
example of purity. Graces so fragrant as these may well have
been privileged to assist in the nurture and teaching of the
holy Boy. The sacredness and the beauty of family life has
never been realized as fully as in the present day. The family
circle at Nazareth at once suggests and sanctions the highest
family ideals. Family love formed a very important factor in
the expansion of the faith, as the family of the faithful spread
from one domestic centre to another, federating all in one family
of God.
That Christ was taught by His mother the Shema, or elemen
tary Jewish creed, as soon as He could speak, that the Psalms
were His child's hymn-book, the Law, the Torah, the object of
• J. Martineau, " Types of Ethical Theory," ii. p. 206. " Ibid.

48 JESUS CHRIST.
His sacred study from five or six years of age, is beyond doubt j
for such was the education of every Jewish child of dutiful
parents. From first to last it was religious. The Jewish child
lived and moved and had his being in a religious environment.
Till ten years of age Jesus must have studied the Bible. That
He passed on according to the usual course to the study of the
Mishnah may be doubted. His knowledge of the traditions of
the elders may have come only from the experience of its appli
cation to every day and every hour of Jewish life. We may be
permitted to doubt whether the pure fountains of revealed
truth were ever sullied by Mishnic admixture in the early home
teachings and self-instructions of the Forerunner or the Mes
siah. Whatever intellectual education the Boy Jesus received, His
spiritual training must have been the first care. The Bible
cannot have been a mere lesson-book. " From His intimate fami
liarity with Holy Scripture " (and that in the original Hebrew)
" in its every detail, we may be allowed to infer that the home
of Nazareth, however humble, possessed a precious copy of the
sacred volume in its entirety." ' The services in the synagogue
upon the Sabbath day, and perhaps on the week-days, the
family worship, the private prayer, were absolutely real to the
Holy Family. The inward history of that soul, the functions of
the unseen life within, the communion with the Father — these
are subjects past the thought of sinners ! In all these ways
known and unknown, the Divine Child increased with the
increase of God.
The higher intellectual and moral currents of the time can
hardly have left Nazareth uninfluenced. The tide of human
thought and national feeling sweeps into the most secluded
regions. But whether Joseph was a cultivated man there is no evi
dence of judging. Culture to a Palestinian Jew consisted
entirely in the knowledge of the Law. If he had any acquaint
ance with the later Jewish literature, their study began, con
tinued, and ended in the glorification of the Law. This is true
of the native history, such as I Maccabees ; of the later Psalms,
such as the Maccabean (Psa. lxxiv., Ixxix, cxlix. ; perhaps
lxxxiii. and lxxxiv.), the literature already noticed in chapter
* Edersheim, i. 234.

THE DIVINE BOY. 49
iii. From these he would have learned and taught first and
last, in every tone of the moral scale, the fear of God. The love
of God was an idea fully developed only in the teaching of
Christ. The spirit breathed in all these writings is pure,
genuine Pharisaic Judaism. It is clear that if Christ imbibed
any such teaching from Joseph or other Nazarene elders, all
that was partial, all that was typically Pharisaic, was rejected
by the pure and healthy mind, while what was true and
spiritual, what was scriptural and universal, was appropriated
and assimilated.
That Jesus was a solitary Child seems unnatural to suppose.
Compulsory education was the law of the land. If the law was
in force in Galilee, He must have attended the national syna
gogue school, and formed one of a circle round the Chazzan, or
minister, of the synagogue. As there was no pride, singularity,
or exclusiveness about Him whose delight it was to be with the
sons of men, He must have joined in childish sports with His
schoolfellows and neighbours and foster-brothers,1 as well as in
childish lessons. That He showed unselfishness and conscien
tiousness, a bright and loving spirit, an open heart at home and
out of doors, that He honoured His adopted father and His
mother, that He actively assisted them in the simple duties of
the household, as age and strength permitted, goes without
saying ; that He throughout His life enjoyed good health and
bodily strength seems implied in the sacred memoirs.
Christ passed through all the stages of life to redeem and
consecrate all. He was a real Child as well as a real Man.
He spake as a child, thought as a child, understood as a child.
The history of the Divine Childhood is summed up in the words
«f St. Luke (ii. 40, 52). There was a natural development of
body, soul, and spirit. None of the Nazarene townsfolks
remembered or recorded any extraordinary feats of mind or
body on His part. As upon Samuel, the grace of God was
upon Him. It was a permanent, not a special or official, endow
ment The attractiveness of transparent innocence, the beauty
of ideal holiness, drew ever the increasing favour of men. The
Divineness of child-life and of the "eternal childhood," which,
with all other perfections, " exists in God," * was here exhibited.
The Epiphany of the Divine Boyhood follows in nature and in
* I.e., Joseph's sons by a former wife.
¦ Rev. H. N. Grimley. 5

50 JESUS CHRIST.
spirit the Epiphany of the Divine Infancy. The darkness lifts
for a moment, and the light breaks upon a boyish figure and
character. He is seen in His Father's house. The act is
typical. It is the Epiphany of the Divine Boyhood.
At the time when Jesus went up to the feast, Quirinius was
Legate, or governor, of the Roman province of Syria ; Archelaus
was in banishment in Gaul under Roman displeasure. Coponius,
the first of the Roman procurators, was there. There, too, at
his official duties, must have been Ananos, the son of Seth, the
high priest Annas. It was the spring of A.D. 9. Joseph, as a
conscientious Jew, and Mary, out of self-imposed obligation or
from the example set by those women of Hillel's school who
went up once a year, were in the habit ' of going up to the holy
city. For the first time the Child accompanied them. He was
not yet son of the Torah, legally of age, but wanting a year
only, according to the custom of the time, and perhaps with
other boys of His age or kin He went. If His mother had
never gone before, she would not have left Him to go without her.
The songs of Zion must have cheered the pilgrim march,
most of all the Psalms of Ascent, such as
¦' I was glad when they said unto me,
' Let us go to the house of Jehovah.'
Our feet stand at last
Within thy gates, O Jerusalem." •
Many children entering their teens are vividly sensitive to
religious ideas. The first journey to the city where God had
set His Name, where all Jewish worship and life and history had
centred for generations, must have been an epoch in the life of
any young Israelite. Add to that the sacred purpose, the Divine
and national feast, the holy place, the house of Jehovah — above
all, the Personality of the Child-pilgrim, Son of God and Son cf
David — and the lingering in the Father's house, the naive ques
tion of the conscious Son of the Highest seems strictly natural.
Looking back through the after-lights, we ask, not — could it
have been ? but could it not have been ?
Some have supposed that at this visit He first realized His
Divine Sonship : the profound Domer,' *.£•., "it flashed upon
1 avafSaivovrtov tense. ¦ Psa. cxxii. (Cheyne).
3 " System of Christian Doctrine," Hi. 365.

THE DIVINE BOY. 5 1
Him in the holy city, in the midst of types of Him, He knew
it also to be His mission, to be about what was His Father's.
God is to Him Father in a special sense ; therefore He also
knew Himself in a special sense to be His Son. And to assert
and carry through this consciousness He knew to be His
mission. He, this man, must remain in the Divine home." It
may be so. The occasion was fitting. But considering the
reality and rapidity of religious conviction \a children of pious
parents and devout environment, it seems not unnatural to
suppose that His consciousness of His Divine Nature had
begun as early as His intelligent and self-intelligible conscious
ness of God. Once knowing God as a Father, could He have
failed to know God as His Father in an unique sense ?
But we are here on the edge of mysteries. The sources of
knowledge are in any case mysterious ; and in the case of Christ
most mysterious. But against the supposition that He only
used this language in the sense that any child of Israel could
have used it, and that He did not arrive at His Divine con
sciousness till His baptism, we enter every protest, theological
and psychological.
It was the third day of the feast, and the two following ones,
that the Child Jesus was at once a pupil and a teacher of the
Rabbis. On the first two days attendance at the Temple was
compulsory. The Paschal meal had been eaten, the Chagigah
offered, and " the first ripe barley reaped and brought to the
Temple, and waved as the Omer of first flour before the Lord." *
Joseph and Mary had begun their homeward journey. They
rested, according to tradition, at Beeroth (BireK), nine miles
north of Jerusalem, spent the second day on the return, and the
third in finding Him. In some part or other of the vast precinct
of the Temple, perhaps on the Chel, or Terrace, where the
Temple Sanhedrin on feast days gave popular instruction,
amongst the Rabbis, sat the young questioner. There was
nothing very unusual in the fact, for the precocious Josephus
at the age of fourteen was consulted by the high priests and
principal men. But there was everything extraordinary about
His intelligence. He was at home. He spake of His own, as
the great thinker of Alexandria said, himself a boy of most rare
promise, " Interrogabat magistros, et quia respondere non-
poterant, ipse his, de quibus interrogaverat, respondebat. . . .
1 Edersheim, i. 24.6.

52 JESUS CHRIST.
Interrogabat, inquam, magistros, non ut aliquid disceret, sed
ut interrogans erudiret." " But it was impossible for the Messiah
to remain in Jerusalem. Rabbinism would have choked Him.
The inevitable breach would have come earlier. Obedient at
any sacrifice He returned to the simple home and parental
supervision. The light of the evangel is turned off. Silence
falls round the Divine home ; the figure of the Messiah is hidden
for eighteen years. One welcome word tells us of natural,
intellectual, spiritual growth (Luke ii. 52).
He grew up as a tender plant on a wholly Jewish soil,
with nothing between Him and the pure air and light of
heavenly grace but the better native surroundings of the day.
His mental and spiritual development was natural, not artificial ;
healthy, not forced. Of His loving fidelity to Nature, His keen
ness of observation, His scientific accuracy of description,
sufficient evidence is supplied by His parables and allegories.
The freshness and originality of His mind from a human point
of view sprang from the immediate perfection of His realization
of fact in all departments, and the absence of the technical
lore and pedantic traditionalism of the schools. Whatever
" bias," in Spencerian language, He had, whatever hereditary
predispositions played upon Him, were conceived and born in
Jewish thought, in Jewish devotion, in Jewish Scripture, in
Jewish family love and honour, in Jewish Messianic expectation
nursed through long years of suffering and decay, sweetened
and purified by trial and discipline, and lighted up with secret,
undying hope.
Neither was Nazareth a secluded town, nor the life of Jesus
a secluded life. Life in the East is always and altogether public.
He increased in favour with men, and cannot, therefore, have
isolated Himself from the townspeople. Simple and reverent,
honest and laborious, loving and faithful, true and just, of
transparent innocency and guiielessness, He did not fail to win
affection and respect. Into all that was honest, pure, lovely,
and of good report, He would enter freely and heartily. From
all that was the contrary He would shrink. His education for
affairs was derived from His experience of men and things.
The realities of life are as appreciable on a small as on a large
scale. His pure spirit was sensitive to the touch of truth as
the leaves to the breath of spring, wherever it was met. His
1 Origen, in Luc., Horn, xviii. xix. (954, 955).

THE DIVINE YOUTH. 53
perfect insight into the ways of men's hearts, and the springs
of human conduct, was brought on its human side by the
suffering shocks of contact with pure evil, or mixed good, and
by the joyous sympathy which flows from love of all that is
right The Christ in youth was sober-minded, strong in
grace. He fled youthful lusts, He followed righteousness. He
was irreproachable in conduct. Not even calumny and the
fierce light of after-criticism could rake up any ashes of scandal
from the pure fire of that white young life. More pious and
devout and simple than a Samuel, fairer and braver than a
David, purer and fuller of the milk of human kindness than a
Joseph, He was at all times and in all companies the pattern
youthful Israelite, the Ideal Young Man. At home, eating and
drinking, working at the carpenter's bench, worshipping on the
housetop or in the synagogue, keeping feast and fast, with the
maidens as sisters, with the young men as brothers, Jesus
Christ was the same in character, as in after-days of public
ministry, as He is now, to-day, and for ever.
The outward circumstances of His Nazarene life may be
briefly noticed. The kind of house in which He lived is still
found in a perfect state. "They are generally square, of
different sizes, the largest, however, not thirty feet square, and
have one or two columns down the centre to support the roof,
which appears to have been flat as in the modern Arab houses.
The walls are about two feet thick, built of masonry or of loose
blocks of basalt. There is a low doorway in the centre of one
of the walls, and each house has windows twelve inches high
and six wide." * Sometimes " the house was divided into four
chambers." Daily food and clothing were simple and sufficient. He wore
in manhood the national turban, probably white ; and tunic of
one piece, and therefore valuable ; over that the talith (i/idnov),
loose and flowing, whether white, or the common blue, or white
with brown stripes, with the Tsitsith blue or white fringes at the
four corners."
The political movements of the day in a people so intensely
national as the Jews, in whose eyes patriotism was a "religion,
* L. Oliphant, " Haifa,'' p. 231.
* Stapfer, ch. a. p. 100 ; but the white of the Transfiguration was the
whiteness of intense colour, and does not imply that His garment was not
white before.

54 JESUS CHRIST.
and whose politics were summed up in the one word, the
Messiah, cannot have failed to excite the interest of Nazarenes.
How seriously, how intently, the political horizon must have
been watched by parents who shared in some degree the ideas
of the time respecting the political character and national
mission of the Messiah and kept to themselves the tremendous
secret ! Christ Himself may have thought out some of the
political problems of the day, as travelling merchant from the
west or returning priest from Jerusalem brought in news. Such
questions as afterwards confronted Him, as the moral obliga
tions of taxation, the respective duties to the Roman govern
ment and its representatives, and to the national government and
its representatives, were settled in the court of His private life
and conscience, before He was publicly required to state His
principles. His kingdom was not of this world, but this world
was of His kingdom and of His love.
Years brought experience of men ; increasing knowledge
increasing sorrow, increasing desire to take away the evil. As
lives and characters were gauged by Him, as hollowness and
unreality, corruption and hypocrisy, dropped their disguise
before His open gaze, as wickedness and vice and all the
wrongful dealing of men burned like fire against the spotless
white of His soul, as hearts lay open before Him, if He willed,
He took the measure of men, of His own people, of His own
generation. If His voluntary exinanition limited Him to the
ordinary media of human knowledge there is a moral insight,
peculiar to holiness of a high order, exemplified in the history
of saints, which even upon a purely human basis must have
distinguished Him above all His holy offspring, which must
have vibrated to every breath of good, and jarred at every
shock of evil. Nor is life on a large scale, in populous
centres, amongst seas of human activity, necessary to breadth
of view and intensity of perception. On the contrary, indi
viduals, where fewer, offer more points for attraction or repulsion.
The microscopic view of life becomes possible. Characters,
individual forces, are more easily measurable. The village
Hampden or the village tyrant are more appreciable by their
nearness. In the thriving country town Jesus saw types of
every contemporary class and interest. The after experiences
of life do not seem to have stirred many surprises in Him. He
knew what was in man from the intuitive insight of perfection.

THE DIVINE YOUTH. 55
He knew what was in man from the accumulated experience of
pain, and the intensified sympathy of an irrepressible stream of
love. If any ambitions presented themselves to Him from
without — from within they never could come — from flattering
friends or home Messianic misapprehensions, they made no
mark upon a heart cased in the panoply of God. Experience
and observation formed the ethical sources of His inductive
knowledge of men. The mysterious powers which were in
volved in His Divine nature are unknowable in their intrinsic
energies. Friends cannot have been wanting to the family circle. The
town may have had its Simeon and Anna, its holy and humble
of heart, its righteous according to the law without self-righteous
ness ; but we know of no Nazarene apostles, or even disciples,
except His long unbelieving " brethren." Such an absence is
conspicuous. During these silent years He may have been shaping His
life plan ; if the comparison may be made without irreverence,
like Milton, "late choosing and beginning late," with conscious
self-education. But it seems more becoming to think that He
lived faithful to the simple light of everyday duty, turning every
detail to heavenly account, waiting patiently for the Divine
summons to wider fields of action and higher " vocation and
ministry." Upon Jesus Christ's youthful high communings with Nature
it is needless to dwell. It has ceased to be the monopoly of
artists, poets, physicists to taste the sacramental gifts of Nature.
That it has so ceased is due to Him who opened the book of
the Gospel of Nature. Nature to Him spoke in most melodious
tones of the fair beauty of the Lord ; His righteousness, His all-
providential care, His wisdom, His power in the things that
were made were read as in an open book. In St. Paul we see a
man of culture and city tastes who found in nature a gospel
which supplied his new faith with the lofty analogies of the
resurrection body and the starlike in glory — a gospel muffled to
his unconverted ears. In Christ we have One whose eyes nor ears
required opening to a Presence in the summer hills and flowers
or the wintry frosts and snows. The Old Testament is full of
Nature's worship. The Psalms, which were Christ's special
manual of devotions, in every cadence spoke of and from the
works of His hands to the Maker. To Christ is due as dis-

56 JESUS CHRIST.
coverer the first revelation of the truth of the unity of Nature in
God, the community of Nature and human nature, their inter
dependence, their common dependence upon the Personal God.
To Him, then, " the meanest flower that blows " upon the Naza
rene hillsides brought thoughts not only " too deep for tears,"
but passing human understanding — thoughts of His Father's
love and power and wisdom, thoughts of man's unlove, im
potence, folly, misery,1 sin, which Nature as truly mirrors,
and as pathetically expresses with her thousand shadows as
with her ten thousand lights she proclaims the Light of the
world. The silences of God are not the silences of inactivity, of in
difference, of oblivion. They are the silence of infinite prepara
tive industry, of the march of myriad evolutions, slow and sure
and invisible. There was the silence before the call of Abraham ;
there was the silence of heavens as brass during the travail of
Egyptian bondage ; there was the silence as of the coldness and
disappointment of an outraged friend before the call of Samuel ;
there was the long pre-Messianic silence after the last of the
prophets had lifted up his voice in promise of the messenger,
Elijah the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the
Lord ; there was the silence of the prophet-priest in the
solitudes of the deserts, before he put the trumpet to his lips
and sounded the alarm ; there was the silence of the Messiah
Himself, gathering up the forces of His soul for the day of
battle, storing the spiritual sinews of war for the superhuman
strife, awaiting the Divine mandate and the trumpet ring of His
human forerunner ; there was the mysterious and most for
bearing silence of God while the Son of Man waged His single-
handed warfare with all the accumulated heritages of lies, the
armed fortresses of evil, the concentrated organized hosts of the
prince and potentate of ill. And the wondering, scarcely broken
silence of the angels ! And the Divine silence still remains in
the majesty of self-reserve till it is burst by the trump of the
angel. But these silences of ages have been the preludes to utterance.
There has been neither speech, nor language, till the fulness ol
* Cf. J. S. Mill's hard reading of Nature in the famous passage in " The
Three Essays on Religion ; " but it is only of one side of Nature, and to
a Christian suggests the redemption and resurrection of Nature implied
in that of human nature through Christ

THE DIVINE YOUTH. 57
each time — till God spake and it was done. Busy, working
lives of men, ye need the golden silences of patient, teachable
prayer and preparatory suffering devotion above all needs of
this work-a-day world if ye would find out God's purpose, fulfil
His ends, and do His work 1
Years passed by over an uneventful life and a silent heaven.
The people called Him by their wants and miseries, the family
of sinners called Him by their sins, the prayers and desires of
thousands who had gone to Sheol disappointed called Him, the
spiritual Messianic watchers for their satisfaction, the deluded
and debased for their correction called Him, " the world with
all its ideals called Him ; " * but His Heavenly Father called
Him not, and He waited His hour. By such a discipline of
waiting and patient endurance God had tried Abraham, had
tried His people Israel, tries His faithful for their hour and
His. How the Christ prayed in flawless prayer, how His human
spirit held communion with the Divine, is unwritable in any
gospel, and unthinkable but on the knees. The patience and
faith of the saints had been tried, had been tasked ; and the
Saint Himself of saints revealed more than all, and bore much
more than He revealed.
But it may be without presumption inferred that He prayed
the customary prayer of the adult Israelite. Morning and
evening He would have recited the Shema, or devotional creed,
derived from Deut. vi. 4-9, xi. 13-21, and Numb. xv. 37-41.
Morning, afternoon, at the time of the Minchah offering, and
evening, even in childhood, the Shemoneh Esreh, " the prayer "
consisting of eighteen, and in its final shape of nineteen, Bera-
chahs or benedictions. The latter form indicates how large a
place thanksgiving filled in pure Jewish devotion. The duty
so often insisted upon by St. Paul was doubtless an improved
survival of his Jewish days, and must have been perfectly
fulfilled by the perfect Son of Abraham. The usual grace
(Berachoth), too, would be said before and after meals from
childhood without attention to the petty and complex regula
tions of Rabbis, such as — " If the blessing has been pronounced
over a side dish before the meal, the side dish after the meal is
exempt" * Lange in a different context

CHAPTER VII.
THE PROPHET BAPTIST. THE DIVINE BAPTISM.
" The brave strong spirit of the man supports him. So mighty is tbl
source of strength within him, that, as the prospects of the present darken,
the prophecy of the future grows more splendid in his soul ; as earth sink«
into shadow heaven grows more radiant around him " (J. A. Stmonds,
" Dante in Exile").
John in the Wilderness — The Great Renunciation— The Cry of the King
dom — The Flow of Penitents— Jesus Baptized — Why?
The things that Jesus learned, the things that He suffered
especially, in the country' town, with all its narrowness, folly, sin,
were the school for the Messianic venture into the public field.
That venture of faith was now at hand.
The silence of Israel was broken by a voice as startling as if
one of the old prophets had risen again trumpet-tongued. It
was the cry in the wilderness of the new prophet. His life, like
Christ's, had been a hidden fire. He had retired to the desert
at the imperious bidding of the Voice within, even in boyhood,
when strong surrenders and great renunciations are by rare
spirits only, and then but seldom made. Spiritual strength was
his great mark.
The forerunner had retired into the desert in boyhood. But
the child life must have begun to take shape before he left the
priestly home. Perhaps the death of his aged parents was the
immediate cause of his going into the wilderness, which lay
south of Jericho and the Jordan fords. There he abode like
other solitaries in outward life, but in the secret burden and
glory of his soul alone and unapproachable. The principal
factor in his home and desert education was the study of the

THE PROPHET BAPTIST. 59
prophets. If a child can be brought up in a pious home for a
missionary career, if a prince's son can be trained for high
station, if a philosopher's child may be steeped with learning,
like John Stuart Mill from infancy, the son of the Jewish priest
could be prepared by holy discipline and many-fountained
prayer to full consciousness of his Divine mission and venture.
Deliberate preparation for a special purpose constitutes a tech
nical education. A technically prophetic education in the lives
and words of Israel's prophets would stamp into the sensitive
heart of the child of Aaron an intensity of conviction, an ab
sorption of desire, an openness to the fires of inspiration, an
irrefragable independence of extra Scriptural authorities and
worldly ranks, which should characterize a shaft polished for
Divine aim (Isa. xlix. 2, 3), a mouth like a sharp sword, a life
long hidden in the shadow of His hand, a servant of the Lord
in whom He would be glorified.
He was an ascetic, but neither in dress, nor food, nor rule,
still less in spirit or in teaching, was he an Essene. He belonged
to no religious school. But he had made the great renunciation
demanded of founders of schools in the East and Reformers.
In the wild steppes of the desert nothing came between his
soul and God. To a purely spiritual atmosphere he was
acclimatized by a long specialization to prophetic work,
resulting in a character altogether unworldly. To every local
or national interest he was dead save one. To every movement
from or towards a spiritual direction he was as tremulously
sensitive as a ministering spirit. Asceticism hardens and
ossifies some natures, but others it intensifies for spiritual im
pact or impression. Such a man as the priestly son of Zacha
rias, trained in a long course of spiritual self-discipline, whose
meat and drink had been the words of the prophets and the
promises of God, was a fully adjusted organ for Divine commu
nications, and one who corresponded with popular ideals, not
in Judasa only, but all over the East. Had he willed the
prophet John might have been numbered among the Gautamas,
the Confuciuses of the world. He might have been a false
Messiah, and a " lost leader."
No mere force of genius, spiritual or intellectual, nor any
fulfilment of popular ideals, can account for the depth of the
impression made by the Baptist. The Acts (xviii. 25 ; xix. 3)
show that his influence, in the course of a quarter of a century.

So JESUS CHRIST.
spread as far as remote proconsular Asia. And his name
became even a "watchword of direct antagonism" and rival
Messiahship.1 And Josephus, with his anti-Messianic bias,
himself is a witness to the popular influence he wielded.
Two facts account for the Baptist's success. First, his per
sonality. Secondly, his opportunity. The man himself was
"a spiritual splendour,"" a moral force of extraordinary momen
tum. The ante-natal prayers, the long discipline of waiting, the
vivid realization of his prophetic vocation growing with his
growth, the stream of self-consecrating prayer which bore him
on the tide of God's undisappointed will, had borne their proper
fruit. He was the one man of his time who could stand upon
the naked truth of the Bible, and knew that he was of the
spiritual lineage of the Samuels and the Elijahs. Such a power
within him, such memories behind him, such a special assurance
and conviction, stamped him as a strong man of God, a prophet,
and more than a prophet.
But great characters may tower in unrecognized oblivion.
Great men require great circumstances. Had not the times
been ripe the Baptist might have been a volcano in the desert.
But it was the time of times for making an impression. The cry of
the kingdom of God went to the breathing heart of the people.
What was this kingdom of God but the ruling idea of the old
covenant, the beginning, the middle, the end of its rites, insti
tutions, laws ; the promise to the fathers, the passionate
dream of the prophets, the unsatisfied desire of a people whom
past sufferings and exiles, whom present subjection, never
crushed out of their pride as the people of God ? Everywhere
the political and religious atmosphere was charged with the
dea, actual or latent. Consciously or unconsciously, directly
or indirectly, men were looking for, or groping after a Divine
kingdom. Pharisees and Essenes were discussing it in their
schools. The Book of Enoch most, and the other apocalypses
expressed and encouraged the same aspiration. St. John took
up the conception, but in a different sense He had derived his
thought from the Messianic prophets. He was driven by the
Spirit of prophecy into the wilderness. He brooded over his
Isaiah till substance and spirit, tone and temper, passed into
him. But for Stephen there had not been a Paul. But for an
Isaiah there had not been a John the Baptist. Although he
• Bp. Lightfoot, " Colossians," p. 403. » Dante.

THE PROPHET BAPTIST. 6l
was distinctly affirmed by Christ to be the second Elias pre
dicted by Malachi (iv. 5) he did not admit the title himself.
Perhaps he did not think he had risen to the spirit and power of
that prophet, and had fallen short of his high vocation. True
greatness, true holiness, are humble and self-depreciative. In
this, as in all respects, John contrasted with the Hillels and
Shammais of the time, and of the time to come.
" Still, some few
Have grace to see Thy purpose, strength to mar
Thy work by no admixture of their own,
Limn truth not falsehood, bid us love alone,
Thy type untampered with, the naked star I " »
He alone then saw that the kingdom of God was a moral and
spiritual fabric, and that moral and spiritual, not political, re
construction was its necessary presupposition. He alone left
theories and formula and stepped forward into action. And he,
in the teeth of current opinion, directed the sword of Jehovah, not
against the Gentiles, but " towards Israel itself." " He began
the transformation which Christ completed. He was His intel
lectual as well as spiritual forerunner.
All sorts and conditions of men, high and low, from city and
country, came down to the Jordan. The movement spread from
Judam to Galilee. A national regeneration seemed at hand ; a
religious reform to have taken root. A stream of inquirers came
down to the river, like Hindus to the sacred Ganges, to wash
and be clean, but with moral rather than ceremonial intention.
The religious revival of the second Elias was repeating that of
the firsts
As the kingdom the Baptist proclaimed was a new and yet old
kingdom, so the typical initiatory rite he required was new and
yet old. Old for "proselytes of righteousness" (Gerey hatst-
sedeq) submitted to baptism (Tebhilah) in order to be " born
anew," in Rabbinical language, as children of the covenant ;
old because water was familiar as an instrument of outward and
a symbol of spiritual cleansing, both in Scripture and earlier or
later tradition.* Rabbi Akiva says, " Blessed are ye, O Israel 1
Before whom are ye cleansed? and who is he that cleanseth you?
1 R. Browning, "Francis Furini." * Hausrath, p. 103.
J Cf. Milligan, " Elijah," in Men of the Bible Series.
1 Hershon, " Treasures of the Talmud," pp. 99, 112, 140.

62 JESUS CHRIST.
even your Father which is in heaven ;" for it is said (Ezek,
xxxvi. 25), " I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be
clean." And again it is said (Jer. xvii. 13), " The ablutionary
bath of Israel is the Lord. As the ablutionary bath cleanses
the unclean, so does the Holy One — blessed be He !— cleanse
Israel." To this day a Jew bathes on the eve of the day of
atonement, to wash away his sins. But it w^s also new.
By submitting to this washing in Jordan the penitents ex
pressed their personal sense of sin, and need of reconciliation to
God, disclaimed the imputation of the " merits of the Fathers "
to Abraham's children, and entered into a new covenant relation
with God. Such a baptism, like the Law itself, of which St.
John was, so to speak, the personal embodiment, and last repre
sentative, could only create, or deepen, without satisfying
the consciousness of sin. The Baptism of Christ was as much
above the Baptism of John as the Gospel was above the Lawf
the master the servant. The Baptism of John led to that remis
sion of sins which the Lamb of God brought into the world.
The penitential element remains in Christian Baptism. The
simple wooden cross often set up by the banks of flowing rivers
in heathen lands, signifies to the converts who partake of
the bath of regeneration a baptism of repentance whereby they
forsake sin, and a remission upon entrance into a new covenant
of life.
How exactly the kingdom of God was coming, what shape it
would take, lay outside the prophet's immediate perception. As
his life was as eminently practical as his teaching, his penitents
appear to have been organized into the germ of a Messianic
community. It was a kingdom as yet kingless. Its members
wereundertraining for a higher Presence and kingdom, were being
led from a Baptism of hope to a Baptism of life and pardon. As
John followed the winding course of the Jordan from Judaea to
Decapolis, increasing multitudes, enjoying the holiday of a Sab
batic year, came from various motives to see him, and some to
remain with him.
The date of his appearance is carefully fixed in St. Luke's ac
count. The third Evangelist often shows that he has Gentile
and cultivated readers in view, who looked for scientific method
in history and chronological data. How long he had been
preaching before Jesus came to him we are not told.
What particular impulse drew Jesus to John's baptism is not

THE DIVINE BAPTISM. 63
revealed. Whether He was conscious that His pre-official life
was at an end, whether He had inward Divine intimation, or
whether He went as a son of Israel in response to the Divine
appeal by the prophet, in unconsciousness of Messianic inaugura
tion, we cannot say. Certainly in the perfection of His human
sympathy, in the desire of His soul " to devote Himself to the
kingdom of God," * He went as a runner to the mark. And the
Baptism itself was Godward, an expression of His self-consecra
tion to the service of the kingdom. And His prayer awakes the
Divine assurance of His accepted surrender as well as manward
laying " the foundation of all future baptisms." *
It may have been at 'Abarah,3 the recently recovered probable
site of Bethany, or Bethabara, that the great event in the
Baptist's life took place. It was " in winter, according to the
unanimous tradition of the early Church,"4 and possibly on
January 6 or 10 (B.C. 4), according to the Basilidean tradition,
that the Messiah stood unrecognized on the bank. He was last
of a crowd The prophet recognized Him.
" Tantum egregio decus enitet ore." 5
The moral majesty and unearthly grace of rapt unconscious
beauty could not fail to impress the one man most sensitive to a
breath from heaven. The power wielded by unfallen Innocence
and transparent holiness was as that of an incarnate infallible
Conscience.6 The spiritual sympathy of St. John would have felt
some of this even if he had never heard the name of jesus men
tioned in his home life. He tried to escape his official duty,
and become the penitent of Jesus.
" How didst thou start. Thou Holy Baptist, bid
To pour repentance on the Sinless Brow I " »
St Luke characteristically mentions that Jesus was praying
when the sign was given of the rending heavens and the de-
' Dome* "System," &c, iii. pp. 377, 378. * Ibid.
" Twenty-one Years' Work in the Holy Land," p. 94 foil.
4 Bp. Ellicott, p. 105. 5 Virg., '¦ JEn.," iv. 150.
Dr. Wace, " Christianity and Morality,'' p. 247 f., in a different contexl
" Conceive yourselves in the presence of a Conscience Incarnate, and then
try to realize the awful homage which would be extorted from your souls "
' I. H. Newman.

64 JESUS CHRIST.
scending dove, and the confirming word of the Father uttered
itself. Why the Christ sought to be baptized is a question which was
first raised by His baptizer, and it has been variously answered.
Some have seen in Jesus the Representative Penitent ; others
view the Baptism as the inauguration of His ministerial life ;
others as the last act of the private life of the Perfect Ideal
Israelite, going to the Baptism of St. John, because it was from
heaven, and of His Father, without ulterior motive. In the ful
ness of the words " fulfil all righteousness," in regard to the past,
the present, and the future, every partial interpretation expresses
but one aspect. It was the righteousness of the perfect Israelite
acknowledging the obligation of obedience to the prophet of
Israel imposing a rite from heaven, and attesting his Divine
mission. It was the righteousness of the Son of Man, the Re
presentative of humanity, inaugurating a new relation with the
Father of all. It was the righteousness of the Apostle of God
devoting Himself to a life of perfect fulfilment of His will.
Nor did the long-withheld Divine response delay. The
sundering heavens, the descending dove, the articulate voice
were the outward and visible signs of the descending Spirit.
The Baptism of the Spirit completed the Baptism of the Divine
Penitent. The reward of self humiliation was given in Divine
exaltation. The Christ was anointed as Prophet, Priest, King,
of the new Israel, the new Church, the new kingdom, conse
crated to His triple office and work by the washing of water and
the unction of the Spirit, even as the high priests were conse
crated by the washing of water and the affusion of " the
anointing oil" (Exod. xxix. 4, 7 ; Lev. viii. 6, 12). It was the
anointing, too, which fulfilled Messianic prefigurements and
types — the anointing of the promised sanctuary of the great
Messianic eighth chapter of Isaiah (viii. 14 ; cf. Ezek. xi. 16) ; the
anointing of the Most Holy after sixty weeks of Daniel's vision.
As the Baptism of the Messiah fulfilled prophecy, so was it
itself a prophecy of the " mystical washing away of sin," and
all the other blessings connected with His own Baptism of the
future. This prospective and retrospective character belongs
essentially to all the work of the Divine Man. His life cannot
be considered in a purely historical context ; nor could it, had
He been only a human being of extraordinary power and beauty
of nature. For " before " and " after " belong to every human

THE DIVINE BAPTISM. 65
life which but faintly ripples over the ocean of time j how much
more to that which has relations to all time ?
The Divine Messiah had waited for the Divine Investiture.
And now His official life was to begin. It was as a second birth
to a new life. In the language of the Church of old, " His
second nativity." ' The Voice from heaven spake in the
Messianic language of the Second Psalm and the forty-second
chapter of Isaiah, accrediting to the Baptist, who, as he saw the
Spirit descending as a dove, in his own words, can hardly have
failed to share alone with Christ the hearing of the Voice, the
man Jesus, as the beloved Son of God.
To Jesus it was the seal of Divine authentication. It was
the Fatherly recognition. It was the first break in the silence
and loneliness of thirty years. It was, so to speak, a. breath
from Home. If the occasion was marked by the first visible and
audible Divine intervention, it must have been one which
called for it. God's acts are not arbitrary, but according to
law. It was the meeting-point of the private and public life
Divine, of the unasserted and the asserted Messiahship, of the
old and the new kingdom, of the old and the new covenant, and
of the old and the new righteousness.
As the Nazarene life of obscure devotion, so the public
Baptism and the descent of the Dove, were contrary to all
Rabbinical Messianic preconceptions. Jesus, as decidedly as
John, broke with the current Messianic idea at once. This
cannot have been done in ignorance. From a purely human
point of view He could not have lived till thirty in populous
Galilee without hearing the current versions of the Messianic
hope. Alike the Baptist and the Baptized had waited for a
sign, waited for God to declare Himself, prisoners of hope.
• Abp. Trench, " Studies," p. 3.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE DIVINE TEMPTATION.
" Some bodily form of ill
Floats on the wind, with many a loathsome curse
Tainting the hallowed air, and laughs, and flaps
Its hideous wings." J. H. Newman, "The Dream of Gerontras."
Personal Tempter, external and real ; not an internal process — First offer —
Supposed Buddhist resemblance — Second offer — Third offer — Tempta
tions recurrent — Temptation representative.
With the rapture of His Father's greeting in His ears, and tho
exultation of the Spirit within, Jesus stepped out of the decisive
baptismal waters like a young soldier into the gaudia certaminis.
He was strong in the Lord. The joy of the Lord was Hia
strength. Even His bodily energy was at full tide. So
strengthened, " He found and felt no need " ' of food for all the
forty days of strife.
There is a Divine fitness in the Temptation. The second
Adam suffered this humiliation that all Adam's sons might
share in the victory. The tempter came. An external * coming
alone satisfies the conditions of the narrative. The history must
be accepted as authentic, or relegated to the region of myth.
To regard the Temptation as an inner process in the mind of
Jesus is to destroy the historical value of the sacred records not
in this place only, but in all. The presence of Satan may, or
may not, have been visible. The supreme master of the science
of evil knew the outward life of Jesus, and all that had been
* Abp. Trench, "Studies," p. 13.
¦ Against Weiss's, &c, &c, " inner process. "

THE DIVINE TEMPTATION. 6j
said of Him. He knew His claim to be the Messiah. How
far a hostile spirit, without the internal conditions of faith and
spiritual sympathy, could penetrate, ab extra, into His Being
and Nature, can only be known to purely spiritual beings. It
is a remarkable fact that the demonized recognized Christ,
though with horror and fear.
Christ was led, driven, An unseen Personal Force bore Him
—a certain violence is implied in the words. Necessity was
laid upon Him. The Temptation was net self-sought. It was
an act of obedience. The constraining power of duty, even in
the Christian, may be at times consciously felt like the pressure
of an Invisible Hand.
How the impeccable Son of God could suffer temptation is a
mystery. That the Temptation was real is expressly asserted in
Scripture. The reality of it stands or falls with the reality of
the Human Nature assumed by the Divine Word. The point
of attack throughout is the Man Jesus' sense of duty to God.
God or self were the alternatives, stripped from disguise, set
before His human spirit. A moment's consent to the mental
picture would have been a declaration of victory to the world
and its prince.
If the demoniacal hierarchy knew Him, who He was, it is
difficult to suppose their Head and Prince was not a partner in
their belief and in their trembling, perhaps as the result of his
discomfiture. The first Temptation was directed not only to the
outward senses, but to the inner spirit. Its attractiveness, "its
subtlety, lay in its very simplicity." * The arguments in its favour
sounded irresistible. To make the stones bread would preserve
a life in danger, and that life the most precious of all, and would
preserve it without injury to any one or anything. The er d was
good, but the means bad. The method was not the one ap
pointed by God. By making stones bread Christ would have
violated the conditions of His submission to human limitations.
He would have broken the laws of Nature, which are the laws
of God. He would have fallen into independence of God and
distrust in His earthly providence, would have wrought a
work for His own individual glory and comfort. He would have
ceased to be a true Son of Man, for His Humanity would have
been unreal. With His real Humanity would have gone His
1 Bishop John Wordsworth, " University Sermons,'' p. 87.

68 JESUS CHRIST
Mediation. And whatever the result, the object was to be
attained at the bidding of the adversary.
By way of contrast the Buddhist legend of Gautama's tempta
tion may be compared. In the latter case the austerities during
which Mara, the destroyer, stood behind him, watching his op
portunity, remonstrating with him for his self-destruction,
were the instrument of self-mortification ; they began and
ended in self, and had no external relation to God and man. In
Christ's case the asceticism was incidental to the Temptation,
not an end in itself. There are other decisive points of contrast.
Gautama's first temptation was to attavdd, the first of the
Buddhists' Ten Sins, i.e., the assertion of a self or individuality;
in fact, to believe that he had a soul. Gautama was also tempted
to ariiparagcl, the seventh of the Ten Sins, or "desire to live in
some one of the formless heavens." *
In the second Temptation, the scene is changed from the
lonely wilderness to the crowded city. The particles, " then," and
"again," present in St. Matthew's report only (vers. 5, 8),
indicate the historical order. St. Luke prefers the psycho
logical classification, and presents the Temptations in order of
their appeal to body, soul, and spirit. Foiled in awaking the
lust of the flesh, the Tempter invokes the lust of the eye. The
former temptation had been to hopelessness. The second
temptation is to over hopefulness. "The Spirit of God had
driven Jesus into the wilderness ; the spirit of the devil now
carried Him into Jerusalem. Jesus stands on the lofty pinnacle
of the tower, or of the Temple porch, presumably that on which
every day a priest was stationed to watch, as the pale morning
light passed over the hills of Judea far off to Hebron, to
announce it as the signal for offering the morning sacrifice."*
Shall not the Messiah cast Himself down, borne angel-like and
by angels, into His Father's house below, where priest and
people thronged the courts for worship, ready to receive the
Divinely-attested sign from Heaven ? Would not a Father's
love, and a Son's trust, be proved and certified ? But Christ's
answer unmasked the lie. He would use, not abuse, His filial
relation. He would not vindicate His own Divinity at the
expense of His own Humanity. He would not please Himself.
1 Professor Kellogg, " The Light of Asia and the Light of the World,"
p. 141 foil., u.v. on Mr. Edwin Arnold's perverse misinterpretations in
' ' The Light of Asia." » Edersheim, i. 303.

THE DIVINE TEMPTATION. 69
He would not become Supreme Head of the Church by the
assertion of mere power. " Never might the hour of
Christ the King be anticipated in order to accomplish more
speedily or more easily the work of Christ the Priest and of
Christ the Prophet." * The victory of grace, the Headship of
the Church, was to be won by suffering. Christianity minus
the Cross was a forbidden fruit. This Temptation was
essentially religious.
The scene changes from the Temple height to a very high
mountain. Ecclesiastical supremacy has been offered, imperial
earthly dominion is now held out, a Messianic empire and
dominion of which Cassar's would be an item. All the king
doms of the world could be seen, not arithmetically but
representatively, from one of the heights, where the second
Moses, as from a Pisgah, could behold a land of promise —
eastward and westward, stretching to the blue distances of the
Euphrates, and the sheen of the Mediterranean flecked with
cloudlike sails. The character of the Temptation suggests one
of the heights of Abarim ; Nebo itself, commanding a view of
the whole of Western Palestine, might have been the very place.
Certainly the sharp hill of Quarantania, of Crusading tradition,
could not be the mountain emphasized in the first Gospel as
exceeding high. But the spot must be left, like the burial
place of Moses, in its sublime secresy.
As the first assault had been delivered upon the body, the
second upon the human spirit, the third tries the human soul
of Christ It was the largest bid the Prince of this world
could offer. The second place in the kingdom was offered
Him. " What Satan sought was, ' My kingdom come,' a
Satanic Messianic time, a Satanic Messiah ; the final realiza
tion of an empire of which his present possession was only
temporary, caused by the alienation of man from God." ' The
height and depth of Satanic usurpation was here nakedly dis
closed. The arch rebel shows his colours. His despair of
success breathes in the unspeakable audacity of the offer. It
is the gambler's last stake, all that he has.
The first Temptation had been personal, the second
ecclesiastical, the third specially Messianic. The first attacked
His Manhood, the second His Priesthood and His Prophetic
office, the third His Royalty. All three involved a denial of
¦ Bp. Magee, ¦ Edersheim, i. 305.

