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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

THE TEACHING OF JESUS

WORKS BY GEORGE JACKSON, B.A.
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
One Vol. Crown Zvo, cloth, net $1.25
This new volume will have increased interest in view of
Mr. Jackson's recent visit when he' added to the already
widespread fame of his work in Edinburgh.
Mr. Jackson states his message seriously and simply and
with the glow that comes of personal conviction.

THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS
AND OTHER ADDRESSES
Fifth Thousand. Crown ivo, cloth. $1.25

A YOUNG MAN'S RELIGION
Fourth Thousand. Crown Svo, cloth. $1.25

THE OLD METHODISM AND THE
NEW
Fcap. Svo, cloth. 50 cents

THE
TEACHING OF JESUS

BY THE

REV. GEORGE JACKSON, B.A.
Author of "A Young Man's Religion," etc.

"Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of
Christ, hath not God : he that abideth in the teaching* the same
hath both the Father and the Son.s'—z John ix (R. V.).

NEW YORK
A.C.ARMSTRONG AND SON
3 & 5 West i8'*> Street, near 5th Avenue
I9°3

Copyright, 1903
By A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON

Published, November, 1903

TO
MY CHILDREN
DORA, KENNETH, ,BASIL, ARNOLD
MY WISEST TEACHERS
IN THE THINGS OF GOD

PREFACE
The following chapters are the outcome of an
attempt to set before a large Sunday evening
congregation — composed for the most part of
working men and women — the teaching of our
Lord on certain great selected themes. The
reader will know, therefore, what to look for in
these pages. If he be a trained Biblical scholar
he need go no further, for he will find nothing
here with which he is not already thoroughly
familiar. On the other hand, the book will not
be wholly without value even to some of my
brother-ministers if it serve to convince them
that a man may preach freely on the greatest
themes of the gospel, and yet be sure that the
common people will hear him gladly, if only
he will state his message at once seriously and
simply, and with the glow that comes of per
sonal conviction. Indeed, one may well
doubt if there is any other kind of preaching
that they really care for.
My indebtedness to other workers in the
same field is manifold. As far as possible de
tailed acknowledgment is made in the foot
notes. Wendt's Teaching of Jesus and Bey-
schlag's New Testament Theology have been
always at my elbow, though not nearly in such

The Teaching of Jesus

continual use as Stevens' Theology of the New
Testament, a work of which it is impossible to
speak too highly. Bruce's Kingdom of God,
Stalker's Christology of Jesus, Harnack's What
is Christianity ? Horton's Teaching of Jesus,
Watson's Mind of the Master, Selby's Ministry
of the Lord Jesus, and Robertson's Our Lord's
Teaching (a truly marvellous sixpenny worth),
have all been laid under contribution, not the
less freely because I have been compelled to
dissent from some of their conclusions. Like
many another busy minister, I am a daily
debtor to Dr. Hastings and his great Diction
ary of the Bible. And, finally, I gladly avail
myself of this opportunity of expressing once
more my unceasing obligations to the Rev.
Professor James Denney, of Glasgow. Now
that Dr. Dale has gone from us, there is no
one to whom we may more confidently look
for a reasonable evangelical theology which
can be both verified and preached.
It only remains to add that in these pages
critical questions are for the most part ignored,
not because the pressure of the problems which
they create is unfelt, but because as yet they
have no place among the certainties which are
the sole business of the preacher when he
passes from his study to his pulpit.
GEORGE JACKSON.
Edinburgh, 1903.

CONTENTS

i
PAGE
Introductory  . i
iLufcexxiv. 19.
" A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people."
3nfjn Hi. 2.
"A teacher come from God."
II
Concerning God  . 17
afofinxvii. 11.
" Holy Father."
Ill
Concerning Himself  33
iWattijefo xvi. 15.
" Who say ye that I ami"
IV
Concerning His own Death . , . . 49
ifflarft x. 45.
" The Son of Man came . . . to give His life a ransom for
many. "
ix

x The Teaching of Jesus

V PAGE
Concerning the Holy Spirit  65
Sofjnxiv. 16.
' ' / will pray the Father, and He shall give you another
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit
of truth." 3of)n xvi. 7.
"// is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away ,
the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I go away, I
will send Him unto you.J' VI
Concerning the Kingdom of God .... 81
fflflattjjcb vi. 10.
" Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earlh.^ VII
Concerning Man  97
ILufet xv. 10.
" There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth. "
VIII
Concerning Sin . . . . . . . .111
ILuftc xi. 2, 4.
" When ye pray, say. . . . Forgive us our sins."
IX
Concerning Righteousness  127
ffiattfycfo vi. 33.
"Seek ye first . . . His righteousness.'

Contents

Concerning Prayer  145
i!flBttf)rf» vii. 9-1 1.
" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for
a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if he shall ask for a fish,
will give him a serpent ? If ye then, being evil, know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall
your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that
ask Him ? "
XI
Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries . . .161
URattijrfn xviii. 21, 22.
" Then came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him ? until seven
times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until
seven times ; but, until seventy times seven. "

XII
Concerning Care  177
fMattfjefo vi. 25, 31, 34.
"Be not anxious for your life . . . nor yet for your body.
. . . Be not anxious, saying. What shall we eat ? or, What
shall we drink ? . . . Be not anxious for the morrow. "
XIII
Concerning Money  191
ILuftt xviii. 24, 25.
" How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the king
dom of God! For it is easier for a camel to enter in through
a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
of God."

xii The Teaching of Jesus

XIV PAGE
Concerning the Second Advent . . • • 207
fEKattfjefo xxiv. 30, 36.
" They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of
heaven with power and great glory. . . . Of that day and
hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither
the Son, but the Father only.''