¦JO IESUS CHRIST.
His Messiahship, of His character and office as the Servant as
well as the Son of God, of His true Manhood. In the last
analysis, the essential principle in each case amounted to, Deny
God, " Evil, be thou my good." *
The last Temptation closes with the address of Satan by
name. The issue had never been in doubt. The defeated
assailant flies from the field. The Second Adam, and in Him
humanity, have more than retrieved the Fall. The place left
vacant by the fallen angel is filled by those who had been
watching, it may be, hard by, spectators of the lists (cf. I Cor.
iv. 9). Man did eat angels' food in angels' society. It is a
foretaste of the triumphal march through Paradise, of the
Royal Coronation at the Victor's return home.
The Tempter left for a season only. The Temptations
recur under various forms and forces. One of the titles to
office and work in His Name was based upon the fact of
having been with Him therein (Luke xxii. 28, 29). The Tempta
tion was not, then, an isolated incident ; it was intermittent, if
not chronic. It was an haunting pain, a dogging mystery, a
dark presence, " Tencris addita Juno."
" His last word, ' I have overcome the world,' tells how sharp
the strife had been, which is remembered even in heaven, as
He speaks to His militant Church, and tells them that they
shall overcome, even as I also overcame." *
The Temptation in the wilderness stands out above the
others in its solitariness as the Temptation of temptations. The
edge of the Tempter's sword was broken. The end was as the
beginning, the victory of suffering and faith. The Temptation
was not the victory of one man, but of the race of the Second
Adam. The Temptation was typical. The Temptation was
sacrificial. The Temptation was mediatorial. The Tempta
tion was redemptive.
¦ Milton.
• W. Robertson Nicou, " The Incarnate Saviour," p. 88.

CHAPTER IX
THE LAMB OF GOD. THE DIVINE SON OF MAN AT THE
SOCIAL FEAST. THE DIVINE REFORMER IN THE HOUSE
OF GOD. THE DIVINE AND THE HUMAN RABBI.
" Who for His immense love's sake was made that which we are, in orde
that He might perfect us to be what He is" (Iren^us v., preface, trans
lated by Keble).
The first disciples — Sense of sin supreme factor — The Lamb of God — The
Son of Man — The Cana wedding ; its promise — First Messianic
passover — The Reformer — The Casuist
While Jesus was in the wilderness His servant John was ripen
ing to spiritual maturity. He had reached the full height of
Messianic faith ; and now crowned his self-devotion by the free
surrender of the flower of His disciples. Jesus was returning,
and passing Bethany, or Bethabara. The morning before the
Baptist declared he himself was neither the Messiah nor
Elijah, nor the prophet of Moses' promise ; nothing but an
impersonal voice. The next day (John i. 29) — could the writer
fail to remember the minute incidents of his spiritual birthday ?
¦ — John stood with the Baptist John and Andrew, and saw their
master's look upon Jesus, and heard his confession of the Lamb
of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. As St.
Augustine eloqently paraphrases it, " digito demonstrans ait,
' Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccatum mundi : tanquam
dicens, Quem multi justi videre concupierunt, in quem venturum
ab ipsius humani generis initio crediderunt, de quo Abraham
dicta: sunt promissiones, de quo scripsit Moyses, de quo Lex 1 1
prophets sunt testes." *
* Con. duas Ep. Pel. iii. iv. 11.

72 JESUS CHRIST.
The words show how the strongest force which impelled the
Johannine disciples to Christ was a personal sense of sin. They
were such as could use the beautiful confession of Augustine,
" I perceived myself to be far off from Thee, in the region of
unlikeness." * It was the sense of sin which the Law had
fostered but not been able to remove. It was the glory of the
Law that it could reach so far. Non-Christian religions lack
this largely, or altogether ; even when equivalent terms are
used the meaning is wholly different. A Chinese Buddhist, for
instance, would consider it tsiu, or sin, for which he suffered, if
he had done " some improper act unconsciously, or in childhood,
as treading on an insect, wasting rice-crumbs, &c." 2 So again in
Confucianism, the restriction of the worship of God to the
sovereign " has prevented the growth and wide development
among the Chinese of a sense of sin. Their moral short
comings, when brought home to them, may produce a feeling of
shame, but hardly a conviction of guilt." 3 "So Hinduism does
not ignore man's sinfulness altogether, but it explains it away
or palliates it." The populace make God the author of sin ;
others, a man's misfortune rather than his fault as the result of
former births ; others, that sin, like the world, is "a mere
illusion." " In Hinduism, considered as a religion, moral
teaching finds no place." 4 Where there is no sense of moral
evil in religion, the sense of sin has no religious existence, and
tends to depart from any moral connection into a ceremonial
one, or to disappear altogether. In Mohammedanism again
orthodoxy covers a multitude of sins. Sin and wrong seem to
the Mohammedans, says one who speaks from long practical as
well as literary experience, " things that can be wiped out by a
word, and they must be very grievous indeed if an orthodox
profession does not win them forgiveness. They have never
learnt that all forgiveness implies sacrifice." s
The modern eclectic Theists of the Brahmo Samaj similarly
regard " sin as only a natural evil requiring remedial treatment,
1 Conf, vii. 10.
2 Dr. Edkins, "Chinese Buddhism," p. 193, in Dr. Kellogg; and cf.
Hardwick, " Christ and other Masters," p. 160.
3 Prof. Legge, p. 296.
* Bp. Caldwell, " Christianity and Hinduism, " pp, 29-50.
5 Bp. Steere, Croydon Church Congress Report, in The Guardian
1877, p. 1386.

THE LAMB OF GOD. 73
and not as a moral evil deserving punishment." * The
presence of Christ always and everywhere, acted as a con
suming fire. The sense of sin would be increased, or created,
when a seed-word or look dropped upon unhardened soil.
Contrition would sometimes have brought the weary and
heavy-laden to Him, and sometimes followed upon discipleship.
It is so still. " I read them," said a Taoist dignitary who had
for fifty years studied and tried to reach the ideal of Lao-tsze ;
" I read them," said this Chinese Simeon, referring to some
Christian tracts, " and it was as if scales fell from my eyes." 2
John himself could instil contrition, but he pointed to the
Lamb of God to supply its satisfaction.
The words show, too, the greatness of the Baptist's faith. No
Other man could have made that confession, and condensed into
an epigram of the soul the whole prospective teaching of the
Law, the Prophets, and the worship. " Behold the Lamb of
God which taketh away the sins of the world 1 " It was more
than a stroke of spiritual genius, it was a coruscation of the
Spirit of God who spake to and by the prophets, breaking in
light upon the Paschal Lamb, the daily offering, the figure of
the Atoning Sufferer, in Isaiah liii., and the "still sad music"
of sin and salvation which underlay the chants of psalmists,
the burdens of prophets, the sacrifices of priests, the prayers
of the God-fearing. It was a decisive speech for Christendom,
a birth moment
Such a venture of faith was the consummate result of ages of
spiritual development, refined and specialized in the disciplined
patience and heart-whole devotion of the chosen prophet-priest.
The Messianic confession takes immediate effect upon the not
unprepared Andrew and John.
"'Tis the taught already that profits by teaching."*
The Rabbinic answer of Jesus, " Come, and ye shall see," to
the question (John i. 39), " Rabbi, where abidest Thou ? " is a
formal invitation to discipleship. He appeals to personal
experience. Experience is a test as valid in things spiritual as
physical. ¦ Canon Churton, from Rev. N. Goreh, " The Brahmos ; their Idea 01
Sin and its Punishment," Mission Life, October, 1883.
• Legge, p. 997 3 R- Browning

74 JESUS CHRIST.
Andrew, the first Christian, findeth his brother Simon, and
with the most momentous words a son of Israel could hear,
"we have found the Messiah," leadeth the son of John tc
Jesus. This family forms the germ of the Church. The
Church develops by families. The family is the primitive unit
of Church life and propagation. The house of Andrew foreruns
the house of Zebedee, the house of Zebedee the churches in the
house of Prisca and Aquila, of Philemon, of Nymphas and his
friends, of the " collegium quod est indomo Sergiae Paulinae." '
On the morrow, minutely remembered, Philip of Bethsaida,
a fellow townsman, and doubtless friend of Andrew and Simon,
is found of Christ, and himself finds Nathanael. By a Divine
thought-reading Jesus works instantaneous conviction in the
heart of the guileless Israelite. Spiritual affinities flash into
contact. Nathanael saw in Jesus the Son of God and the King
of Israel ; the very thought of his thoughts as he mused under
the shadow of his fig-tree." Jesus revealed Himself to him as
the Son of Man.
The Cana miracle explains the title in action. How far the
title was new to Jewish experience is a critical question.
Daniel's vision of a Son of Man seems far too distinctly per
sonal to be dreamed into an idealized nation. Enoch, in the
Book of the Three Parables, frequently uses the title, but this
portion of his Apocalypse is probably of Christian origin. In
Rabbinic literature the name, Son of Man, is not used of the
Messiah.3 The name, then, seems to have been unknown as a
Messianic title to the Jews of our Lord's time. Here we have,
then, a title due to the creative mind of Jesus Himself, or
drawn out from unsuspected germs. The fulness of meaning
germinant in the term remains for all the centuries of Christian
life to develop.
If ¦Conder's identification of Bethabara, or Bethany, with
the ford of 'Abarah, near Beisan, as the place of Christ's
Baptism be accepted, it was but a day's journey distant from-
1 Col. iv. is, and Bp. Lightfoot, s. I.
2 As a sacred fig-tree is mentioned in the case of the Buddha, as the
place of the first conversions to his religion, and of his entrance on his
ministry, Professor Seydel grounds upon this, in connection with four other
alleged but illusive coincidences, the inference that the gospel is more or
less dependent upon and derivable from the Buddhist legend. Vide Kel-
logg. P- 85 foil, i Kuenen, lecture v. and note xiii . for a complete refutation.
s Stanton, confirmed by Dr. Schiller Szinessy.

THE DIVINE SON OF MAN AT THE SOCIAL FEAST. 75
Cana or Nazareth. 'Abarah is the principal ford of the Jordan,'
north of Beis&n," and is " about twenty-two miles in a line from
Kefr Kenna." The variant and preferable reading, Bethania,
is probably only Beth-Oniyah,3 the house of shipping, and
another appellation for Beth-Abara, the " house of passage," or
"of shipping." This identification invalidates the objections
of Schenkel, and the author of " Supernatural Religion," to the
geographical accuracy of the fourth Evangelist, and the as
sumptions built thereupon.
Kefr Kenna, the traditional Cana, is now a large village,
lying on the southern slope of the plain of the fertile " Golden
Plain," or plain of Toran. The balance of authority strongly
supports it in preference to Khurbet Kana.
The distance from Nazareth is but five miles. The proximity
suggests that the bridegroom or bride of the marriage feast
were friends of the family of Mary or Joseph. At the south
of the village is still found " a copious fountain of excellent
water," which may have supplied the waterpots. The village
of Christ's day appears to have been " at least thrice as large
as now." Cana is still the " reedy," as its name suggests.
Here, probably Wednesday, Jesus and His mother and His
disciples came as guests to a wedding feast. Jesus had con
secrated home life at Nazareth. The highest and holiest point
of home life He consecrates at Cana. The Divine origin and
character and meaning of marriage He reaffirms most fitly
where Scripture and Rabbinical tradition alike would hallow
the mystery. The presence of His mother appears to have
occasioned the invitation to Jesus and His disciples. The
unlooked-for addition possibly caused the insufficiency of wine.
Galilean simplicity and kindness ruled the day.
When the wine fails the mother turns naturally to Jesus, as
in any need of the Nazarene household. But " the hour ", the
time for Messianic revelation— and Mary could not have been
a stranger to all that had happened in the last forty and more
days, and the confessions of faith — lay not with her, but with
God. Having vindicated His Messianic independence, the
» For a picture of a Jordan ford see Warren, " Recovery of Jerusalem,''
P- 33S-
• "Survey," p. 131 f. ; "Twenty-One Years," p. 96 ; Conder, "Tenl
Life," ii. 65 f. 3 Edersheim, i. 378.

"6 JESUS CHRIST.
Son of Mary grants her indirect prayer. The water which
filled the six waterpots, perhaps drawn from the existing
fountain, variously estimated at from 63 to 153 gallons ac
cording to the measure of the metretes (Hebrew bath), became
wine. The Messianic effect of the first miracle is specially noted by
St. John. His and his fellow-disciples' faith was confirmed.
Christian thought has seen much more than a wedding gift
in the boon of Jesus. The first supper points on to the last,
and both to the marriage-supper of the Lamb. The Cana
wedding looks back to the marriage between Jehovah and His
people, ratified and renewed betwixt Christ and His Church.
The transmutation of water into wine suggests the final trans
formation and glorification of Nature, the consecration of
matter under ennobled forms. The Christ blessing of the
wedding party shows that " all life is potentially divine," * and
that all social relations are transformable into a communion of
saints. Again, the miracle deserves all the emphasis of its first place.
For it is typical. "As the first act of the new creation, it shows
what the nature of that creation is to be." * " As the first leaf
which the plant produces is the type upon which the whole
plant is constructed ; and foliage, flower, and fruit are but
modifications of the primordial leaf; " so the first Divine work
is "a key to the character of the whole series." It is Eucharistic.
The gospel is joy. The Christ came from joy to bring to joy,
from glory to glorify.
Family ties were breaking, but not yet sundered. The Holy
Family and the disciples went down to Capernaum, thence
forward the head quarters of Messianic work.
As the Cana sign was typical of the Divine power of bene
dictory joy entering into a joyless world ; so the Temple-
cleansing which soon followed was typical of Divine wrath.
It was the same character under opposite conditions. As a
Messianic sign the former was to bless, the latter to ban.
The one as much as the other was an assertion of the Messianic
claim. The Divine Man to nature, to society, to religion, was
uttering Himself. On either occasion, time and place are fit-
» H. Macmillan, "The Marriage in Cana," p. 16.
* Ibid., p. 224.

THE DIVINE REFORMER IN THE HOUSE OP GOD. Tl
test scenes for Divine drama, the wedding feast, the national
Temple, the home of man, the house of God.
The first Messianic passover was now nigh at hand. All
over the country preparations were going on. Over flower-lit
plains and hills, along repaired roads, by cleansed streams,
by tombs freshly whitened, pilgrims poured from all parts of
Jewry. The far-shining marble walls and golden roof of the
Temple was their goal. All this preparatory purification was
an unconscious prophecy of the Messianic work of purifying
which would begin with the House of God. From the 15th
Adar the money changers' stalls rang in every town. The
statutable Temple tribute must be paid in the half-shekel, and
the charge of qolbon * must be met for the change.
What a scene of noise and confusion opened upon the eyes
of the Messiah as He made His first entrance as the Son of
Man into His Father's house. What disappointment to a
mind filled with preparatory awe in approaching the greatest
feast of the Church ! The lowing of the sacrificial oxen, the
bleating of the sacrificial sheep, the moan of the sacrificial
doves, the jingling of coins, the hubbub of barter, had turned
the court where Gentiles worshipped the Father of all into a
Babel market. The shock was too great to be borne. The
evil must be met full face at once. If any ordinary Jew,
Phinehas-like, might champion God's honour against illegal
authorized desecration, much more should the Messiah vindi
cate God's exclusive claim to the place where He had put His
Name. Casting out all the lawbreakers, Jesus in one judicial
moment stood upon the platform of the prophet and the re
former. The boldness and success of the stroke was a miracle
of moral force. It was a direct challenge to the priestly
faction, who were the chief shareholders in this Vanity Fair.
The Temple market was probably the " Bazaars of the sons of
•Annas,'' the covetous oppressor (Chanuyoth beney Chanan},
The Temple was profaned by its own highest officers. The
unpopularity of the traffic may have given negative support
to Christ's acition. The effect upon the priest party was to
awake a rancour which never forgot. The effect upon the
disciples was naturally to deepen their convictions, and likewise
to increase their number. Such a temper was pre-eminently
1 ijd to 2d., hence KoKkv&oq, KoWv&ioriJQ.

78 JESUS CHRIST.
Messianic. A Messianic Psalm had foreshadowed the devour
ing zeal shown by the Lord. And other signs followed.
This act was critical and formed two parties. The " sign "
was spoken for and against. The disciples formed the nucleus
of the Messianic party, the Jews, as St. John terms the hostile
faction, the anti- Christian. The latter demand a sign, the in
variable reply to any Messianic assertion. The answer was
mystical. The Temple of His Body, which was now the true
Temple into which all the meaning and worship of the latter was
passing, let them destroy it, He would raise it again in
three days. This intimation in His first official Messianic work
shows that the end was full in view. Sacrifice, Death, Resurrec
tion — the end was before the beginning. Nor were the words
forgotten by His enemies.
The sharp turns in the Johannine narrative may be of set
purpose. Scene in the life contrasts with scene ; and cross
lights converge upon the one character. From the crowded
Temple the disciple carries us to the silent room (John iii.).
From the public clamour to the darkness and the solitary
thinker. From a descriptive picture to a character sketch.
The writer's object is not to give an encyclopaedic history, but
a vivid personal memorial. He selects typical scenes. The
fourth Gospel is the most individual and the most universal.
The light, the truth, the Word, absolute, very God. The light,
the truth, the Word in contact with individuals ; faith or un
belief the necessary answer. Nicodemus (Naqdimon) was a
representative man. A Sanhedrist, a cultivated gentleman, an
intellectual inquirer, a seeker after truth. Like many of the
nation he was spiritually awake. The miracles of the Passover
week had arrested his attention. Miracles had done for him
all they can do, they had brought him questioning, seeking, to
the Royal Presence. The obstinate questions which importuned
an answer must be brought to Him who raised them. The
" how '' of Nicodemus exactly reflects his character and point
of view. Christ throughout replies to his latent as well as
expressed thought. There is no concession to the social
position, educational prejudices, or intellectual prepossessions
of the master in Israel. The master must learn to be a disciple,
the teacher to be taught of God. The kingdom of God, the
substance and desire of all Jewish thcught, was come and in
His own Person. The laws of that kingdom were after a

THE DIVINE AND THE HUMAN RABBI. 79
heavenly and spiritual order. A second birth and spiritual
childhood were required to enter into it. The night wind that
swept past the aliyah along the dark and narrow street was an
" apt figure of a self-determining invisible force " ' — that force
the action of the Divine Spirit. Jesus not only lays down the
law of Christian Baptism as the initial Sacrament of the
Kingdom, but also determines the rightful temper of the
mind towards the mysteries of the Kingdom. The " how "
is knowable to faith alone. The child years, or the' child heart,
accept the personal word of Christ as credible upon its own
merits. The conversation moves on from mystery to mystery. To a
mind so thorough and so well furnished as Nicodemus', at all
events in the Law, the only culture of the Palestinian Jew, one
question suggests another. St. John has doubtless given but a
fragmentary outline. The new teaching and' the demand it
made raised the question of its authorization. Christ speaks
openly of His pre-existence, and of the coming shadow of His
death, in fulfilment of the type of the brazen serpent.
The death to which He had obscurely alluded in the Temple
is still in His mind. This truth sunk deep into Nicodemus'
mind. It bore fruit. The Cross is always the turning point.
Under the Cross the victory of conviction was complete, and
he stepped forward to honour the forsaken Body.
Nicodemus, the Jewish savant, honestly yielding to the pres
sure of evidence, as to an imperious spiritual and intellectual
necessity, is a speaking likeness of many moderns. Among
the higher class of cultivated heathen there are not a few in whom
the prejudice of society and the pride of secular culture are
breaking up. But with them conviction may be slowly wrought.
And the distance between conviction and action — e.g., in the
case of the native Indian half-Christian— is as great as Oriental
irresolution can make it. And within the Christian circle, too,
there are many who are asking the inexorable how, in every
tense of the interrogative mood ; and many too impatient to
wait for an answer " a little while."
« H. °. Liddon, " University Sermons," ii. 80.

CHAPTER X.
THE BAPTIST'S FAREWELL TESTIMONY. THE SAVIOUR AND
THE SAMARITANESS. THE NAZARENE.
" Life, I repeat, is energy of love
Divine or human ; exercised in pain,
In strife, in tribulation ; and ordained.
If so approved and sanctified, to pass.
Through shades and silent rest to endless joy.'"
Wordsworth, " Excursion," Book V.
Jesus on the Baptist's ground — The Prophet's last testimony— Jesus in
Samaria — The Well of Jacob — In Galilee again — In Nazareth again.
Jesus now left the City for Judaea. His disciples administered
a symbolical preparatory baptism, empty as yet of the Spirit.
The work of the Baptist was carried on. But it is possible that
he had never been as far south. The traditional site of his
baptizing in Judaea would then have to be given up.
The Gospels only mention Bethabara and jEnon, both north of
Judaea. But as the people of Jerusalem and all Judaea are
specially mentioned as coming to his baptism, and as he would
be more likely to begin in the south and move northward, it is
more likely that he had been in the very places, and left among
those who dwelt in the neighbourhood of Jordan souls maturing
for the advent of the King (Matt. iii. 5). " At this point, then,
the work of Christ and of His Forerunner met. Christ had
not been acknowledged as King in the chief seat of the theocracy,
therefore He began His work afresh in a new field and in a new
character." * ' Dr. Westcott.

THE BAPTIST'S FAREWELL TESTIMONY. 8l
As Jesus passed northward His disciples and John's would
meet and intermingle. The stronger force overbore the weaker.
Perhaps in jealousy the disciples of the Baptist upon the occasion
of a controversy with a Jew upon one of the numerous current
questions connected with purification bring him the tidings of
Jesus' greater success, and of what might appear to them as
the defection of his own partisans to another. The answer of
the forerunner was as noble as characteristic, " He must increase,
but I must decrease." Nothing equal to it had been said before
him, except Moses' " Enviest thou for my sake ? "
It was a fitting peroration to his life's testimony. He had
borne the prophet's cross without of malice, and calumny, mis
representation — of fighting as God's standard-bearer against a
rebellious house. He had borne the prophet's cross within of
failure, self-distrust, and the coming short of high ideals. He
now bore the rising tide of loss in personal disciples and per
sonal influence, the diminution of the faithful remnant, not
with equanimity, but with joyous joy.1
Whilst Jesus' disciples were baptizing in Judaea, John seems
to have followed the course of the Jordan southward from
Bethabara. This may have been partly to avoid the growing
ferocity of Pharisaic antagonism, partly to prepare the way of
Christ at a central situation, convenient both for the north, for
Samaria, and for the main road from the south. For JEnon
near to Salim is by Conder and others identified with 'Ainun,
at the head of the W&dy Far-ah, " which is the great highway
up from the Damieh ford for those coming from the east by
way of Peniel and Succoth ; " Salim being seven miles north
ward, perhaps the Shalem of Gen. xxxiii. 18. The Wady
Far-ah, starting at Shechem, formed the north boundary of
Judaea ; and the open ground there is just the place for crowds
to assemble. Here, too, is the " much water," or many springs,
indicated by the name.
The objection, however, that iEnon and Salim would both
then be in Samaria has great force. And the old tradition,
mentioned by Jerome, placing it eight miles south of Beisan
(Scythopolis), apparently " at the opening of the Widy
Khusneh into the Gh6r,"* on the border of Samaria and
Galilee, "has this in its favour — that it locates the scene of
John's last public work close to the seat of Herod Antipas,
' X"P^ Xa'Pu (Jonn iii- 20)- * Caspari.
7

82 JESUS CHRIST.
into whose power the Baptist was so soon to be delivered." ' It
is also nearer 'Abarah where John was last heard of. In any
case there is not the slightest indication, but every probability
to the contrary, that Jesus and John met again after the
Baptism. The Baptist's martyrdom of life was now drawing to an end.
Herod was a suspicious coward like Tiberius himself, and
according to Josephus, " fearing lest such influence of his over
the people might lead to some rebellion, for they seemed ready
to do anything by his counsel,"" resolved upon his arrest and
death. " Calm 's not life's crown ; " »
this life's crown was very storm. His capture, of which we
should have been glad of particulars, for we might have found
some of the indignities of Herod's soldiers to the Master
anticipated upon the servant, took place about this time. The
Synoptists ignore the ostensible, and disclose another and
weightier, reason which actuated Herod ; for personal offence
is a deeper spring of hatred than political antipathy, and would
be keenest of edge in such a mean, sensual, nature as Herod's.
His outspoken rebuke of his incestuous connection with
Herodias stung him too sharply for pardon. When he was in
his power the king paid him the tribute of attentive listening.
He was interested. He had, if no religious scruples, religious
curiosity and sensibility. He could be moved in his feelings
to anything but repentance and heart change. Like the guilty,
conscience-stricken king in Hamlet, he would like to
" Be pardon'd, and retain the offence."
The capture of the Baptist endangered Christ. The Pharisaic
party, with the sharpsightedness of hate, must have already
seen that the cause of the two was identical. They would take
the one life on their way to the other. Had not the Lord kept
out of danger He could easily have been arrested on such a
false accusation as He afterwards was. He could have been
imprisoned in Machaerus. The Forerunner and the Messiah
would have been executed together, and the blood of the
world's ransom been shed in a rocky cell. So would Scripture
« Edersheim, L 393. • " Ant." xviii. 5. a. s M. Arnold.

THE BAPTIST'S FAREWELL TESTIMONY. 83
have been unfulfilled, and the agony and Cross spared to the
Saviour, and lost to the children of His salvation. The life
of the Son of Man was too precious to be thrown away. Our
Lord was courage itself, but not presumption or rashness.
Persecuted from one city, He would on occasion flee to another.
Endangered in one place, He would seek safety of His life, and
His kingdom, and His teaching, and all that depended upon
them, without hurrying to fatal issues, or hastening by one
moment the movement of Scriptural fulfilments, and the
season of Divine appointment.
To reach Galilee the natural road lay through Samaria.
This was taken by the Lord. One Samaritan incident is
graven in the memory of the fourth Evangelist. Perhaps for
personal reasons. He may, as some think, have been the
solitary witness ; and the account bears the marks of an eye
witness in such incidental pictorial details as " sat thus," and
the woman " left her waterpot." And the Samaritan episode as
a whole formed a most encouraging contrast to the Judasan
experience. The Messiah was well received. The conversion
of the unnamed woman was fruitful in a harvest of ingathering.
Samaria was, too, the scene of St. John's own apostolic labours
when he and St. Peter went down from Jerusalem to lay their
hands upon those who had been taught and baptized by Philip
the Evangelist. Personal associations are so impressing a
factor in memories of time and place that some of the above-
named reasons would account for the minuteness and freshness
of personal portraiture and local colouring shown in the account.
While Jesus sat in the weariness of a real humanity at the
sixth, or evening, hour,1 let us pause to reflect upon the associa
tions of the scene, and its present condition to-day. It was the
Well of Jacob — the laborious work of " a stranger in the land "
where surface springs were abundant, who was confident of its
tenure by his prosperity, according to Divine promise. It was
a monument to the industry and faith of Jacob, and bears his
name, honoured by Jew, Samaritan, Moslem, and Christian to
this day. Joseph, too, had his memorial hard by, less than
half a mile, on the north. The Tomb of Joseph occupies the
accepted authentic site, and is now a square, roofless, white-
walled enclosure, resembling most of the Moslem cenotaphs.
•Westcott and Maclellan have settled the question of the Johannine
reckoning of hours quite conclusively.

84 JESUS CHRIST.
On the south towered the rough, rocky slopes of Gerizim
" about iooo feet above the valley east of Shechem, 2848 feet
above the sea," the mountain of the Old Beatitudes, the " holy
mountain " of Samaritan faith. On the west the olives, vine
yards, and varied foliage of the many-watered Vale of Shechem,
most fertile of valleys, Ebal rising behind, mountain of curses
and Joshua's altar of unhewn stones. On Ebal's slope the
town of Sychar, now the mud huts of 'Askar, about half a
mile off ; coming from which to the well the Samaritans would
have been in the Lord's sight. The site, too, of the Tomb of
the " Holy King Joshua," as the Samaritans call him, appears
to be rightly identified as but nine miles south of the present
Nablus. On the north-east the neighbourhood of Shalem, but
two miles distant, with its memory of Jacob's tents, at Shechem,
a mile and a half distant, Abraham had made his first encamp
ment, and built the altar on the ground which Jacob had after
wards purchased. Here, too, " by the oak of the pillar that
was in Shechem " (Judg. ix. 6), Abimelech had been made the
first king. Hither had come Rehoboam, "for all Israel were
come to Shechem to make him king" (1 Kings xii. l) ; and
here Jeroboam set up his rival kingdom.
However weary the Lord was, such a speaking scene could
not have been mute to the Son of Israel. The spot where He
rested, being so certainly identified, is all but the most worship
ful in the Holy Land. The well is now covered with a ruined
vault, which may " possibly be the crypt of the church built
over the well about the fourth century."1 The well is now
generally dry. Originally it must have been of great depth,
for in 1838 it was 105 feet deep, according to Robinson ; in
1866 the accumulation of debris had reduced it to 75 feet ; in
1875 it remained the same. The groove in the stone made by
the ropes which drew up the waterpot may still be felt*
While Jesus rested the disciples went to buy food, allowably
purchasable of the Samaritans then, but not later. If John
did not stay with Him — as would be the most natural negative
inference from the twenty-seventh verse, and the omission of
any mention of another witness, the absence of a third person
may have not been fortuitous in the Saviour's solemnity and
delicacy of contact with the fallen daughter of Samaria. In
• " Survey/' ii. p. 177 ; Barclay, 1881.
• "Twenty-On e Years," p. 194, and ill urtration.

THE SAVIOUR AND THE SAMARITANESS. 85
that case the narrative may well have come from the thankful
lips of a convert, at the time, or at St. John's after-visit.
It is another contrast which now fills the Johannine canvas, a
contrast of scene, society, and character. The dialogue with the
Samaritan woman follows close upon that with Nicodemus.
The scene is very fully given. Doubtless St John's apostolic
visitation of Samaria was one of the later fruits of this Samari
tan episode. Christ's spiritual treatment of the doubly outcast
Cuthite is the opposite of His treatment of the Jerusalem
Sanhedrist. In the latter He repels ; in the former He attracts,
In the latter He is sought ; in the former He seeks. In the latter
His speech has the ring of authority ; in the former He stoops
to conquer. The spiritual meeting-point between the Divine
and the earthly Rabbi was found in the signs of Divine power.
The spiritual touch between the Saviour and the sinner in her
consciousness of sin.
Nicodemus and the Samaritaness agreed in a Messianic hope
of some sort But the former started from the full Scripture
canon and the post-canonical literature ; the latter from the
Mosaic books only, in a tampered and falsified text. The former
from the Law, of which he was a master ; the latter from the
inferiority and ignorance of a degraded womanhood. The
former from orthodoxy ; the latter from heresy and schism.
The former from social honour ; the latter from shame. The
venture of faith was as slow in the former as rapid in the other.
The '' personal equation " made the difference, and unknown
developments of inward history. No one else in the world
could have united in a common interest, preparatory to a
common brotherhood, two such opposites as the proud Sanhe
drist, and the low Samaritaness.
As the Lord sat by the well in restful silence, the woman of
Sychar came there, as she may have come hundreds of times
before. Evening is still called in that changeless East " the
time that women go out to draw water." * She was indeed an un
conscious type and representative of the thousands upon thou
sands of the then and still degraded, downtrodden daughters of
Eastern lands, whom nothing but the strong arm of Christian
faith can raise, and the power of Christian civilization elevate to
their true place and function in the kingdom of a world- winning
Christ. It is not likely that the women of half-heathen Samari;i
1 Rev. J. Neil, " Palestine Explored," p. 19.

86 JESUS CHRIST.
occupied as honourable a position as those in Israel, and the
higher -class women of Israel fell far below the standard of
respect, of chivalry, of importance, of influence, of work
accorded to them in Christian societies and civilizations.
In defiance of conventional manners and proprieties the Lord
spoke first. The dialogue is deeply instructive as showing more
clearly than any other on record how the Lord dealt with those
He sought to salvation. There is the quick play of conscience
alarmed, but evasive ; the rapid thrust which wounds in order to
heal ; the courtesy, the respect to a woman, a Samaritaness, and
a bad character ; the change of front by wounded self-love to a
controversial subject ; the wonderful and profound revelations
of Christ, of His Father, and of the worship of His Father,
undisclosed to Jewish ears.
The earthly water our Lord graciously asked for suggested
the spiritual. The local reference to Jacob on the woman's
part, the well whereof he drank, his children, and his cattle, was
as natural as that to this mountain — her religious world. This
leads to furtherexplanation of the water of eternal life. The Lord's
manner was something no gospel, however faithful, could repro
duce ; we can only know that it must have added to His simplest
words that impression of power, of love, of holiness, which He
left whenever and wherever His fulness of grace and truth
uttered itself. Manner and tone must be superadded to words
in themselves such as never man spake, and the home thrust at
the guilty life follows. It was a personal attack, and the woman
would parry it by shifting her defence to the question of
questions between Jew and Samaritan. The absence of false
hood, the implied confession, leave an opening for the Spirit of
truth to enter. After the memorable words which have been
a foundation-stone of the charter of the faith (John iv. 24), the
controversial decision, the judicial affirmation, that salvation
was not of the Samaritans, but of the Jews, suggested without
mentioning the Messiah. The woman follows the lead ; and
the first open declaration of Messiahship immediately follows :
" I am, I that speak unto thee."
The Samaritan conception of the Messiah was that of a pro
phet or teacher. When Messiah cometh, He will announce to
us all things, the woman said. His teaching would be final and
absolute. He was the Hashab, the Converter, and Hathab, the
Guide, now FA Muhdy in the Samaritan vocabulary. As such

THE SAVIOUR AND THE SAMARITANESS. 87
the Cuthite accepted Him. Faith with the Samaritans was a
plant of quick growth. Before the Lord had departed they not
only believed in Him as the Hashab, but arrived at the certitude
of knowledge that He was the Saviour of the world. The
Messianic seed had fallen on favourable ground. The un-
Jewish friendliness of Master and disciple may have more than
disarmed prejudice, and converted it into goodwill. This epi
sode must have been a sort of holiday, a time of refreshing,
among the months of disappointed labour.
Just as Jesus announced Himself the Messiah, the disciples
came up and marvelled at His breach of etiquette. An inci
dental touch reveals the eye-witness. " She left the water-pot "
(John iv. 28). It was filled but forgotten, for other water had
been tasted. The rapid faith of the woman bore rapid fruit. As
the whitening ears, so the ripening harvest of the Samaritans
spread out before them. Some, perhaps, were actually approach
ing the well. The Messianic evidence which convinced the
Samaritans was the Messiah Himself.
If the Messianic purification of the Temple be regarded as
only an indirect confession of Messiahship, the first direct
declaration was this. It seems better to seek the fitness in
spiritual causation than in prudential policy, as some have done.
The Samaritans were strangers to the political Messianic hope,
and may have been riper on this ground for spiritual develop
ment. But the success which attended Christ's personal minis
try continued to attend upon that of His servants a few years
later. The memory of the Messiah kept alive, and the shame
of the Cross He suffered at Jewish hands would have been a
lesser barrier to Samaritan belief.
After " the two days of" Samaritan work (John iv. 43), per
haps passing through Herod's magnificent Sebaste, once
Samaria, now Sebustieh, where remains of Archelaus' temple to
Augustus still are found, Jesus came across the plain of " El
Buttauf " into Galilee. His fame had already preceded Him.
The eye-witnesses of His works at Jerusalem spread it abroad.
Perhaps there was some touch of provincial pride in welcoming
the distinguished Galilean Prophet whom " His own " Judaea
had rejected. Cana is the scene of a second miracle. Possibly
the son of Chuza, Herod's court official, is the restored sufferer.
The Galilean ministry, which follows,1 is briefly summed up in
• Vide Edersheim against Tischendorf, &c,

88 JESUS CHRIST.
Mark i. 15 (Matt. iv. 17; Luke iv. 15). The cry of the Baptist
is resumed, but with the addition, "believe in the gospel."
Many must have heard the former appeal, and were ready for
its fulfilment. Later, if not sooner, these, or some of them,
recruited the ranks of the Christian brotherhood, and may have
been some amongst the five hundred and more who beheld the
risen Christ, and among others who spread northward to
Antioch and Damascus.
The next scene opens at Nazareth. Jesus has returned to His
own Galileans. Jesus had declared Himself in the Temple, the
one centre of Jewish worship. He now declares Himself in the
other centre, the Synagogue. He came as was His Sabbath
wont. He is invited to act as the Sheliach Tsibbur. Facing the
sanctuary, with His back to the people, He leads their devo
tions. After introductory prayers the Shema, or " Hear," is
recited. The form of prayer follows (Tephillah), i.e., the Eigh
teen Eulogies, or Benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh). Of the
present nineteen, some, notably the three first and three last,
are of great antiquity. As these have left a marked, but as yet
unexplored,1 influence upon Christian devotion, and as we may
so catch some echo of the public devotions of Christ upon this
occasion, the first and second only may be quoted * for fear of
length, and a fragment of the eighteenth.
I. " Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, and the God of our
fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob, the God great and powerful and terrible, God most High,
who bestowest Thy benefits graciously, the Possessor of the
Universe, who rememberest the good deeds of the fathers and
sendest a redeemer unto their sons' sons for Thy Name's sake
in love. Our King, our Helper and Saviour and Shield, blessed
art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of Abraham."
2. " Thou art Mighty for ever, O Lord ; Thou bringest the
dead to life, Thou art mighty to save. Thou sustainest the
living by Thy mercy, Thou bringest the dead to life by Thy
great compassion, Thou supportest them that fall, and healest
1 The relation of Synagogue prayers to early liturgies awaits inquiry.
The development of early liturgies from various germs is a subject requiring
the attention of liturgiologists, and as a basis the examination of MSS.
and the continuation of Canon Swainson's labours.
"'Bishop Lightfoot, "Clemens Romanus," ii. 461. " Dictionary ol
Christian Antiquities," i. p. 1022 ; and Schiirer, ii. 85.

THE NAZARENE. 89
the sick, and loosest them that are in bonds, and makest good
Thy faithfulness to them that sleep in the dust. Who is like
unto Thee, O Lord of might ? and who can be compared unto
Thee, O King, who killest and makest alive, and causest salva
tion to shoot forth ? And Thou art faithful to bring the dead
to life, Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who bringest the dead to
life " ;— and the last clause of the eighteenth Benediction, so
suggestively pathetic to a Messiahless people —
" And may it seem good in Thy sight to bless Thy people
Israel at all times and at every moment with Thy peace. Blessed
art Thou, O Lord, who blessest Thy people Israel with peace."
And so patient are the words of Christian adoption and
adaptation that we are not surprised to find traces of them in
the long liturgical prayer at the end of St. Clement's Epistle to
the Romans, and possibly in the Greek Liturgy of St. Mark,
and the " introductory part of the present Greek Office is a
Christianized epitome of the first eight." '
After the seventeenth followed the threefold blessing pro
nounced by the priests, or offered as a prayer in their absence.
The congregation said Amen. They had prayed standing.
They now sit to hear the first lesson, from the Thorah, on
Sabbath mornings ; and the second from the Prophets, the
Haphtarah. The Methurgeman stands by the reader to trans
late the Biblical Hebrew into the current Aramaic. The sermon
(Derashah) follows. This was the form which the teaching in
the synagogues so often mentioned in the New Testament and
in Philo took, and which in Apostolic Missions supplied the
basis for the new Evangel.
Jesus stood to read the lection from the Prophets : Himself
targumed it ; and sat down to deliver His first Nazareth ser
mon. It was a personal claim to be the Hope of Israel. But
words of light and power were insufficient to change obstinate
prejudices. The claim was too absolute for local bias and
narrow hearts, unconvicted of sin sickness.
"Without the city wall,"
as later, the rebellious answer is given. The site of precipita
tion is still seen on the hill above the Maronite Church, where
they would have pushed Him down (Luke iv. 29). It is a sharp
descent of forty feet.
* Freeman, " Divine Service," i. p. 64.

CHAPTER XL:
THE DIVINE GALILEAN.
" I shut my door agamst my Saviour, but, lo. He stands before me day
and night as a prisoner, whom His own mighty love hath enchained in the
house of His beloved child " (An Indian poet of " The New Dispensa
tion ").
Capernaum — The unknown feast at Jerusalem— Galilee In Christ's time
and now — Galilean labours.
NAZARETH is left to its darkness. Capernaum becomes the
Christian mission centre. The Light shines upon the land of
Zabulon, the way of the sea becomes the way of the King (Matt.
iv. 1 5). What better centre of the new spiritual industry could
be found than busy thriving Capernaum ? Capernaum was a
fishing, an agricultural, and a mercantile centre. Fishermen,
shipbuilders, dyers, weavers, stonecutters, jostled with the cara
vans from Egypt and the sea-coast, backwards and forwards to
Damascus and the East
The controversy respecting the site of Capernaum is as yet
unclosed. Tell Hum and Khan Minyeh are the rival claimants ;
but as they are within two and a half miles of one another
neither can be far wrong. Tell Hum is supported by the balance
of authority, and the suggestion that Bethsaida was the fishing
suburb of Capernaum seems a very likely one.
The return visit of Jesus to an unnamed feast at Jerusalem
is recorded with much detail by the fourth Evangelist (John v.
1-47). The feast, a feast merely according to the better read
ing,' appears to have been that of Trumpets," the new moon of
1 Westcott and Hort, Tregelles, and R.V. omit ij, but Tischendorf and
Gebhardt retain it, » Westcott, u. v.

THE DIVINE GALILEAN. 91
September, shortly before the Day of Atonement. The
Messianic crisis centred in the feast. The great question be
came more urgent. Upon this visit Jesus directly formulates
His Messianic claim,1 and His equality with God. This had
been implied in the Temple cleansing. His works are the evi
dence which accredits Him. As so often, the increasing contra
diction of sinners called out the clearer statement of truth.
Christ on His defence must vindicate His authority. His own
cause and work He identified with John's ; but as the greater
contains the less, the perfect flower, the spring bud. His works
in the present must be considered in the light of the immediate
past of the Johannine work, and the historic testimony of their
acknowledged Scriptures. Christ, then, appealed to history like
Christianity ; and like Christianity to the inward light of the
human heart. Whoso had the Divine in him would recognize the
Divine in Himself. The Messianic conflict had not now begun,
as some say, but it had deepened. The Jews, i.e., the Sanhedrist
party, are standing in sharp outlines on a hostile horizon. The
whole controversy took occasion, but not cause, from three
several festal healings — this at Bethesda of the impotent man ;
the second of the man born blind at Jerusalem ; the third, and
most victorious, and unpardonable, the resurrection of Lazarus.
A decisive step had been taken. No disciples appear to
have attended Him. The final call had not as yet separated
them for His work. The brief ministry in Galilee had been the
first effort. The great Galilean ministry in its full sweep now
begins, the final call to the fishers of men. Consider the scene
of the Divine Galilean's work.
Galilee in the time of Christ was densely peopled. Josephus
estimated the number of cities and villages, the smallest of
which numbered above fifteen thousand inhabitants, at two
hundred and four. His estimate has usually been rejected as
an absurd exaggeration. But it must be remembered that as
military governor of that province he had unusual facilities for
gauging its resources ; that he raised without difficulty an army
there of above one hundred thousand young men ; and that a
gross misstatement would have been easily detected. We are
inclined, therefore, to agree with Dr. Selah Merrill ' in attach
ing more credit to his testimony. In any case Galilee mus;
» Stanton, p. 276, hardly does justice to this.
" " Galilee in the Time of Christ " (R.T.S.), p. 63 foil, and p. 19.

1)2 JESUS CHRIST.
have presented to the eye, from outlying heights, the spectacle
of a sea of habitations, an unbroken sheet of towns, " a land of
brooks of water, of fountains " (Deut. viii. 7), having in its two
thousand square miles a possible population of three millions.
The fertility and beauty of the country at the time are well
known. It was the "garden of God." It was a "watered
garden," and the splendid wealth of the soil was turned to the
best account by the industry and enterprise of a vigorous and
intelligent agricultural population.
"All the trees and fruits of Palestine flourished here to
perfection." To quote again one * who has the technical know
ledge of years of special study on the spot ; " forests, in many
cases, covered its mountains and hills, while its uplands, gentle
slopes, and broader valleys were rich in pastures, meadows,
cultivated fields, vineyards, olive-groves, and fruit trees of every
kind. Here, in this garden ' that has no end,' flourished the
vine, the olive, and the fig ; the oak, the hardy walnut, the
terebinth, and the hot-blooded palm ; the cedar, cypress, and
balsam ; the fir-tree, the pine, and sycamore ; the bay-tree,
the myrtle, the almond, the pomegranate, the citron, and the
beautiful oleander. These, with still many other forest, fruit,
and flowering trees, and shrubs, and aromatic plants, together
with grains and fruits, to which should be added an infinite
profusion of flowers, made up that wonderful variety of natural
productions," which smiled in undefiled beauty round the houses
of Jesus' Galilean work.
The products of the province were fish, wine, wheat, and oil,
flax, all in great abundance. The port of Tyre connected the
Galilean market with consumers from the far West to the far
East. The lake cities were centres of the fishing industry ;
Tarichaea seems to have been specially famous for its fish
factories, and had about forty thousand inhabitants.
Nor was art very far behind Nature. Architecture was not an
indigenous Jewish product. The Jews were not great builders.
But modern critical research and exploration have shown how
widely Hellenizing influences had spread, and many magnificent
buildings, temples, theatres, palaces, chiefly under the inspira
tion of Herodian taste, covered the land with Graeco-Roman
monuments. Even the Temple at Jerusalem showed abundant
traces of the influence of the Grecian style ; just as in Solomon's
¦ Dr. S. Merrill.

THE DIVINE GALILEAN. 93
time Memphis, and possibly Nineveh, supplied suggestions,1 and
Tyre, masons and skilled artificers. Synagogues, too, were often
handsome edifices, with ornate mouldings. "But the Jewish
ordinary architecture was, on the whole," probably " much what
is now the natural style of the country," and "the buildings
were neither large nor solidly constructed." *
The Sea of Galilee has little in common to-day with the
bright busy populous lake of Christ's time. The purple blush
of the oleander still fringes its shore. The green or brown
hills still "stand about" it. The turf is still stirred with
myriad wild flowers varied and lustrous. The waves still beat
their monotonous music upon the white shingle. Hermon's
snowy dome still shines afar. But all else is changed. Where
hundreds of sail winged their whiteness over the sparkling
water, where Herod, Josephus, or Titus could easily collect
fleets of from three hundred to five hundred vessels, where
numbers of fisher-folks plied their nightly craft to furnish the
numerous markets of a densely-crowded neighbourhood, where
the magnificent Tiberias, lately built by Herod the Great, and
named after the Roman Emperor, lined the lake-shore for nearly
three miles with handsome public buildings, temples, the palace
of the Tetrarch, and fashionable residences, " all built in the
sumptuous style of Graeco-Roman art, with their spacious courts,
surrounded by marble columns, adorned with elaborately carved
designs, the whole embosomed in palm groves, and gay with
gardens of tropical luxuriance ; "3 where the Plain of Gennesareth
spread out its fruit orchards and gardens ; now is the plain all
but uncultivated, now is a squalid town, now are some rows of
columns lately discovered by Mr. Schumacher, representing
Tiberias, now are half-a-dozen miserable villages, the black
tents and the cattle of the Bedouin on the hillsides, a few
small dilapidated fishing-boats resting on the banks, or moving
languidly over the waters, the only signs of human life.4
" On the shores of this lake might be seen temple after temple
rearing their vast colonnades of graceful columns, their courts
ornamented with faultlessly carved statues to the deities of a
• Cf. C. R. Conder, "Syrian Stone Lore," p. 122.
• C R. Conder in " Survey," iii. p. 441 f. » L. Oliphant.
4 S. Manning's, "Those Holy Fields," pp. 196, 202; Selah Merrill,
" East of the Jordan," p. 461 ; L. Oliphant, " Sea of Galilee," English
Illustrated, December, 1887.

94 JESUS CHRIST.
heathen cult. Here were the palaces of the Roman high func
tionaries, the tastefully decorated villas of rich citizens, with
semi-tropical gardens irrigated by the copious streams which
have their sources in the Plain of Gennesareth and the neigh
bouring hills. Here were broad avenues and populous thorough
fares, thronged with the motley concourse which so much wealth
and magnificence had attracted— rich merchants from Antioch,
then the most gorgeous city of the East, and from the Greek
islands, traders and visitors from Damascus, Palmyra, and the
rich cities of the Decapolis ; caravans from Egypt and Persia,
Jewish Rabbis jostling priests of the worship of the Sun, and
Roman soldiers swaggering across the market-places, where the
peasantry were exposing the produce of their fields and gardens
for sale!"1
In such a hive of half-Hellenized civilization, Oriental com
mercial industries, and mixed cultures and faiths, did the little
body of Christ's workers set to leaven the whole mass. The
nearest modern parallels are still to be found in the East rather
than the West. In Calcutta, where the Christian missionary's
first feeling " is the utter helplessness of his outlook in the face
of a joyous, idle, universal, self-satisfied, non-Christian life, the
streets crowded, the students happy and eager, the idolatrous
processions beautiful as a dream, the burning sun, the beautiful
flower-trees, the birds singing, the philosophers lightly and
airily discussing the religious life of the past and of the future,
the missionary thought of either as a needless bore, or a pleasant
means of obtaining an hour or two's logical word-play,"* and
overshadowing all the majestic aegis of a foreign government
and a distant sovereign, just as the Roman official exercised
dominion over the concourse of mixed multitudes. Or again
in Bombay, the Indian Tyre, which, like Calcutta, delights to
call itself " the hall of all the nations," and where all varieties
of national type and national dress throng the streets, and of
the Christians, European or native, the question asks itself,
" What are they among so many ? "
Capernaum was a suitable base as the home of growing faith
(Luke iv. 31). Here lived the court officer and his son. Here,
or close by, dwelt the sons of John and the sons of Zebedee.
* L. Oliphant, " Haifa," p. 219.
• MS. letter from the late Rev. P. S. Smith of the Oxford Mission to
Calcutta.

THE DIVINE GALILEAN, 9j
" Here He would on the Sabbath days preach in that synsgogue,
of which the good centurion was the builder, and Jairus the chief
ruler." » Here begins a new departure in the life of Jesus. He
had been a lonely missionary preacher. He had been scattering
the seed. He now begins to gather in. The Organizer of the
Church appears for the first time. Simon and Andrew, James
and John, form the first community of the new kingdom, the first
spiritually specialized to definite office. They are no longer dis
ciples. They are called to the personal fellowship of Messianic
work and undivided spiritual industry. On the following Sab
bath they witness His words and works of power — the unclean
spirit cast out, the mother-in-law of Simon restored by the touch
of His hand. The home Simon had given up is already blessed,
and the sick in the neighbourhood,
" At even, when the sun was set,"
and the Sabbath over, were graced with the healing touch, one
by one.
The Galilean labours which follow, briefly sketched in the
Synoptists, produced abundant fruit. Two points specially
marked them (Luke v. 17 ; vi. 7). The Rabbinical party, deputed
from, or instigated by, the Jerusalem faction, were in ceaseless
and open opposition. The Messianic party was increasing in
quantity and quality. Another onward step in "organization"
takes place when Jesus, after the long night-prayer, formally
selects the Twelve (Luke vi 12).
* Edersheim, 1. 457.

CHAPTER XII.
THE DIVINE APOSTLE. THE DIVINE MORALIST.
"And these things He taught, not as contrary to the Law, but as fulfilling
the Law, and rooting within us the means whereby the Law maketh
righteous" (Iken^us iv. xiii. I, translated by Keble).
" What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others (Con
fucius' "Golden Rule").
The selection of the Twelve— Organization of the Divine society — Organi.
zation of the life— Code of the New Kingdom in its past, present, and
future revelations.
The site of the selection of the Twelve and the delivery of the
Sermon on the Mount was evidently well known in the early
Church. It is termed by the Synoptists " the mountain" simply,
perhaps as being so well known to Christians as a habitual
resort of Christ and His disciples, and possibly, in after-time, as
to require no specifying ; or there may have been no name to
this one of the many heights in the neighbourhood. Tradition
regards the Horns of Hattin (Kurun Hattin) as the place, and
many moderns are disposed to assent to it.
The appointment of the Twelve Apostles was an example of
supernatural rather than natural selection. It was a spiritual
differentiation of the fittest of the disciples according to Divine,
not human valuation. The chosen of the chosen were summoned
to step into the inner circle which should share the Lord's inti
macy, and constitute the governing body of the Church. The
inclusion of Judas is one of the unsealed mysteries of God's pre
destination. It was only after a night of prayer that Jesus de
cided upon His final choice. An unseen Hand pointed them
out. They did not choose Him ; He chose them. How shall

THE DIVINE APOSTLE. 97
they preach except they be sent ? He was the Apostle of the
Father, the authorized and accredited Messenger ; they were the
Apostle's Apostles (Malachim). Their authority was derivative,
as their teaching was in His Name. Their present mission and
commission was preliminary and local. Their promotion to
world-wide jurisdiction was at present unrevealed, and, as the
case of the traitor proves, conditioned by their faithfulness in
service. Of these twelve, Judas, the man of Kerioth, alone was 01
Judean origin ; the others were Galileans. The Galilean
character formed the best ethical basis for the elevating power
of the new kingdom. The Galileans were men of loyal and
patriotic spirit, intelligent, active, laborious. They were fashioned
of the stolid stuff and high spirit which make good soldiers and
merchants, from the days when Zebulon and Napthali jeoparded
their lives unto the death in the high places of the field (Judg.
v. 18), to the days when the fighting men of Japha beat back
the Roman soldiers till twelve thousand of the former fell. They
were free children of nature, filled with the sunny breath of
their own highlands. Their reality, their manliness, their
perfervidum ingenium, their zeal for the law apart from tradi
tion, stood in sharp contrast to the artificially religious and self-
seeking political Rabbis, who would —
" Make of God their tame confederate.
Purveyor to their appetites." «
These Twelve were in an eminent degree meant to be living
gospels — personal Christ-forces, Christ-organs. The trans
mission of the faith was dependent, in the first instance, upon
living depositaries, personal eye- and ear-witnesses. The faith
and the life are alike one. Christ alone is the source of either.
Human media are strictly media between Him and His. Life
and faith were meant to co-exist, hence living agents propagated
the Divine life and the Divine faith before any documentary
embodiment of either. The Church existed before the Bible
What God hath joined together let not man put asunder.
The number Twelve was significant. It indicated that under
the Messianic King they would rule the twelve tribes of Israel.
The organization of the official element in the Church to all time
* R. Browning, " Pippa Passes.'
8

98 JESUS CHRIST.
lay in this germ. In Christ is the fulness of all functions— ruling
evangelizing, pastoral, prophetic, Church officers claim but
delegated authority. The dependence of the Apostles upon
Christ was absolute, at first more " outward and unconscious," '
afterwards more inward, self-intelligible. At first they were
servants, they became friends ; they never ceased to be children.
The manifestation of His own life and character indirectly, as
well as directly, was the leading factor in their moral, spiritual
training. Only after He left them visibly did He become an
inward formative force. His personal influence was at first
outward — an example, a voice, a manner, a temper, a look, a
conversation. Later on these passed into the memory and
very life as an abiding power. From without He passed within,
to interpenetrate, to transform, to spiritualize.
The Sermon on the Mount was the natural and immediate
sequel to the nomination of the officers of the kingdom. It
was the official manifesto of the moral code of the kingdom.
It was addressed, in the first place, to the new officers ; in the
second, to all the children and children's children of the king
dom. It was, above all, a definition of character ; a statement
of principles, rather than a promulgation of rules. It had re
lations to the past, to the present, to the future. To the past ;
for He, the Lawgiver, came to fulfil all righteousness, to conserve
and to reinforce all the moral force, and colour, and authority of
the old covenant ; to give finality to what was partial and incom
plete ; to develop incipient morals to the full length, and breadth,
and depth, and height of a perfect organism. To the past ;
for all the moral thinkings of all previous non-Jewish moral
teachers were here recognized, revised, and re-issued. The
Divine Law, as approached in varying degrees in divers ethical
schools — Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Persian, Greek,
Roman— is here, so far as true, and therefore authentically
Divine, ratified and confirmed. The moral system of Bud
dhism, for instance, so far as its theory goes, occupies the
highest place among non-Christian religions The five com
mandments are as follows : " Not to kill (anything that has
life) : not to steal : not to lie : not to drink what can intoxicate :
not to commit adultery." » And the Buddhist commandments,
1 Neander, p. 126.
¦ Professor Kellogg, "The Light of Asia and the Light of the World,
p. 270 following.

THE DIVINE MORALIST. qg
just as the Mosaic interpreted by prophet and psalmist in
distant approximation to Christ, reached beyond the letter
to the disposition of the heart. Thus we read that the
Buddha, on one occasion, being asked to declare '' the highest
blessing," answered in words such as the following : —
" Waiting on father and mother, protecting child and wife,
and a quiet calling, this is the highest blessing. ' Giving alms,
living religiously, protecting relatives, blameless deeds, this is
the highest blessing,' " &c.
But it must be remembered parenthetically, to avoid mis
understanding, that these higher Buddhist flights must be taken
in connection with their whole code, which has no conception
of a personal God, no conception of a moral obligation, or
authoritativeness, which is " law " only by a transference of ideas
without a lawgiver. If the Mosaic law could not give life,
much less could the highest non-Jewish, such as the Buddhist.1
And the moral weakness of Buddhism is too notorious and
patent to need illustration.
As non-Jewish moral teachings so above all the Jewish law
given by Moses, glorified in countless Psalms, vindicated and
enforced by prophets and men of God, striven after by the
righteous remnant in every generation, was reaffirmed and
certified. Its inviolability, its absolute validity, its catholicity
reasserted and authenticated, not word by word, and detail by
detail, but as a whole and by typical examples.
But there was more than reaffirmation of the past righteous
ness. There was expansion, creative development, progress
inward and spiritual. " In five cardinal points of the moral
code " * the new righteousness is contrasted with the old : in
the law of murder, the law of oaths, the law of adultery, the law
of retaliation, the law of charity. The public placard of the
Decalogue is taken down and rewritten upon the heart. The
sources of good and evil, the inward springs of thought and
life, are dealt with at their centre and focus. Thought and look
and gesture are traversed and scrutinized.
If the Law of Christ had simply been a more stringent pro
vision than the Mosaic, covering a wider field, and penetrating
1 Professor Kellogg, p. 280 following, and the express declarations of
such experienced and credible eye-witnesses of Buddhism, as Bishops
Schereschewsky and Copleston, or Dr. Edkins.
' Re*. S. Cox, D.D., " Expository Essays and Discourses," p. 12.

ICO JESUS CHRIST.
into deeper chambers— where had been the possibility of ful
filling commands which in their earlier form were beyond
attainment ? With the new law Christ, but not till after His
Resurrection, liberated a new power. The Christian's life is a
reproduction of Christ's life. His energy is transformed and
conveyed into the Christian. Communion with Him is a
scientific necessity of spiritual obedience. Faith is the line
along which the currents of spiritual energy pass ; and Sacra
ments are the means of His communications of life.
With regard to the present, its synchronal position, the whole
required to be interpreted in the light of the Life of the Law
giver. He spake by authority and He exemplified by authority.
The Blessed above blessed ones revealed and exhibited every
beatitude. With Him the law was not external, it was not
imposed from without ; it was the expression of His own inner
nature. The Law Royal was a reflex of the Royal Mind.
In its positive aspects and in its negative the Royal life was
the best commentary on the Royal Law. He was Himself the
exponent. His example expressed it in the concrete. When
ever the disciples had difficulties about the application of
principle to different details, they had the ever-speaking like
ness of the Law obeying Himself. The Royal Law was to
Him a perfect law of liberty, and became so to all who took
the yoke freely upon them of Him, " cui servire libertas."
In this the most effective of all ways, that of personal
influence, the apostles were trained to deal with moral problems-
The gospel in contact with the degraded morals of corrupt
society had, as it often has now, to create moral demands before
supplying them. The gospel had to meet most perplexing
problems in applying the sweetness and light of moral truth to
the various complications of artificial, often highly civilized, but
rotten society. One of the sayings of the Lord, unrecorded in
the Gospels, capable of wide application, "it is more blessed to
give than to receive," is an instance of many others which in His
own life-time, and in the life-time of His ear-witnesses, became
fruitful principles of action, and useful guides of conduct.
Such difficult questions as those of caste and polygamy which
confront the Christian missionary of to-day were present to the
after-experience of the apostles and disciples. Those who had
occupied the pre-eminent place of being eye-witnesses of the
Word of Life had two first principles which they could apply.

THE DIVINE MORALIST. IOf
¦{ 0 t\'o.
What did the Lord say? What did fhe^Lord' do.?pS,imple,
untutored minds, without other culture tRan&hat of thef'tloDrd's
life and words engraven on a memory qhjci«Cw-ith the strong
pulse of love, and fortified by the re-creative ra^ujffcf *he Sgirit, ,
were thus enabled to cope with the mental and iS&iiaJ^c^bstd-eles
to belief, and the mental and moral difficulties of planting,"pre-
serving, and perpetuating the holy stock of the faith in noisome,
unclean social soils, and hotbeds of civilized vice, in nurseries of
deeply rooted, widely ramified evil, strong in possession, in inte
rest, in degenerate undisturbed heredity.
And in its immediate applications, the Law had negative re
lations. It was polemical. It was the unqualified contradic
tion of the fashionable authorized moral teaching and living.
The best Rabbinical ethics may be found in the small
Talmudical Tractate Pirke Aboth ; * and at every point of con
tact pale in comparison. The moral teaching of the day,
allowing for exceptions, resolved itself into personal and
national selfishness. Righteousness was an acquisition, not a
gift, purchasable by individual merit. Individual merit was
consciously created, valued, and asserted. " My humility is my
greatness, and my greatness, my humility," said Rabbi Hillel.
The famous Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai would say, " I have seen
the children of the world to come, and they are few. If there
are three. I and my son are of their number ; if they are
two, I and my son are they."
And not only had the current moral teaching to be negatived,
or transformed, where capable of transformation, ethics had to
be raised to a new position. An externalism like that of
Brahminism had to be dethroned. Rabbinism had debased
the whole theocratic system. Morals were enslaved. Action
was chained and bound in a systematized machinery of fetters.
The polemic of Christ against the Pharisees and Sadducees
was the absolutely necessary condition of creating a healthy
moral standard. Between Christian law and Rabbinical there
was no reconciliation. It was a life-and-death question. One
or the other must perish. The Sermon on the Mount was the
epoch of the new birth of moral life. It was as life from the
dead. One or two examples of the legalism and formalism from which
men were delivered will suffice. No less than twelve treatises
1 See Dr. Taylor's convenient edition and ngtes.

IOJ JESUS CHRIST.
of the Mishna, filling the whole of the last part, deal with
ordinances relating to cleanness and uncleanness, such as the
defilement of hollow earthen vessels, of metal vessels of which
"the mouth and the hollow are capable of defilement. If they
are broken they are clean ; if vessels are again made out of
them they are in their former uncleanness." The very three
mementoes, the Tsitsith, the tassels or fringes which every
Israelite wore at the four corners of his upper garment;
the Mesusa, or box fixed to the doors, containing Deut. vi. 9,
and xi. 20 ; and the Tephillin, or prayer-straps, which every
male Israelite put on at morning prayer, except on Sabbaths and
holy days, probably of scriptural origin, and of great value
rightly used, were debased to a thousand superstitious prescrip
tions about knots and threads and the like, and were often
treated as charms.1
In regard to the future the permanent force and value of the
Sermon is witnessed by its own perennial freshness and vitality.
All moral progress is a pursuit of these ideals. The ideal
Christian, the ideal righteousness of the individual, the society,
the Church is here outlined. Christ believed in Himself, in
His work. He knew His community would last. He knew
His work would survive His earthly life. He knew its con
tinuity to the ages of ages. His action and His words were
equally prophetic, equally creative, equally indestructible. He
could trust in His cause, and in human nature. Knowing
humanity as He did, with the perfect insight of intuition, and
the experience of active mixture with all classes, and in a
country where men of all nations met, knowing its worst and
its best, knowing its worst to Himself to the end, He was
never a pessimist or a cynic. He was the incarnation of faith
and hope in human nature, as well as of faith and hope in God.
He was the lover of humanity, whose delight was to be with
the sons of men, as well as the destroyer of all the works of
the devil, and the supreme hater of evil.
The moral teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is the
charter of moral life to all Christians. But its influence has
gone far into non-Christian regions. It leaves its impress
upon the characters of those who have lost faith in Christian
doctrine, and upon non-Christian ethical systems like Comtism.
It attracts with a wonder of joy those who have not learned
1 Vide Schiirer, ii. 2, { 28.

THE DIVINE MORALIST. I03
to believe in Christian doctrine, and leads the more honest and
enlightened among them on to the full acceptance of the
doctrine without which it has but permissive value arid force.
Many educated Hindus are now adopting some form of
Theism. The Brahmo Samaj movement in Calcutta is one of
the most striking instances. But it is a Theism which is learned
from Christianity, and with or without acknowledgment borrows
Christian moral ideas without the sanction upon which they
rest Some have found this out, and have been consistent
enough to embrace the creed which underlies the morality.
The Rev. Nehemiah Goreh, the eminent missionary, is a
notable example, and the promise of more. He affirms, " I
know, and am as sure as of my own existence, that I learnt
Theism from Christianity, and, I also know, that Christianity
alone does teach it, and that from Christianity alone it can be
learnt"* In the Sermon on the Mount, the Christ formulated for all
time the principles of the Christian character. His faith was
a school of character. He Himself was a trainer of special
character. Character was to be the human propagating power
of His truth. His immediate teaching was a technical edu
cation in spirituality. All the graces and gifts of Christian
character were perfectly embodied in Him, and transcribed,
reproduced in varying approximations by those on whom He
stamped the ineffable beauty of His image, and the lustrous
light of His native force. His spiritual children were to be His
speaking likenesses.
His character, like His truth, was progressively revealed.
Cross lights beat upon it ; counter currents, fierce oppositions,
fought against it ; but as the darkness increased it shone brighter
and brighter, as hatred waxed and wove fresh combinations,
newer lights and fuller beauties flashed forth from the furnace.
The complete ascendency of His character, the full apprecia
tion of it, the true measure of it were only won by the Resur
rection. That was the beginning of the final victory of
character which was consummated at Pentecost. From that
moment the victory of the Christ, and Christ-derived character
over all contradictory ideals, was assured. Human life in all its
moral relations has never lost, and can never lose, that ideal.
1 «¦ Occasional Papers of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta,'' quoted by
Rev. E. F. Taylor, on Indian Theism, Mission Life, Feb,, 1883.

I04 JESUS CHRIST.
It is of eternal validity, of universal worth and potency, and
is an everlasting spring and fountain-head of like characters, in
all the provinces of human life, in all the possible develop
ments of moral loveliness and strength and truth. While He
lived on earth His eye was always upon His pupils. In their
missionary works and tentative transient evangelizations, they
could always refer to Him. He superintended, He dictated.
This revealed His public character under various difficulties and
emergencies, and prepared them to deal with the like when He
was gone.
The Sermon on the Mount was the official manifesto of in
carnate moral truth and life. Viewed in connection with His
whole life-work, it was the beginning of the transfiguration of
character, of the transformation of morals ; the beginning not
the end. The end was sacrifice, and that could only be under
stood after He who pleased not Himself had officially an
nounced : "IT IS FINISHED."
The Ten Beatitudes are the ten words of the new law
corresponding to the ten of the old. They are the prototypal
moral ideas of the gospel. They are marks of the ideal
Christian ; one and all perfectly manifest in the Divine Man.
The last two Beatitudes were specially suggestive of suffering,
and a prophecy of the progressive victoriousness of suffering.
The kingdom was one built upon triumphant pain. " In this
world all good, even the fairest and noblest — as love — rests upon
a ' dark ground,' which it has to consume with p"ain and con
vert into pure spirit." * This truth was one which had re
peatedly to be pressed upon the disciples. For current Jewish
teaching regarded suffering as the reward of sin, and even the
pure pre-Christian scriptural sufferers had fallen back baffled
before the dark mystery. And in their present stage of
Messianic experience the disciples had but tasted the cup, and
were sheltered by an overpowering strength and sympathy.
The organization of the Christian body, and the organization
of the Christian life, were correlative. The words of the Sermon
presupposed in the future an organized community, a recog
nizable brotherhood. The exact form of the body wherein the
¦ Rothe, quoted by Professor Martineau.

THE DIVINE MORALIST. 105
spirit should be ensouled is as yet undefined. It was not the
method of Christ to seal systems upon living forces before the
spirit within needed some embodiment, visible, social. The
Kingdom of God centred in the King while He lived and
worked on the earthly scene. He would define in word and
create in practice the character and life which should stamp the
children of the kingdom. He would breathe into them the
breath of the new royal life before any outward organization
was dowered with the royal charter.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE DIVINE ART TEACHER. THE DIVINE NATURE-WORKER,
THE DIVINE MISSIONARY.
"A sweet attractive kind of graces
A full assurance given by looks ;
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel books—
I trow that countenance cannot lye.
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye."
" Friend's Passion for his AstropheL"
Capernaum — Nain — The Baptist in Machasrus — The Saviour and the lost
woman — Divine self-assertion — Spiritual industry — Parables of Divine
art interpret Nature — Miracle of power over Nature — Demonism—
Incessant labours — Mission tours — The martyr of Machasrus — The
Feeding of the Five Thousand — The Bread of Life — The stormy lake
— The contradiction of sinners — Passover retreat — Back to work.
Jesus descended from the mountain of Beatitudes, and entered
into Capernaum (Luke vii. i). The crowds had not dispersed.
The spell of His presence and His words lay upon them. They
still followed Him. They witnessed the prayer of the large-
hearted centurion, the wonder of the Lord at his faith connect
ing itself with the promise of many more of Gentile blood
entering into the kingdom of heaven. This last word, coming
upon us as a surprise in the Jewish Gospel (Matt. viii. 1 1), was
one of those germs which would fructify in the after-teaching of
the disciples. The evidential force of it should not be over
looked. The Divine Galilean boldly announced the world
width of the kingdom of heaven, and flatly contradicted the
whole stream of current teaching and national jealousy, by not
only admitting, but preferring the " children of hell," in Rab-

THE DIVINE ART TEACHER. 10?
binical language, to the "royal" posterity of Abraham. The
unique faith of the straightforward soldier was the spark which
kindled the prophetic fire. By a natural association of ideas,
Jesus already saw in him the march of a vast army of likeminded
soldiers of Christ.
The reward of faith was followed by a miracle where no faith
could have found place, or is unrecorded (Luke vii. 1 1). Victory
over death follows victory over disease. On the next day,1 or
shortly after," still accompanied by crowds, sailing perhaps down
the lake, and then, taking one of the still existing roads, Christ
came to what was then a city, Nain, some twenty miles from
Capernaum. Nain, in " its green nest " on the edge of " Little
Hermon," well deserved its descriptive name, " the pleasant."3
The name Nein still lingers over the squalid huts which mark
the site.
The two streams met at the gate, probably on the east, where
the "rough rock was full of sepulchral caves, which still exist."
The only Son of His Mother feels for the mother of an only
son — and she a widow. The body lay face upwards and hands
folded on the breast, like an effigy on a cathedral sepulchre.
The'bier was open. Jesus came and touched it. The initiative
was His own. In an instant the spirit of life returned to the
dead young man. Fear falls upon the whole multitude, mourners
with the tears yet upon their cheeks, and those who had now
witnessed a greater triumph than any that went before. What
was the spiritual link between the Divine power and the lifeless
youth ? Some think 4 he died with an intense prayerful yearn
ing for life. We would rather leave it among the unrevealed
mysteries and suggested potencies of blessed hope.
Tidings of Jesus' works came to the heroic spirit whom Herod
had cast into his fortress prison. St. John was in the palace
fortress of Machasrus, now M'Kaur. The castle, standing
"starkly bold and clear,"5 3,860 feet above the Dead Sea, 2,546
above the Mediterranean, dominated the whole country round
like some dark angel. Here Herod occupied at once a splendid
psdace and a frontier rampart against Arab marauders. Within
the waste of ruins which now mark the spot the two dungeons
of the citadel still remain, " the small holes still visible in the
¦ Wry i%i\e, Gebhardt, Tischendorf. * iv rip, Hort.
i Hugh Macmillan, " Our Lord's Three Raisings from the Dead," p. 75
? Godet. 5 I. G. Whittier.

I08 JESUS CHRIST.
masonry, where staples of wood and iron had once been fixed." "
One of these was probably the last home of the free son of the
wilderness. Never did life's work seem a more complete failure. St. John
knew how God's people had treated God's messengers of old.
But was the kingdom of heaven still but a floating light upon
the retreating hills of prophecy ? and the immediate future as
dark as the mountain walls which girdled his dungeon ? The
uttermost isolation, bodily and spiritual, the horror of encom
passing darkness left its trace upon the strong spirit. The iron
entered into his soul. The second Elias, like the first, faltered.
To face his own doubts, and to satisfy for ever himself and the
faithful disciples, who still sought his rocky cell, he would put
the question to Him alone who could answer it. " Art Thou the
Coming One (habbd), the Man of the Future, or do we, I and
my school of faith, wait for another ? " The answer came,
clothed in the language of the Messianic prophet,3 whose words
and spirit were the life-breath of all the creed and teaching of
John. The benedictory warning3 is added rather to hearten
the disciples than their master, " Blessed is he, whosoever shall
not be offended in Me." The brevity of the dismissal may have
been needed to quicken the dull flame of their convictions.
When they departed lest their weakness should reflect on the
Baptist, Christ lifted up His voice in unqualified praise of him
who was a prophet, and more exceeding a prophet. Yet, stand
ing outside His Kingdom, he was less than the lesser within.
Holy violence such as his could alone force an entrance into its
gates. Yet this generation was like fretful children, who would
neither mourn with the ascetic nor rejoice with the joy of the
Messiah. In St. Luke's record a dramatic incident follows (vii. 36). Our
Lord's dealings with women, and women's dealings with Him,
form an instructive study, and show marked contrasts with the
Rabbinical theory and practice. The woman who came through
the open door into the house of Simon the Pharisee was a fallen
one, possibly a notorious professional harlot of the town. It
may have been Mary of Magdala, whose name is mentioned so
soon afterwards. Three figures are prominent in the company,
1 Tristram, " Land of Moab," p. 359 ; Edersheim.
a Isa. xxxv. s, sq. ; xxix. 18, sq. ; xiii. 7 ; IxL 1, sq.
3 Not "public censure," as Keim.

THE DIVINE ART TEACHER. log
The Holy One, all tenderness and truth ; the smooth Pharisee,
coldly civil, critically unsympathetic ; the penitent daughter of
affliction, gliding in unabashed in the glory of her passion and
her tears. Modern verse and art have combined to halo the
gently audacious guest raining the dew of her tears and kisses
upon His feet, and the perfumed ointment from her flask upon
His head. "Oh, loose me I See'st thou not my Bridegroom's face
That draws me to Him? For His feet my kiss,
My hair, my tears, He craves to-day ; and oh I
What words can tell what other day and place
Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His ?
He needs me, calls me, loves me ; let me go." *
Such conduct from her, and towards Him, is unthinkable of
any contemporary Rabbi, and was immediately challenged. So,
often, the good works of Christ, perhaps always, were accom
panied or followed by some revelation of the power of evil, some
liberation of defeated spite, to mar His happiness in well-doing,
and to counterwork its activity. Criticism turned this time upon
a crucial question — " Who is this that even * forgiveth sins ? "
It was a personal question. The answer turned upon His Nature
and Office. Christ indirectly asserts both, and so far from with
drawing or explaining the implied authority, reaffirms it by His
dismissal, " Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in peace."
Attention must here be drawn to our Lord's repeated as
sertions of His own Nature and office. Sometimes directly,
sometimes indirectly, sometimes openly, sometimes by impli
cation, sometimes by word, sometimes by deed, He avows
Himself more than man, and the equal of God. Unless these
assertions were bond fide Christ was a self-deceived impostor,
or a deceiver whose influence was, as His enemies declared, of
Satanic origin. We are left in this dilemma. We are shut up
between these alternatives. The verdict must rest with the
sound heart and pure conscience. To maintain that Christ
was a self-deceived enthusiast is an outrage upon common
sense. If any man was sane and whole-hearted, clear in mind
and purpose, able to convince others of His absolute wisdom,
¦ D. G. Rossetti.
¦ So R.V., if as A. V., the rat would suggest forgiveth sins, as well as
treating sinners thus.

HO JESUS CHRIST.
truth, and holiness, it was this Man, it is this Man. Eithet
He was honest, or He was dishonest. In the last resort this is
the final issue. Upon the answer to this question, the whole
past of Christianity depends, the whole present, and the whole
future. The believer echoes St. Paul's " audacious challenge " x
from the inner heart of His own experience, if Christ be not
risen then are we of men most wretched ; and so far from
admitting it to belong to " a past stage of religious develop
ment " 3 regards it as the decisive issue upon which all future
history depends, and the pledge of the advancing triumph of
Christ's kingdom, as well as the absolute basis of his own in
ward and outward life.
The rapid ingathering of the multitudes, and the special
selection of the Twelve, and the manifold works of healing are
indirect evidence of the Lord's intense activity. His work was
the travail of a spirit held in leash for thirty silent years of
praying, bursting forth with the fire and impetus of economized
power. A vast reserve of spiritual energy had been accumu
lating for the day of work. The springs of love and grace
were flowing unchecked. Viewed merely as a piece of human
labour, the Lord's industry at this time was that of incarnate
Work. While the apostles must have tested the powers which
they were " sent " to exercise, He bore the burden and heat of
"the day, and the solitary diadem of responsibility. Among His
helpers we find mention of many women (Luke viii. 2), one of
whom, at least Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward,
was of the upper classes.
The first recorded parable was spoken at this time. Our
Lord's sympathy with Nature was not only artistic, it was moral.
The poet interprets the beautiful in Nature, the physicist the
order of facts ; Christ drew out the moral and the spiritual
revelation. Job had seen something of this. Isaiah too, and
the Psalmists. But Christ was the first to emphasize the
unity between Nature and grace. His parables are translations
of the order of Nature into the order of grace. He created
the parable.3 Apologues are found such as Judges ix. 8 and
foil., 2 Sam. xii. 1, but the parable was a spiritual work of art
unattempted before. The Buddhist parables of the so-called
"Sower" and "Prodigal Son" may be compared not as
'-¦• ' " J. A. Symonds, Fortnightly Review, ccxlvi. p. 895.
* Ibid. 3 Renan, p. 136.

THE DIVINE ART TEACHER. Ill
possessing " exactly the same tone and the same character," as
M. Renan affirms, but as allegorical tales and images suggesting
doctrinal or moral lessons.1
The parable in form is a work of art. Truth is taught
mediately ; the truth of spirit enshrined in matter. The moral
function of art is best taught in one of its highest teacher's
words. " Why take the artistic way to prove so much ?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least
How look a brother in the face and say,
1 Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind,
Thine ears are stopped and stuffed, despite their length.
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith I '
Say this as silverly as tongue can troll —
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him,
Are not so bad to bear— but there's the plague
That all this trouble comes of telling truth,
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant.
Nor recognizable by whom it left —
While falsehood would have done the work of truth,"
But Art, wherein man speaks to men,
Only to mankind — Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought.
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word."*'
The first parable contains under its landscape colouring a
complete moral classification. It is a work of the master of
spiritual analysis. It is a scientific arrangement, valid for all
times and places, of human hearts in experimental contact with
the Word of God. That Word is the seed truth of the kingdom,
and was spoken in His pre-incarnate days by the Word through
human organs, and was now spoken by Himself. All human
hearts upon whose soil the word fell, falls, and will fall, from
the hand of the Sower, or His ministers and workers, are here
classed in four divisions. They are not arranged upon arith-
1 Cf. Rhys Davids, " Buddhism," p. 133 f. ; his so-called Parable of the
Sower is an invidious misnomer, cf. reff. s. /., and Pressense\ "The
Ancient World and Christianity," p. 241, and Bp. Copleston on Buddhism.
• R. Browning, " The Ring and the Book," ad fin.

1 12 JESUS CHRIST.
metical principles. They are qualitative, not quantitative dis
tinctions. The first parable was minutely explained by Jesus, in order
to supply the key to open others, and with a view to teach His
disciples how to clothe His truths in like lively forms, and here
in also to discern the inter-relations of Nature and grace in their
identity of source, common dependence upon law, and simi
larity of operation.
A cluster of parables are grouped in the Synoptists with the
first, probably spoken at different times. The teaching through
out was one, the word (Mark iv. 33) developed under various
aspects, according to the spiritual capabilities of the hearers.
The leading idea of the whole was the Kingdom of God, its
outward development, its inward development, its absolute
worth, its finality, its authoritativeness.
The underlying teaching of Nature was uncovered by Christ
in the parables. His spiritual insight into Nature was exhibited
that the inward and spiritual might always be detected in and
under the outward and visible. " Verily Thou art a God that
hidest Thyself," was the summary of prophetic interpretation of
Nature under the Law. Verily Thou art a God that revealest
Thyself is the Christian version. From the time of Jesus
Nature has become a sacrament, whereof artist and poet and
man of science have partaken in diverse ways and many parts, a
sacrament of life unto life, or of death unto death.
By a harmonious sequence of teaching in word and teaching
in work, Jesus exhibited His power over the forces of Nature
after He had unfolded the spiritual lights which lay hid within
them. He is the Divine Man of Science imposing His laws
superphysical, as He is the Divine Artist revealing beauties
supersensible. But this miracle was not primarily a lesson,
still less a dramatic display of power. It followed in the
natural order of events. It was evoked by circumstances ; it
fell in with the ordinary current of the Galilean trials of life. And
it was singularly adapted to impress the hardy fishermen of the
lake in the line of their own business and experience. It was
one of the casts of the Fisher of men. They had seen a
hundred times the majesty, the violence, the sudden impetuosity
of the Galilean storms. They had long known the fickle
temper of the winds which swept down the gorges of the hills,
and left the lake half calm, half riot and confusion. They

THE DIVINE NATURE- WORKER. Ill
may have lost dear lives in such storms, on such days 01
nights when " One could not hear
A word the other said, for wind and sea
That raged and beat and thundered ; " *
r waited and watched
" The awfullest, the longest, lightest night
That ever parents had to spend — a moon
That shone hke daylight on the breaking wave.
Ah me I and other men have lost their lads, . • •
And seen the driftwood lie along the coast." *
And now they seem likely to lose their own, for one of those
thunder gusts that hurtle across the lake and lash the calm
surface into tossing sheets of foam3 had burst in more than
ordinary violence, as is shown by their terror, upon the filling
vessel. And the Master slept tranquilly on the steerman's
pillow as in His Father's arms. At their cry of alarm He
awoke, and the "Wild winds hush'd"
in a moment at His breath. It was a double-edged reproof.
He smote the winds with a curt rebuke, as if behind the in
animate play of impersonal forces He beheld (as perhaps He
did) the active personal control of a guilty spirit. And the
disciples were chid for the faith which had not cast out fear.
This victory over Nature was immediately succeeded by a
very different one. The psychology of demonism is obscure.
Modern lunacy furnishes points of contact, and apparent
instances of it now and then.* But the two are not to be con
founded, as the ordinary lunatic may merely suffer from some
1 Jean Ingelow, "Brothers, and a Sermon." * Ibid.
3 Compare Captain Conder's graphic account of a storm, " Tent Life,"'
iip.340. * The writer believes there is more connection between the two than is
usually supposed, and is in possession of evidence indicating that both
demoniac possession still exists, especially in uncivilized and unchristianed
countries, and that cases of lunacy are sometimes partly, at least, spiritually
conditioned. 9

114 JESUS CHRIST.
cerebral disease, while the demonized need have had none, an J
was conscious of possession by some foul spirit, sometimes
losing his consciousness in that of his master fiend, sometimes
violently asserting his own separate individuality. Again, the
moral connection between demonism and evil was absolute,
between lunacy and evil it is partial and relative and occasional.
It must still have been evening when, after the short, stormy
passage, the crew landed on the eastern shore. Two demoniacs,
one of whom appears to have been the spokesman and leader,
immediately (Mark v. 2) came to meet Him. Led by some
unaccountable Divine instinct, some far-off vibration of mercy,
they saw Him at a distance in the moonlight, and ran and
worshipped Him. Unless the sacred narrative be tampered
with in the interests of critical presuppositions, the demons
recognized Jesus, addressed Him in a loud voice as the Son
of the Most High God, and besought permission to enter the
swine. And He said unto them, Go. The sharp bluff down
which the panic-stricken herd rushed has been easily identified,
and the caverns and sepulchral rock-chambers out of which
the demonized came abound around. One of the two patients
of Jesus clung doglike to his Saviour's presence, clothed, and
sane, but he is ordered to leave it and to proclaim God's
mercies to his own circle. The owners of the swine and all
the city would rather be rid of Him. " Egypt was glad at their
departing." The stone of stumbling proved an offence.
The question of Christ's right to destroy, or, more accurately,
to suffer the destruction of animal life and property, has been
raised. But it is only a part of the larger question of the
permission of all evil, moral and physical. In this case moral
reasons appear on the surface. It was for the good of the
possessed that he should have ocular evidence of the removal
of his masters ; and the same applies with less force to the
disciples. It was for the good of the owners who set so much
store upon their swine, and probably in defiance of the law,
for the population of Peraea was essentially Jewish,1 that they
should learn by punishment if they would not be taught by
mercy. Jesus returned by sea. Crowds gathered round Him in the
morning light. Pushing his way through (Luke viii. 41) with
the persistency of an impassioned purpose, Jairus, one of the
• Schiirer, i. 3, and reff. s. I. to Josephus and the Mishna.

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY. 115
synagogue rulers, lays his father's sorrows at the feet of Jesus.
His healing powers were well known ; and His words of
"comfort ye," and His pitifulness, and sweet compassionate-
ness must have been recognized in the synagogue, and by the
bedsides of the sick, most of all by the merciful and the
sorrowful. On His way a woman with an issue of blood (Luke
viii. 44) touched His tallith, and was healed of the twelve years'
incurable malady and consequent Levitical uncleanness. Many
of such restored invalids, comforted mourners, and healed sick,
if only one in ten like the lepers were grateful, must have
formed a nucleus round which the Messianic societies would
increase. The house of Jairus was now reached. Tumult and wail and
" the flutes for the dead " sound round the still form. So far
from wishing to advertise His recall of the maiden to life, Jesus
took apart with the parents only His select three. Peter and
John and James were now for the first time taken into the
innermost circle of His confidence. It was a spiritual differen
tiation of the three most like-minded to Himself, and most
adapted to respond to the high gift and burden of His special
call. "Talyetha Qum"; two words recall the spirit to its
forsaken tenement. She awoke from the death which our
Lord, in common with Rabbinism, called sleep. Perhaps this,
the second, to be followed by a third, return from the kingdom
of the departed, prepared the way there for our Lord's myste
rious journey from the Cross to Hades, and the proclamation to
disembodied spirits. Before His saving death, before the keys
of Hades (Rev. i. 18) lay in His victorious hand, the spirits of
the departed cannot have been as blessed as after. Since the
parting of that soul and body, and the penitent robber's trans
lation into Paradise, a new beatitude has been uttered on them
that sleep in Him, and on those who mourn for them. Christ
passes from the busy streets of Capernaum. Perhaps He was
becoming too famous there, and a continuous presence and
work might have precipitated a Messianic movement, and one
of the very kind He uniformly rejected. His Messianic policy
was founded on a Divine, not a human, basis. Otherwise He
might have created a storm of popular enthusiasm in any of
the largest towns, and ridden upon the crest of it to the gates
of the capital. There are, too, unseen links of spiritual causa
tion in all lives governed by conscious obedience to Divine

Il6 JESUS CHRIST.
vocation. Alike in its greater heights and deeps, as in its.
every-day entrance into commonplace duties, the life of the
Divine Being in the flesh is, and must be, a mystery which the
highest raptures of faith in its loftiest adoration must approach
a great way off. He returns to Nazareth (Mark vi. i). His
own city has a second opportunity offered. The same objection
is made. The narrow vulgarity of local self-sufficiency cannot
understand His "generation." How could He rise above the
level of His " parents " and family ? It was a social breach of
the laws of Nature. Their unbelief imposed limits upon Christ's
power, and He wondered. But the dilemma before them and
modern unbelief is the same. His human environment being
what it was, how could He rise so infinitely above not His
source only, but above His highest contemporaries in the whole
world, in thought, and in life, unless He was "before them"?
(John i. 15.) What laws of heredity, of environment, of evolu
tion can account for Him ? If His origin was not natural, then
no account is possible, but that for which His own word is
pledged. Either the Nazarenes were right, and are the creditors
of the human race, for their superior insight, or He whom they
cast out. " We can understand nothing of the works of God,
if we do not take it as a principle that He blinds some while
He illurfiinates others." * Into the conditions of such blindness
we need not now inquire. But so much we may be permitted
to observe. That the Nazarenes had, if exceptional difficulty
on social ground, exceptional privilege. They had witnessed
for years the lovely growth of the tender plant j they, in all the
world. A general missionary tour followed in the immediate neigh
bourhood. And now as the spiritual harvest lay thick, He
called to Him His reapers. Not till the time was come, not
till the workers had received some preliminary training, did He
send them forth. He sent them two by two (Mark vi. 7 f. ;
Matt. x. 5 f. ; Luke ix. 1 f.) as His missionaries now ought to
be, and are more often sent, possibly to regions as yet un-
visited by Him. The mission was not final, but temporary j
not catholic, but limited to the house of Israel. Their function
was to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal, to cast out
demons, and to raise the dead. They were royal messengers
* Pascal, Thoughts, zvill.

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY. 1 17
and emissaries accredited with delegated royal authority. They
were to go unprepared, unprovided. A Jewish colouring per
vades the whole charge of their Master. The words in St.
Matthew's account go beyond the immediate prospect, and
gather up the fragmentary missionary directions of different
occasions. This is quite in accordance with the classifying
method of the sacred writer. The spirit of all His missionary
operations is identical, though the form and manner may differ
widely. The sacred narrative abruptly turns at this point to the heroic
spirit who lay forgotten in the rocky dungeon at Machaerus
(Mark vi. 21 ; Matt. xiv. 6). Spring had come, and with it the
approach of Passover. The anniversary of the death of Herod
the Great, and of the accession of Antipas to his Tetrarchy has
arrived. There is a sound of revelry. Salome, daughter of
the adulterous Queen Herodias, descendant of the Asmonaean
heroes, granddaughter of a king, dances, like a Nautch girl,
before the tetrarch and his lords and courtiers. And the head
of the noblest of the pre-Christian white-robed army of martyrs
falls as the guerdon of a dancing-girl. But
" Be sure they sleep not whom God needs 1 " ¦
The tidings of this event must have moved Jesus deeply.
The forerunner had been faithful unto death, and had gone
before to the end which awaited his Lord in a greater darkness
of foreseen horror. And His immediate plan was adapted to
the change. Yielding to the current of events, to escape the
danger in which the murder of the Baptist involved Himself and
His disciples, and the uprising of popular indignation, Christ
retreated across the Sea of Tiberias, outside the jurisdiction of
Antipas, to Bethsaida-Julias.
When St. John's voice had been silenced in the prison
fortress, and his outward and visible work broken off, the cry
of the kingdom was again taken up by Christ, and rung
through Galilee. The prophet's work had died only to rise
again to a new life of higher and wider fulfilment, and his
message to be repeated in louder tones with more peremptory
authority. There are no gaps in the continuity of the kingdom,
no breaks in the order of Divine development.
! R. Browning, " Paracelsus."

Il8 JESUS CHRIST.
"O power to do I O baffled will I
O prayer and action I ye are one
Who may not strive, may yet fulfil
The harder task of standing still,
And good but wished with God is done,"'
The news of St. John's death must have spread rapidly
among the people, and may have been one element in the
motives which brought a vast concourse after Jesus, and sug
gested the popular rising to make Him king. The miraculous
feeding of the five thousand men, without counting women and
children, is alone of all the miracles related in full by all four
evangelists. Its importance lay in its symbolical meaning. It
was an act of Divine compassion, in the first place. They who
had hungered after righteousness, and sought first the kingdom
of God, did not even lose their daily bread. But the discourse
in the synagogue at Capernaum interprets the sacramental
prophecy of the miracle. Jesus began both to do and teach.
This is His way. First the work, then the doctrinal content.
The discourse and the miracle interpret one another. Christ
would be the Bread of Life ; His apostles and successive
ministers would distribute the Bread to His people. His very
words and action, the blessing, the breaking, look onward to
the Last Supper, as the Last Supper preludes the Marriage
Supper of the Lamb. The Passover, too, was nigh, and most
of the guests at the table in the wilderness were on their way
to partake of the Paschal Lamb in Jerusalem. And was there
not also the further thought indicated that all "daily bread"
should savour, as in St. Augustine's rendering of the Divine
prayer, of the " supersubstantial Bread," and all common food
recall Divine, and every Christian table be a table of the Lord ?
It was upon the green grass at the north-east corner of the
lake, near the eastern Bethsaida, perhaps now Et Tell, or
Bethsaida-Julias, upon the present fertile plain of Batihah, that
the multitudes sat down in order. St. Mark, from the graphic
stroke of St. Peter, has pictured the scene in a word. Their
many-coloured order, their regular arrangement, suggested rows
of " garden-beds," bordered by the verdure of the spring grass.
Turning from spiritual to historical sequence, the tumul
tuous Messianic enthusiasm which broke out after the miracle
¦ J. G. Whittier, " The Waiting."

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY. 119
of feeding forced Jesus to decide between heading the excitable
multitude on a royal march to the capital or instantly leaving
them. The disciples had been fired by the explosion of popular
feeling, and two Gospels significantly report that they were
compelled by Jesus to embark while He dismissed the multi
tude. Here, then, the third temptation had recurred, and His
own friends were an instrument in it. Had He been a mere
social reformer or Nationalist, He would have mounted on the
wave of an overpowering popular impulse to the highest place
of authority. Not so ; He fled to the mountain, to be alone
with God, wrapt in the storm, but with a soul bright with the
consciousness of duty done and temptation overcome, as lake
and shore and windy height with the effulgence of the Paschal
moon. Yet in their hour of need unforgetful He walks across
the waves to the tossing boat and labouring crew. Perhaps
this was rather a work of psychical sympathy than of power.
" Star to star vibrates light : may soul to soul
Strike thro' a finer element of her own ? " *
Sympathy annihilates distance, and reads the thoughts of the
farthest away. They were in actual jeopardy, in fear ; perhaps
further disheartened at His repulse of an offer which, made by
so vast a Galilean multitude, if not national in act, was national
in promise. Their faith must be strengthened, their hope con
firmed, their love not left comfortless. And so, quite naturally, 1
and without effort, He stepped across the moon-lit surge and I
brought them to the haven where they would be.
The western Bethsaida, or " Fisherton," must have been
very near Capernaum, and was probably its fishing suburb.'
Christ had purposed landing ; but the storm-drift had borne
them northward, and they made shore at the beautiful " land of
Gennesaret," now the marshy plain of El Ghuweir, along the
north-western shore. The discourse in the synagogue on the
Bread of Life, must have been delivered on the Sabbath, or
Saturday ; consequently it was early on Friday morning when
the Lord landed, and the miraculous meal, like its antitype,
took place on Thursday evening. During Friday took place the
1 Tennyson, " Aylmer's Field."
• Comparing Mark vi. 45 and John vi. 17 and Mark i. 29 with John i.
44 - xii. 21.

120 JESUS CHRIST.
concourse of out-patients, as if to a living hospital. These
must have been happy hours of healing. They were not
undisturbed. The evil spirit of opposition rises up in the
person of a deputation of Pharisees and Scribes from Jeru
salem. Why at this particular crisis is not clear, nor is it
material. The question between them was fundamental.
Underlying the particular point of complaint, eating with
unwashen hands, lay the whole principle at stake, which
Western thought would have formulated in exact terms : First,
what was the relative importance of Scripture and tradition?
Second, what was the authority of Christ in comparison with
both? Third, what was the spiritual worth and position re
spectively of the opposite parties ? A definite solution of these
questions was essential. A point of detail involved the whole
principles. Any mode of reconciliation between the contending
forces of thought was more of a moral than an intellectual
impossibility, because the difference was really spiritual, a
difference of character — the final difference of Christ and
anti-Christ in all their embodiments of thought and life.
With regard to the first question, Christ appeared to
Rabbinism to be taking up a revolutionary position, whereas
He really returned to the original and primary prototypal
revelation. To this day Christianity is faithful to the first
hand law. The Jews are the representatives of hereditary
degenerate Rabbinism. Christ restored the true type. Phari
saism was committed to the degenerate forms. The law of
custom (the Halachah) was " quite as binding as the written
Thorah (law) ; " ' nay, as the former was the " authentic exposi
tion and completion of the latter," a breach of it was a more
serious transgression. While the Law was supreme and final
in name, in practice it was superseded and made void. The
conscience could not breathe. Religion was adulterated at its
source. Christ came to substitute a natural for an artificial
conscience, to harmonize nature and grace, or rather to trans
form nature into grace, mechanical slavery into free-hearted,
intelligent obedience ; in short, to substitute the spirit of
sonship for the spirit of servitude. The Pharisaic party were
too heavily laden with their own fetters to appreciate the sweet
air of freedom ; nor could they confess ignorance and sin, and
• Schiirer, i. 334 and reff.

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY. 121
humble themselves to the seat of the poor in spirit. Pride was
their sin of sins.
With regard to externalism then and thereafter, Christ came
to set it upon its right basis. Here again He came not to
destroy, but to fulfil ; to combine together internal and external
truth, as soul and body are united. Spirit and matter coexisting
in Him could and should coexist in happy accord, the latter
subject to the former, as the body to the souL
" Inward evermore
To outward, — so in life, and so in art,
Which still is Ufe." «
The whole incidental question of ceremonial is here deter
mined. Ceremonies are indifferent in themselves. To eat with
unwashen hands defiles not a man. Their moral and spiritual
valuation entirely depends upon the spiritual thought they em
body, the spiritual life they reveal. Christ Himself used cere
mony when He broke bread and blessed it, and likewise the
cup. Ceremony was an end in itself in the Judaism of Christ's
days, and is still in Brahminism and many forms of non-
Christian religions and superstitions, from fetishism upwards.
By Christ ceremony was not put out of court, but humbled to a
means and instrument.
Two of the dark shadows of the Passion were already falling
upon Christ in these victorious hours. One was the contradiction
of sinners ; the other was the falling away of His own friends.
As the Pharisees openly thwarted Him, so the doctrinal dis
course upon the Bread of Life was the signal for disaffection
and desertion. "Will ye also go away?" was the appeal of
human and Divine disappointment to the first, so to speak, of a
long series of refusals to His holy table.
The discourse was spoken, partly at least, " in synagogue."
The Palestine explorers have discovered eleven synagogues,
and Mr. Oliphant another since, at El Dikkeh. The architec
ture of these is much alike. It is a florid and debased Roman
type. The Capernaum synagogue, being built of white lime
stone blocks, must have formed a conspicuous contrast to the
black basalt all round. The pot of manna found engraven on
a block may have pointed Christ's very words. Verse 37 and
¦ E. B. Browning, " Aurora Leigh."

122 JESUS CHRIST.
following appear to have been spoken in further explanation to
the inner circle of the disciples.
The chilling blasts of controversy which had beaten upon
them must have deepened our Lord's purpose of seeking a
restful shelter for the weary, disappointed spirits. The two
miracles, accompanied by the Messianic storms of favour and
disfavour, had been an exciting episode, and our Lord and His
disciples would be glad of a quiet Passover. He retired to the
borders of Tyre and Sidon without leaving the land of Israel
proper (Matt. xv. 21 ; Mark vii. 24), and must have kept the feast
" in some friendly Jewish home." ' Here the intercessory faith
of the Syro-Phcenician woman was rewarded, after being
purified by instruction and whetted by delay, by the dispos
session of her daughter. The act was one of the incidental
mercies of special Providence, and may have roused the droop
ing spirits of the disciples. It was another preparatory hint
that Samarian schismatic, Roman or Greek proselyte, and
even outer heathen, were to find a place in His household and
at His table. It was another indication that the fence of law
and privilege and ceremony and tradition was being broken
down, that all nations would seek and find the Universal
Healer. They were so slow in apprehending the Messianic
kingdom that they may have put down to the overflow of
gracious sympathy what was' a scientific law of the kingdom.
That kingdom was to be universal, not natural ; cosmic, not
terrene ; eternal, not temporal. Entrance into it, and alle
giance to it, demanded spiritual, not natural, affinities. For
some such purpose He may have taken the circuitous route of
the district of Sidon * as His return journey. Another excursion
into heathendom follows. Decapolis becomes the scene of
missionary activity and of many works of healing. The feed
ing of the four thousand takes place. Hagaret-en-Nusara, or
" Stones of the Christians," one of the points of the Toran
range, is the supposed site.
1 Edersheim, ii. 44.
3 Mark vii. 31. "Through Sidon," R.V., Tischendorf, Westcott and
Hort, &c.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE DIVINE TRANSFIGURATION.
" Upon a sudden One there entered there
Whose countenance with marvellous beauty shone,
More than the sons of men divinely fair,
And all whose presence did the likeness wear
Of angel more than men."
Archbishop Trench, " Gertrude of Saxony."
On the way to Caesarea Philippi — The Petrine confession — The Rock--
The Divine sign — The excellent glory — The descent — The.return— The
predictions.
"The retreats of Jesus were not merely journeys of flight ; they
were epochs of reflection," * and, we may add, of revelation, of
progressive teaching. The storm of opposition, the ebb of
desertion, had not shaken Christ's spirit nor abated His pur
pose. Caesarea Philippi, Hermon, were spiritual stages on the
road to Jerusalem. Having dismissed the multitudes (Matt. xv.
39), Christ came to the region of Magadan and Dalmanutha
(Mark viii. 10), which are unidentified, unless the latter be
Tarichaea,11 Kerak, and encountered the Pharisees and Saddu
cees. They demanded a sign from heaven, perhaps in allusion
to ths manna feeding. Leaving the issue to be fought out upon
another arena, He journeyed on beyond the borders of Israel,
past the " lower springs " of Jordan, through a well-wooded,
park-like country, rich in varied beauty, forward to Caesarea
Philippi, twenty-five or thirty miles north of the Sea of Galilee.
* Keim, iv. 256.
' Or Dalmanutha may be the present ruin of Ed Delemlyeh, one mile
north of Jarmuk (Dr. Thomson), and Magadan, Megidon (Ewald).

124 JESUS CHRIST.
It was another devotional epoch rather than a missionary tour.
It was a time of spiritual retreat. The sign refused to unbelief
and hardness of heart was to be given to the faithful. The
rapture of conscious Divine communion was to forearm Jesus,
as if with a second baptismal unction, for the last and worst
agonies of labour and suffering, and those who would be with
Him in His temptations and drink of His cup.
On the way thither (Mark viii. 27) Christ drew from Peter,
the spokesman, the great confession, " Thou art the Christ,
the Son of the living God." The rocky base of the great castle
frowning ahead may have supplied the material colouring, or
pointed the meaning, of the responsive promise of the Messiah,
" Upon this rock I will build My Church " (Matt. xvi. 18).
As Moses had hailed God in his triumphant Nunc Dimittis
again and again as the Rock —
" The Rock, His work is perfect, —
Then he forsook God which made him,
And lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation J—
Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful,
And hast forgotten God that gave thee birth " —
(Deut. xxxii. 4, 15, 18)
and so on (verses 30, 31, 37), and Hannah in her Magnificat —
" Neither is there any rock like our God " (1 Sam. ii. 3) —
so did Christ identify Himself with the Rock of Moses and
Israel's salvation. Upon His Messianic Divine Nature, i.e.,
upon Himself, would His Church be built (Heb. xii. 28), "a
kingdom that cannot be shaken " as He afterwards told them
in the words of the Messianic Psalm. He was the chief corner
stone of the real, true Temple (Psa. cxviii. 22). That His
hearers understood Him in this sense then and thereafter is
manifest from the use made by St. Peter himself of the word
and its underlying thought, conceiving Him " as a living, life-
giving stone, and a stone of stumbling," and a rock of offence ;
and the Fathers who have regarded the Petrine faith as the rock
may be followed if we regard the same subjectively. Faith in
Christ is the inward heart foundation upon which the whole
life-confession of the Church and the Christian reposes. This
is, then, one of the many places where Christ peremptorily

THE DIVINE TRANSFIGURATION. 12 5
required immediate and prospective faith in Himself as a
spiritual necessity ; and upon this occasion, in surroundings
specially heathen, where the temples of Greek, Roman, and
Syrian deities uprose like outlying fortresses of error marked
out for destruction.
Far from Zion, the city of God, far from the potentates and
lords and teachers of Israel, did Messiah receive His due
homage. Here another latent prophecy of the incoming of
the Gentiles and the Epiphany of the sign from heaven to
those whom the stars of righteousness, godly fear, and peniten
tial desire were, and are, leading to the Light
And now they had come to Caesarea, or its immediate proxi
mity. At the south-west foot of Hermon were the sources of
the Jordan, where the grotto was dedicated to Pan, and the
place and surrounding country named after him, Paneas or
Panias. Close by, Herod built a splendid temple to Augustus ;
Philip rebuilt the place and changed its name to Caesarea. The
place has retained its earlier name, and is now called Banias,
and is famed in travellers' descriptions for its beauty and its
seclusion. The rest here, or in the neighbouring villages, attempered
their minds for quiet thought undisturbed by controversial
heats. Peter's adoring confession of faith and the immediate
reward of promise was the preface to the deepening solemnity
of the Messiah's forewarnings of His suffering and rejection.
These were no instinctive vaticinations, nor the political forecast
of a leader who felt his cause was lost. They are the ex
plicit and detailed intimation of His Passion, His Death, and
His Resurrection. The prophecy calls out the surprised rebuke
of the leading apostle, whom perhaps the promise of the keys
had exalted, and who was now humbled. Till the Petrine con
fession had been made, Jesus had spared them some of the
revelation of the Cross. Not till the truth of His Nature was
- deeply lodged in their faith did He task it with so unwelcome,
so novel, and uncontemporaneous a revelation as that of the
suffering Messiah. Doubtless they took the truth to heart.
Hut we cannot live in our highest moments, and from this level
they fell away in life, as the temporary desertion at the Passion
shows, and partly in faith. Nor did they rise to it again till
the light and power of the Resurrection transformed their con
ceptions of His Office, and work, with its own glory, and the

126 JESUS CHRIST.
majesty stood out before them in the kingly splendour of its
proportions, till with the Spirit He passed into them, the hope
of glory, the faith of their faith, the life of their life.
Mountain heights have from time been chosen as the scene
of supereminent Divine manifestations. The cliffs of Sinai
heard and echoed the Ten Words which were the crown of the
older Covenant. Upon Hattin the new Law was delivered by
the Prophet of the New Covenant. Upon one of the elevations
of the snowy height of triple Hermon Christ was transfigured.
From a mount He ascended. The solitude of the lofty moun
tain, the stillness of the night, or possibly the early dawn,
befitted this more than " Bridal of the earth and sky,"
when the Shechinah came down and the Voice was heard out
of the cloud. It was the supreme moment of spiritual elevation
in the life of Jesus. It was a prelude of the Ascension. Jesus
was never nearer Heaven, nor farther above earth, alike in
body and in spirit than upon this night. Hermon shares in
Scripture with the mount of the first Divine Epiphany the title
which one of the eye-witnesses of the excellent glory applied to
it — "the holy mountain" (Ezek. xxviii. 14 ; 2 St. Peter i. 18).
Jesus took with Him the three chosen disciples. They who
witnessed and shared the prayer of the Garden of Agony,
witnessed and shared the prayer of the Mountain of Glory.
The immediate purpose of this evening journey was, St. Luke
¦lone characteristically informs us, prayer. The snowy dome
of Hermon is the most conspicuous object of the landscape
from almost any point of the country. And now it rises befoie
them — " A kingly spirit throned among the hills,"*
as they leave Csesarea Philippi and climb its steep heights and
ridges. How long the silent prayer of Jesus had lasted we
know not. The heights and depths of that incense offering
upon that midnight mountain altar pass human thought. Even
devotion gives place to weariness. It is a very true touch of
nature and physical infirmity that the disciples exhibit The
time, the fatigue of the climb, the drowsy effects of the snow,
* Coleridge, to Mount Blanc, changing "Thou" to "A."

THE DIVINE TRANSFIGURATION. I27
and the keen mountain air, tell upon their senses, and they are
heavy with sleep. When they have become wide awake they
perceive that a change had come over the Lord. He was
transfigured before them. His face shone as the sun, His
garments were white as the light, such as no fuller on earth
could whiten them. And within the circle of glory were two
human forms, recognized by their words or signs as the great
Lawgiver and the first great Prophet. Law and Prophecy in
their persons rendered homage to the fulfiller of both, whose
words should not pass away. Moses and Elias had broken, as
it were, away from Sheol upon the wings of this "light unspeak
able and full of glory," to speak with Jesus of His Exodus which
He should accomplish at Jerusalem. The communion of saints
was for the time visible. The word exodus carried with it all
the types and predictions of Israel's history of conflict and
deliverance and victory, and pointed the way to their definite
fulfilment at Jerusalem in the second Moses, and to the promised
city of glory beyond, which was the inheritance of the spiritual
Israel, whose glory they already beheld in foretaste.
While they were still looking in wonder the three disciples
were parted asunder from Jesus. " The extreme rapidity of the
formation of cloud on the summit " of Hermon has been noticed.
In a few minutes a thick cap forms over the top of the mountain,
and as quickly disperses and entirely disappears. Such may
have formed the material basis of the cloud of light which over
shadowed them. As St. Peter, the spokesman, in confusion
and fear suggested that they should make three tabernacles, or
arbours, from the boughs of the trees, for it was good to be
there, in this heavenly society and effulgence, they entered into
the cloud. The simplicity and materiality, so to speak, of the
plain Peter are marks of the truth. The writer of a myth or
fairy-tale legend would never have invented so prosaic a state
ment. They were afraid. The climax of glory was reached,
the same Voice which had attested the Divinity of the Messiah
at His Baptism, commanded them to hear Him, as the
authentic Prophet of God, because He was the Beloved Son of
God. To Jesus the recognition of His Father's voice must have
been a repetition of the transcendant joy of the baptismal
greeting. Must we not say that for the moment all else was
forgotten, or in that absorbed, that —

128 JESUS CHRIST.
" He heard not, saw not, felt not aught beside,
Through the wide worlds of pleasure and of pain.
Save the full flowing and the ample tide
Of that celestial strain " ? •
Must it not have been for His sake as well as for the disciples?
The irresistible outflow of Divine approval and attestation, the
surpassing benediction of the Father upon the Son of His love ?
There is no mention, as in the Baptism, of the Third Person of
the Holy Trinity. But the presence of Moses and Elias sug
gests far-off, unknowable relations to, and vibrations of joy to,
the pre-Messianic children of light.
The Divine Voice, the burden of joy and glory, were too
tremendous for human nature. The three witnesses fell on their
faces with terror. It was necessary for Jesus to come near
and touch them, as the Angel of the Covenant touched Daniel,
and set him upright, before they could look up (cf. Jer. i. 9 ;
Ezek. i. 3, ii. 2). And when they had lifted up their eyes the
glory had passed away like a pageant, and they saw no man
but Jesus only.
The veracity of the account stands or falls with that of the rest
of the Gospels. Its spiritual fitness at the time, and importance
in the drama of the Christ life, are better understood the more
they are studied in the after-light of the Passion, Resurrection,
and Ascension. The Transfiguration looks before and after.
Before to the glory of the Only-Begotten of the Father, before
to the triumphant confession of Simon Bar Jonah crowned with
unsought proof (Matt. xvi. 17) ; after to the resumption of the
same glory with the Father, after to the communion in glory of
all the sons of God.
In indirect support of the gospel veracity and in general
remark two observations may be made. First, that of all un-
Jewish incidents in the life of Jesus this is the most un-Jewish ;
of all words or deeds unexpected of, out of correspondence with,
and indeed impossible to a Messiah of contemporary Jewish
conception, this was up to this time the most remarkable. The
kingliest Messiah of the highest Jewish conception would never
have made this expedition to Caesarea, and the promises uttered
upon the occasion. The revelation of glory upon the mountain
none but a Divine Messiah could have made. Yet, secondly
1 Abp. Trench. " The Monk and the Bird."

THE DIVINE TRANSFIGURATION. I29
that revelation bears on the face of it, in the light of its before
and after, its own explanation. The Transfiguration must be
viewed in strict connection with the preceding confession
They are chronologically two scenes in one act, but spiritually
undivided. It was the Divine answer to the divinely-inspired
avowal of the disciples, and the authentication of Jesus' clairr.
to be Messiah by the Divine sign, withheld from unbelief. Eye
hath seen, and ear hath heard, not all, but some of the things
which God hath prepared for them that love Him. The king
dom of God was seen in power by three of those who had
heard the King speak of His departing to Jerusalem, His
Cross, and His Passion. The very words were, so to speak,
overheard by, or the teaching knowable to, the pre-Messianic
saints, and formed the subject of their talk with the transfigured
Messiah. The continuity of God's plan of redemption is
illustrated as it moves on from stage to stage in the gradual,
timed, localized evolution of His Divine eternal purpose.
The glory had passed away. Jesus and the three descended
from the mount of God to the valley of tears, from spiritual
rapture and exaltation to the broken cries and discords of tune*
less, half-articulate humanity.
The first incident jarred. Even the nine apostles were of a
faithless generation (Luke ix. 41), and could not cast the demon
out of the lunatic child. The crowd which had gathered round
the famous Prophet must have been deeply impressed at the
Lord's work of power and sympathy. In the grateful father,
the healed son, and the sympathetic crowd, undisturbed by
Rabbinical cross-fires, we discern the germ of an outlying
mission church, to the very early existence of which the after-
legend of Jesus' statue points.
Without any record of the intervening journey we find Him
again in Galilee. Very solemnly He again warns the disciples
(Luke ix. 44, 45, and Synoptists) of the approaching Passion
and Resurrection, to which now He was consciously approach
ing, and for which He was deliberately preparing them. How
much they needed preparations of heart and head after-events
disclose. At Capernaum was made of St. Peter the demand for the pay
ment of the national Temple-contribution, with which the
public sacrifices were bought (Exod. xxx. 13 f. ; 2 Chron. xxiv.
6). This consisted of two Attic drachmas, i.e., one common
10

130 JESUS CHRIST.
shekel, or Sanctuary half-skekeL The stater in the fish yielded
up by a Providential coincidence, paid in full for St. Peter and
for Christ. Jesus pointed out, too, that He paid it, not as an
obligation, but as a concession to misunderstanding. The
Prince was free of the king's taxes. The payment should not
therefore come out of the common fund, but from an extra
ordinary source.
Lessons on the spirit of the new kingdom follow according to
natural suggestions of circumstances. The lesson of humility
and simplicity of heart like that of the child set in their midst.
The lesson of largeness of heart, which sinks itself in the
advance of the kingdom so far as to overlook an imperfect
sanction and authority when devils are cast out and good works
are done in Christ's Name outside the Apostolate. The lesson
of mortification, or sacrifice of any line of thought, word, or
deed which imperilled the spiritual life and threatened the ruin
of the whole nature in Gehenna fire. The lesson of brotherly
forgiveness, which forgets as well as forgives; the true altruism,
or spirit of brotherliness, which does not efface "reasonable
self-love," » but extends it to the other self. Each of these
lessons was complete in itself, and part of a whole.
• Bishop Butler, " Sermons."

CHAPTER XV.
THB ASCENSION JOURNEY. THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN
PERiEA.
" I was glad when they said unto me.
Let us go unto the house of the Lord."
A Song of Ascents ; of David (Psa. cxxii. i).
" And every thought and word,
And all things seen,
And every passion which his heart has stirred,
And every joy and sorrow which has been,
And every step of life his feet have trod,
Lead by broad stairs of glory up to God."
Lewis Morris, "The Food of Song."
The days of going up— Peremptory claims — The Feast of Tabernacles —
The adulteress— The Light of the World— The Shepherd of Israel—
Pastor pastorum — Peraean Mission — The seventy missionaries — The
Good Samaritan — The devout home scene — The prayer of prayers —
Feraean work resumed — The Feast of Dedication — Return to Peraea —
Incarnate energy — Missionary parables — Parables of the Unseen
World.
A pregnant phrase of St Luke's shows that a new chapter
(Luke ix. 51), and that the last, of Jesus' life now opens. The
rest cf His life constituted the days of His receiving up.
From the height of that crowning event, the writer looks back
upon the different incidents as so many stages linked in spiritual
order and sequence. The unity of the purpose is the key to
the whole. The Christ who said and did and suffered what the
following record reports is now in glory. To that Ascension
glory He was moving. The Ascended Lord is the thought
which fills the mind of St. Luke even while he relates His

132 JESUS CHRIST.
earthly ministry ; so he spoke of His exodus, not of His death.
So St. John's picture of the earthly life is dominated by his
conception of the Eternal Word manifesting Himself humanly
in the world and then returning to His glory.
If, as seems likely from the Mishna, the Temple tax was due
about the Passover, the date of the journeys to and from
Hermon is approximately fixed, and followed immediately upon
the events before narrated. An interval of silence occurs in
the fourfold history. From the Passover of John vi. to the
Feast of Tabernacles of John vii. 2, i.e., from Nisan 15 to
Tishri 15, was a period of half a year. The months that
followed the return to Galilee after the Transfiguration are
passed over in a single connecting verse (John vii. 1). To go
up to the Feast of Tabernacles with the pilgrim company which
His " brethren " joined Jesus refused (John vii. 9). They did
not, as yet, believe in Him. Their Messianic conceptions were
of the purely Jewish order. They could not be in sympathy
with Him; their paths must lie apart. After they had gone
Jesus began His " Ascension " journey privately (Luke ix. 51)
with His disciples, and by a different route. For instead of
going through Perasa to avoid schismatic Samaria, His first
intention was to go direct by way of Samaria. The first
incident on the journey showed that the seed sown in Samaria
had not ripened sufficiently, or spread widely enough, to dispel
Samaritan hatred ; nor had the sons of thunder who wanted to
bring fire down from heaven ' learnt yet to apply the lesson of
forgiveness. Further on a scribe, unique in his calling, said
he would follow the Master. He Himself bade another. A
third offered Himself. All three meet with searching half-
repellent answers. From the last two Christ claims a peremp
tory obedience overleaping the dearest natural ties, such as
only the Divine Being and the Divine cause could justify. It
was an application of the precept, " Seek ye first the kingdom
of God." His own homelessness, outward, as the first was
reminded, inward, as His own spirit knew, was His own more
than fulfilment in example.
Whether the mission of the Seventy took place before 01
after the Feast of Tabernacles is much disputed We put it
ater. The Feast of Tabernacles, the Harvest Festival of the
Jewish Church, was the most popular and important festival
1 Even as Elijah did— om. R. V., Tischendorf, Hort, Gebhardt

THE ASCENSION JOU1NEY. I33
after the Captivity. It was observed in the month Tishri. It
began on the fifteenth day, five days after the Day of Atonement,
and lasted eight days. At Jerusalem it was a gala time. It was
to the autumn pilgrims, who arrived on the fourteenth, like en
trance into a sylvan city. Roofs and courtyards, streets and
squares, roads and gardens, were green with boughs of citron
and myrtle, palm and willow. The booths recalled the pil
grimage through the wilderness. The ingathering of fruits
prophesied of the spiritual harvest already beginning.
As Jesus did not arrive in Jerusalem till the middle of the
Feast of Tabernacles, He cannot have been there for the Day
of Atonement. St. John (vii. 11) especially intent upon the
conflict of faith of which He was the centre describes the
questioning and murmuring among the different knots of Jews,
Jerusalemite or Galilean. Feeling was divided, but those who
were well disposed towards Him knew too well the mind of the
hierarchy to express openly their sentiments. While men
speculated and questioned, Jesus came up Himself in the
middle of the feast, and resumed His teaching in the Temple.
The oft-repeated question " How," takes another form. How
knoweth this man letters, having never learned in any recog
nized school of thought? The answer is a plain, unevasive
appeal to first principles. His teaching was derivative, not
humanly, but divinely, and assigned the highest place in ap
praising spiritual evidence to the will honestly bent upon doing
God's will. His doctrine was knowable to doer, not dreamer.
Up to this point the argument is universal in scope, and ap
peals broadly to mankind. It is spiritual, superhistorical. It
then takes a Jewish turn — an argumentum ad hominem — an
appeal to Moses. Which showed the true Mosaic spirit, those
who broke the Law they professed, those who sought to kill, or
He who wrought a greater work of healing and mercy than the
circumcision which was permissible on the Sabbath day ? The
dilemma was a personal one. It was the alternative of the
Messianic, or the anti-Messianic party, the invariable, the final
alternative set before the Jews.
The bold stand made by Christ was the next object of re
mark (vii. 25). There was no shade of concession on His part,
no pretension to a compromise with the dominant party. The
scabbard had been thrown away. An ineffectual order for His
arrest followed,

134 JESUS CHRIST.
The last, or great day, of the feast came, the seventh, " the
great Hosannah " (John vii. 37). When the voice of Jesus rang
loudly through the Temple, " If any man thirst let him come
and drink." This must have been after the symbolic pouring,
at the Altar of Burnt Offering, of the water solemnly brought
from Siloam, with its thanksgiving choral song, the great
Hallel (Psa. cxiii.-cxviii.). It was the Divine answer to the
supplication of the ingathered thousands of far-scattered Israel,
" with palms in their hands." Another ferment breaks out.
The crowds are convulsed with a rush of conflicting movements
of thought and feeling. Is, or is not, this the Christ ? The fal
tering Nicodemus was a type of those who would give Him
fair play, but were slow in forming their convictions, and timid
in acting upon them. Many believed in Him (John vii. 31 and
viii. 31), and were at various stations on the road towards the
light, others waxed in unbelief and hostility. The line oi
division became more marked. Several futile attempts were
made to seize Him. The Temple officers themselves confessed
to the hierarchial party, " Never man spake like this Man."
The episode of the woman taken in adultery is no part of St.
John's original gospel (John vii. 53). All internal and external
evidence is against it. The moral evidence is admittedly for
it. It is just one of those anecdotes which would be remem
bered and handed down. That some incident took place of
the kind may well be supposed. But the time of it is quite
uncertain, and the details appear to be un-Jewish and inaccurate.
It may have crept into the fourth Gospel from a lost work of
Papias of Hierapolis, who collected various discourses of our
Lord, with comments, gathering them from the reports of
primitive disciples.
Probably on the next day, or Octave, Jesus spake in the
Treasury, within the Court of the Women. Another of the
festal rites supplied Him with a text. The nightly illumination
of that court symbolized Him who was the Light of the world.
The light was a Messianic title, and would have been Mes-
sianically understood, as in the vesper hymn of the aged Simeon.
Both this and the following discourse, reported in a summary
by St. John, travel along, yet infinitely above and beyond,
Jewish modes of thought and argument, but utter eternal truth.
His own claim was self-evidential of Divine. That truth could
only be appropriated spiritually. Truth carried with it freedom.

THE ASCENSION JOURNEY. I3J
The children of Abraham were those who shared his faith. Abra
ham himself had spiritual sympathy with Him. Christ here
strikes out the great doctrine developed by St. Paul. They must
be taught of God. Christ's words became more and more deci
sive, and the dilemma before His adversaries increasingly pe
remptory. He ended with the assertion of His eternal existence
(John viii. 58). Before Abraham was, I am. It was brought
out by the stress of controversy, like all great truths. It set the
issue straight before all. They answered with stones. But He
was not to die like St. Stephen, and hid Himself and withdrew.
If, as seems likely,1 St. John's narrative is here strictly con-
tinous, the healing of the blind man took place on the next
day (ix. 1). The connection of doing and teaching,2 as ever,
and the correlation of thought between moral and physical
blindness and enlightening, necessitate the inference as to
chronological connection. And the Sabbath sheltered Him
from renewed violence. The miracle took place probably at
the entrance 3 to the Temple. Again St. John, as so often,4
fixes our attention on the mental and spiritual forces at work.
Again he dwells minutely on the history of an individual. It is
the inward scenery of the moral life as every soul passed across
the penetrating Light, and revealed itself to which he is sensi
tive. His intense moral realism is the secret of the vividness of
the dialogue. The whole scene is not a triumph of artistic
imagination, but the vivid expression of what he saw and
remembered, outward and inward. The eye- and ear-witness
records, whose eye and ear have been opened. Were not this
the explanation, St John must be placed at the head of all
dramatic artists. Christ was the Master light of all his seeing ;
in that Light he saw the light, the Light Himself and that on
which He shone, and, by shining upon, made transparent.
But upon the enemies of the Light the darkness was now sinking.
St. John's tenth chapter contains our Lord's address to the
shepherds of Israel,s and the flock which had become a prey to
them. There is nothing arbitrary in the choice of the figure of
the shepherd. He identifies Himself with God the Shepherd
• Reading dt in John x. 22 with R.V., Gebhardt, Tischendorf, &c, ii
tot* be read with Westcott and Hort, then Dr. Westcott's inference may be
torrect, that John ix. i-x. 21 all belong to the Feast of Dedication.
• Cf. Acts i. 1. » Cf. Ibid, iii.a. « Cf. vii. 43 ; viii. 30 ; x. 19, &o
5 Cf. all Ezek. xxxiv,

136 JESUS CHRIST.
of Israel in the past ; • and promises the universal extension o<
His one flock. So with the flock He identifies Himself else.
where as the Lamb of God. He knows the Shepherd will die
for the sheep ; but His death is a voluntary self-surrender, and
He will take His life back again. Such teaching must hare
prepared the apostles for their own work of shepherding.
Again, the continuity of God's purpose reveals itself. He had
been, and is, the One True Shepherd all along, the Pastor
pastorum. His under-shepherds, His flock, belong to Him
only, and by their character and work set forth the pastoral
aspect of God's character, revealed fully in Christ. Under the
figures of Shepherd and Lamb, combining both lines of thought,
we have the full expression of the doctrine of Christ's media
tion. And the figure of the Shepherd would remind the more
cultivated of Enoch's pre-Messianic vision of God as the " Lord
of the sheep," calling seventy shepherds and committing to them
the punishment of the sheep. The recognition of other sheep
not of the Jewish fold was a very un-Jewish statement. Such an
implied prophecy revealed His pastoral love and yearning
sympathy over the unshepherded flocks of universal humanity,
for whom He laid down His shepherd life. And the prophecy
speaks of His personal bringing them, and the becoming, how
slowly, how gradually, He knows, one flock under One Shep
herd. Such words must have been one of the inspirations of
the first apostolic missionaries, as they have been of the latest.
" He loved all men alike, and he never despised any one," were
the words of the Melanesian boy over the body of Bishop Pat-
teson, lying with its five wounds before him. So after the
death of the Rev. Philip S. Smith, of the Oxford Mission to
Calcutta, at a meeting held a few days after that event had
brought mourning to many non-Christians, Mr. Protap Chunder
Mozoomdar, a leader in the Brahmo Samaj since the death of
Keshub Chunder Sen, spoke of him as follows : " Truly did
the Rev. Philip Smith imitate the glorious Ideal by whose name
he was known, by living in this country a life deep and pro
found. What shall we say of his life ? It was so gentle, so
good that his features have painted themselves upon our mental
vision for all time. Manhood and womanhood, tenderness and
strength, blended in his sweet character. I, thinking of him,
¦ Psa. lxxx. i, xxiii. 1 ; Ezek. xxxvii. 24 ; Zech. X. 3.

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERjEA. 1 3"
am reminded of some mediaeval saint, overflowing with kindness
to bird, and beast, and man." *
Such overflowing love to peoples of strange heart and tongue
and colour has been the uniform characteristic of those who have
carried on the Messianic tradition of love beyond the bounds of
national creeds and the home centres of the faith.
Love was the inspiring motive of the Incarnation, of the
Atonement Love is the central fire of the sacrificial energies
of the Christ-bearers. The passion to spread the kingdom of
love is the master passion in the hierarchy of noble ambitions.
The love of the Chief Shepherd propagates and repeats itself
in thousands of hearts, and wings flights upon flights of prayer.
" The world is used to have its business done
On other grounds, find great effects produced
For power's sake, fame's sake, motives in men's mouth.
Truth is the strong thing. Let man's life be true 1
And love's the truth of mine." "
The view taken of St. Luke ix. 51 negatives the opinion of
some that Christ now returned to Galilee. Of Galilee He had
taken farewell. Nor is it likely that He can have remained
tranquilly working in Judaea after so determined a declaration
of hostility. And the woe upon Chorazin and Bethsaida loses
its point away from their neighbourhood. We agree then with
those who place his Peraean ministry here lasting with the break
of the Feast of the Dedication about six months. Some place
the mission of the Seventy3 on the journey to the Feast of
Tabernacles. But there seems more time for it now, and as a
missionary campaign of ingathering it fitly follows on that
festival. We are wholly without geographical details in St.
Luke's account. His bias is towards missionary history and
spiritual expansion. The personal colouring shows itself here.
For the writer was an evangelist and a fellow-worker with St.
Paul. Just those details of Christ's discourse or work which
he had laid under contribution in his own labours would natu
rally collect in his memory, or in his notes and manuscripts.
This will account for the universality, the humanity of his
1 Oxford Mission to Calcutta Report, June, 1888 ; compare Sir W.
Hunter in The Nineteenth Century, July, 1888, in reference to " the young
Oxford ascetic.''
* R. Browning, " In a Balcony." » With Tischendorf, &c.

138 JESUS CHRIST.
Gospel, for its Pauline character, its especial attention to tha
home and foreign missions of Christ. His is the Gospel of
the Good Samaritan, of the Prodigal Son.
The mission of the Seventy was a new departure, both in the
constructive organization and in the outward expansion of the
kingdom. They were sent in pairs. This society and fellow
ship provided for spiritual sympathy and co-operation, for
practical efficiency, and also formed a knot of so-to-speak
churches, where two were gathered together into a nidus or
centre, and the whole co-ordinated under the Supreme Mission
ary. The occasion was temporary. The underlying principles
were permanent, and are specially suggestive of the importance
of sending out missionaries, two by two, or in brotherhoods and
societies. The concise practical directions given to the evan
gelists show that the Christ, as Administrator, did not despise
attending to minor details of order and method. Economy of
time, of equipment, and healing of the sick were especially
insisted on.
The number seventy was not a statistical accident. It was
a sacred number, and bore the dignity of honourable and his
toric precedents. Moses had organized seventy elders. The
Sanhedrin, when instituted or reorganized, numbered seventy.
The number seven again and again recurs in the cycle of
Jewish religious observances.
The Mission was successful. The Seventy returned with joy,
and reported that even the demons were subject to them in His
Name. Jesus had identified Himself with His workers in the
impressive words, " He that heareth you heareth Me, and he
that rejecteth you rejecteth Me," implying thereby their plenary
authority and representative commission. Now after the
declaration of Satan's fall from heaven, as if He beheld behind
the visible scene the prehistoric downfall of the Evil Spirit
repeating itself in spiritual dethronements, He renews, and
[onfirms, and extends their delegated authority over all the
power of the enemy. And more than the disciples their
Master in that same hour rejoiced (according to the right,
newly recovered, and most remarkable reading, Luke x. 21,
R. V.) " in the Holy Spirit." Were not such hours when He
saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied but few?
At this time the question of the lawyer elicited the parable of
the Good Samaritan. Some episode in the lawyer's own life,

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERiEA. 139
or some well-known incident of the day, may have formed the
basis of the story. It was entirely un-Jewish ; just as now it
would be un-Mahommedan, for a Mahommedan Sunni would
leave a Mahommedan Persian Shi'ah to perish unheeded on the
roadside.1 It taught the spirit of brotherhood of which He
gave so many examples. Perhaps some of the Seventy were
Samaritans. The parable is, as it were, the foundation-iione
of all Christian hospitals, and the equalization in treatment of
all sects and faiths within the walls where Christian doctors
and nurses often exemplify the power of His faith and
fraternity. The visit to the home of Mary and Martha at Bethany may
have been just before, or just after the feast. Its interest lies
in its revelation of the Lord in the retirement of home life, and
in His intercourse with women. The anecdote of Mary and
Martha is inserted by St. Luke for some purpose other than
biographical. Mary and Martha are representatives of two
orders of human character." One was absorbed, preoccupied,
distracted ; the other was concentrated and single-hearted.
Her own world was the all of Martha ; Christ was the first
thought with Mary. They did not necessarily represent the
laborious and the contemplative types of life. The former was
divided ; the latter, one. To Martha life was " a succession of
particular businesses " ; to Mary life " was rather the flow of one
spirit." 3 Martha was Petrine, Mary was Johannine. St. Luke
gives us a moral as well as a domestic interior. The one was
a well-meaning, bustling busybody ; the other was a reverent
disciple, a wistful listener.* Did not the first miss the Divinity
of the guest, and the other go far towards recognition and
worship ? As a rare glimpse of family life in the Gospels, and
Christ's presence in the home we gladly dwell upon it. We
shall hardly do wrong to notice a certain touch of humour in
the Lord's reproof of the " distracted " mistress of the house
hold. St. Paul had such a picture in his mind when he spoke
of attending upon the Lord "without distraction" (1 Cor. vii. 38).
» Sir F. Goldsmid gives an example in his own experience at a '1 urkish
caravansera near Baghdad, " On Islam," Mission Field, May, 1888.
* Cf. J. Martineau, "Hours of Thought," p. 59. 3 Ibid.
4 Cf. " Pirke Aboth." 4 ; Taylor, " Let thy house be a meeting-house fol
the wise ; and powder thyself in the dust of their feet ; and drink theii
words with thirstiness."

I40 JESUS CHRIST.
By the law of association of ideas it is likely that the prayei
of the disciples (Luke xi. I ) to be taught to pray, took place in
some spot where John, like any other Rabbi, had taught his
disciples a form of prayer, or where our Lord Himself had been
seen, or heard, offering the calves of the lips. It is well
known that the Lord's prayer was based upon pre-existent
Jewish prayers. But there was transformation as well as con
servation. In the first place, no orthodox Israelite could have
sincerely prayed " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them
that trespass against us," any more than an orthodox modern
Mahommedan. In the second place, Christ laid down no rules
as to posture and ceremony. The prayer was internal — without
implying or excusing irreverence. The Rabbinical prayers
were too often external. " This appears from the Talmudic
tractate specially devoted to that subject (Berakhoth), where
the exact position, the degree of inclination, and other triviali
ties, never referred to by Christ, are dwelt upon at length as of
primary importance." * The universality of its content, " Our
Father," was also as un-Rabbinical as un-Mahommedan, and
another indication of the fraternity and interdependence of the
members of the kingdom one with another. The clause, " Thy
kingdom come," may have been a devotional creation of the
Baptist, and adopted by Jesus. " Thy will be done on earth as
it is in heaven," could only have been born of a mind con
versant with heaven and earth. " Give us this day our daily
bread," was a practical confession of faith in the minute pro
vidential superintendence of the bodily needs of those who
sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
" Deliver us from the Evil One," " had special point in times
and seasons of conscious warfare with the ubiquitous works of
the devil, and in relation to thanksgivings such as " I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven," and prayers such as that of
the Great Intercession. The personality of the Evil One comes
into very distinct view in the New Testament. He had been a
figure in the background under the Old Covenant revelations.
But when the intense light of the gospel was shed with
increasing power on things unseen and seen, the figure, the
character, the work of Satan emerged more and more clearly.
' Edersheim, i. 536.
• For this rendering see the Bishop of Durham's (to the writer's mind)
conclusive essay

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERyEA. 14I
The work of Christ as a personal antagonism, past, present,
future, and as a chronic victory over a personal enemy, can only
be fully understood by reading it in the light of His own
prayer, His own words, and in those of the men whom He
taught. He knew He was contending not with the vis inertia of
evil, with mechanical masses of death and corruption, but with
a superhuman personal will and intellect at the head and front
of others like him, many as those who fell from heaven like
stars. The Peraean ministry was not rich in noticeable incident.
Christ's teaching was public and open. The masses flocked to
Him. The words of the prophet Jeremiah (xv. 10), " Woe is me,
my mother, that thou hast born me a man of strife and a man of
contention to the whole earth," describe the tone and spirit
which pervade His teaching in the face of Pharisaic opposi
tion. The necessities of spiritual polemics drove Him into
open denunciation of those whose spiritual disestablishment
was necessary in the interests of their own souls, and of
those who looked up to them. Even at the friendly meal, out of
season as well as in season, the Pharisaic host must be taught
to unlearn his externalism, if he would be a child of the pro
phets and not of their murderers.
A prophetic outlook underlies His teaching to the disciples.
With regard to the nation his call to repentance becomes more
and more accentuated ; with regard to the disciples, more and
more illuminative. The burden of coming events seems to
weigh every word. The night was coming when no man could
work. Our Lord's warnings became increasingly severe. His
invective breathes the thunder of the prophets, and predicts the
wrath of the Lamb. Mighty works and deeds, of which the
former are selected rather than the latter by St. Luke, lose
evidential force for, and judiciously harden, hearts encrusted
with guilt and blackened with hatred. The climax of warning
sin the against Holy Ghost (Luke xii. 10), in the face of myriads of
was reached in the declaration of the unpardonableness of the
the multitude, so closely packed that they trod on one another
(Luke xii. 1), and emphasized by the preceding tenderness of the
context which spake of the unforgotten sparrows, and the hairs
of the head all numbered.
This Peraean ministry was interrupted by the Feast of

t42 JESUS CHRIST.
Dedication (John x 22). Christ was not afraid to face His
enemies again in the heart of a hostile territory. The
feast was not one of Divine, but of national institution. After
the desecration of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes, Judas
Maccabaeus had dedicated the altar " with songs, and
citherns, and harps, and cymbals" (1 Mace. iv. 54). The spirit
of patriotism, the wish to render honour to national feeling and
civil authority, animated the Ideal Son of Abraham. Both as
Messiah Prince demanding the allegiance of Israel, as Son of
God always and everywhere declaring His Father's glory, and
as Child of Israel, He would discharge the duty of an Israelite
indeed, and show His fellowship with His people. Under the
last aspect we have the consecration of patriotism. Upon the
altar of the Divine heart that flame burned brightly. Christ
accepted His place in the organism of the State, and discharged
His civil obligations with the fullest recognition of the Divinity
of their claims. When Judas "decked the forefront of the
Temple with crowns of gold and with shields " (1 Mace. iv. 57),
he was champion alike of Church and State, and in both
characters a vicegerent of God.
Not till the Temple of Christ's Body had been restored and
reconsecrated by the Resurrection, after the desecrating violence
and profane destruction at the hands of the wicked, did the
figurative prophecy of the Maccabean restoration come to
a fulfilment. The festival probably took place at the Christian
Christmastide, but the twenty-fifth of Chislev that year,
according to some, fell earlier in December. The wintry
season is especially noted by St. John, and accounts for Christ's
walking under the shelter of Solomon's Porch.
The teaching contained no new elements, but re-emphasized
and reiterated old truths. The consistency of Christ's claim
through evil report, and through good report, with opposition
or without it, the steadiness of His front, and the calm decided
insistence of assured conviction, must have deepened the
favourable impression of honest inquirers wavering towards the
light. Here was One who never quailed, who never abated,
who never lost dignity nor temper, whose looks and mien
towards high or low breathed tenderness, sincerity, holy
force, whom no one could detect in any weakness, compromise,
or concession, whose words of grace and truth seconded
works of power and love. Character is a potent force, often

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERAEA. I43
when and where least acknowledged, or openly decried. The
character of Christ must have made itself felt with increasing
clearness, and farther range of influence, as He became more and
more a public Man and the great question of the day, in Temple
Court, in crowded street, in upper chamber gatherings, and in
the private musings and heart-searchings which come to all but
the careless and profane.
The great point in His statement He presses again and again
— His works. It is still the evidence of the Christian life which
tells most among non- Christians, or half-believers.
Again He employs the familiar figure of His sheep, but makes
a magnificent addition, which implies that the turning point had
come to some of them, and the great decision made — " I give
unto them eternal life," not I will give. The gift is theirs for a
present possession, the free, unbought guerdon of the saving
Giver. His unequivocal statement of unity of nature with the Father
was understood, and rightly understood, in the only sense it
could bear. It was a more categorical statement of what had
been implied and indeed asserted before. Again the threaten
ing stones were taken up. Again they sought to arrest Him,
and He escaped from their hands.
The change to Perasa was as sudden as it was welcome. In
the capital the more He loves the less He is loved. In Perasa
He again reaps where the Baptist had sown. In Jerusalem
the tide of hatred is rising to the flood. In Peraea " many believed
on Him " (John x. 42). Wherever He is His presence cannot
be " put by." His character, and the work which is the neces
sary outflow of it into His social environment, is strong to repel
or to attract Neutrality was impossible. The question of the
day, in public debate, in private self-examination, was approach
ing solution. Every other question, national and political, social
and sectional, religious and spiritual, general and individual,
turned upon this. Eyes and ears were opening to this fact
everywhere in Jewry. We constantly meet evidence of our
Lord's physical activity. Here in Peraea (Luke xiii. 22), as
formerly in Galilee, a round of cities and villages is visited.
Everywhere the new teaching is heard, and the same results
took place on small fields which the scanty records and the
incidental hints of the Gospel memoirs depict in the larger
centres of population.

144 JESUS CHRIST.
We feel again in the presence of incarnate earnestness and
energy. The drain upon the Lord's physical and spiritual re
sources at this time must have been unceasing. Religious work
is especially exacting. The flow of feeling, the pressure of re
sponsibility, the excitement of aggressive labour, which His
workers knew, and know, and which we see so luminously
reflected in the pages of the Pauline Epistles in every phase of
high emotion, and breathed in the thousand diverse harmonies
of the Psalter, must have been as real, and as exhausting, in the
perfect Missionary and Christian Worker, at least as in any of
His followers, or in many put together.
But to balance the pressure of over-work there was the per
fect trust in God, the casting of all care upon Him, the rest
under the shadow of His hand. When He bade His " little
flock " " fear not," or " be of good cheer," or " be not over
anxious," He spoke straight from the heart of His own experi
ence. He revealed therein indirectly the inner springs of His
own spiritual strength and peace, and the outward demeanour
of the Blessed of all His own beatitudes must of itself have
been an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace
and light.
The parables of the Perasan ministry are transcripts from the
Divine experience. Tbey all illustrate the seeking and saving
love (Luke xv.), the redemptive forces of God, seen actually and
visibly in Christ's own life, secondarily and derivatively in the
lives of those He taught and inspired. They harmonize in place
and time with the specially missionary character of this Perasan
episode. These discourses may be viewed under three aspects
— as they bore upon the apostles, upon the general body of the
disciples and hearers, and upon the Church of God. Under
all aspects they pourtray the eternal character of God, as the
deepening light of ages has shed the lustre of progressive reve
lation upon it from glory to glory.
In reference to the apostles the parables had an educational
value. Christ was gradually transforming the false Messianic
ideal of their minds into the true. He was educating their con
sciences at the same time to a higher level and an acuter vision.
Their whole mental horizon had to be universalized. The para
bles paved the way for the teaching of St. Stephen as that
contained in germ the full flower of the Pauline Gospel. The
Messianic message to all nations, and the sacredness of the

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERfiA. 145
individual in God's right, the absolute annihilation of preroga
tive and privilege in the election of grace, the freedom of sal
vation, and over all the yearning heart of God willing all men
to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth —
these are the truths which flowed naturally from these doings
and sayings, and sunk imperceptibly with fructifying power
into the hearts of the disciples. And they were lit up at every
point by a host of unrecorded words, looks, acts, which even the
Catholic Gospel of St. Luke has left for future resurrection and
the historians of other worlds.
So to the general body of followers, hearers, inquirers, un
organized as yet, and unshepherded, this Peraean ministry must
have opened a new world. All men need Christ, but not all
seek Him. Of those who seek Him many seek blindly or un
consciously. The history of modern missions supplies examples
of what went on on a grander scale where Christ and His
apostles laboured. Much, most, of the work had to be left for
future labourers. But an impression must have been left, a
mark greater and deeper than the Baptist's made in the same
region, which broke ground for the coming harvests.
With regard to the Church of the ages, it is needless to dwell
upon the force and meaning. Every missionary effort has drawn
upon the stories of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son, as
a fund of inspiration and energy.
" Out in the desert He heard its cry —
Sick and helpless, and ready to die."
A pair of parables follow in St. Luke's sixteenth chapter, which
would not be placed there except for chronological or spiritual
fitness. As the preceding triad threw open the gates of the
Messianic kingdom, so these close them. Even the spiritually
dead might revive, the lost might be found, but there were limits
imposed by character, in this department of the kingdom, and
in that province which lay beyond the grave. The moral of
the parable of the unjust steward was that all property —
intellectual, spiritual, material — is a trust to be used in the
interest of the kingdom to come. The " other-worldliness "
with which George Eliot taxes Christianity might be a true
charge if there were no moral connection between the kingdom
that now is visible and that now is invisible. On the contrary,
11

146 JESUS CHRIST.
Christ emphasizes the absoluteness of that connection. Use
this world aright, because it is the school for another. Here lay
His heaviest charge against Pharisaism. All the things in the
world, even religion, the most sacred of all, ministered to their
selfishness and personal exaltation. They claimed the praise
of men here, and the praise of God hereafter. They would step
grandly from their popular thrones below to loftier pedestals
above. They sat in the seats of learning and knowledge, religious
honour, wealth, and social esteem ; and every one of these trusts
was perverted and abused to their own glory and self-righteous
ness. The second parable changes the scene with terrible irony to
the next world. The conditions of Dives and Lazarus are ex
changed, but the characters of each are unchanged. Dives still
justifies himself, and under the cover of a plea for his own
brothers, impugns the righteousness of God in not giving him
self and them a fair chance. Dives still regards Lazarus as an
inferior being, who should be summoned at his beck. Dives
still views his environment from the centre of himself and his
family. It is a shallow exegesis which here discovers moral im
provement in the rich man.
" Ccelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currant"1
Character becomes eternal, independent of space and time.
The personal point of the parable cannot be missed. The
Pharisees and Sadducees were warned and exposed. They were
the rich men, who fared sumptuously in the palaces of religion,
knowledge, and material luxury, and left the " accursed " rabble,
Am-ha-aretz, to starve. The drama ends in the prophecy that
the resurrection would fail to elicit the moral obedience of those
who were deaf to Moses and the prophets. The last words
establish and re-affirm the moral continuity and unity of the law
an»i character of God, under its three successive stages of the
Law, the Gospel, and the kingdom of the Unseen. God is always
true to Himself. According as men were true to Him or untrue,
they fell on either side. The Messianic advent was a pre
liminary judgment and division, reversing the false ideals of the
day, and affirming the true. The death of Christ was the cii*
Hor.

THE DIVINE MISSIONARY IN PERiEA. 147
max which both sides were approaching. Viewed as to their
need of salvation and moral culpability, mankind as a mass were
arrayed in hostility to Him, and in varying degrees were guilty
of that death. Viewed as confessing or disowning their guilt,
as accepting or rejecting a Saviour, mankind fell into two classes
before the dividing presence of Christ. In the long run man
must admit his own sinfulness, or impute it to God. So the
Pharisees established their own righteousness, and imputed to
Christ unrighteousness.

CHAPTER XVI.
GATHERING SHADOWS.
" ' Mere reason ' cannot be tolerated in religion, even as it cannot in the
sanctities of home. For religion is truly the home-feeling of the universe.
The Church is the home. Here comes feeble, weary, jaded humanity, to
teek its rest" (Jas. Hinton, " Philosophy and Religion," p. 187).
The resurrection of Lazarus — Back to Peraea — Divorce and marriage —
The rights of woman — The rights of children — Behold, we go up to
Jerusalem ! — Jericho — Zacchaeus and the service of man — The blind
healed — The pilgrims in debate — The Sabbath rest and unction.
The Peraaan ministry was now broken by an appeal which could
not be set aside. Tidings of Lazarus' dangerous illness reached
Christ from some trusted messenger of his sisters. " He whom
thou lovest is sick." The message was short and anxious, as a
sick bulletin and a virtual prayer. The Lord's answer is a key
to the whole of His conduct. Had this sickness — and death —
not been for the glory of God we can hardly have believed that
Christ would have placed the dearest claims of private friend
ship above the " bitter cry " of Peraean Messianic need. But
there is no real clash of duties. Duty is one. The record of
St. John has all the fulness and picturesque minuteness of the
memory of the eye-witness. The objections of the disciples to
His returning to Judaea and certain death by stoning were the
common-sense objections of the natural man. Our Lord's appeal
to the preordained limits of His working-day removes the
ground of duty to the region of that faith which reads off the
invisible. The human, the Divine, move with perfect harmony
in the mysterious music of the unity of the Divine Person who

GATHERING SHADOWS. 1 49
is of both. Human affection and sympathy prelude the out
burst of Divine power. The silent tear, the loud cry. The
word of Christ was a discharge of spiritual force, a supernatural
vibration to the unknown regions of the spiritual cosmos. It
was the inner current of volition, rather than the loud wave
of sound, which was heard by the disembodied spirit. The
latter was spoken for the witnesses, or possibly as the discharge
of deep feeling, like that of the one grateful leper. Might not
unbelief urge, has it not urged that here was imposture ? or
credit to the evangelist the creation of " a masterpiece of alle
gorical fiction"? The answer depends upon the presupposi
tions. This miracle directly declares Christ's independence of
the laws of nature and of human nature more emphatically
than any preceding one. It was the prelude to the Royal
Resurrection. It was a great sign of the greatest sign of all at
hand. Its credibility externally rests upon that of the Fourth Evan
gelist. Its internal credibility is swallowed up in the larger
proposition of Christ's own resurrection. The effect of the
resurrection of Lazarus was decisive upon many of the eye
witnesses (John xi. 45). Many of the Jews, i.e., as usually in
St John, the anti-Christian Jewish party, believed on Him.
But " some," contrasted with " many " must mean a minority,
carried their report to the Pharisees. This miracle more
than any other up to the greater one it prefaced, is not only
a help to certify Christ's revelation, and itself a means by
which in part it is made, " but also a pledge of our final restora
tion and victory over sin and disease and death." "
Such a majestic sign of power was decisive. Lazarus was a
living witness who could not be gainsaid before friend or foe.
In the heart of Jewry, in the streets of Jerusalem, in the courts
of the Temple, could henceforth be seen and heard a man who
had returned to this corruptible life in the flesh at the bidding of
Him who declared Himself the Messiah. Either His Messianic
challenge must be accepted, or He must be finally silenced. At
this juncture a council was held to consider. There was no
hesitation among the Sanhedrists, no change of mind. Their
hearts were too hardened to listen to evidence. The one ques
tion was not, is He after all the Messiah ? but, what can we do ?
The one danger, their personal ruin before the rising tide of
' Stan ten, p. 17.

I50 JESUS CHRIST.
popular belief, and in the near distance the annihilation of
Temple, and city, and nation, of Church and State, by the
Roman power. It is one of the Divine ironies of history that
the fate they would avert by the sacrifice of principle to policy
was that which befell them. The Romans took away their name
and nation, and destroyed the Temple which they falsely accused
the Lord of wishing to destroy. The wailing-place of the Jews
in modern Jerusalem, viewed in its past spiritual and historic
relations, and from Christian Jewish sympathies, is indeed the
saddest nook in this vale of tears.
Tidings of the decision of the council reached Jesus. He re
tired to the obscure Ephraim, probably Ophrah, of Benjamin,
afterwards Epherema, a village thirteen miles north of Jerusalem,
now Taiyibeh. Here He stayed with His disciples. Such a rest
may have been needful to them and to Him.
From Ophrah He could get by Roman roads to one of the
Jordan bridges, and must have gone, for once more He is in
half-heathen Perasa, at a safer distance, and goes as far as Galilee
(Matt. xix. 1), perhaps to some rendezvous where He might join
Galilean pilgrims to the Passover. From the frontier of Galilee
(Luke xvii. 11) He passed between Galilee and Samaria,1 perhaps
because rejected at En-gannim (Jenin), the northern frontier town
of Samaria, into Peraea. His previous missionary work had left a
deep and wide impression. Great multitudes again came round
Him, and He healed and taught them (Mark x. 1). Again we
may compare His Peraean to the foreign mission, His Judaean and
Galilean to the home work of the Church.
The union here, as usual, perhaps always, of the ministry of
healing with the ministry of teaching suggests the importance
of combining medical* with directly spiritual work in the mis
sionary operations of the Church. Modern missions lack the ex
traordinary gifts of healing. If apostolic faith and unity of heart
be restored to Christendom, why should not this missing weapon
return to the armoury of Christian aggression ? Without it, at
least the best resources of medical science should contribute to
the holy warfare of heathen evangelization. Some of the most
' b~ia fikaov as Hort, Tischendorf, Gebhardt ; "between " margin R. V.
- Cf. especially the decisive utterances, exemplified by their own experi
ences, of the Bishop of Rangoon, J. M. Strachan, M.D., and the late Bishop
of Sarawak ; and that of medical missionaries of the Church Missionary
Society and Scottish Medical Missions.

GATHERING SHADOWS. 151
satisfactory results of evangelization have followed in the wake of
missionary philanthropy, ministering, in the true spirit of love,
to the wants of diseased limbs and famishing bodies. The
annals of such missions as those of Nazareth, Tinnevelly, and of
the ingatherings after the waifs and strays of the Indian famine
had tasted the kindness of thoje who gave bread to the hungryi
furnish "cogent evidence. The lives of such men, as Dr. Hender
son and Dr. Lockhart in China, Dr. Elmslie in Kashmir, show
how deep an impression may be made, and how the gospel way
may be prepared by medical skill moved, hallowed, blessed by
prayer, and followed up by teaching.
The first noteworthy incident was the healing of the ten lepers.1
The watchful opposition of the Pharisees lay in wait for Him at
every place. The nearer He drew to Jerusalem the hotter was
the fire of criticism. Opposition to the truth does truth great
service. Attack calls forth defence. Criticism enforces explana
tion, arrests attention. " These men are full of new wine," said
the negative critics at Pentecost. An answer to the charge vin
dicated the truth and published it abroad. Frequently the
Pharisaic attacks supplied Jesus with a text and an opportunity
for declaring the kingdom of God. Such questions as that may
have sometimes been the expression of honest difficulty and
single-hearted inquiry (Luke xvii. 20). But that stage was long
past with the Pharisees —
" Sin of self-love possesseth aU mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part :
And for this sin there is no remedy.
It is so grounded inward in my heart," *
Any questions put by them were the explosion of bitter animus,
and of the desire to involve Jesus either with the Roman govern
ment, or with the masses, or with both.
The question of divorce was cunningly raised about the same
time by a Pharisaic deputation. Whatever answer our Lord re
turned He would come into conflict with Rabbinical practice and
popular belief. It was the deepest of all questions pertaining to
family life As Prince of Israel, as the Divine head of society,
¦ On leprosy, past and present, see an article by Agnes Lambert in The
Nineteenth Century, August, 1884.
9 Shakespeare, Sonnet (a.

I52 JESUS CHRIST.
as the reformer both of the individual and of human society,
He resolved a question which touched many human interests-
To this current of controversial inquiry we owe Christ's re
affirmation of the primitive Divine law of the unity effected
by holy matrimony, and of its indissolubility. The Mosaic
permission of legal ' divorce was, He said, a provisional con
cession to their hardness of heart. No teaching could have
been more against the grain of contemporary practice. The
school of Shammai counselled divorce only on the ground of un-
chastity, "a matter of shame" (Deut. xxiv. i). The school of
Hillel interpreted the latter clause in any and every sense. " A
man," said Hillel, " may put away his wife if she prepares a
dish badly ; if she makes a blunder ; if she lets the meat burn."
Rabbi Akibah allows it if he sees a fairer woman. But in any
case divorce " was obtained with an ease and frequency quite
revolting." *
That some of the nobler minds took a higher view in principle
and in practice is proved by clear evidence, as by the saying of
Rabbi Eliezer, " Whosoever divorces his first wife, even the
(very) altar sheds tears over him, for it is said " (Mai. ii. 13, 14)
&c, &c.3 But whatever may have been exceptional practice on
the whole " the Jewish Law unquestionably allowed divorce on
almost any ground." ? In no respect was Jesus more above and
beyond and contrary to His time than in the matter of marriage.
In no respect less conceivably the creature and the exponent of
His age and environment. To this positive and negative ele
vation of marriage to a level worthy of symbolizing in His
apostle's language, " Christi et ecclesiae sacramentum," 5 the
Lord added a sanction to celibacy, and a virtual blessing upon
it undertaken for the kingdom of God's sake by those to whom
it is given. Buddhism, on the other hand, regards celibacy as
all but essential to the attainment of Nirvana, and invariably
discourages the married life.6
Christ's teaching on marriage was very different to that of
the Rabbis. It stands still farther apart from that of the sanc-
' The Talmudic letter of divorcement may be seen in Stapfer, p. 154, E. T.
• Stapfer, p. 153.
3 Hershon, p. 239 p., and Stapfer, p. 153 q. ; "Gittin," 10 b, "San-
hed.'' 22 a.
* Edersheim, ii. 333 ; Stapfer, s. I. I Mediaeval marriage service.
* Cf. Kellogg, p. 313 following.

GATHERING SHADOWS. 153
tioned polygamies of Mahommedanism. It breathes a wholly
different air. The whole conception of marriage was more than
restored to its original ideal. It was transformed and heigh
tened and consecrated.
The general position of woman towards man, both in the
particular matrimonial relation, and in all the social and domes
tic relations, was raised in conception infinitely, and gradually
has risen in practice as Christian ideas have taken effect.
Christ's own demeanour towards woman, His birth of the holy
virgin, His honour and compassion to the outcast and the in
fluential alike, were repaid by the abundant devotion of daughters
of Israel. His conduct and bearing were the first movement
towards their emancipation. His attitude towards divorce, a
question in which woman has always been the greater sufferer,
was in itself an incalculable advance of their rights.
He was never sick. He never needed those gentle ministries
of mercy where women all the world over are angels of compas
sion and skill. But His wounded Body was reverently handled
at the rocky sepulchre by those whom His love and respect had
won. But His Incarnation was the honour of honours paid to
womanhood. Women henceforward were all implicated in
the sacred dignity of her
" Who born of Eve, high mercy won,
To bear and nurse the Eternal Son,
O awful station to no Seraph given.
On this side touching Sin, on th' other Heaven." *
And the long submission in gentleness and patience to the
mother's love and empire in the cottage home has brightened
Christian homes and Christian motherhood with a glory of con
secration and pre-figurements of heaven. For Christian women
are not likely to forget, nor Christian men who honour a
mother's name with filial devotion, and secret incense of
homage when only the name and memory are left, nor Christian
children most of all to whom the mother is an earthly divinity—
to forget how " Thenceforth, whom thousand worlds adore,
He calls thee mother evermore ;
Angel nor saint His face may see,
Apart from what He took of thee." '
* J. Keble.

154 JESUS CHRIST.
And as He honoured the higher and holier provinces of
woman's empire, the marriage union, the home, so He shed the
rays of His compassion upon the dishonoured and the self-
degraded. Such He won back to self-respect, to usefulness, to
devoted service ; of such materials as the harlot He could
manufacture saints.
Side by side with the Christian homage of women, from the
days of chivalry to those of their intellectual emancipation,
may be placed by way of contrast the Jewish Morning Prayer,
where the men in three consecutive benedictions, bless God
*' who hath not made me a Gentile — a slave — a woman.'' * Or
we may compare such a high non-Christian religion as that of
China, where the feet of girls are bound and cramped, and
where " no generous sentiment tending to the amelioration of
the social position of woman ever came from either " Confucius
or Mencius." Possibly the respect shown to women may have
been at times pushed too far in the next Christian generation.
For in the Corinthian Church there are indications of feminine
usurpations of ecclesiastical authority in St Paul's Epistles.
And in the remarkable Epistle of St. Clement of Rome to the
same Church about forty years later, the same irregularity calls
for severe censure.
And in this love and respect shown to those who have lost
all, even for themselves, Christians have from the first seen an
example. Christ could not only wash away guilt, He could
renovate and re-create. And so the weak are made strong, the
unclean clean, the sensual spiritual. In this way the moral
laws of nature are constantly broken. The chains of evil habit
and circumstance are snapped, sometimes by a sudden resurrec
tion, more commonly as in the history of society as a whole so
in that of its units, by gradual disintegration of evil and integra
tion of good. The waifs of passion, the wrecks of stormy lust,
the prodigal daughters, are sought and saved by Christ's
workers, not in the contemptuous spirit of the proselytizer, or
in the interests of sanitary science and public health, but by
those who are armed with the purity of the One Pure and His
compassionate love, or by those who have been rescued from
the like dregs by His sweet mastery.
1 Cf. Taylor, " Pirke Aboth," 5, " prolong not converse with a woman."
* Prof. Legge, " Religions of China," p. in

GATHERING SHADOWS. 155
One of the greatest contrasts between Christianity is it now
is, with all its imperfections and unrealized ideals, and non-
Christianity may be seen to the advantage of the former, in the
moral and social position, or no position, of women, where there
has been no Christian influence to disenslave them. And
where, as in India, there is beginning to show itself a tendency
to raise them in the social, intellectual, and spiritual scale, it is,
directly or indirectly, traceable, beyond any shadow of doubt,
to the working of Christian teaching and practice in social and
individual life. In the instruction and elevation of Indian
women in their zenanas lies one of the most open doors to the en
trance of the one faith which leaves no fragment of life, social or
individual, ungoverned, unpurified, unenfranchized, uncrowned.
The holy charm, the loveable attractiveness of Christ's
character is exemplified by the next incident. Perhaps a
spectator of the un-Rabinnical tenderness to the children, or of
some similar unconventional emotionalism, a young ruler threw
himself impetuously at the Lord's feet (Mark x. 13 ; x. 17, and
Synoptists). His haste, his question, his spirit, revealed the
presence of a deep moral need shaking his soul. The answer of
our Lord contained no new revelation, but a re-affirmation of
the old. Let the young man examine himself and so let him
prepare for eternal life. His conscience certified that he had
been obedient after a Jewish manner. Christ then lifts the
veil of the higher life. He was eternal life ; union with Him
implied there and then the loss of all things. Such a demand
could only be justified if the good Master were really God.
The rich man must return to his original question and decide
who He was — who made a claim so sweeping.
The tremendous decision shown and demanded by Christ
foreshadowed the approach of the final crisis. The time was
very short, the fire would be very hot, only the whole-hearted
would bear the strain. The same spirit breathes in tl e follow
ing warning about and to the wealthy. Times of dilemma come
when the Christ follower will be called to sacrifice everything to
Him. They may come to all. All then must share the sacrificial
spirit and be ready, if called upon, for the forlorn hope. Such
surrender brings its own reward. What has been given up is
received again many times over1 — with persecutions — in this
1 The present writer heard a Colonial bishop (Rawle of Trinidad) dwell
upon his own experience of the fulfilment of this promise — but without tin
darker side, persecutions

156 JESUS CHRIST.
present life. These words form another important contribution
to the missionary charter of the Church ; for to the foreign
warfare of Christ's soldiers they most literally apply.
The many indirect warnings are now clenched by His le-
iterated prediction of the Passion. " Behold we go up to Jeru
salem" (Luke xviii. 31, and Synoptists) — this, the long silent
master-thought, now finds utterance. The details of the scene
rise up minutely before Him even as they had flashed
" In outline, dim, and vast,"
in fragmentary intuitions and scattered half-lights upon the
prophets. What they saw in parts He saw wholly, but the
disciples vaguely or not at all. So completely had the suffering
aspect of Messiah's work crumbled away from Jewish memory
that this detailed statement, and that too doubtless in a manner
indescribably solemn, failed to be intelligible to them ; and the
next question asked was the petition for pre-eminence, in the
Messianic kingdom, by Zebedee's wife and her two sons (Mark
x- 35)-
Jesus now crossed the Jordan. It was His Rubicon. A march
across an arid waste brought the festal band to Jericho. (Luke
xviii. 35 and Synoptists). A gleam of sunshine lighted up the
way to storm and darkness. For the beautiful city of Palms
and the plain of Jericho recalled warm and verdurous Galilean
home, and the salvation of Zacchaeus, the healing of the blind,
the joyous crowds of pilgrims, suggest an interval of inward and
outward gladness. There are no signs here of the rejection of
the Messiah. Officials from the grand palace and gardens of
Archelaus, soldiers from the forts of Herod which guarded the
death-bed of their builder, merchants who have stopped to pur
chase balsam on their route to or from Arabia and Damascus,
priests from the priestly city or their rural homes, and a many-
coloured stream of Galilean and Perasan pilgrims, form a crowd
of questioning onlookers as the Nazarene Prophet passes
through the midst. The question of all questions was the
absorbing one of the hour. All the minutiae of triviality which
fill the minds of many even at great times, and moving moments,
must have vanished at the living presence of the great Mystery
passing on to the threatened death or to the crest of a Messianic
revolution. ¦

GATHERING SHADOWS. 15?
" All cognition is recognition." * For the most part unknown,
because unrecognized in His fulfilments of Messianic law and
prophecy, the Master of hearts stepped out into the fierce light
that beats upon a public man by a direct challenge to social
prejudice and local pique. The head of the customs is directly
invited to become his host for the night, the most unpopular
man in a focus of national life and prejudice. The spiritual
intensity of the incident is shown in the instantaneousness of
the publican's conversion. The corrupt child of an age of cor
ruption and fraud, steeped in an atmosphere of oppression on
the one side, social suspicion, national aversion, and individual
opposition on the other, is confronted for the first time of his
life with absolute personal honesty, transparent truth, and single-
mindedness. The hardened man of the world openly confessed
his guilt to the world. Heart and life were changed at a
stroke before the burning gaze of Incarnate Honour. Many
previous doubtings of heart may have led up to this happy
catastrophe. Jericho, as a place, is now a desolate wilderness. "The
Bedouin lead the flocks across the plain as did the patriarchs of
old." " But there is no other sign of human life." * The soil,
as in so many parts of Palestine, is said to be as fertile as ever.
A good government in that afflicted country would be as life
from the dead in a land where Nature opens a bountiful bosom
to farmer and agriculturist and engineer. The redemption of
the soil of the Holy Land, its restoration to fruitfulness, to sani
tary well-being, to freedom from ruinous oppression, venial
administration, and financial tyranny, is a worthier cause of a
Crusade than even the recovery of the questioned site of the
Holy Sepulchre. Christian politicians have here a golden
opportunity for putting unexceptionable pressure upon the
Porte ; Christian commerce and science an inviting field for
regenerating efforts and richly rewarding work. May the Lord
who there brought us salvation of body and soul help us to
extend to il material salvation I
The discrepancies in the accounts of the healing of the two
blind men at Jericho must be left as they are. At all events
they prove the independence of the narratives, and the absence
of collusion. The general credibility of the evangelists will not
be destroyed by minute differences of detail, here or elsewhere-
1 H. Spencer. * S. Manning, " Those Holy Fields," p. 77.

I58 JESUS CHRIST.
The absence of any such differences would be far more suspi
cious than the presence. Some have supposed that the Old
Testament and the Herodian Jericho are here confused in the
accounts, but a brief examination of the passages negatives that
hypothesis. Bengel's solution is more probable, that Christ heard
one man cry for mercy as He entered and healed him, and
Bartimaeus as He left the city. But common as blindness was,
and is, in the East generally, and in Palestine, it is not impro
bable that He healed one on the way to Jericho, and that he
told his recovery and the method of it, to two fellow sufferers.
So the same scene may have taken place again as He left.
A crowd of pilgrims had come up early to purify themselves
before the feast. As they stood in groups in the Temple (John
xi. 56) the uppermost question in their minds was where is
Jesus ? St John sketches this scene as illustrating his general
plan of pourtraying the spiritual attitude of the people towards
the Messiah, and as prelusive of the final decision. That deci
sion was the last result of a long series of intermediate rejections.
It was deliberate on the part of the leaders at least. The causes
which led up to it are indicated at every turn of the history, it
was not a momentary outburst of temper, nor the rabid fury of
blind fanaticism mistaken in means while worthy in ends. It
was the climax of all the struggles in which the most favoured
branch of fallen humanity had contended against God.
While Jewish pilgrims were speculating about His coming to
the passover Jesus spent the last Friday before the Passion in
the now dearer home of Bethany. On the following day He
shared the Sabbath feast with Mary and Martha and Lazarus
and apparently other guests, in the house of Simon the Leper
(Matt. xxvi. 6 ; Mark xiv. 3 ; John xii. 1). Mary's anoint
ing may have been prompted by some reference to His self-
consecration by death, or the simple outpouring of a sisterly
love made more fragrant by gratitude for a brother restored
from the grave. But Christ saw a higher end fulfilled, as
all action passes beyond itself to unseen Divine issues. He
was already being embalmed for His burial, and some of it may
actually have been used. The words were mysterious and
suggestive. Yet only a week lay between the symbolic and
actual, unction. The outspoken objection of Judas is reported
by St. John, not as a mere detail, but to reveal the hidden
man of the heart. The moral attitude of Judas was no

GATHERING SHADOWS. I59
more sudden than that of the chief priests and Pharisees, or
Mary and Martha's. The importance of this incident in its after
lights explains the Johannine repetition of the two previous
Synoptist accounts in fuller personal portraiture.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE MESSIANIC ENTRY. THE CONTRADICTION OE SINNERS.
" Now I behold how worldly gain is loss, —
That weeks and days and hours that by us fleet,
Must wear the Royal impress of the Cross." Isaac Williams.
The Triumphal Entry— The Devil's stand— The Second Temple cleansing
—The barren figtree— The " Day of Questions "—The Divine Con
troversialist — The Divine Apocalypse— Jewish Eschatology.
The offering of Mary's homage is followed by the acclaiming
welcome of the people. For one day He came unto His own
and His own received Him — even on that day a minority
despised and rejected Him.
The importance, present and prospective, of the Triumphal
Entry of the Messiah appears from the fourfold minuteness of
the report.
With the patient foresight of details, and the orderly method
which marked the march of Jesus' plans, He sent forward two
pioneers to loose and bring the ass's foal.1 This detail of
Zachariah's prophecy had not escaped His memory, nor failed
of its aim. The Prince of Peace could not ride on the horse,
the beast of war, into the City of Peace.
The final decision was now coming. The King makes His
* The actual and metaphorical use by Christ of the animal world
suggests per se its participation in man's recovery, and in the resurrection to
anew earth of "glorious liberty," as was suggested before at the manger.

THE MESSIANIC ENTRY. l6l
last offer to the Royal City. For once He will enter in royalty
and imposing pageant. They had rejected Him upon His own
evidence of dignity and worth. Will they accept Him at the
head of an army of peace, supported by serried troops of
Galilean pilgrims, their acknowledged Lord and Prince
Messiah ? Even the people are declaring for Him. Will they
change their minds ? The verdict must be given this day.
The last plea is uttered. The last witness has been called.
The question is now set before the nation, and the Holy City
especially, for the last time. Jesus asks it in word. Jesus asks
it in action. In word and in action the all but universal reply
is made. There is not the slightest evidence that Jesus
expected to take the allegiance of the people by storm " by
suddenly unfurling the Messianic banner and overwhelming the
murmurs of opposition by the rejoicing shouts of the people."
From first to last He knew perfectly well how it would end.
The temporary enthusiasm of the pilgrims did not confuse
Him. Nor did He turn bitterly away with cynical contempt for
mob acclamations. The vision of a fallen Jerusalem, a
desolate city, a ruined house of God, shows that His eyes were
looking beyond the gates of the present, and that His heart was
brooding over His people's sorrows, not His own. We need
not therefore suppose that the cheers of the festal crowd were
ungenuine or uncomforting. We may rather see " in part," and
prophesy " in part," a vision of a Royal entry into the anti-
typal City of God, of waving palms, and multitudinous concor
dant voices, greeting and accompanying the King of Glory.
It is impossible to read the long and darkening tragedy of
Jewish rejections of God, first in His messengers, and last in
His Son, without detecting a superhuman influence at work.
Behind his unconscious instruments the master of evil was
busy. Annas and Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate, Judas, were tools
of the anti-Messiah. He was at bay. The gates of hell were
threatened ; the whole hierarchy of hell mustered for defence.
Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the devil. The
devil may be credited with a better contemporary knowledge
of that fact than ignorant erring humanity. Whatever power
he could exercise over a fallen and partly enslaved race in the
plenitude of his spiritual intelligence, in the fulness of his
command of all the resources and powers of evil, he must have
put out in his self-defence. He carried the war into the
12

16a jesus cHrist.
enemy's country. The loss of Judas, the breaking of the
apostolic company, the denial of the leading apostle, and the
desertion of all of them, are tributes to the vast organized
activity of Satan's final stand. After three years of the trans
cendent personal influence which had been acting upon them
night and day, he succeeded in wresting one captive from the
strong grasp of Christ, and in shaking the allegiance of His
chosen. He had already succeeded in turning the Messianic
nation from the Divine Messianic Ideal. He had blinded the
most enlightened, he had turned religion itself into an anti-
Messianic engine. He had corrupted and perverted the truth ;
he had maintained an unbroken hostility to it through the
dominant party. He had united every worldly interest in a
common league. He had by masterly manoeuvres, bound
together in a common cause and a common course, persons and
interests so antagonistic as the Roman governor, the Idumean
king, the Jewish high priesthood, and the masses. All hated
one another but shook hands. And now the final issue of ages
of progressing evil, advancing corruption, and accumulating
falsehood, had reached its climax, and the full volume of the
gathered momentum of actual and transmitted evil under its
acknowledged and, so to speak, lawful head, guided by a super
human will, ordered by a stupendous intellect enriched with
incalculable experience of all the sciences and successes of
wrong, was launched at the head, and at the heart, and at the
life of one devoted Man. The Week of the Passion was the
time of times. The field of battle was the City of God.
Humanity was the prize of the Victor. Till the hour and in the
hour of his absolute rout the victory appeared to rest with the
Prince of Darkness.
The Triumphal Entry need not be described in detail. The
picture is well known, and Dean Stanley's memorable contrast
of the scene that then was and the scene that now is is too
perfect for broken quotation.
We pass on with the" silent King and shouting crowd to the
Temple. He looked round about on all. He might have seen a
Temple still cleansed and for ever purified, the home of a re
pentant people, ready to welcome the Messiah on their knees.
But Temple and people were uncleansed. The irreverence of
the Temple represented a people who had a name but not a life.
The night was spent at Bethany. Sleepless watch and

THE MESSIANIC ENTRY. 163
prayer may have caused the hunger of the early morrow. Very
early Jesus left the village, well known as the modern El Aziriyeh,
in its sheltered peace. A single figtree stood out on the sky
line as they walked on to the city, like the " one tree " on a
Kentish hill.
It bore neither new nor old fruit, but leaves only. The
curse of Christ blasted the false tree ; it was barren, so
untrue to its mission, it had not yielded its life in the labour
of bearing the fruit ; it was false in its display of leaves, instead
of, or without, fruit. In both respects it typified the people, for
whose fruits the Lord hungered unsatisfied. It was an object-
lesson, an acted parable, a re-telling of the story of the Fall,
and a rehearsal of the Last Judgment, " Depart from Me, ye
cursed." The second Messianic cleansing of the Temple follows. The
first had been that of the Messiah Prophet, the Messiah Patriot.
The second was that of the Messiah Judge, the Messiah King.
It was a repeated miracle of moral impetus, an outburst of
" sublime and generous anger." ' Those who look only at the
gentle and meek lights in the human character of Christ, forget
the fire and victorious force which lay hid in the reserves of
His strength. His was neither the meekness of resigned,
Hindu-like inactivity, nor the nerveless gentleness of the spirit
less, but the tenderness of the strongest of the strong under the
restraint of self-governing love and unfathomed compassion.
And His words were as trenchant, as incisive, as powerful, as
His deeds. The robbers were cast out from the House of
Prayer. The carriers of vessels were stopped on their profane
walk. The place was cleared, and as quickly refilled with the
blind and lame, who came to be healed.
" How soon a smile of God can change the world I " •
And to the noise of wrangling traffic succeeded the ringing
acclamations of childish hosannas. Up the porticoes and
through court to court sounded the welcome of the only lips
in Jerusalem, outside the Christian company, which did not cry
Crucify. Perhaps they were Galilean children ; "perhaps those
children of the Levites who acted as choristers in the Temple." '
« J. A. Symonds on Dante's " Divine Comedy."
* R. Browning, " In a Balcony." 3 Edersheim, ii. 381.

164 JESUS CHRIST.
The remainder of the day was occupied in teaching. The
approaching feast and its Messianic applications must have
pointed its drift. A very deep impression was made upon the
Paschal multitudes. The after-labours of the apostles must
have profited by these lessons to large audiences. Their rapid
successes on and after Pentecost were prepared for, and they
themselves were being made ready for ministries of healing and
preaching in large centres of population, and before mixed
crowds, as they had already been in training for missionary
tours and rural evangelizing. Again Christ left the city and
sought a night's shelter at Bethany. Perhaps the rest was
necessary to Himself and His apostles ; for the night was
coming when no man could work, and for the work of the
remaining hours of life's day all His strength was needed.
The third day opened with the early moming walk over the
verdurous Mount of Olives. The figrree, now withered, was
again passed, and made the text of a lesson in the power of
prayer ; its destructive power over evil and difficulty
conditioned by the faith and forgiving love of the sup
plicant. " We remember, that the promise had a special
application to the apostles and early disciples ; we also re
member, how difficult to them was the thought of full forgive
ness of offenders and persecutors : and again, how great the
temptation to avenge wrongs and to wield miraculous power in
the vindication of their authority."1 And as aggressiveness
was to be the constant policy of Christian warfare, the temper
must be of impersonal, selfless aggression.
When Jesus had entered the Temple Courts and was walking
about and teaching, the Chief Priests and scribes and elders
came up to Him. This was the first result of the party
deliberations which had been taking place since the raising of
Lazarus, which had been embittered by the Triumphal Entry,
and exasperated by the second implied denunciation of the
priestly profits made by the Temple traffic, which latter must
have been seriously diminished and perhaps entirely stopped
for this Passover. They put a question to Jesus. It was the
first of a series which has given to the day the name of the
" Day of Questions." It was no new one, nor asked for the
first time. What was His authority ? The Lord's answer was
the same as before. He identified His authority with John's,
¦ Edersheim, ii. p. 377.

THE CONTRADICTION OF SINNERS. 165
so far as the greater more than covers the less. They stood
upon the same platform, authenticated by the same direct
inspiration, and accredited by the same Power. If John was
of God, Jesus was of God. If John was of God, what he said
of Jesus was of God. An acceptance of John's baptism and
teaching as heavenly, involved the acceptance of the claims of
Jesus, who was the end of all John's preaching. Whose duty
was it but theirs to examine the evidence and to pronounce
official judgment? Their answer "we know not" condemned
themselves. They abdicated their position and evaded their
duty, and denied their moral and social responsibility. It was
an Agnostic attitude to adopt towards God, who had, or had
not, sent John ; who had, or had not, sent Jesus.
They feared the people and durst not before them publicly
pronounce the claim of the great prophet invalid. They acted
upon policy. Expediency was their touchstone. Truth was a
matter of indifference. The venue must be changed ; the
ground of controversy shifted ; another issue raised. To
appeal to Rome upon any religious question was a national
apostasy. It was to betray the Church to the State, and that
State, heathen, hostile, idolatrous, and impersonated in hated,
guilty, and corrupt officials. To an honest and patriotic Jew it
was a downright appeal to the devil. Yet would Annas and
Caiaphas, and their tools, shrink from calling in upon an
ecclesiastical question the very power which had invested them
with rank and office ?
But Jesus did not act upon the defensive only. The three
parables from Matt. xxi. 28-xxii. 14, were a counter attack.
The burden of the prophets was taken up, the familiar imagery
of the vineyard was adopted as the veil of a personal denunci
ation ; and in no softened tones or hesitating accents the
judicial wrath of the king was sternly announced.
Neither entreaty nor menace, neither gentleness nor anger,
equally proceeding from a love which would leave no stone
unturned, no moral lever unapplied to petrified hearts and
darkened understandings, had any effect upon the set hatred
of the Pharisees.
They were past repentance. But the people were not im
penetrable. For the sake of the sheep their shepherds must
be publicly exposed and shamed. The direct, or indirect,
polemics of Jesus were dictated by necessity, not opportunismi

1 66 JESUS CHRIST.
They were the utterance of uniform charity, not the explosion
of party passion or outraged feelings. They were the utterance
of plain truth by One who knew the whole truth and for truth's
sake must speak it — in behalf of God, for the sake of the false
hypocrites themselves, and for the sake of those whom they
had deceived, and would deceive. The Jewish nation of to-day
suggests the most cogent evidence of the necessity of the
withering exposure of the hierarchy. They have inherited the
Rabbinical learning, and perpetuated the Rabbinical tradition
alism ; they have as a nation adopted the debased Rabbinical
Messiah for the true and Scriptural Christ. But signs are not
wanting that the hearts of Israel are beginning to be drawn to
the true Messiah.
On the same day two cheering incidents occurred. In the
storm of judicial wrath which swept over the soul of the
Messiah in the face of the enemies of God's righteousness
there were bright interludes. There was the poor widow in the
Court of the Women, who cast in her "two Perutahs" — all she
had, the germ of the goodly company of mothers and daughters
of Christ who spend and are spent for their Master. There
was the momentous and fruitful inquiry of certain Greeks.
They must have been seekers after truth, who had found in
Jewish Scripture, doubtless in the Septuagint version, or in
later pseudepigraphic writing, or among Jewish home in
fluences, some satisfaction of their spiritual wants. Greek
thought could lead them to moral and asthetic self-culture,
Greek art could lead them to the beautiful, but no abstract or
impersonal ideals can satisfy a hungry soul. The Law brought
before them an Ideal Personality, but must have, even in the
watered Septuagint, created the sense of infinite distance be
tween Him and men accustomed to anthropomorphic concep
tions of God. The Law could not solve the question, it could
only point to its solution. Some such lines of inquiry, whether
morally or intellectually, must have been followed by the
Greeks who pressed Philip for a personal interview with Jesus.
Thilip may have been passing through the Court of the Gentiles.
A stone balustrade (Soreg) parted the Greeks from Jesus in the
Court of the Women, which was open to both sexes, and where
public meetings took place. The Greek inscription it bore has
been lately discovered by M. Clermont Ganneau, and ran as
follows —

THE CONTRADICTION OF SINNERS. l67
" no foreigner to proceed
within the partition wall
and enclosure around thb
Sanctuary ; whoever is
caught in the same
wul on that account be liable
to incur death."
The news of the quest of the Greek proselytes made a very deep
impression upon Jesus. Since the Magians sought His infant
bed it was the first Christward movement of the Gentile world.
It was spontaneous and self-originated. Jesus must have
stepped down into the Court of the Gentiles and in their
presence delivered His soul of the Creed of the Cross. The
grain of wheat was a single example of the universal law of
self-sacrifice, which beginning in Nature, ascended to human
nature. The Son of Man Himself obeyed that law ; His
service required it ; God would honour it. The death He
would die, and the life it would bring and the power of His
own attraction thereby and thereafter over all, came vividly
before Him. And a voice from heaven authenticated His
prophetic word and prayer. Here was another missionary
lesson to those who would soon welcome the men of Corinth
and Ephesus, Rome and Alexandria, Antioch and Babylon, into
the liberty, fraternity, and equality of the faith. Those Greeks
and that crowd which heard of Christ's lifting up must have
been prepared to put His word and act together, when they
saw it in three days with their own eyes. But the Christian
syllogism requires the touch of the Holy Spirit to connect the
premises. In His light would they see the Light.
This Tuesday was possibly the most laborious day, excepting
the last, in the earthly life of Jesus. He met in turn every
assailant. He silenced Pharisees, Scribes, Herodians, Sad
ducees. He lifted up His voice to the crowds. It was the
final day of debate. He was compelled to be a man of strife
and contention. Such a day of mental and physical exertion
must have exhausted the human spirit of Jesus. It was a
spiritual martyrdom for the truth's sake. Mind and body were
much more than overworked. Yet as He went homeward on
His way out of the Temple He had more to say, and it must
be said. What it must have cost Him can only be faintly
realized by prophets whose hearts break at the message they

1 68 JESUS CHRIST.
cannot muffle. Necessity was laid upon Him. Christ felt what
He said, but said little of what He felt. The deeps of His
sympathetic sorrow and yearning desire agonized His soul
before the final darkness encompassed Him round.
As they were leaving the Holy City it was evening. They
walked up the Mount of Olives, perhaps to rest, perhaps to look
at the crimson flushing the white and gold of the Temple mount,
and the long shadows of the massy walls. The red rays lingered
over the royal city as its Sun of righteousness was departing,
"an awful sign and tender,
Like the Blood of the Redeemer shown on earth and sky." *
They had often seen the Temple in its glory before. But just
now, perhaps under some such striking atmospheric effect, and
with the connecting thread of some lingering ill-understood
words of the day in their mind as they went out of the Temple,
they came to the Lord and directed His particular attention.
Christ's own Messianic predictions and their sense of His
prophetic powers supplied a basis for a lesson upon this majestic
text. The flames of Jerusalem would re-write it in letters of
fire. The early Christian Church would never be able to forget
that the direst calamity that ever fell upon the house of Israel
was clearly predicted by Him who wept over its coming
shadows. The crash and downfall of the Jewish Church re
verberated through the Jewish and Christian world. And the
prophetic discourses of the Lord, which must at the time have
thrilled the disciples with wondering awe and horror, must have
come to the ears and minds of many, and accentuated in their
creed the belief in that Second Coming foreshadowed in the
same visions of judgment. This may help to account for the
wide and strong feeling which filled early Christians of the
nearness of the Lord's return.
Christ had declared Himself a Prophet all His life. The great
prophecy on the Mount of Olives marks the climax of His
prophesyings. It was the great Messianic Apocalypse. The
occasion, the associations, would impress the memory of His
words, while the surprising novelty and un-Jewish originality of
them would shock. Voice and manner were as sublime as the
burden of His prophecy, with some touches, it may be, of the
• Jean Ingelow, " Requiescat in pace."

THE CONTRADICTION OF SINNERS. 169
rapture of prophetic ecstasy, without any loss of self-command
or merely emotional excitement ; and underlying all, streaming
over all, the fulness of perfect sympathy, Divine and human,
with all that was on His side in the time to come, lighted by
perfect insight, welling from a heart at one with God. If the
style is the man, the Man Jesus was not less great than His
words, as from the mountain over against the Temple He looked
down the horizons of the sons — the holy city, in division and
fratricidal strife, a ruin and desolation where the Temple was, a
scattered people, the world a greater city of confusion and divi
sion, but in its midst a fair Temple, made without hands, gradu
ally rising, bearing the Name of names ; and, in the farther
distance, the lightning rush of angels, the shaking of the powers
ol heaven, the Son of Man descending with power and great
glory, the Judgment, the Trial, the passing away of all but words
eternal with the breath of His eternity.
Upon the devout imagination of one apostle the visions of
judgment made the deepest mark. In the Apocalypse of the
Messiah we have the germ of the Apocalypse of John. But the
Lord from heaven supplemented and authenticated what the
Lord on earth had outlined.
Nor were the disciples altogether unprepared on purely Jewish
grounds for eschatological Messianic conceptions. The disciples
m nst have known the Book of Daniel, which exercised so great
aii influence upon Jewish thought that it became the parent of
a long line of Apocalypses with symbolical historic pictures and
vaticinations. The visions of Ezekiel were, by St. John at least,
minutely known and realized. The ideas expressed in the
Apocalyptic and Pseudepigraphic literature must have assisted
in the formation of their Messianic conceptions in this as in
other aspects. The way then was prepared for the conception
of the Son of Man in His glory as Judge.
Pictorial visions had been made public of wars and confusions
and iniquity abounding among men, hostilities between God's
people and the nations, and the overthrow of the latter ; in later
documents by the Messiah Himself, or by the Most High to
usher in His coming. "The slaughter of enemies before the
Messianic era would be at once consummated by a universal
judgment, or something very like it, on men and fallen angels ; " '
• Stanton, p. 299, foil, for detailed quotation and comparison, and Edeis-
heim ii. 433, foil.

170 JESUS CHRIST.
or else, and more commonly, the Messiah's reign was of fixed
duration, "and the universal judgment was placed at the con
clusion of it, after which would follow finally 'the world to
come.' " * The woes of the Messiah (Chebley shel Mashiach)
were a common theme. The future blessedness of the righteous,
"the accursed valley" for "all those who speak with their
mouths unseemly words against God, and speak impudently
concerning His majesty" (Enoch xxvii. 2, 3). In connection
with the Day of Judgment, "The gulf of torments shall appear,
and opposite to it the place of rest ; the furnace of Gehenna
shall be revealed, and opposite to it the paradise of pleasures "
(4 Esdras vi. 1-4).
Yet comparison of Jewish and Christian eschatology shows
that where the former left the language of psalmists and pro
phets, it often fell from the sublime into the grotesque, from the
spiritual to the material and earthly. The Christian conception
corrected, refined, simplified, purified, dignified, ennobled,
spiritualized in the process of transformation and promotion.
The Christian conception was a much higher and deeper and
larger structure than the Jewish. The distance between the two
is measurable by reading the Book of Enoch side by side with
the visions on Patmos.
The double aspect of the Lord's Apocalyptic discourse is
plain upon the face of it. It was both historical and spiritual.
Historical, in so far as it bore upon the immediate dangers and
difficulties of the early Church, and especially upon the catas
trophe which would swallow up Jerusalem and the whole fabric
of Church and State which centred in the Temple ; it was
spiritual and unchronological, so far as it pourtrayed in vivid
colours, but in outline only, the militant condition of the Church
of Christ, its sufferings, its enemies, its unceasing progress from
nation to nation, till the consummation of the age, and the
Parousia of the Messiah in His glory. The object of the address
was not to satisfy the speculative superstitiousness which is
always peering into the darkness of the unrevealed, but to create
a character unshaken by chance and change, a temper of spirit
and life not changing with changing environments, but perma-
ment and unalterable." It was also calculated to destroy falsified,
1 Edersheim.
2 Gordon's watchword, "Be not greatly moved," expresses the passive
Bide of this truth, the Christian's defensive position.

THE CONTRADICTION OF SINNERS. 171
materialized, and realistic conceptions of " the days of the
Messiah." The "coming age" (Athid labhd) merging into
" the world to come " (Olam habba) was very different from any
of Rabbinical fancy.
The Messianic yoke had as yet been comparatively light and
easy. The disciples had been in " the boyhood of religion." »
The fiery trial awaited them. They were now entering into the
troubled waters of storm and shadow, through which the gospel
fishing-vessel would fight its peaceless way of peace to the
haven. The life of the Master, looked back over from the
brightened heights of adoring memory, flooded the whole of His
words with light. As He had been, so they would be in the
world Their past, and yet more their future experience with
Him, first visibly, then invisibly, would be a repetition of His.
The false Christs, the false prophets, the persecutors, the
physical, the mental, the social, the spiritual adversities and
adversaries, were not the accidental difficulties of the childhood
of the Church and the faith. They were the inseparable environ
ment of the warfare of the Christ and of the Christ's, whereby a
process of selection' and elimination would sift the strong and
true. The great shock of conflict between the Christian and the
Judaizer has been better understood of late, however magnified
into irreconcilable antagonisms. Within the precincts of the
faith there would be the dissensions which even the living pre
sence of the absolute Master did not entirely check. Without
there would be the active hostility of disintegrated cults and
philosophies, and the vis inertia of deadened indifference. Yet
in the calm presage of certain progressive victory, the Messiah
armed His Messianic community for a world-wide warfare. The
parables enforce the same practical and doctrinal truths as the
apocalyptic discourse. The reiteration, the fulness, the peremp-
toriness of style and description, indicate the strength of the
impression the Lord wished to make and His own assured con>
fidence. ¦ Bp. Milman, "Love of the Atonement "
• H The elect " (Matt, xxiv. 39).

CHAPTER XVIIt
THE DIVINE SACRIFICE.
•* What marvel, when the Lord our God most High,
Clothed in our flesh, was lifted up to die,
If then His Godhead to His Manhood gave.
Merit and force a thousand worlds to save ? "
W. Bright, D.D.
Judas traitor — Wednesday in retreat — The Last Supper — Gethsemane —
The arrest — The Divine Prisoner before Annas, before Caiaphas, before
Pilate, before Herod — Judas' end — Before Pilate again — Ecce Homo 1—
Round the Cross — The Seven Words — The Atonement.
Once more Jesus withdrew Himself. A Jewish Messiah would
have raised the popular tumult dreaded by the Rabbis. The
Son of Man refuses the opportunity and passes into a sacred
silence of preparation. The day of apocalypse, of warning, of
prophecy, is followed by a day perhaps of prayer and sacred
conversation with the disciples. We can hardly be wrong in
finding here the explanation of Judas' final change. Under the
plain outspokenness of the Lord's Tuesday words, the last shred
of a hope of a Jewish and a worldly Messiah had been destroyed.
Judas wanted a version of the Satanic Messiah of the Third
Temptation. Failing that He would join the anti-Messianic
party. So far from being false to himself he would be false to
his Master, and true to himself. There is not the slightest
evidence to support recent attempts to whitewash the traitor.
Whether he ever made such excuses to himself as that the
Master would be able to deliver Himself by His own wonder
working power, or had any secondary intention of forcing His

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. 173
hand, and compelling Him to declare Himself as the Messiah,
it is bootless to inquire. The psychological gospel shows the
real spring of his action (Luke xxii. 3 ; and later John xiii. 27) :
Satan entered into him. He decided for evil. Love, honour,
conscience, benefits, and blessings, common prayers, a common
hope, were not worth thirty pieces of silver. His Messianic
ideal had all along been self. His Messiah must enrich and
advance His friends. He had been mercifully denounced as a
devil. The plain personal truth had not won him " the grace
of repentance.'" He had stolen from the common fund which
had been entrusted to him as the man of business capacity.
What should have been and was meant for his wealth became
an occasion of falling.
His illusion was over. His ambitious hopes were broken.
In bitter disappointment, and the low cunning of hate, he would
make a bargain and save something for himself out of the com
ing wreck. Secretly he steals away from the little company,
perhaps pleading Paschal preparations, and makes his offer to
the priestly council. " From the very Temple Treasury," 2 with
the sacrifical money, at the hands of the responsible officers of
the Church, the apostate apostle is paid for the blood of the
Redeemer. The legal price of a slave is " weighed out " (Zech.
xi. 12) piece by piece, thirty shekels.3 It is not to be wondered
at that Wednesday as well as Friday were kept as fasts by the
early Church.
Wednesday was the 13th Nisan. On the evening, the 14th,
began and with it the Passover, " in the popular and canonical
sense."* This was the Day of Unleavened Bread (Luke xxii. 7).
Peter and John were sent to slay the lamb and to make ready the
Paschal Supper. Armed with provident instructions Judas may
have bought the lamb on the previous day, and '' on his way from
the sheep-market to the Temple, to have his lamb inspected,
may have learned that the chief priests and and Sanhedrists
were just then in session in the palace of the high priest close
by." s Some of its blood was cast at the base of the altar, and
amongst thousands of other worshippers and Paschal pilgrims,
going to and fro the Court of the Priests, the two bore the lamb
to the large upper chamber of the unnamed friend.
The Paschal Supper was the highest point reached in the
1 Clement of Rome. * Edersheim, ii. 477.
s Worth about 2s. 6d. each. * Edersheim, ii. 479. 5 Ibid, ii. 486

174 JESUS CHRIST.
self-revelation of Christ to heart believers, as the Cross was the
highest point in His revelation to all the world. All sweet and
holy communions with Him, in prayer and in sacrifice, in
chanted psalm and quiet song of praise, in teaching and in learn
ing, in still meditation, in suasive discourse, public or private, in
mighty works and ministries of miracle, met here in a central
core. The discourse at Capernaum had prepared their minds
for the truth of spiritually receiving the Bread of Life, the
miracles upon the loaves had interpreted His power and bounty
of supply even of daily bread. The frequency of His bodily
contact with the sick in His healing treatments had revealed
glimpses of the mysterious and benedictory Divinity outflowing
from His Body. The Lord's prayer for daily bread and the
beatitude upon the hungry and thirsty after righteousness sug
gested more than the supply of physical want. The Paschal
meal itself, the sacrificial time and place and act, the common
feast, the broken bread, the outpoured wine — all under the
historic, under the devotional associations which they conveyed
to Israelites steeped in the lore of their fathers, worshipping
with their worship, taught in part their Christward application,
went to their deepest heart of memory, of devotion.
There was the still fresh impression of the burning words and
works of Tuesday, and the restful prayers or communings of
the day before. There was the dark sweet shadow of the Cross
bathing the whole scene in its coining glory, and breaking in a
flood of inexpressible tenderness upon the sacrificial Lamb Him
self. Laden with the weight of such high and holy, such sad
and joyous memories, it was but natural that every day in the
week, which became the Lord's own, became a day for repre
senting the memorial of His death, and the witness to His
resurrection, and the medium of His imparted life. The Holy
Communion and the Commemorative Sacrifice, the Lord's
Supper and the Eucharist or Thanksgiving, are names which
express aspects of priceless truth and beauty impossible for
Christian devotion, unheated by controversial discords, to spare.
Many are the dear memorials of Christ. This the chiefest.
Viewed under these converging lights of the past, in its present
cheer and solace to Himself and His faithful, in its future blessed
ness to the children of His kingdom, and its typical relation to
yet far-off Supper of the Lamb, we understand in part how the
Passover was by th» rd desired with desire. And this

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. 175
sacrament, like its twin sister of the gospel, was into His death
but into His life, into His suffering and into His glory, into His
humiliation and into His exaltation.
At the Supper Christ took the head of the low table, St.
John was on His right.1 " But the chief place next to the Master
would be that to His left, or above Him. In the strife of the
disciples which should be accounted the greatest this had been
claimed, and we believe it to have been actually occupied, by
Judas." After the foot-washing" and its speaking humility and
its gentle pathetic warning to the traitor, and the scriptural ap
peal to his conscience in the language of the psalmist, the next
incident of moment where every detail is most precious was the
plain public declaration of the betrayal. It is spoken of as still
in the future, for though more than begun, there was still the
hope of leaving the last blow unstruck. The words and the
sop struck home to a heart which had now ceased to be human.
Satan and his own hell were there, and even the final thunder
of woe upon that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed fell
harmless upon it. There is no text in the Bible so awful as
that which follows in the record of him who lay upon the Lord's
bosom, and was parted by Him only from the one apostle who
was never seen again — " He then having received the sop went
out straightway : and it was night."
And now the atmosphere was changed. There was room for
that Christian Passover which should take the place of the
Jewish, but much more than surpass it. " If we are asked what
part of the Paschal Service corresponds to the 'Breaking of
Bread,' we answer, that this being really the last Pascha, and
the cessation of it, our Lord anticipated the later rite, intro
duced when, with the destruction of the Temple, the Paschal as
all other sacrifices ceased," anticipated, i.e., the custom after
the meal of breaking and partaking "as aphiqomon, or after-dish,
of that half of the unleavened cake which had been broken and
put aside at the beginning of the Supper." So too with the
third cup at the close of the Supper, or Cup of Blessing, was
connected the institution of the cup.
A fourth cup followed, and the remainder of the Hallel (Psa
cxv.-cxviii.) formed the Eucharistic Hymn of Thanksgiving
* For diagram and details see Edersheim, ii. 494.
* Still practised among the Greeks and Latins in Jerusalem.

[76 JESUS CHRIST.
This was followed by the spoken thoughts which St. John alone
brought out from the treasure of his memories of that
" Food, so awful and so sweet " *
and of His words of after-communion. We have, as it were, a
continuation of the prophetic utterances of the Tuesday. But
the tone is different. He has now not the world in view, but His
own redeemed children and faithful friends. He speaks heart to
heart, soul to soul. He dwells not so much on conflict and
opposition, and on the forces of evil in their progressive mani
festation, as on the inward glory and light and peace of His own
in the midst of the world, in spite of the Evil One. Above all,
He prepares them for the coming Paraklete," Advocate, Com
forter, Spirit of Truth. No words of Christ are sweeter with
the breath of love, none clearer or more definite in doctrine.
Christianity was never so tender, as when it was most doctrinal,
on the lips of its Head; but, alas, speaking the truth and speak
ing it in love have at times parted company.
After listening to the Lord's words of communion with His
friends, we are suffered, as they were, or one of them, to draw
nearer still and hear His words of communion with the Father.
It is the high-priestly prayer of self-consecration, and of the
consecration of those whom the Father had given Him. The
intercession in their behalf follows — that they may be one.
Whether in the Temple, as some suppose, or in the open air, or
more probably in the stillness of the same chamber which would
so often afterwards be perfumed with the incense of Christian
devotion, the Divine Prayer was breathed, is unknowable.
Alike in communion with the Father and in communion with
the disciples, there breathes the same tender tone of strong
hope. Jesus calmly, in the felt shadow of the Passion, looks
forward and upward in the certitude of triumph.
Cheered and strengthened by the sweet song of praise, if the
One Hundred and Eighteenth Psalm, laden with Messianic
music,3 the little company passed out of the still crowded city,
across the torrent Kidron, which separated the Mount of Olives
from the Temple mount, to the garden of the oil press, even
now, possibly, rocognizable at the traditional site. The un-
1 Hymns Ancient and Modern, 322, by Dr. Bright.
» On Paraklete, vide Watkins on St. John, appendix.
• See especially vers. 22 to end.

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE 177
¦peakable horror of darkness into which Christ's soul entered is
past human thought. Soul and Body could not have endured
the strain but for the brief respites of return to the sleeping
disciples, and the more strengthening visit of one pitiful angel.
Here we are in the deep of "the unknown sufferings" and the
dissection of such incalculable anguish may be spared, noting
only for devotional attention the agonizing wrestle of the
human soul in the full force of redemptive desire, the absolute
meek submission of the human will to the Father's will, the
spiritual and inward torture pervading even the whole prostrate
body of the Divine Son of Man.
And now the solemn silence of the garden is broken. Nearer
and nearer draws the hurrying of a crowd, the tramp of armed
feet, a confused tumult of lights and arms flashing through the
trees. The calm words of the Master, Arise, let us go hence,
fall clearly, like thunder drops before a storm, on the ears of
the aroused sleeper. " It is well known that there is seldom
any strictly defined account of moments such as these and
those which followed it. The terrible deed is accomplished by
one stroke after another ; and before full consciousness of the
situation could be attained, Jesus had fallen into the hands of
His enemies." * "All the disciples forsook Him and fled ;" but
one young man, who some believe to be Mark, and others
Lazarus, casting his sindon about him, began to follow Him, only
to flee, too, leaving his garment behind.
The Divine Prisoner is led to Annas. Annas, like all the
members of the Temple aristocracy, was a Sadducee. Doubtless
the vast wealth his family derived from their famous booths,
and the cunning intrigues they carried on with the Roman
power, won the High Priesthood for Annas, for his five sons,
for his son-in-law, Caiaphas, and for his grandson. The
Pontificate and the Temple traffic had almost become a mono
poly, " and the family of Hanan and their serpent hissings "
were accursed of the people. What passed between Jesus and
the anti-Messianic leader was brief, but decisive. The High
Priest questioned Jesus about His disciples and His doctrine
(John xviii. 19-23). The former part of the question may have
been directed to ascertain what social or political support He
might be thought to count upon. The preliminary examination
was informal and private and was, after an interval, followed
1 Weiss, iii. 326.
13

178 JESUS CHRIST.
by the formal examination before Caiaphas. All discrepancies
disappear if, as is not unreasonable to suppose, Annas had
lodgings in the official residence of the High Priest, Caiaphas,
and that consequently both were present at both examinations.
Two of the disciples had soon recovered from their panic
John obtained entrance into the inner court. Peter stood with
out, till he too was let in by the maid who kept the door. John
was unnoticed, and had perhaps gone to the upper gallery, in
one of whose apartments the prisoner was being tried. Peter
mingled with the crowd of menials round the coal fire, which
the chilly spring night made welcome. It was a time of intense
depression. From the heavenly altitudes of the holy Paschal
communion the apostles had sunk to the lowest deeps of
sorrowing disappointment. Unnerved, unstrung, out of heart,
borne down on a wave of violent reaction, without any sensible
spiritual support, the apostle who had not watched in the
garden and prayed in the hour of temptation flinched and fell.
At the first flush of dawn the leading priests, elders, and
Sanhedrists came hurrying to the High Priest's palace. "Thus
much, at least, is certain, that it was no formal, regular meeting
of the Sanhedrin. All Jewish order and law would have been
grossly infringed in almost every particular if this had been
so."a Both time and place and procedure are proof of this. But
it was the expression of the mind and will of the Sanhedrists,
the official leaders of the people, and their representatives.
The death of Christ was predetermined. The capital sentence
could only be executed by the Roman power. It was their
work to establish a capital charge. The false witnesses contra
dicted one another. At last two, possibly among those who
had suffered loss from the purifications of the Temple, arose
and perverted the Lord's statement about destroying the
Temple, yet without agreeing. And the Lord preserved a
merciful silence, like the long-suffering voicelessness of God
when His rights are trampled on, His honour outraged, His
love scorned, by the devil born. The holy dignity of the
Prisoner, and the confused contradictions of the witnesses,
1 The other alternatives (Edersheim and others), to press the aorist,
atr'mrei\ev (John xviii. 24), into a pluperfect, referring to verse 14, and to
ignore the oiv (Hort, Tischendorf, Gebhardt, R. V.), or omit it with
Tregelles, is too violent.
3 Edersheim, ii. 557 foil. , for proofs.

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. 1 79
drive Caiaphas to his last stake. He must put the question
of all questions, under the most awful sanction possible, in the
name of the living God : "Art Thou the Messiah, the Son of the
living God ? " The two questions were rightly put in one. Many
would have accepted Jesus as a Messiah upon their own terms.
But the whole of Jesus' Messianic claim was, and is, indivisible
from His assertion of His Divinity. The answer to the ques-
' tion was as unmistakable as it was solemn. Question and
answer still ring through the world, and leave the everlasting
dilemma, Is, or is not, Jesus the Divine Christ ? Is He what
He said He was ? Or was He a liar and blasphemer ? If the
answer of Caiaphas be right, His death and execution were
right. For us, apart from and in addition to other currents of
evidence, " the moral and spiritual evidence is His own cha
racter, which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is
inconceivable that He should have made a false claim." '
The scene changes from palace to palace, from judge to
judge. Whether Pilate occupied the palace of Herod at the
north-western angle of the upper city, or the barracks of the
castle at Antonia, is a question still in debate ; but the balance
of opinion favours the former locality. It must have been
about five or six in the morning that the Sanhedrists arrived at
the gates of the Praetorium, and refused to enter in because
they would be defiled by entering a heathen dwelling, and so
be prevented from offering and eating the Chagigah.' Here
took place what St. John describes (xviii. 33-38, and St. Luke
xxiii. 2) — the first formal civil charge against the Messiah,
and their openly-expressed resolution to have Him put to
death. Pilate was not unprepared for the encounter. He
could not have been in total ignorance of so notorious a move
ment, and his own soldiers had been called out ; and he had
the insight of Jewish experience of the unscrupulous Annas
party. The message from his wife came at a later stage, but
may have been the emphatic accent of a repeated warning.
Certainly Pilate hesitated even in the face of so serious a
charge as that of Jesus' aspiring to royalty. Nor could the
influence of the Prisoner's demeanour, so unlike a criminal's,
so gently fearless, so noble in transparent innocence and wan
1 Bp. Temple, "The Relations between Religion and Science," p. 216.
¦ This view of (payioaiv ro irdffva (John xviii. 28) of course follows upon
«hat of regarding the Lord's Supper as the real Paschal supper.

180 JESUS CHRIST.
dignity, have been wholly lost upon one who was Roman
enough to know a man, and whom magisterial and Roman
bias would have prepossessed in favour, not in disfavour, of an
object of Rabbinical odium. Had he come to the issue with
the cleaner l^nds and truer heart of a Cato or a Cicero, Pilate
would have been steadier to face so unexpected and over
whelming a responsibility. But the Son of Man came un
awares. Temptations are apt to mask themselves under the
guise of a surprise, which the ordinary discharge of daily duty
would have forestalled or disarmed. And what shreds of
rectitude or tenderness of honour or of heart were left to one
whose official career had been one long murder, whose cruelty
had been " unceasing and most vexatious " ? ' Roman statecraft
of the best was unable to fathom such a character and such a
policy. A kingdom of truth, not of this world, was an intan
gible, unpractical idea to a man of the world, much more to
such a man of such a world. It was a far-off Divine idea which
a practical, business-like officer could not attach any workable
meaning to. It never occurred even to cynical Pilate that
there was delusion or imposture. Here was One whose every
word and look breathed manly dignity, appealing tenderness,
and reserved force. Here was no slavish cringing, no hot
fanaticism, no stubborn defiance. Jesus already bore the
marks of cowardly insult ; but no suspicion of a quailing spirit
or a resentful temper lurked under the open grandeur of the
Perfect Sufferer. While Pilate wavered,
" Letting ' I dare not ' wait upon *I would,'"
the storm of accusation waxed louder and fiercer, and the man
whose root-motive was selfishness dashed with expediency, with
all the power of Rome at his back —
" Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos,"
quailed before those who never turned his helpless Prisoner a
hair's breadth, and caught at the word Galilee tossed up on the
surging multitudinous roar. Let the Galilean go to the Galilean
Tetrarch, and a troublesome case be got rid of, and a politic
compliment paid to the hostile provincial potentate !
Another figure has seen afar off or has learnt in his hiding-
' Philo.

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. l8l
place, what is coming to Him who had received the traitor's
kiss. The pains of hell have gat hold of him. He would rid
himself of the accursed wages. " His lust and greed
Whom thou abettest thou dost make thine own,
And nothing gett'st but wages of thy work
To pay thy sin. What 1 is't not shame on shame
Thou puttest thine immortal soul to sale
For profit of another ? . . .
Oh soil of bad men's service . . .
Oh curse of bad men's hire." •
He would own to the high priests, unmoved as the rocky walls
of the Temple, that he had betrayed innocent blood. But the
repentance of Judas was a sorrow of this world, which worketh
death. Away from the Temple, away from the holy city,
away " Anywhere, anywhere out of the world I " •
In the old palace of the Asmonaeans Jesus confronted Herod
and his men of war. Never did He break into his flippant
volubility with a word. " Herod was provoked by the obstinate
silence of the gentle Galilean. But not one stripe was laid
upon His shoulders by the order of Antipas. ... He had had
enough of murdering prophets." 3 Arrayed in the mockery of
gorgeous apparel, possibly purple, or a candidate's white toga,
the Prisoner was remitted to Pilate ; and the Roman again
discovers the piteous figure of Incarnate Suffering which no
caricature could unking of royalty.
Pilate has not yet succeeded in shaking off the impression
made by his Prisoner's words and demeanour. The " august
authority of righteousness " cannot have been unfelt by one
trained in Roman law. He was not wholly unpenetrated by
"a secret worship of honour, truth, and might."4 His con
science had been hardly used, but not destroyed. His repeated
efforts are the measure of its mute force, and his unwonted
scrupulosity a tribute to the moral ascendency of the humi-
liated and insulted Prisoner. It would be difficult in any
• Sir H. Taylor, " Philip van Artevelde." ¦ T. Hood.
3 Bp. Alexander, "The Great Question," p. 174.
* Martineau, "A Study of Religion," i. 21.

1 82 JESUS CHRIST.
calculus of guilt to place a Pilate as low as a Judas or a
Caiaphas. Our Lord Himself judicially differentiates them.
Pilate was an indifferentist, Judas an apostate traitor, Caiaphas
high priest to the devil.
Pilate again endeavours to release Him after a special
summons of the Sanhedrists and the populace. He tries
another shift. But from one centre he can never move. His
basal principle is self-servient expediency, and no power in
heaven or earth can unseat it. He will not now unconditionally
release a Prisoner whose innocence he admits as expressly as
he knows the envy which moved His adversaries. He offers
them an alternative. He will try and shift the responsibility to
their shoulders. Bar-Abbas or Jesus ? The kingdom of truth
was a visionary empire. To the kingdom of justice Pilate
pronounces himself as strange. Nor were his effortless efforts
without moral support. His wife's dream startled a conscience
open to fear. A minority of the crowd desired the release of
Jesus, but obduracy and hatred were the stronger power ; the
voices of the high-priestly party prevailed.
" Once more. If Pilate cannot move the Jews to a sense of
justice (and how should he, when setting them an example of
injustice ?), or even to self-respect (and how should he, when
neglecting to respect his own authority ?), he may yet move
them, as he thinks, to pity. . . . He will fulfil half their wish ;
he will execute part of their vengeance. He will torment Jesus,
but stop short of destroying Him. ' The tender mercies of the
wicked are cruel.' He bids Jesus to be scourged, and it is
done. Torn, bleeding, crowned with thorns, in purple rags,
amid scorn and shouting, Pilate brings Him forth. ' Behold
the Man ! ' The sight awakens no compassion ; only a tenfold
storm of wrath." *
But the varying details of the Divine tragedy call for larger
and stronger colours than the few bare outlines possible here ; ana
we hurry on with hushed steps and penitential spirit to the last
scene, leaving the majesty of the Gospel accounts undisturbed
it their controlled reticence, pathetic in speech and silence,
with the impress of Him at whose feet they are written.
The record of the last scene of the Passion owes several dis
tinctive particulars to one who was, of part at least, an eye-
* Bp. Milman, " Love of the Atonement," where » most spiritual
tccount of the Passion is to lie found. Cf. Westcott, John, s.l.

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. 183
witness and, so far as a man could be, a fellow-sufferer. St.
John's account is first-hand. Along the Way of Sorrows to the
place of execution outside the gate, like His own apostles x at
Rome, nigh to the city, Jesus goes. Golgotha may have been
rightly identified with the rounded knoll near Jeremiah's
Grotto, just outside the present "Damascus gate." But the
excavation of the newly-discovered wall must be completed
before opinion can utter its last word. The knoll is higher
than the sacred rock of the Temple. " A sort of amphitheatre
is formed by the gentle slopes on the west ; and the whole
population of the city might easily witness from the vicinity
anything taking place on the top of the cliff. The knoll is just
beside the main north road."" "The hill is now quite bare,
with scanty grass covering its rocky soil." 3 It has been dis
covered to be the traditional place of stoning. And the proba
bility of the identification gains ground. It is generally agreed
that it was the usual place of execution. And so Jesus identified
Himself with criminals in the mystery of His representative
sacrifice in the very place as well as mode of punishment.
Around the Cross the world was grouped by representation.
For at the Passover members of all nations, faiths, cultures,
gathered. The Paschal Supper was over, and the Jews had
leisure for a spectacle of momentous interest to all who had
heard of the Messianic claims of Jesus. How many of the
converts of Pentecost and after were actual spectators ; how
many of the pitiful daughters of Jerusalem gathered round the
Stricken group of holy women ; how many children who cried
Hosanna, but never Crucify ; how many devout disciples of
the Baptist, or taught of them ; how many Gentiles convicted
of righteousness like the centurion of the Cross ; how many
priests unforgetful of type and shadow, of sacrifice and pro
phesy, and specially impressed with the rending of the Temple
Veil ; how many awestruck by the physical wonders to a sense of
the supersensible and the eternal Power ; how many, in short,
the Son of Man lifted up began to draw to Himself, and pre
pare for the victorious ingress of the Spirit, and His own in
visible return — is written only in the archives of the angels and
the spiritual histories of the conquering travail of Christ.
« St Peter and St. Paul.
¦ "Survey" ; and Henderson, " Palestine," p. 164.
• •¦ Cruise of the Bacchante," ii. 586.

184 JESUS CHRIST.
Two groups stand out from the Cross with intense vividness
of contrast ; the heart of the Messianic and the heart of the
anti-Messianic parties ; the children of light fellow-suffering,
the children of darkness rejoicing. The mother with the sword
passing through her heart in incomparable anguish, the beloved
apostle, the holy women. And within their sight and hearing
and His the still-scoffing, evilly-rejoicing Caiaphas and Annas
party, the elect of the Wicked One. It was, and is, the eternal
touchstone ; the rock of faith or of offence, where the waves of
good and evil meet in eternal conflict.
The Seven sacred Words from the Cross are each and
altogether an organic whole. The intercession of the High
Priest, the royal pardon and the absolution of the High Priest,
the filial love of the Son of Mary, the brotherly love of the
Friend of friends, the bodily and spiritual thirst of the Son of
Man, the forsakenness of the atoning Sin-bearer, the finished
work of the Divine Apostle and Victim and Mediator, the final
farewell when the human soul passed on its journey to the Father's
hands, and the weary Head bowed itself on His Father's bosom.
Alike of each word, and of every word and work of Christ it
maybe equally said, " It is finished." For nothing broken, frag
mentary, incomplete, in the wrong time, place, or manner, was
thought, said, or done by the Perfect Man. Nothing of Mes
sianic fore-ideals had been unfulfilled by the Messiah. Every
thing was timed to a second, and finished to a hair. And
round the broken fragments of broken hours, broken lives,
broken thoughts, broken prayers, in Nature and in human
nature, is wrapped the blood-stained mantle of the perfect
righteousness of the High Priest of both.
When we ask the wherefore of so stupendous a Sacrifice,
gleams of light break from the fountains of revealed truth, but
partial only. We know that the Cross revealed God's love,
God's righteousness, God's holiness, God's truth. It was man's
necessity, man's need, that drew the Son, a willing Sacrifice for
life and death, from the bosom of the Father. God was in
Christ reconciling the world to Himself. " The human blood
of the Eternal God was the ransom paid to God for our
eternal redemption from the curse of the Law and from the
wrath of God, and from the claims of Satan, and from the power
of sin." * " How His life and death and resurrection accomplished
* Canon Eve ns on i Cor. vi. 20.

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. 1 85
our salvation, what share they each or all together had in
making Him our propitiation they (the creeds) tell us not.
They teach an Atonement ; but theory of Atonement, God be
praised, they give us none." *
Looking upon the Atonement in its practical result as a
spiritual dynamic, it " stamps upon the mind with a power, with
which no other fact could, the righteousness of God. To trifle
with a Being who has demanded this Sacrifice is madness, and
hence arises awe : but from the acceptance of the Atonement
arises the love of God."a The love and fear of God actuated
men before the Atonement in Israel. The fear of God was the
supreme practical religious virtue of the old Covenant. The
righteous man feared God. The love of God breathes in the
Psalter, and in the highest visions of the Prophets breaks
through the stormy voices like the clear shining after rain with
the promise of brighter morrows. And the fear of God or
Gods is the dominant religious motive of non- Christian religions.
The Atonement has deepened the fear of God, and set it upon
a more intelligible basis ; the love of God the thought of the
Crucified has not only made an infinitely real conception, but
inconceivably the strongest active principle and inspiring
motive of all Christian life Godward and manward. " For if
when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death
of His Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by
His life" (Rom. v. 10.). " From that event dates his 3 adoption,
his glorious liberty, the law of the Spirit of life, the witness of
that Spirit in his own heart, the expectation of that glory which
shall be revealed in him, and the gift of eternal life."4 From that
" Fountain filled with blood "
have flowed the countless streams of Christian self-devotion ;
from that Sacrifice all other sacrifices have derived their moral
strength and substance ; from that blood-shedding " all sacra
ments, all prayers, all authoritative words of pardon, all sancti
fying works of mercy, draw whatever they have of power or
virtue."'4 To suppose that all that has been consciously or
« Bp. Magee, " The Atonement," p. I".
» Dr. Mozley, Bampton Lecture, vii. p. 139. > I.e., man's.
« Dr. Liddon, " University Sermons," i. p. 246, "The Divine Victim."

186 JESUS CHRIST.
unconsciously, directly or indirectly, based upon and sanctioned
by the Atonement is based upon and sanctioned by a delusion
which would be criminal, or a " legend of pity " which would
be fictitious, is an outrage to the soberest human reason, the
deepest human piety, the tenderest human love, and the
strongest human lives. " Upon the ground
That in the story had been found
Too much love I How could God love sol"*
1 R. Browning, " Easter Day."

CHAPTER XIX
THE DIVINE SABBATH.
" Where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest"
Tennyson, from Job iii. 17.
The marred Body—The Soul free among the dead — Easter Eve.
Evening was approaching, and with it the Sabbath and the
second Paschal Day. St. John had escorted the mother, and
perhaps the other women with her, to his own home, and
returned in time to see the dead Body of the Lord still hanging
and the soldier drive his spear deep into His side. Suffering
is the best teacher. Latent or recognized truths flash into
light and burning reality. Then and there he saw the Messianic
fulfilments of type and prophecy in the pierced form with bone
unbroken. Then and there Joseph of Arimathea was lifted
from a secret to an open disciple ; Nicodemus from a night
seeker to a day-believer. Reverently the two Sanhedrists bear
the marred Body to Joseph's new rock-hewn tomb hard by, and
lay it in one of the niches (Kukhin). Many of these have been
excavated and described, and it is yet possible ' that the very
one which sheltered the Body may be found. Present opinion
is divided between the Holy Sepulchre and a spot near the
Damascus Gate. The opening of the whole course of the newly-
discovered wall will throw light on the problem, and if the wall
run outside the present " Holy Sepulchre " negative the tra
dition which gives it its name, if within, confirm it. There
was the Body of the Divine Sufferer left in lonely repose, guarded
by a great sealed stone, and apparently all through the Sabbath
day of rest by a detachment of Roman soldiers.
• " Twenty-One Years," p. 6a foil.

1 88 JESUS CHRIST.
And whither, happy Soul, free among the dead didst Thou
go? What parts of Sheol didst Thou traverse in triumph?
Were the Antediluvians the only hearers of Thy proclama
tion ? Or rather not all the dead ?' Did not Moses and Elias
who had been with Thee at the Mountain of Transfiguration to
speak of Thine Exodus now greet Thee ; and Abraham, and ii
Abraham, Abraham's children, exult to see Thy day ? Thou
alone knowest, who didst descend into Hades and hast the
keys of death and of Hades 1
Silence and darkness fell around the Holy Sepulchre. Silence
and darkness lay over the hearts and homes of the mourners in
Zion. But the love, the force, the work, the truth lost to the
earth was gained by the other world. And those who were
asleep in death and had laid them down to the long rest in their
hope full of immortality had not gone to utter destruction, but
were in the hand of God. They were in peace, and to them
the Peacemaker came. So the energies of human love and
blessed endeavour are not spent shot, but transmutable to
" unimpeded activities," ' beatifying and beatified, in the brighter
and more populous half of the one kingdom. Such is the
teaching of the physical analogies. Energy passes off to other
transmigrations. Nothing is lost. The departed soul enriches
another kingdom, and increases its working power— the king
dom of light or the princedom of darkness.
Nor has the night of Easter Eve been unremembered by
Christian devotion. It has been a night vocal with praise. It
has been the night celebrated by such accents of adoration as
these : —
" It is very meet and right, with all powers of heart and mind,
and with the service of the lips, to praise the invisible God,
the Father Almighty, and His only begotten Son our Lord
Jesus Christ, who paid the debt of Adam for us to the Eternal
Father, and effaced the bond of the ancient guilt by the blood
poured forth in loving-kindness. For this is the Paschal
festival ir. which that true Lamb is slain, and the door-posts
hallowed by His blood : in which first Thou didst bring our
fathers, the children of Israel, out of Egypt, and madest them
to pass over the Red Sea dry-shod. This, then, is the night
which now throughout the world restores to grace and unites
» i Peter iv. 6 (F. C. Cook, s. 1.). ' Aristotle, N.Etn., vii., xii. 3, &e.

THE DIVINE SABBATH. 1 89
to holiness believers in Christ, separated from worldly vices and
from the gloom of sin. This is the night in which Christ broke
the bonds of death, and ascended a Conqueror from the grave.
For to be born had been no blessing to us, unless we could
have been redeemed. O the wondrous condescension of Thy
loving-kindness towards us ! O the inestimable tenderness of
Thy love ! To redeem the servant, Thou gavest up the Son.
This holy night, then, puts to flight offences, washes away sins,
and restores innocence to the fallen, and joyousness to the sad.
O truly blessed night, which spoiled the Egyptians and enriched
the Hebrews — the night in which heaven and earth are recon
ciled ! We pray Thee therefore, O Lord, that Thou wouldest
preserve Thy servants in the peaceful enjoyment of this Easter
happiness, through Jesus Christ our Lord." *
That night has been a " watch night " to many hearts who
look for the uprising of the Resurrection morning, and listen for
the trumpet blast of the Resurrection Angel.
* Ancient Gregorian prayer preserved in Bright's "Ancient Collects,"
p-Sa-

CHAPTER XX
THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS.
" Thou know'st He died not for Himself, nor for Himself arose :
Millions of souls were in His heart, and thee for one He chose.
Upon the palms of His pierc'd hand engraven was thy name.
He for thy cleansing had prepar'd His water and His name."
J. Keble, " Lyra Innocentium," " Easter Day."
T^v I wijif opov Avcurraoiv. Chrysostom in Princip., Act vi.
The Resurrection — Magdalena dolorosa — The Resurrection unexpected, a
Divine must be — Emmaus — Appearance to the eleven apostles and
other brethren — Differentiation of offices — Doubter Thomas — Messianic
critical difficulties — Celsus's objection — Vision hypothesis — Galilee
again — The fishers on the sea again — All authority — Undetailed ap
pearances — The great Forty Days— Divine organization — Development
of order — Development of faith — Continuity, both of soul and body —
The four distinct Evangelic reports.
The darkness, but not the silence, was burst when the angel
of the Resurrection came to the Holy Sepulchre. God's
mightiest physical agencies are silent.
" There is neither speech nor lauguage " (Psa. xix. 3)
end His spiritual activities are for the most part inaudible here
as the songs of angels.
One human being was the meeting-point between heaven
and earth, the instrument of the Incarnation. No human eye
witnessed the Resurrection. Out of the guilty sleeping city stole
a little band of women like shadows. By the time Mary
Magdalene, " last at the cross, firs at the grave," had reached

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 191
the rock-hewn sepulchre, the light had flashed over the eastern
sea, and the Lord had risen. She hurries back from the un
tenanted tomb, and her companions reach the spot and see an
angel. "In their affliction they will seek Me early" (Hosea
v. 15). St. Luke may be describing another and later party
which sees two angels. The two apostles arrive and see the
threefold sign, the stone removed, the sepulchre empty, the
grave clothes in order. The writer records his eye-witness and
his belief. His was the first act of faith. It was a germ which
bore the fruit of knowledge. To know * was the end of the
Johannine creed.
After the running apostles Mary Magdalene returns untold
or unconvinced. The angels comfort her not. Only when He
calls her byname does the penitent recognize her Saviour. The
first to see the risen Lord is the most blessed of them that
mourn. Soon after, as it seems, He goes forward to meet the
returning company of women and reveals Himself, and charges
the brethren to go to Galilee and await Him.
Several points call for attention. Not one soul expected the
Resurrection. The fact is not creditable to the disciples, and
certainly prejudices in favour of the honesty of the report.
Their Messianic belief was derived from two sources, their
Jewish preconceptions and Christ's teaching. Their Jewish
preconceptions were partly Scriptural, partly traditional. In
the Old Testament they had not noticed the types and figures
or direct prophecies, which Christian light afterwards illumi
nated. Extra Scriptural Jewish thought less increased than
diminished any belief in a Messianic resurrection. The notion
of a pre-existent Messiah was vague and colourless at the best,
and such as it was, supplied no basis whatever for belief in a
retura to life.
It 5s difficult to see how any honest mind can shake off the
impression of transparent veracity and artless truth to nature
in the fourfold narrative. The faith of the disciples was at its
lowest pressure. The grief, the surprise, the indignation, the
physical pain, which overwhelmed them on Friday stifled hope.
The Lord's promises were forgotten, crowded out by the stress
and storm of present affliction. Great grief has no past 01
future. It is all present, overwhelming, catastrophic. The
sufferings and death of Christ were the greatest trial the dis-
1 Cf. i. Ep. passim.

iyi JESUS CHRIS*.
ciples ever underwent. Not only did they suffer with Him,
drink His cup of shame and ignominy, sorrow in His sorrow,
not only were they baffled, beaten, defeated as a party, di
spirited, disintegrated as a body, not only were they wounded
in their tenderest affections, but their Messianic beliefs and
hopes were assailed at all points. The more heartily they
believed in His Messiahship the more difficult and disap
pointing did the end seem. The further they had reached in
acceptance of the mystery of His Divinity, the greater did the
mystery of His suffering humanity seem. That their Messianic
prejudices had not died the long death of mistake is abund
antly apparent. The shock to their faith might have been
overwhelming had the Lord not risen again. The Resurrection
was the final and conclusive, but not the only, proof of His
Divinity. By it He vindicated His claims, fulfilled His
promises, verified His words. Without it His life might have
been regarded as a magnificent dream, and an unparalleled
venture of heroism. With it His life descends into the regions
of sound reason and verifiable fact. The Resurrection " should
not perhaps have been necessary. The loftiness and purity and
humility of His character should have been enough to prove
that He only spoke what was true." ¦ But there are many aspects
to the Divine " must be." Among the many human necessities
of the Divine " must " here was one.* The moral and spiritual
resurrection followed naturally and inevitably. After the shock
the recovery was instantaneous and absolute. Henceforward
Christian conviction stood upon unassailable ground, and trans
mits itself by its own inherent force. The evidential power of
the Resurrection stands its ground. Upon it is built the whole
historic fabric of Christianity. Invalidate that evidence and
Christianity is dead.
All the appearances are not recorded in detail. There was
one revelation in:identally mentioned by St. Luke, and at an
earlier date by St. Paul (i Cor. xv. 5), which a legendary writer
could not have failed to embellish. He appeared to Cephas.
This was before the evening appearance to the Twelve. Who
1 Stanton, p. 253.
¦ Cf . St. Bernard on the Atonement, in his wonderful letter, ' ' De erroribus
Abaelardi," Tom. ii., Opusc. xi., Ep. exc, ch. viii., } 19. " Respondemus ;
Necessitas nostra fuit, et necessitas dura sedentibus in tenebris et umbra
mortis. Opus asque nostrum, et Dei nostri, et sanctorum Angr orum," &c

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. I9J
would not be glad to know what words, or speaking silence,
passed at that interview ?
The Lord's self-manifestation to the two disciples on the way
to Emmaus is related with some minuteness by St. Luke. He
would "travel with the travellers," to adopt the words of
ancient liturgical prayer. Of the two disciples one was Cleopas,
the other may have been the narrator himself. Either they
had not heard at first hand, or had not fully credited, the
tidings that the Lord had really and indeed risen. Their state
of downcast ignorance and disappointed half hope evidently
represented the mental and spiritual condition of many of the
faithful in Jerusalem, as the first undulations of the report
reached them, and required the confirmation of the Lord's
Person to carry conviction.
St. Matthew, the writer of the Jewish Gospel, naturally gives
the Jewish version of the Resurrection. It was the authorized
anti-Messianic version ; he may have often heard and answered
it by the appeal to personal testimony. The high priests and
elders bribed the soldiers to say that the disciples came and stole
the Body away while the guards slept. It is surprising that
any revivals of this story could have found credit since ; it
would seem a far more reasonable hypothesis altogether to deny
the fact by discrediting the witnesses. But the difficulties of
unbelief are greater than those of belief, and labour under the
superincumbent addition of the contradictory theories, clashing
hypotheses, and changing no-creeds, which confront the un
changing and unchangeable faith of Christendom in a risen and
living Christ.
On the afternoon of the Resurrection another appearance of
the Lord took place. Much interesting discussion of the site
of Emmaus has taken place in the columns of the Quarterly
Journal of the Palestine Exploration Society, and various
identifications have been suggested. St. Luke's careful note of
its distance, sixty furlongs, negatives the identification with
the Emmaus, afterwards Nicopolis, now Amwas, which is one
hundred and sixty furlongs distant. The alternative lies be
tween three : (1) Khurbet el Khamasa, " the ruins of Khamasa,"
"from the Arabic Hammath." It lies close beside "one of
the ancient roads leading from the capital to the plain near
Beit Jibrin," * and is distant eight miles from the capital.
• •• Survey," iii. 36 and foil.
14

104 JESUS CHRIST.
Ancient rock-cut sepulchres and a causeway mark the site as
being of considerable antiquity, and the vicinity is still remark
able for its fine supply of spring water.1 But springs do not
necessarily suggest the "hot spring " (Khammath) or " medici
nal spring," implied by its name ; and the identification is open
to this objection. (2) El Kubeibeh, the Crusaders' Emmaus, is
situate sixty stades north-west of Jerusalem. This site is
supported by the proximity of Kolonieh, »".«., Colonia. As
Josephus mentions the plantation of a military colony of eight
hnndred Roman soldiers at Emmaus, the retention of the name,
in addition to that of El Hummam hard by, constitutes a strong
claim. The still-existing ruin Beit-Mizza, near Kolonieh, may
represent the " Ammaous " of Josephus (" Amosa " of the
Septuagint ; Ham-M6fsah, Hebrew), "and be the southernmost
trace" of the old name"3 of the district, as Josephus calls it
(3) Urtas,4 in the valley of Etham, near Bethlehem, a possible
corruption of Hortus. At present the second alternative seems
the one which combines most of the lines of identification.
The conversation of Christ with the two bears all the internal
marks of genuineness. It is natural, it is simple. It is just a
Bible lesson which the unknown Stranger gives. They ought
not to have required the detailed explanations of prophecy.
They ought to have remembered, or others ought to have
remembered and reminded them, of the Lord's own repeated
prediction of His Passion and His Resurrection. As the
Passion had taken place, they should have been the readier to
believe in the Resurrection. But Scripture does not idealize
its characters like ancient myths or modern novels. They had
to unlearn so much before they knew their own Scriptures.
" Even in the case of the few who believed in Him, faith was
not the effect of the proof from prophecy. Believers did not
first study the prophecies, and then come to Jesus as disciples ;
they first came to Jesus, and then learnt how to interpret
the prophecies. The proper interpretation of prophecy was
not the cause, but the effect, of their faith." s What was
true of prophecy in its strict sense was true of the underlying
prophetic and priestly element of all the old Covenant revekv
¦ " Twenty-one Years, " p. 120. * Being only four miles off.
' Rev. R. F. Hutchinson and Rev. A. Henderson.
* Mrs. Finn and Rev. P. Mearns.
• Dr. A. B. Bruce, " The Chief End of Revelation," p. 057.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 195
tion in its Messianic relation. The kingly element had been
better understood, but distorted and secularized. The explana
tions given by St. Peter notably, and the other disciples, of
which the Acts gives us but bare outlines, and suggestive
specimens, were doubtless grounded upon the Bible lessons
they had personally received from Christ, before and, more
especially, after the Resurrection, when His whole earthly
time was taken up, not in mighty works, not in preaching to
the masses, but in instruction of His believers in the things
pertaining to the kingdom of God. Before the Resurrection
the disciples had but imperfect appreciation of the Old Testa
ment. In the intellectual and spiritual resurrection which
followed upon that of the Messiah the whole of God's dealings
became illuminated ; and the older inspiration was Targumed
in the fulness of its Messianic wealth.
Such re-revelations of old truths renewed, but not under
stood till a living voice, or a new inspiration, had interpreted,
enforced, and cleared up, is not without many parallels in the
history of the Church and of the individual. The struggles of
the first four Christian centuries involved a constant return to
old truths, re-reading of familiar but unperceived or unformu
lated doctrines. And in the spiritual histories of the aged
there is a tendency to revert to the familiar hymns or texts
learned in childhood, little understood at the time, but lying
hid and bursting into life and flower, just when many anchors
are slipping away. St. John himself, in his old age, as we
read his latest utterances, his Epistles, seems to be clinging
round a few old truths, and old formulas. They have become
fuller and fuller of meaning and light, like songs of childhood
charged with the sweetest memories, or treasured letters
embalming the most deeply-rooted fibres of the personal life.
It is remarkable that the eyes of the disciples were first
spiritually opened when the Lord sat with them at supper and
took the bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave it to
them. " He blessed the bread, but vanished at the word,
And left them both exclaiming, ' 'Twas the Lord.' "«
The act of Christ was quasi-sacramental. He did what He
¦ Cowper, " Conversation."

ig6 JESUS CHRIST.
had done at the Last Supper, but whether He gave the cup or
not, we are not told. Perhaps the supper then stands midway
between a communion and an agape. Though the two dis
ciples were not present at the Last Supper, they may have been
familiar with its details, and may have been among the five
thousand or the four thousand. Or they may have been like
those in whom ignorance is no bar to the benefits of the Holy
Communion, where spiritual preparedness exists. Certainly
at this moment of, on the lowest ground, social communion their
eyes were opened to the Light. And they are soon on their
way back to Jerusalem with the glad tidings.
The same night, perhaps about 8 p.m., when the two had
returned with their joyful evidence to the eleven apostles and
others gathered with them, He Himself stood in their midst.
He had appeared to individual believers ; He now appeared to
the Church. Resurrection had not been a mere revival. His
body had "put on" new conditions and higher powers. It
was now a spiritual body, entirely indifferent to material
limitations. And so the way was paved for the conception of a
heavenly bodily organism fitted to be the perfected instrument
and organ of a glorified spirit ; and for the presence of His
own body " after an heavenly and spiritual manner." x
The passing of the real substantial body through the closed
door was both an evidence and a prophecy. After giving the
senses of sight, and hearing, and feeling independent evidence
of His continued humanity and unbroken identity, He now
formally renewed and ratified the commission they had before
received. But it was a grant of enlarged powers upon the
basis of His increased authority. It was the grant of a King
distributing His functions of government according to His
royal will and power with primary reference to the spiritual
domain. He gave them mission identical with His own. To
send in itself carries with it no powers. But authority n
addition was delegated. And under the outward sign of breath
ing the inward grace of the Holy Spirit was imparted for the
discharge of apostolic and ecclesiastical functions, with
especial reference to the remitting and retaining of sins.
Christ was, and is, the Minister and High Priest of the Church
All offices are actually, as well as ideally, contained in His
Person. Out of His fulness He differentiates selected offices,
¦ Art. xxviii. of the Thirty-nine Articles.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 1 97
functions, powers, gifts. The Church as a whole and the
apostles most nearly were to represent Him in the world, His
life, work, authority ; not to speak now of His mind and
character. There was one absentee upon this occasion. The doubting
Thomas peremptorily demanded rigorous first-hand, sensible
experience of the reality of the Resurrection. All appear to
have doubted in differing degrees. Doubt was characteristic
of the most unhopeful but straightforward apostle. What
were the especial difficulties of his faith we are not told. Pro
bably they were in the main physical, for physical proof
satisfied his doubt. And the Messianic hope may have taken
more definitely local and national outlines with him. Thomas
was the impersonation of the doubt of the dull, matter-of-fact
character which sinks under the pressure of overpowering
environments, but does not cease to love. Thomas wanted
imagination ; he could see only straight before him ; he wanted
faith in others because he wanted faith in God. And so, though
he honestly loved,
" Doubt, a blank twilight of the heart, which mars
All sweetest colours in its dimness same ;
A soul-mist, through whose rifts familiar stars
Beholding we misname," '
clouded his mind, as it shook, if we mistook not, even the
strong grip and single eye of the prophet in Macharus.
Our Lord's reproaches (Mark xvi. 14 ; Luke xxiv. 25) upon
this and other occasions would not have contained that element
of bitterness which usually characterizes deserved, or un
deserved, human reproachfulness. They were the chidings
of them that " smite me friendly." And we know not how
much His manner and tone sweetened and solemnized the lash
which revealed the moral source, the hard-heartedness and
slow-heartedness, of their intellectual sins. But what of those
whose faith and love retreat in company at quick march?
What of those who seal their eyes and heart to evidence
within and without, who create difficulties, instead of waiting
their approach, with an increasing appetite for negatives, and
an unchecked passion to hear all that can be said against the
1 Jean Ingelow, " Honours,"

198 JESUS CHRIST.
old story, who " blaspheme dignities," or halve and distort la
order to scorn,

" E'en those, Thine own in earlier youth,
Now coldly asking, ' What is truth? '
Who spurn the way their fathers trod,
Forego their faith, and lose their God"?'
Are such Thomases ?
A week passed. The news must have spread and brought
Thomas to the weekly gathering, which anticipated evidently
another appearance when the day of Resurrection came
again. Here is the instinctive and unconscious consecra
tion of the Lord's Day of subsequent observance. Again
the Lord appears. Thomas receives the verification he had
desired, and the " ninth beatitude " is pronounced upon those
who had not seen the "atoning wounds," but would believe.
The falling Church had now become the standing Church. The
spiritual and intellectual victory of the Resurrection was now
complete. The rising or falling of the Churches to the end
depends upon their response to the power of the Resurrection,
and their increasing or decreasing in the life of the Risen.
Contrary to their own preconceived opinions of the Jewish
Messiah, contrary to their own prejudices, unbroken by the
repeated waves of surprise in Christ's conduct, character, and
teaching, the disciples believed in the return of Jesus to life,
and that life in their belief belonged to a wholly higher order of
being. And what was the next step taken in the progress of
their conviction ? They believed in the return to a pre-existent
earthly life, followed by a return to a pre-existent heavenly life.
They believed that Jesus was alive in heaven at the right hand
of God, in the plentitude of power and glory, and yet in imme
diate relation and minute contact with His earthly friends,
officers, representatives. The excited hallucinations of enthu
siasts nrght have restored to an imaginary life a beloved form.
But how could the fondest flights of fancy appeal to His pre
sence above by His works beneath ? How could they deepen
and widen and strengthen their convictions with the lapse of
time ? And in the face of hostile criticism and sleepless perse
cution maintain unshaken their own conviction of His present,
energizing power, and afford sufficient proof of the same
« Dr. Bright.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 199
to others to gradually convince many of their own people, in
cluding a leading opponent, and many in different places, and
of divers tongues, cultures, environments, beliefs, that their faith
was not an open question, not a religious novelty, or a tenable
hypothesis, or a fanciful superstition, but an absolutely peremp
tory fact ? It is unhistoric, unscientific to isolate the evidence
of the Resurrection to its bare context. The whole line of result
must be measured from the conviction of the first convinced
woman of tears to the still throbbing life and hope of Christen
dom. It must be remembered that the scientific difficulties of
belief were as serious, if not as clearly defined, for them as for
us. In addition to that they had greater difficulties of their own.
The rejection of the Messiah by all the influence and authority
of Jerusalem; His unresisting submission to the Gentile powers ;
the defection of His nearest disciples ; the contradiction to
all their hopes and Messianic preconceptions — and all coming
when the crown of popular favour had been set upon His brow
by the Messianic exultation on the Day of Palms. The reaction
to faith required a tremendous impetus. The recoil was by
degrees. Jewish preconception had so far from created a bias in favour
of a risen Messiah, that it increased the difficulty of belief.
The notion of a pre-existent Messiah * was vague and colourless
at the best, and even where it existed failed to suggest a resur
rection. The only basis of faith was derivable from the predic
tions of Jesus Himself. The Old Testament itself contained
the truth. But it was hidden and unsuspected. Christ's
definite promise was forgotten. His words would rise again.
They had died and been buried. The change in the disciples'
life, outward and inward, in their aggressive militancy, in their
power of conviction and producing conviction, is absolutely un
intelligible, unless an adequate cause be found. That cause —
the resurrection of the Master — carried with it the resurrection
of their hearts and lives, of their convictions and powers.
From Celsus onwards the objection has been raised that
Christ did not appear to any but believers. But the time for
evidential miracles was past Nor were miracles ever wrought
by Christ without obedience to law. That law was God's will
and character on the one side, with which He was in constant
touch ; human spiritual affinity on the other. The universal
• Cf. Stanton, p. 130 f.

200 JESUS CHRIST.
vindication of His claims before believers and unbelievers Is
held in reserve by the Father.
There was assuredly a judicial element in His withdrawal.'
It was a pana damni. Was there not here a touch of mercy
— lest they should sin too awfully against the light ? " If a man
love Me I will manifest Myself to him." But where was the
promise of manifestation to those who loved Him not? Love
opens God's heart as well as man's. And where the initial at
once and final gift of love was wanting, what good could mere
intellectual coercion have done ?
" Had Jesus showed Himself not to disciples only, witnesses
chosen before of God, but to all the people— to the Pharisees
and Sadducees, to the judges who condemned Him, and to the
soldiers who nailed Him to the cross," it would have been, as has
been well said,' " to renew His Passion." " That Passion con
sisted in other things besides sufferings deliberately inflicted
on Him by the world. Mere intercourse with the world caused
no small part of it. To have His aims misunderstood, His
motives misinterpreted, His revelations scorned ; to have the
very works in which the glory of His Father most conspicuously
appeared traced to a league on His part with Beelzebub : to find
that much of the Divine seed sown by Him fell upon the hard
wayside, and was taken away before it could penetrate the
heart ; to come into hourly contact with ignorance instead of
knowledge, selfishness instead of love, oppression instead of
justice, formalism instead of piety, truth perverted by its
appointed guardians, His Father's house turned into a den oi
thieves, the wretched denied consolation, man living without
God and dying without hope— all this was suffering and sorrow ;
it was His burden and His cup of woe. No approach even to a
fresh experience of a like kind was possible after the burdtnhad
been borne and the cup drained to the dregs. From the very
nature of the case, the risen Lord could come in contact only
with disciples — with those in whom, instead of finding cause for
a renewal of His pain, He might ' see of the travail of His soul
and be satisfied.' If His resurrection was the beginning of His
glory, it would have been a reversal of the whole plan of our
redemption, a confounding of the different steps of the economy
¦ Cf. Tert. Apol. 21, "ne impii errore liberarentur."
• Prof. Milligan "The Resurrection of our Lord," p. 33.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 201
»f grace, had He ' after His passion ' presented Himself alive
to any but disciples."
Negative criticism still has to content itself with the vision
hypothesis. It shatters itself historically upon the evidence of
the undisputed epistles of St. Paul. Morally and psychologi
cally it totally fails to account for the rapid, decided, and per
manent moral and spiritual resurrection of the believers, and
the present power and working of the Church of Jesus. If the
Resurrection were a visionary hallucination, the whole of Chris
tian devotion and life rests upon the baseless fabric of a vision ;
and a vast stream of moral and spiritual energy flows from an
inanimate object of worship. A delirium which has flooded the
world with seas of prayer, crowded it with churches, girdled it
with armies of workers in every field of human activity, leaves
the world more insane every day 1 So vast an effect requires
an adequate cause, and that cause is pronounced to be a dream
" of the feverish moods of evening ! " *
It does not seem difficult to follow the Lord's reasons for
sending the disciples into Galilee, which to negative criticism
has been suggestive of suspicion. Galilee was the centre of the
faith. The apostles were Galileans. Old associations would be
renewed. Old ties riveted. In sight of the old places, on the
ground redolent of word and deed and a thousand minutiae
of tones and looks, the old truths would come home with
gathered interest. The continuity of the pre-Resurrection and
post-Resurrection teaching would be shown to be as consistent
as the continuity of the pre- and post-Resurrection life. Scenes
of home affections, consecrated and doubly endeared, or freely
surrendered, scenes of spiritual birth and conversion, times and
places which were landmarks to be unforgotten in heaven,
would reinvest the old teaching, and connect it with the new, in
a network of hallowed environment
In Galilee the sentiment of attachment, the affection of per
sonal loyalty, gained the accumulated and organized authority
of past association. " It is undeniable that, taken in its widest
acceptation, the feeling of the community is the sole source of
political power." a Feeling, as a source of moral, spiritual, and
social power in the Christian body, would be invigorated and
' Keim, vi. 345, though he disclaims in words adopting the visioa
theory. » Herbert Spencer, " Political Institutions," p. 337.

K>2 JESUS CHRIST.
refreshed. The resurrection both of emotion and of intellect
would be completed where eyes and ears told a thousand unfor
gotten tales of the Master's past works and words. Galilee was
the real home, the dear home, both of the Master and of His
disciples ; and the resurrection of all Christian home life whicn
began in the Incarnation was now perfected. And with the
love of home in their hearts His teachers would go forth to
bring all families into one, and show them the way to the Home
of homes.
The home feeling would cling around the remembered form
of the beloved Master, and all of His, when He had left them
for the silence.
The first Galilean scene is a prose idyll. They are in the
thick of the old work, just as if nothing had occurred to break
it off, and the three last years had been a dream. With the
three fishers of the lake in the old place are Galilean Nathanael
and Thomas and two disciples — a company forming the mystic
number seven. They had fished all the night and had caught
nothing. Parting the fresh morning air like a cheery good
morning came the hail from the Stranger on the shore,
" Cast the net on the right side of the ship and ye shall find."
The successful haul was a speaking sign. Love is quick of
memory and recognition. It is the beloved apostle who at once
understands, and characteristically says to Peter, " It is the
Lord !" It is Peter who characteristically springs into the sea,
respectfully putting on his fisher's coat, to swim or wade the
hundred yards to His Master's feet.
The dragging in of the loaded net follows ; and the exact
counting of the fish. Considering the importance of numerical
combinations in Scripture the symbolical interpretation of the
number, supported as it is by names so weighty as Augustine,
and so devout as Isaac Williams, claims a respectful hearing.
The meal upon the shore is irresistibly suggestive of prophetic
import. The Rabbinical and extra-canonical pictures of Mes
sianic banquets under spiritualized applications find some
scriptural countenance, and the figures, or whatever the truths
that underlie them be, of eating and drinking in the kingdom,
recur in the Apocalypse of St. John.
After the meal follows the memorable dialogue with the son
of John. He had been reinstated with the others in office. He
is now formally reinstated ii ronfidence before himself and his
fellows.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 203
" He can forgive, we never can forget." His own future up-
ifting on the martyr's cross is shadowed forth. Such a touching
exhibition of unbroken loyalty to His friends, such a more than
redintegratio amoris, restored the apostle to his own self-respect,
and left no doubt resting upon his future priority in the society.
His friend too, and his Lord's, unforgotten of either, must tarry
on till the judgment thunders broke over Jerusalem, a real judicial
coming of the Christ, and a type and shadow of the Last.
" The spell of the mountains seems to have been on St. Mat
thew, and he loved to contemplate the Son of God in those
solemn sanctuaries." * The spell was upon the disciple because
it was upon his Galilean Master. Upon some Galilean height,
it may well have been the mountain of the Sermon, for it was
specially appointed by Jesus, and would have been well-known
ground, Christ came to them. It was the time for a Royal pro
clamation. All authority in heaven and earth was His by gift.
He now issues His royal commission to baptize in the threefold
Name and disciple the world, and pledged His word that the
Royal presence would accompany the faithful to the consum
mation of the world. The circle of victory widened through
unknown reaches to invisible shores of hope. The Messianic
hope was lifted and extended beyond national borders and
temporal royalties to the regions of the Infinite and the Eternal.
Earth and heaven were different provinces of one Empire.
The Head over all, blessed for ever, stood before them.
It would be travelling out of our way to point out how this
truth was only gradually realized through the shock of party
conflicts, voices of debate and discord in the apostolic company,
the disseminating effect of persecution, the rise of a personality
of unique power and unclouded vision upon the scene of
Christian warfare, and the direct visions and revelations of the
Lord from heaven : so slow is human nature to rise to the
supernatural, so ready to lapse from its highest moments of
conviction, and to fall into moral disintegration and spiritual
disorder. No details remain of other manifestations. He appeared to
" above five hundred brethren at once " (1 Cor. xv. 6), of whom
more than two hundred and fifty were alive twenty-eight years
after. Such a large company of witnesses of the Resurrection
must have disseminated the seeds of faith far and wide, especi-
1 Bp. Alexander, " Leading Ideas," p. 16.

804 JESUS CHRIST,
ally when the persecution of which St. Stephen was the first
victim scattered the faithful. We also learn from St. Paul
(i Cor. xv. 7) of an appearance to James. "At the time when
St. Paul wrote, there was but one person eminent enough in the
Church to be called James simply without any distinguishing
epithet — the Lord's brother, the bishop of Jerusalem. It might
therefore be reasonably concluded that this James is here meant.
And this view is confirmed by an extant fragment of the Gospel
according to the Hebrews, the most important of all the
Apocryphal Gospels, which seems to have preserved more than
one true tradition, and which expressly relates the appearance
of our Lord to His brother James after His ascension." ' If
Bishop Lightfoot's inference be accepted there are nine re
corded appearances of the Lord after His resurrection, if that
to James be placed before His ascension there are ten.
Tradition preserves a beautiful memory of an appearance to
His mother. It is difficult to suppose that the inspired historian
of the Magnificat, who does not either forget to mention her
presence with the apostles, with the women, and with His
brethren in the upper chamber (Acts i. 14), should have omitted,
or been ignorant of such a record. But " le cceur a ses raisons," *
and upon such heart reasons we dare not contradict, though we
may not affirm, such a greeting between mother and Son as
would have been a foretaste of the first in heaven.
The Lord might also have made an unrecorded appearance
to His " brethren," i.e., Joseph's sons by a former wife,3 His
foster-brethren. Certainly we find them gathered together with
the apostolic company after the Resurrection, " all " of whom
"continued with one accord in prayer and supplication" (Acts i.
14). Yet shortly before His passion they did not believe in
Him (John vii. 5). How did this happy change come about ?
Bishop Lightfoot suggests that the Lord's appearance after the
Ascension, as he places it, to James was the turning point in
his religious life and that of his brethren. This is open, how
ever, to the serious objection mentioned above of James being
in the company of the faith before the Ascension. Nor have
we any records of our Lord's appearing to unbelievers in
order to win their faith, for Thomas had been no unbeliever
before the passion. It would seem, then, the more natural sup-
* Bp. Lightfoot, " Galatians," p. 265. • Pascal.
> According to the Epiphanian view.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE IORTY DAYS. 205
position that James and His brethren were among the fruits of
the Passion-travail of His soul, whom the Resurrection brought
out of the tremors and hesitations of imperfect conviction.
The influence of the Lord's mother, and His kinsmen after the
flesh, such as the sons of Zebedee, would have told in this
direction. And the appearance to James, if it really took place
after, not before, the Ascension, would have been the reward of
faith, its effect, not its cause.
Such changes of conviction are suggestive of others like
them. The inward histories of faith are not hewn after the
same fashion, but vary with the infinite diversities of human
character. Among the " more than five hundred," some of
whom still " doubted," but probably ended in full conviction, at
least when the Holy Spirit came down and convicted thousands
of the sin and sinfulness of unbelief (John xvi. 9) ; among the
thousands of the Pentecostal day of conversion ; among the
"great company of the priests" (Acts vi. 7) who became
obedient unto the faith ; among the number of the disciples
who within so short a time as that preceding the preaching of
St. Stephen " multiplied in Jerusalem greatly ; " among the
many, in short, of the apostolic first-fruits there cannot fail to
have been some in various stages of progress towards the faith,
who had witnessed or heard of the crucifixion, who if among
the recognized five hundred brethren had witnessed, if outside
the inner circle had not witnessed, but heard the report of
witnesses. Certainly the statistics of the faith would have been
very different on Good Friday, on Ascension Day, and a week
after Pentecost.
The great Forty Days must be regarded as an organic whole.
The moral education of the disciples had been completed. The
discipline of character had received its finishing touches. The
shafts had been polished (Isa. xlix. 2), they had been kept
close in the quiver : now they must fly abroad. The Church
had centred in Christ's own Person. The Church had been
integrating. The little community who followed Him con
stituted the faithful. The Divine society had been in the
nursery stage. Childish things must now be put away, as when
a young man leaves a godly father's roof, enriched by hallowed
examples and speaking memories, to do battle in the struggle
for existence. The example of Christ had done its work.
Memory was filled to the full. A fund of energy could be

2o6 JESUS CHRIST.
drawn from the past. New resources must be opened up. New
powers furnished. A new impetus derived from the present.
The great Forty Days is the period of organization. The
differentiating movement had begun in the separation of the
Twelve, it continued in the separation of the Seventy, it was
now made constant. The simple unclassified collection of
believers formed a little Messianic knot and nidus.
The new society was organized upon a definite basis, with a
definite formula of initiation and bond of cohesion. It was
gifted with the promise and potency of self-government, self-
development, self-propagation, " a plant, like those of the first
creation, having seed in itself upon the earth." ' The family of
God was promised indestructibility and spiritual fertility. The
unexplained title, Son of Man, cast its light forward. The Son
of Man was the ideal Man, and the King of men. His kingdom
found satisfaction for all the wants of humanity in all relations
Godward and manward. Every development of truth and
righteousness in every direction is a ray from the Kingdom of
light. The Light in the world must now diffuse itself into the
world. The mind of Christ is the ideal human mind. The
sOul of Christ is the glorified human soul. The Body of Christ
is the glorified spiritualized human body. Christward march
all the forces in heaven and earth, good to their consummation
and coronation, evil to their destruction,
" On to the distant
Star of existent
Rapture and love." »
As there was development in the sphere of order, so there
was development in the sphere of faith. The germ of the
Catholic faith lay in the confession of the leading apostle,
" Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," at a crucial
moment. The baptismal formula embodies and completes the
definition. Whatever legitimate development there has been in
the formulation of Christian truth has rendered explicit what
was implicit. There have been parasitic growths which have
cumbered the ground, and embarrassed the freedom of natural
progress and soiled its many-hued bloom. As all true develop*
1 Bp. Cotterill, " Genesis of the Church.*'
• Goethe, " Faust," translated by Bayard Taylor.

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 207
ment tends to repair to its original source, and to conform to
its proper type, so all excrescences tend to fall away. As the
different sections of Christendom, which stand self-condemned
by the very fact of being sections, gravitate nearer to their
Centre and source they must draw nearer to one another. In
the end the centripetal tendency must fuse all together who
obey it As there are three Persons in one indivisible God, as
Jesus Christ eternally unites divinity and humanity in Himself,
so through and in Him humanity moves on to its deification.
The nearer humanity approaches Christ, ideally and actually,
the nearer it approaches unity, Divine and human. For such
Christian unification, inward and outward, all Christians should
work and pray. And the day of days must come when Christ's
unfulfilled words are fulfilled, and Christ's unanswered prayer is
answered. The permanence, the identity, of the Lord's Body was as real
as the permanence, the identity of His soul. He had submitted
His risen Body to the touch of Thomas and the others ; He had
allowed Mary to cling to His feet, if but for a moment ; He had
in the preceding meal taken and eaten before them. His Body
then was under new conditions, but the same. It was a spiritual
Body, yet it had not put off material relations. It consisted then
of spiritualized matter. That all the bodies of the faithful Chris
tians will be so spiritualized, St. Paul has expressly taught under
the figure of the seed. That all matter will undergo spiritual
transformation seems a further inference necessitated by the
view of the Son of Man as the Head and Archetype of Creation.
So, too, early Christian thinkers taught. " The Lord," says St.
Cyril of Jerusalem, "will roll up the heavens, not in order to
destroy them, but in order to raise them up better." ' Such a
conception follows upon the consideration of the view of Creation
opened up by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of the Romans. As
Irecseus long ago discovered, " The Creation, therefore, itself
must be renewed to its old condition, and without hindrance
serve the righteous."* And it is needless to dwell, for it would
take us too far away from our subject, upon the sidelights flashed
in by such physical doctrines as those of the conservation of
energy. The permanence, the identity, of the Lord's human soul was
1 Quoted by Rev. P. G. Medd, Bampton Lectures, p. 566.
• Irenseus, v. xxxii. 1.

2o8 JESUS CHRIST.
also proved by His human feelings. He took a human interest
in the places and the persons He knew before. There was no
break in the continuity of His affection. Whatever scenes He
witnessed in the bodiless world, He had not forgotten any of
His earthly life or any of His earthly friends. St. Peter's denial
is recalled to the apostle His little flock are His brethren.
The Cross had not stamped out, but stamped in, all that had
gone before. The Resurrection had brought new life, had not
abolished the oid, but preserved it. The permanence, the
identity, of human affections in the risen state is surely here
indicated beyond any possibility of doubt. All that has gone
to form the Christ-life and the Christ-love, and to contribute
thereto, will remain under revived glory and resurgent blessed
ness. All the sweet affections and friendships, all the heaven-
born recollections, whereby hearts have been bound in the
strongest, tenderest bands, sundered awhile by death, shall here
find their fullest consecration, their highest development, their
perfected resurrection. All that is Christian in every possible
development of the Christ-energy, from the highest glories of
the greatest saint to the lowest and least stone in the Temple,
rose in Him. The thoughts raised thereby are boundless, they
burst the limitations of the human mind, enlarged and illumi
nated by the radiant revelations of the inspired prophets of the
new Covenant, of the Apocalypses of the Divine character and
working. The four distinct records of the resurrection life of Christ shed
differing, but converging, lights upon that life. Briefly, it may
be said that St. Matthew views Jesus from his Jewish point of
belief as the risen Messiah, victorious and triumphant, " estab
lishing an external polity upon the basis of the Old Cove
nant ; " ' and " over all is the light of a glorious majesty, abiding
even unto the end." * And " he alone notices the humble adora
tion of the risen Lord before His ascension, and, as if with
jealous care, traces to its origin the calumny currently reported
among the Jews to this day." 3 St. Mark's account is compli
cated by the question of the original source of the last verses.
That question is still an open one, for weighty names are ranged
upon both sides.* But even those who reject the verses as a
1 Bp. John Wordsworth, " University Sermons," p. 22.
' Westcott, " Study of the Gospels," p. 332. 3 Ibid.
* Lachmann, Griesbach, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Weiss, Westcott and

THE RESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 200,
part of the original Mark accept their canonicfty, and so, for
our purpose, as trustworthy documentary evidence they may be
provisionally admitted. St. Mark is then seen to be filled with
the personal energy of the strong Son of God. And the strongest
argument on internal grounds for retaining the last section, or
regarding it, at all events, as the later work of the same hand,
springs from the "moral connection " and unity of tone "be
tween the body of the Gospel and the last and crowning
section." * St. Luke, according to the uniform drift of his
Gospel, depicts the risen Lord as the incarnate Saviour, and
connecting the Resurrection with the Passion "unfolds
the spiritual necessity by which suffering and victory were
united." ' St. John, on the other hand, great organizer of the
Church 3 as he was before and at the time he wrote, dwells upon
the Lord in His individual and inner relations with disciples in
the interfacings of faith within the communion of saints.
Yet the fourfold picture in itself was inadequate. Outlines of
the risen, as of the whole earthly, life, are all that have reached
us. For " even the world itself," said the last and greatest
witness, " would not contain the books that should be written,"
if all were told.
Hort rej'ect ; Bleek, Lange, Hilgenfeld, Broadus, McLellan, Scrivener,
Morison, Cook, Bishops Wordsworth of Lincoln and Salisbury, and Dr.
Salmon retain. See especially Salmon, p. 190 foil., and Schaff, " Com
panion," p. 189.
1 Bishop John Wordsworth, of Salisbury, L c. p., p. 23, in an eloquent
defence of the retention of the section in the original body of the Gospel.
• Westcott, L c 3 In Asa Minor.

»5

CHAPTER XXI.
THE ASCENSION AND AFTER.
•• When fire is kindled on the earth it glows
In highest heaven ; none run uncall'd, none love
Unloved ; below, above.
Thy works are many, but Thy Name is One.''
Dora Greenwell, " Carmina Crucis."
The scene fitly closes at Jerusalem. May it not re-open there
in the fulness of time ? He leads out the witnesses, not to, but
towards, Bethany. " To three only had the first Transfiguration
been granted. All the apostles are to behold the second, and
yet greater, Transfiguration."1 The traditional scene must be
rejected, for it is only half a mile from the city. One of the
eastern slopes of Olivet, overhanging Bethany, satisfies the re
quirements of the narratives. Somewhere here He visibly
ascended, accompanied by a choir of prayer, and escorted by
a guard of angels. The Blessed One was last seen blessing.
Some have supposed that " the nine days of the ascent refer to
the nine orders of angels through whom He passed to reign."
Let only Dante eyes look into the clouds of glory which roll
between the upper and under Church.
"Ascendit in coelos, sedet ad dextram Patris."
The glad tidings of the kingdom of God end with the music of
uplifted hearts and voices in the Temple, like a far-off ringing
of heavenly bells about the feet of the great High Priest
Sursum corda. 1 Archdeacon J. P. Norris.

THE ASCENSION AND AFTER. 211
The Ascension was an act as strictly necessary as the Resur
rection. The 'AvroZuil), the very Life could not but return to its
own level. And for the disciples it was necessary as supplying
the last link in the chain of faith. If Christ came in a super
natural way it was meet that He should leave in a supernatural
way. " How could His resurrection have formed, for the dis-
| ciples, the basis for belief in an eternal life, if it had been
subsequently followed by death?" » Even if the account had
never been given the conviction of the Lord's ascension and
continuous life above is the constant presupposition of the dis
ciples' life and worship and work. The evidence of the fact and
the evidence of their conviction of the fact are interdependent
And the result of their convictions in themselves and others
ends to proof independently the validity of the same.
St. Luke, upon whose mind the before-mentioned allusion to
the Ascension," shows how vivid an impression that event made
upon his mind, gives a brief summary in the Acts of the great
Forty Days in the light of the Ascension and its Pentecostal
sequel The question of the future developments of Christ's kingdom
upon earth is too wide an one for brief treatment. We can only
note one or two headings. First, that past progress, inward
and outward, past development, inward and outward, is
the pledge and the earnest of future. Parallel development
of force seems suggested on the side of evil, and fore
shadowed upon whole lines of Scripture. The accumulations,
the organizations of spiritual activity, motive or latent, both in
the realms of the seen and the unseen, increase with the
increase of every unit to the one side or the other.
Upon a merely arithmetical basis, the conversion 3 of India at
the present rate of Christian increase in comparison with the
rate of increase of population is within measurable distance.
And if of India, of China and the great races of Central Africa.
In both these barely opened doors the signs of future submission
to Christ are not wanting.
¦ Neander. * Chap. ix. 51.
3 The data upon which these views are based are too lengthy to insert,
and lead to conclusions quite at variance with Canon Taylor's. Special
reference may be made to Sir R. Temple's evidence, " Oriental Experience,''
pp, I34i I35, 142, 143, 161, 162, "India in 1880," and Sir W. Hunt'-r's
statistics.

212 JESUS CHRIST.
The most difficult problem before the Christian is the con
version of Israel. But even in this peculiar field there is the
promise and potency of life from the dead. The Jewish sabbath
hymn may be applied in a wholly Christian sense,
" Thou city of our King ! Thou royal shrine I
Rise from thy ruins ! rise once more and shine I
Soon shall thy tears in the sad vale be o'er 1
Soon shall His mercy bid thee weep no more I "*
The language of the Old Testament in regard to the return of
the chosen people not only to God, but to their own country
also, is read by some in a purely spiritual light in reference to
spiritual blessing, but the present writer agrees with a living
scholar that " the general tenour of the Old Testament pro
phetic language with regard to God's treatment of purposes
towards the Jews does point to a recovery and a restoration to
His favour and to their own country ; " * and echoes his ques
tion with regard to St. Paul's language in the eleventh chapter
of the Romans, may the apostle " mean that in the predicted
and now visibly incipient decay of faith among Gentile Churches,
a movement towards faith in Christ on the part of the Jews, or
some considerable portion of them, may revive Christianity in
the world ; and that, coincidently with the return of the Jews in
large numbers, whether with Christward tendencies or other
wise, to their own land, Jerusalem, when the times of the
Gentiles shall have been fulfilled, may become once more,
through the faith of Christian Jews, the centre of Christian life
in the world ? " Such would be a Messianic age fulfilling under
Christian conditions many of the most sublime previsions of
Jewish seers, and the most patriotic aspirations of the higher
Rabbinism. Christian thought cannot stop at the Ascension. Christian re
velation itself beckons it further. Christian science rigorously
demands a continuity of life and energy. Such life and energy
might conceivably be a vanished force. It might upon such
ground be held that Christ's relation to the earth had ceased
with His departure. But the same record which hands down
1 A. Bernstein, " The City of David," p. 35.
* Canon Medd ; for a long list of texts vide Medd's Bampton Lecture,
p. 553, note xvi.

THE ASCENSION AND AFTER. 213
His departure contains His promises of return by the Spirit,
and of His permanent continuance even unto the end of the
world, and intimates a development, an increase in the exercise
of His powers and functions. In whatever sense, and with
whatever power, Jesus was Prophet, Priest, and Sovereign of
His people below, initially, the same is He under glorified con
ditions now. The full and entire discharge of all corresponding
and consequent offices and functions belong to Him still. His
environment is changed infinitely for the higher. His powers
must correspond. What is unchangeable in Him is His Divine
Person and Character. What is unchanged in Him, though
glorified, is His human Nature, indissolubly annexed to the
Divine, which has gone from glory to glory. It is through His
human Nature enthroned above that He is the causative force
and primitive energy of all the energies of His kingdom.
The sketches of the Acts, the histories and experiences dis
closed or implied in the Epistles, both of churches and indi
viduals, supplement the Gospel memoirs. They constitute " the
Gospel of the Holy Spirit." They are brief typical examples of
the heavenly life of Christ transmitting itself through and into
earthly lives, characters, ministries, agencies. They are the
uplifting of His hand, the stretching out of His arm, the breath
ing of His breath. He is the Thinker, the Worker, the Saviour,
the Reformer, the Preacher, the Pastor, the Organizer, the
Teacher, the Unifier.
He is either this or He is out of the world, and out of all re
lation to it. Here we find the truth which Pantheism distorts ;
the Immanence of the Christ in the Church and in the world.
Mankind will not be able to abide long in the half-way houses
of Theism. Man will find God in Christ everywhere or nowhere.
He will see the infinite radiations from the Light of light in all
the scattered rays of light, or He will stand in blank blindness
before the myriad dance of atoms, the fortuitous rush of im
personal forces, in a world unredeemed, bounded by the infinite
dark of the unknowable, a Christless cosmic chaos, and chaotic
cosmos. Between faith and faithlessness, hope and hopeless
ness, love and lovelessness, stands midway the form of a Cross,
and the mystery-solving mystery of a Divine Sufferer with out
stretched hands 1

CHAPTER XXII.
THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. CHRIST AS A MORAL AND
SPIRITUAL WORKER.
"Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever " (Hebrews
xiii. 8).
Miracles morally conditioned—Jesus Christ a spiritual miracle— Strength
of right will— His originality, negative and positive — Authoritativeness
— Placed humanity upon the throne of the cosmos, and made moral
and spiritual interests supreme — Gave a moral ideal, and a moral
dynamic — Individualism — Universalism — Women — Children — Practi
cal every-day morality — Consistency — New virtues and graces — Faith —
Hope— Love — Humility — Truth — Religion of the Body — Unification
of religion and morality — Prayerfulness — Self-assertion of sinlessness.
The author of " Supernatural Religion " thinks that he has
caught the Christian apologist in a vicious circle, when he says,
" that the whole argument rests upon miracles which have
nothing to rest upon themselves but the Revelation." But the
statement is a begging of the question. Christianity rests as
upon a foundation-stone upon the character of Jesus Christ.
The character, the life of Jesus Christ appears to the honest
seeker after truth to be a spiritual miracle, to be the spiritual
miracle of history. Upon His character revealed in His life,
and His life flowing out of His character the whole historic
structure of the faith hangs. Physical miracles are but one
expression of His character, and one of the many-sided ex
hibitions of His energy. They constitute, therefore, one line
of evidence, and unquestionably they belong to the substance
and texture of the revelation. But no candid thinker can
impose upon them the whole weight of truth.

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 21 5
Once admitting the supernaturalness of Christ as a personal
spiritual force, the admission of supernatural in the physical
region follows, as the less contained in the greater, the part in
the whole, to any but the believer in the purely mechanical.
When we further examine the miracles which disturb the
phenomenal order of the world, as we understand it, we can
not escape the inference that they are spiritually conditioned.
In no one single case can the mere manifestation of power for
its own sake be detected. There is always a moral background.
The currents of moral causation set those of physical effect.
Moral conditions are annexed to the whole machinery of
miracle, from the lesser ones of healing, which were, so to speak,
the letting out of His own spiritual and physical health into the
diseased spiritual and physical organisms of His patients, to
the supreme miracle of His own Resurrection, which vindi
cated the truth of His claims to be the Lord of life and death,
and the Master of an eternal life which no physical dissolution
touched. We further notice a strict principle of economy in the work
ing of His miracles. Granting Him the power, how rarely He
used it t How many needs were left unsatisfied, how many
sufferers unhealed, how many evidential forces held back, even
during His official life, and during His private life, the silence
of self-control, the majestic, unhasting calm of those —
" Who only stand and wait,"
till a higher Power bids them wait no more, but work 1
No one who harbours critical doubts of the verifiable testi
mony of the Gospels disputes the fact of Christ's life. If the
character depicted in the Gospels was not His historical
character, the miracle of conceiving and exhibiting His cha-
, racter must be transferred to the four Evangelists, and to the
writers of the Epistles. This is to reject a smaller miracle in
order to accept a much greater one. It has been reserved for
Bruno Bauer to exemplify such a reductio, not ad absurdum, but
ad absurdissimum, when he put forth in the year 1879 a book
in which Seneca and Philo of Alexandria are averred to be
the real founders of Christianity ! Such criticism is its own
refutation, and damages both moral and intellectual respect
for the ultra-critical school all along the line, just as a bad

2l6 JESUS CHRIST.
professing Christian often does more harm than an open
opponent. We see in Jesus Christ more than in any one who ever
lived the majestic strength of a self-determining will, per
fectly bent on perfect ends. He was right Will incar
nate. His personal causality was independent of His
surroundings. He did not adapt Himself, except under the
physical limitations of His real human Nature, to circum
stances ; He adapted circumstances to Hill will. He com
manded them as their lawful Lord, subject in all times and
places to the Will above. He lifted, He transformed the good ;
the evil He put down, He destroyed. Even His enemies never
accused Him of being the tool of any party or person. His
independence was acknowledged while it was condemned. In
His life conscience sat upon a throne, threatened by a host of
claimants, unshaken for a moment. In the court of His con
science the absolute rule of duty reigned — for duty was
synonymous with the dear Will of His Father.
The moral creativeness of Jesus is admitted by unbelievers.
But the absolute contrariety of His moral spirit, His authori-
tativeness, His temper, and His very words fairly taken in their
context, to all the moral environment of the time, Pharisaic,
Sadducaic, Essene, or Gentile, is fatal to any theory of its
human derivation. The only moral teacher who approached
the outer edge of His conceptions was the Baptist. But the
Baptist never rose above the level of the prophets, and every
word he spake sprang from legal roots. And the Baptist
towered morally above his fellows, for he occupied the moral
platform of the prophets while the Judaism of the day
had sunk to the Rabbinical levels, both negatively and
positively. The negative ideal was "to keep one's self
from sin, not a positive one, to do good upon the earth."1
While the positive ideal of devotion to the Law resulted in
traditionalism and externalism, and the narrowest national and
individual selfishness. " The Creator of heaven and earth
becomes the manager of a petty scheme of salvation ; the living
God descends from His throne to make way for the Law. The
Law thrusts itself in everywhere ;, it commands and blocks up
the access to heaven ; it regulates and sets limits to the under-
• Wellhausen, " History of Israel,'* p. 509.

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 217
standing of the Divine working on earth. As far as it can, it
takes the soul out of religion and spoils morality." *
Jesus showed indisputable originality as a moral Teacher,
both negatively and positively. Negatively by rejecting the
most approved teachers and rulers of thought of the time, by
His polemics again externalism, by His reversing the moral
positions of Pharisee and publican or sinner, and His oppo
sition to mere traditionalism. Positively His originality con
sisted both in what must have seemed to His enemies a
reactionary return to the primitive fountains of inspiration and
revelation, an insistance upon the eternal validity of the moral
law, and by superadding to it not a crust of overriding tra
dition, but a new height and breadth and depth, new
sanctions, new promises, new penalties. There was no break
with the old Law ; there was expansion ; there was develop
ment. Such expansion and development were not natural. The
natural development had been downwards towards decay and
deterioration. Rabbinism is the proof result ; Hillel the finest
flower. It was entirely supernatural, as the expression of a
superhuman mind under the impetus of superhuman force.
" Out of the covenant God of Israel grew the Father ; out of
the dignity of Israel, the dignity of man ; out of the national
fellowship, human love ; out of the theocracy, the universal
kingdom of God ; out of the law of the two tables, with an
omission of the sacrificial statutes, the service of the moral act
of the heart." " This advance in ideas is tremendous measured
from the highest height and purest purity of the old Covenant
teaching ; from the debased, adulterated teaching of a genera
tion in Israel perverse and adulterous, and outside Israel
corruption itself, the leap was infinite. It was a revolution, or
rather a new creation. And as the teaching towered above
contemporaneous, teaching, so did the Life much more than
ower above contemporaneous lives. The Lawgiver outdid
His own law. The highest non-Christian ethical teaching, on
the other hand, found and finds no adequate expression m the
life. Ethical ideals are not lived, is the uniform complaint both
of preacher and of disciple. Video meliora proboque deteriora
sequor. Oh wretched man that I am, who can de*ivei me ?
Without the unsaying answer ere the question has left the lips ;
* Wellhausen, * Keim, vi. 429

2l8 JESUS CHRIST.
I thank God— and how thank I God ?— through Jesus Christ
our Lord.
Another aspect of His originality was His authoritativeness.
There had been strong authoritativeness in the illustrious line
of the prophets. One after another had claimed to be the
accredited organ of God's revelation. One to another had
handed on the sure word of prophecy. One from another had
received, confirmed, and transmitted to spiritual successors, the
awful heritage of benediction and cursing, of promise and of
threatening. Yet all had pointed on with hand uplifted to Him
who was to come, and would fulfil and sum up, and complete
all the preliminaries of prophecy. John the Baptist spake with
the same authoritativeness. Yet he and they claimed only the
place at the footstool ; they were not the Light ; they were but
lights reflected, derivative. Christ spake with all the authorita
tiveness of all the prophets, and much more than all. For
their authority was impersonal and derivative. His authority
was native, personal, primary. They affirmed, as saith the
Lord. Jesus affirmed, / say unto you.
As He transcended the Baptist and the prophets, much more,
then, He transcended contemporary teachers. Their highest
conception was faithfulness to tradition. They might draw out
of their treasure things old, but things new never. The Rabbi
was '"a well-plastered pit,' 'filled with the water of knowledge,'
' out of which not a drop could escape.' " The only room for
spontaneity was in the manipulation and adaptation of pre
cedents and the infinite subdivision of applications. Memory
was the supreme intellectual virtue.
The moral and intellectual authoritativeness of Christ was
original and self-dependent. It sprang from His Divine certi
tude. Christ had spiritual and intellectual certitude. Truth
was to Him unclouded. It flowed from Him as from a pure
perennial fountain fed from the Divine deeps. He had no
wrestle with doubts, no hesitations, for His mind was perfectly
poised. No fallacies could ever mislead Him, for they are spun
of the Spirit of error which could find nothing in Him. But
for His immediate contact with absolute truth He could never
have apprehended the true Messianic ideal at a time when it
was lost and had to be recovered. Perfectly humble, perfectly
simple, perfectly sincere, He uniformly asserted, and uniformly
acted upon the assertion, that He knew the truth, that indeed

CHRIST AS A MORAL AND SPIRITUAL WORKER. 219
He was the Truth. All the expansions and developments of
truth through the ages in all departments of the knowable are
the workings of His mind, the continuous outpourings from the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Him, and pro
gressively disclosed through the minds He enlightens and leads
on to all the truth. While He had immediate native com
munion with truth He did not slight, but honoured previous
teachers. He drew from them words and thoughts. He
appealed to historical, to prophetic evidence and instruction.
" This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." "Moses and
the prophets," "What read ye in the Law?" are phrases con
stantly on His lips. Often instead of opening some new fountain
of truth He turns a questioner to the old flow, the old familiar
current coin.
Christ shifted the whole centre of interest in the world. The
leading interest in the world became for the first time moral
and human, and upon a definite basis. Human nature sprang
into a supremacy of position and authority in the cosmos. Man
is the explanation of Nature, the crown of its development, the
god of its unconscious worship. In the hierarchy of forces
he occupies the throne. Such a position was drawn out in the
Epistle to the Romans in the great chapter which sees the en
franchisement of Nature implied in the glorious liberty of the
children of God, and by a bold personification attributes to
Nature a travail rainbowed with hope, and a hope issuing in
fruition. Not only was human nature re-established in the
dominion over Nature enjoyed before the Fall, but it was
brought as a whole, and potentially in all its parts, to the
throne of heaven.1 And the whole process of redemption and
glorification was transacted in the moral and spiritual region,
upon moral and spiritual ground. " All the relations between
it (human nature) and God became immediate and direct, not
incident to it merely as part of the universal organism, but due
to its own special state and essence ; so completely that they
would remain the same were the visible frame of things to
vanish and leave us alone in the infinite Presence." ° If by
"immediate and direct" be understood in and through Christ, the
above statement is absolutely true for the Christian. Human
* Conf. Aristotle's splendid aspiration dAA', i<p ooov lvSi\eTat (sc. \pfj)
MavariZfiiv, N. Eth. a. 7.
* Prof. Martineau, "Types of Ethical Theory," i. p. 14 folL

Ho JESUS CHRIST.
nature was elevated at every point, at every interest, pre
eminently in all its moral relations. In fact, under Christianity
moral and spiritual relations penetrate and pervade all other,
and measure their importance.
Christ elevated human nature in itself. He also armed it
with powers of self-development. In the first place, He set
before humanity a supreme and absolute ideal. This ideal is
final, and absorbs and concentres all minor and incidental
ideals". It is the ideal of His own character and life Divine
seen under human conditions. This ideal was His own con
ception and His own creation.
More than this. It is one thing to exhibit an ideal, a very
different thing to reach it. An art student may admire Michael
Angelo, but does not dream of rivalling him. An ideal becomes
a stimulus to the gifted, but the despair of the many. The
Law had erected an ideal, and ended in repelling instead of
attracting. Christ then gave a new power. It was not enough to set an
example for imitation, not indeed outward, as some rare spirits
have understood it, and rightly it may be for themselves, foj
what Christian would have spared a Francis of Assisi to the
Church? — but universally applicable as to its spirit and relation,
Godward and manward. That power is Christ Himself, and the
Spirit of Christ as an inward energy and life. "The powers of
the God-united humanity are made available for us men through
the Spirit. The life of the Incarnate has not vanished from the
earth ; it is perpetuated through spiritual channels in the race
of the redeemed. The 'new Man,' like the ' old man,' exhibits
Himself as a self-propagating type, self-propagating by its own
laws, ' having its seed in itself, like every lower form or stage
of life which had yet appeared." ' The moral and spiritual
self-developments of mankind hinge wholly upon the incorpora
tion of the Christ self in each self, and the appropriation of His
nature according to His prescribed and certified media of grace.
Christ gave a new sanction and meaning to the individual.
The individual was the individual of God's love and care, and
of the Son of man's, and consequently of man's. The individual
was not lost in a crowd. Primitive society was a collection of
families. Individ it.1 rights beyond the privileged classes were
unknown outside the Jewish world. Aristotle regarded the
1 Church Quarterly Review, July, 1883, pp. 39a, 293.

CHRIST AS A MORAL AND SPIRITUAL WORKER. 321
slave as a human tool Half the Roman Empire at least were
at this time, it has been computed, in slavery. Even in Israel
the ignorant Am-ha-aretz in Rabbinical eyes were accursed.
Christ both declared the principle and acted upon the principle,
of the sacredness of each separate individual in the eyes of the
All-Father. Much of His time was given to the teaching of
individuals. He did not deal only with masses. Rather His
chief care was the individual training of the apostles.
Nor was the individual elevated as an isolated individual,
but organically, in his relation to the race. Racial differences
and national prejudices were ignored. Jew and Samaritan,
Syro-Phenician and Greek and Peraan, were all welcomed into
the kingdom of God. The Son of David was the Son of man.
Nations and kingdoms were to enter into a new nation, a
spiritual Israel, a catholic society. With the Zealots, who were
the representatives of extreme nationalism politically, as the
Pharisees were religiously, we do not find any trace of sympathy.
The de facto Roman Government was recognized as de jure.
The threefold inscription of scorn upon the Cross was one of
the unconscious prophecies of hate. The Gentiles were uni
formly regarded as unclean by all Jews, just as Englishmen by
Brahmans. Christ opened the door to the Gentiles during His
life, and commanded all nations to be baptized. All " hedges "
and disabilities He broke down.
The attitude of Jesus Christ towards women was the germ of
their whole after enfranchisement. " The Mishna deliberately
and constantly places women on a lower level than men, both
legally and socially." ' Jesus Christ treated the outcast
Samaritaness with respect, was ministered to in life by women
of their substance, and suffered His Body to be ministered to
by women in death. He was the personal friend and guest of
Mary and Martha. He had mercy and gentle words for the
penitent harlot. Above all, He was born of a woman. And to
His mother He rendered filial obedience for thirty years. His
dealing with women has already been touched upon and con
trasted with non-Christian practice.
Christ had sweet and gracious dealings with children. No
children found place, or have left any record if they did, in the
society of John the Baptist. Jesus loved them. He gave them
1 Bennett, p 67.

223 JESUS CHRIST.
the Rabbi's blessing and touch. He observed their games, and
drew illustrations of teaching from children playing in the
market-place. They followed Him to the greenswards of the
wilderness, and a little boy supplied the food of the five
thousand. The children cried, " Hosanna," in the Temple.
One child, unique in her history, He raised from the dead.
Tenderness to children was no new thing even for fallen human
nature. We see it in animals' affection for the young. Christ
transfigured and renewed all natural affection. His intense
desire for the spiritual regeneration and education of children
breathes in His burning words against any who should offend
one of these little ones ; and in His sweet revelation of their
angels. Just as in His lowliness He raised women and children to
new possibilities of honour in the future, and showed His
reverence and honour to the weak, so His life and character
revealed an every-day homeliness. His teaching was a living
thing for every day, a living spirit which would pour oil and
wine into the wounds of an injured man, which would forgive a
brother his trespasses, which would pray for daily bread, which
declared war with selfishness and covetousness in all shapes.
Consistency is another mark of Jesus' character and view of
life. We entirely fail to see any contradictions, or discords, or any
gradation of ideas, such as Renan has asserted but not proved.
There was progress in revelation of ideas according to maturity
of receptiveness, but no change in His own attitude or purpose.
The Father ; the Cross. These were the keywords from first to
last. Wherever He was, He was always the same — in different
places, societies, ethical sceneries, " the same soul, the same
doctrine, the same faith in God the Father, the same religion of
the love of God, of purity of heart, of renunciation of the earth,
of heavenly hopes." *
In the sphere of His spiritual creativeness Jesus added
new virtues, both in example and precept. Faith was the one
word which summed up the virtue of psalmists and prophets.
But faith received newer and higher meanings and applications,
and was submitted to severer strains. Jesus Himself showed
an uniform temper of faith in God ; from first to last He trusted
absolutely in His Father. When He committed His soul into
' E. Caro, " L'Idee de Dieu," chapitre iii.

CHRIST AS A MORAL- AND SPIRITUAL WORKER. 223
His hands, it was the last act in the whole life of surrender.
What He did He required, faith in God, faith in Himself.
This was a necessary presupposition. Faith entered upon a
new field. It formed the basis of all Christian life, the founda
tion of all morals. With faith, hope and love entered upon a
new history. But this subject would require a treatise to itself.
Let this remark suffice, faith, hope, and love, for Him and His
bare both Godward and manward. He trusted in God, He
knew man best of all, man's weakness, falseness, treachery, yet
trusted too in man. To man He committed His work, His
cause. He hoped in God, He hoped in man. He loved God,
He loved man. The so-called service of man began with His
life, His teaching, His death. He gave man a new interest
in his brother. Neighbour was but one example of a word
baptized into new meanings.
Humility, as has often been observed, was a newly created
virtue, born in Christ's example, and bred in His teaching.
" The characteristic of humility and submission," as Lotze * has
observed, " that is lacking even in the most mournful expres
sions of this sense of finiteness in antiquity, was brought for the
first time by Christianity into the heart of men, and with it hope
came too. It was a redemption for men to be able to tell them
selves that human strength is not sufficient for the accomplish
ment of its own ideals." Truthfulness, in life and speech, was
certainly enforced by Christ with new sanctions and guarantees.
" I am the Truth," He certified, and Christendom has not yet
got to the bottom of that statement. The Spirit of Truth He
promised to send to lead into all the truth.
A world of new religion began for the human body. Christ had
supreme respect for matter, and for the human body, as the
" roof and crown " of the material world. He showed it by His
healings, generally by bodily touch. He showed by His bodily
suffering and reverent burial Above all, He showed it by His
bodily resurrection. He showed it by His stress upon purity.
This stands in the sharpest contrast to ultra-asceticism which
treats the body as wholly evil, an idea so prevalent in Oriental
religions. The death-bed of the eminent Buddhist pilgrim,
Huian-Thsang, gives a striking example. " His friends are all
invited to assemble round his couch and take a joyous leave of
his 'impure and despicable body,' which, after having played its
1 " Microcosmus," Eng. *tansl., ii. p. 370.

224 JESUS CHRIST.
part, is lost to him for ever."' Hinduism, through all its
opposing forms of thought, agrees in one desire, the deliverance
from the body." Christ came to purify and redeem body as well
as soul, and to set both in an eternity of inseparable glory, where
His own body reigns. His body, He taught, was the Temple,
which destroyed in " three days would rise again." Such
teaching bore its fruit in St. Paul's dicta about the bodies of the
redeemed Christians being the temple of the Holy Spirit.
As in the redemption of the body, so in all ways, Jesus Christ
effected an alliance and a permanent reconciliation between
religion and morality. Contemporary religion consisted for the
most part in ceremonialism. Jesus purified the Temple of truffle.
The act was typical of His purification of all religion towards
God. He found a moral factor in all religion. He enshrined
forgiveness and brotherly love in the prayer of prayers. It is
needless to contrast here Hinduism with its immoral divinities,
its faith without works, its worshipper, who by offering up " an
animal duly consecrated by Agni, and by Soma, is therewith
able to buy off all deities at once ; " 3 as needless to contrast
Mohammedanism. Whether modern moral systems in declared
antagonism to Christianity, such as Comtism, non-Christian
forms of Socialism and the Service of Man, are more than
eclectic fragments, borrowing without acknowledgment from
Christianity, as when Comte, "finally getting his Positive
doctrine ' free of theological oppression and metaphysical
dryness, and condensing it into a maxim that shall hold it all,
alights, unconscious of their source, upon the words of Jesus,
' It is more blessed to give than to receive,'"4 whether such
systems are capable of transcending Christianity and super
seding it in the struggle for existence, is for the disciples of
such systems to prove.
The very intellectual enfranchisement which is enjoyed by
Christian and anti- Christian thinkers is a debt to Him who
offered stimulus to thought as well as to feeling, who
redeemed the intellect as well as the heart, whose after-course
through the world, so far as it is traceable in the workings
of Christians, has been a constant, steady progress towards
1 Hardwick, " Christ and other Masters," Religions of China, p. 344.
'Cf. Rev. E. G. Punchard, "Hinduism," Mission Life, Feb., 1880.
3Hardwick, " Christ and other Masters," p. 228.
* Prof. Martineau, " Types of Ethical Theory," i. p; 475.

CHRIST AS A MORAL AND SPIRITUAL WORKER. 22$
the enfranchisement of all right thinking, right speaking,
right doing, and the gradual overthrow of the legions of
error. The Christian who works from a basis of belief in the
guidance of the Spirit of truth, in individuals in less degree, in
collective Christianity in a greater degree, has a sure in
tellectual as well as moral standing ground ; whereas the non-
Christian has only some man or system of thought to fall back
upon, who, or which, must, in the invariable experience of the
past, give way to new men and new systems.
Jesus would not have been true man if He had not shown
a spirit of prayer. Prayer is the life breath of the Christian,
and cannot have been less to the Son of man. The Divine in
dwelling did not exempt Him from the natural language of man
conscious of God. Times of especial prayer were times of
especial human need and signal work, times also of extraordinary
Divine manifestation. It was while He prayed at the Baptism
that the Holy Spirit descended ; after a night of prayer that
the Twelve Apostles were chosen ; in prayer that He was
transfigured; in the Gethsemane prayer that an angel comforted
Him. It was the sight apparently of Jesus in prayer that
prompted the prayer to be taught a form of prayer. At
times He would give thanks before what He asked for to
human eyes came to pass. " His prayer was the middle point
of His activity, the holy altar upon which He ever consecrates
and offers anew His humanity to God, and this is always in turn
penetrated and illumined by the Divine."1
The most remarkable of all Christ's moral characteristics was
His absence of any sense of sin, or moral shortcoming. Unlike
any other moral teacher, He never expressed any moral regrets.
He never, like the best of Israel's sons, a Moses, a David, a
Nehemiah, a Daniel, bowed Himself in penitential confession.
He not only knew His own sinlessness, but He asserted it ;
asserted it as a necessary factor in His self-revelation, self-
vindication, self-evidence, challenging His enemies to con
vince Him of sin. And the question still rings from His
lips. And the adoring hearts and bowed heads, and
triumphant hopes of millions of Christians, past and present,
in life, and in death, in prayer and in working, whether they
eat or drink, whether they sleep or wake, or whatever they
* Dorner, " System of Christian Doctrine,'' iii. p. 370.
16

226 JESUS CHRIST.
do, bend before Him in His moral innocence, His spiritual
strength, His inexhaustible love, His omnipresent energy, as
still and for ever true Son of man and Son of God, as the
centre and spring of their life in this world and their hope in
the world to come.

m urn

A SELECTION FROM
Fleming H. Revell Company's

New York ; 112 Fifth Avenue
Chicago : 63 Washington Street
Toronto : 140 & 142 Yonge street

CATALOGUE

/?ev. Alfred Edersheim, Ph.D.

Pre-eminently suggestive books. They excite interest, they
stimulate inquiry, and they point the way to fields of thought thai
are entirely new, or to old fields that shine in new richness and
beauty from the light that is thrown upon them.

Bible History. 7 volumes, i2mo, cloth, each  $1.00
The set, boxed  6.00
s The World Before the Flood, and History of the Patriarchs
1 The Exodus and Wanderings in the Wilderness.
% Israel in Canaan under Joshua and the Judges.
4 Israel under Samuel, Saul, and David, to the Birth of
Solomon.
5 Israel and Judah from the Birth of Solomon to the Reign
of Ahab.
6 Israel and Judah from Ahab to the Decline of the Two
Kingdoms.
1 Israel and Judah from the Decline of the Two Kingdoms
to the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivity. Containing
FuU Scripture References and Subject Indexes to the
Whole Series.
" There is no doubt that this author was qualified in a very
remarkable way_ to prepare such a history as this. . . . Dr.
Edersheim's intimate familiarity with Jewish life and modes of
thought, and his ability to say so well what he knows, enable
him to paint with great vividness and distinctness the scenes he
describes and the events which he narrates. . . We heartily
recommend it to our readers." — The Presbyterian.
*' In the easiest, simplest way imaginable, in unostentatious,
popular language, he embodies the results of a large literature."
— The. Clergyman 5 Magazine.
The Temple: Its Ministry and Services at the Time of
Jesus Christ. i2mo, cloth  1.25
" The author knows the varied topics he discusses bettet
than most scholars in England. There are few who will not
Searn from a volume which has the results, with little cf the
¦ihowof learning."— The A thenaum.
Sketches of Jewish Lite, in Illustration of the New
Testament. i2mo, cloth  1.25

Prof. A. H. Sayce, M.A., LL.D.
"The works of Professor Sayce are distinguished for originality
of conception and freshness in the handling of their themes. Th*
high respect of this English scholar for the Bible, and the influence
of his believing disposition on aU his writings, renders hie
researches especially acceptable and useful to every student of the
Bible."— Ths Sunday School Times.

Social Life Among the Assyrians and Babylonians.
By-Paths of Bible Knowledge. i2mo, cloth  $1.00
"This volume is packed with information concerning the
lives, occupations, industries, experiences, etc., of the people,
the region lying between die Tigris and the Euphrates in
earliest times. The author is an authority in his line."— Public
Opinion.
Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments. A
Sketch of the most striking Confirmations of the Bible from
recent discoveries in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Palestine
and Asia Minor. By-Paths of Bible Knowledge. With
fac-similes from photographs. i2mo, cloth  i .20
The Hittites; or, The Story of a Forgotten Empire. By-
Paths of Bible Knowledge. Illustrated, umo, cloth. 1.00
Races of the Old Testament. By-Paths of Bible
Knowledge. Illustrations from Photographs by Mr.
Flinders Petrie. i2mo, cloth  1 .20
" It comes very near the ideal of what such a book should
be. It is brief, but covers the ground of a complex subject.
The author's treatment of the Bible and its evidence is a model
both from the scientific and the religious point of view."— The
Independent.
Assyria: its Princes, Priests and People. By-Paths of
Bible Knowledge. Fully illustrated. i2mo, cloth.. 1.20
The Times of Isaiah, as Illustrated from Contemporary
Monuments. By-Paths of Bible Knowledge. i2mo,
cloth  80
Fresh Light on Biblical Races. 6 volumes in box,
umo, cloth, bound uniformly  6.00
*#* Comprises the six volumes named above.
" One of the most successful of the recent investigators oJ
the remains of ancient nations is the eminent English philologist
and ethnologist. Professor A. H. Sayce. * * * In these days
of general Bible study just such condensed reports of scholarly
investigation as are contained in these small books are eagrly
read by many people who do not have either the time or money
to spend on larger and more detailed accounts."— The Christian
Advocate, (N. V.) „ .....
Introduction to the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah,
and Esther. i2mo, cloth  «-o©

Biographies.

The Life of Catherine Booth, the Mother of the Salvation Army.
By F. de L. Booth-Tucker. With ig full-page plates and many
other illustrations. 2 vols., 1340 pages, royal 8vo, cloth,
boxed  net, $3.50
"This excellent woman did more to save erring souls than
any other person in this century." — The New York Times.
A Memoir of Adolpb Sapblr, D. D. By Rev. Gavin Carlyle,
M.A. With photogravure portrait. Large 8vo, cloth, gilt
top  „ . . «  2. 25
"The volume is very interesting, and by it, being dead,
Dr. Saphir will speak for the highest and noblest conceptions of
the work of the ministry.'' — The Christian Inquirer.
The Bells of Is; or, Voices of Human Need and Sorrow. Echoes
from my early pastorates. By Rev. F. B. Meyer, B.A. 12010,
cloth  75
" It is inspiring to read these accounts related in Mr. Meyer's
inimitable style, and infused with a spirit of such abounding
faith and trust.'' — Christian Work.
The Chronicles of the Sid; or, The Life and Travels of Adelia
Gates. By Adela E. Orpen. With many illustrations. 8vo,
cloth  1.50
"A refreshingly cheerful book. . . . A woman ot origi
nal and interesting character."— The Outlook.
Charles H. Spurgeon. Second Edition. By Rev. J, J. Ellis, a
graduate of the Pastor's College. With portrait. 121110, cloth, 1.00
41 This is a very entertaining biography of the great London
preacher and makes very delightful reading." — The N. V.
Observer.
John Wesley. By Rev. J. J. Ellis. With portrait. i2mo,
cloth  „ . . . .  1 .00
" Well written, and shows a just appreciation on the part 0/
the author of the genius of the great spiritual reformer."— The
Methodist Recorder.
Memoir and Remains of Rev. Robert Murray M* Cheyne. By
Andrew A. Bonar, D.D. i2mo, cloth  1.50
Nineteen Beautiful Years; or. Sketches of a Girl's Life. By
Frances E. Willard. With preface by John G. Whittier, and
portrait. New and Revised Edition, iamo, cloth  75
Wary Mortimer, A True Teacher. A memoir. By Minerva Brace
Norton. With portrait. 8vo, cloth  net, 1.50
Eliza Cbappell Porter. A memoir. By Mary H. Porter. 8vo,
cloth  net, 1.75
Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Founders Day Address, Hamp
ton Institute, 1894. By Robert C. Ogden. 12010, half-cloth, .35
" In the death of Gen. Armstrong the negro race lost a faith
ful friend, and Christianity one of its best exemplars." — The
Philadelphia Call.
''World's Benefactors" Series. Lives of Livingstone, Spur
geon, Stanley, Nightingale, Wycliffe and Luther, Faraday, and
Gladstone, 7 vols., illustrated- 12010. cloth, each  ¦ .75
*** See also Missions and Missionary Biographies.

;