XV
Concerning the Judgment ...... 223
JHattfjeio xxv. 31-33.
" When the Sori of Man shall come in His glory, and all the
angels with Him, tjien shall He sit on the throne of His
glory : and before Him shall be gat lured all the nations : and
He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd
separateth the sheep from the goats : and He shall set the
sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left."
XVI
Concerning the Future Life  239
fHattfjefa vi. 20.
" Where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where
thieves do not break through nor steal. "
Mstk ix. 48.
" Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.'

INTRODUCTORY

"O Lord and Master of us all !
Whate'er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.
We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray ;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
The Light, the Truth, the Way." Whittier.

INTRODUCTORY
"A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people."-, — ¦
Luke xxiv. 19.
"A teacher come from God." — John iii. 2.
IN speaking of the teaching of Jesus it is
scarcely possible at the present day to avoid
at least a reference to two other closely-related
topics, viz. the relation of Christ's teaching to the
rest of the New Testament, and the trustworthi
ness of the Gospels in which that teaching is
recorded. Adequate discussion of either of these
questions here and now is not possible ; it must
suffice to indicate very briefly the direction in
which, as it appears to the writer, the truth may
be found.
First, then, as to the relation of the teaching
of Jesus to the rest of the New Testament, and
especially to the Epistles of St. Paul. There can
be no doubt, largely, I suppose, through the
influence of the Reformers, that the words of
Jesus have not always received the attention that
has been given to the writings of Paul. Nor is
3

T-he Teaching of Jesus

this apparent misplacing of the accent the wholly
unreasonable thing which at first sight it may
seem. After all, the most important thing in the
New Testament — that which saves — is not any
thing that Jesus said, but what He did; not His
teaching, but His death. This, the Gospels
themselves being witness, is the culmination and
crown of Revelation; and it is this which, in the
Epistles, and pre-eminently the Epistles of Paul,
fills s6 large a place. Moreover, it ought plainly
to be said that the Church has never been guilty
of ignoring the words of her Lord in the whole
sale fashion suggested by some popular religious
writers of our day. Really, the Gospels are not
a discovery of yesterday, nor even of the day
before yesterday. They have been in the hands
of the Church from the beginning, and, though
she has not always valued them according to
their true and priceless worth, she has never failed
to number them with the choicest jewels in the
casket of Holy Scripture. Nevertheless, it may
be freely granted that the teaching of Jesus has
not always received its due at the Church's hands.
"Theology," one orthodox and Evangelical divine
justly complains, "has done no sort of justice to
the Ethics of Jesus." * But in our endeavour to
rectify one error on the one side, let us see to it
that we do not stumble into another and worse
on the other side. The doctrines of Paul are
not so much theological baggage, of which the
1 J. Stalker, The Christology of Jesus, p. 23, footnote.

Introductory

Church would do well straightway to disencumber
itself. After all that the young science of Biblical'
Theology has done to reveal the manifold variety
of New Testament doctrine, the book still remains
a unity; and the attempt to play off one part of
it against another — the' Gospels against the
Epistles, or the Epistles against the Gospels — is
to be sternly resented and resisted. To St. Paul
himself any such rivalry would have been im
possible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was
no claim which he made with more passionate
vehemence than that the message which he
delivered was not his, but Christ's. "As touching
the gospel which was preached by me," he says,
"neither did I receive it from man, nor was I
taught it, but it came to me through revelation of
Jesus Christ." The Spirit who spoke through
him and his brother apostles was not an alien
spirit, but the Spirit of Christ, given according to
the promise of Christ, to make known the things
of Christ; so that there is a very true sense in
which their words may be called "the final testi
mony of Jesus to Himself." "We have the mind of
Christ," Paul said, and both in the Epistles and the
Gospels we may seek and find -the teaching of Jesus.1
1 " The sources for our knowledge of the actual teaching o£
Jesus do not lie merely in the Gospel accounts, but also in the
literature of the apostolic age, especially in the Epistles of
Paul. . . . Even had no direct accounts about Jesus been
handed down to us, we should still possess, in the apostohc
literature, a perfectly valid testimony to the historical exist
ence and epoch-making significance of Jesus as a teacher." —
H. H. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i, p. 28.

The Teaching of Jesus

It is, however, with the teaching of Jesus as
it .is recorded in the Gospels that, in these
chapters, we are mainly concerned. We come,
therefore to our second question: Can we trust
the Four Gospels? And this question must be
answered in even fewer words than were given
to the last. As to the external evidence, let us
hear the judgment of the great German scholar,
Harnack. Harnack is a critic who is ready to
give to the winds with both hands many things
which are clear to us as life itself; yet this is how
he writes in one of his most recent works : " Sixty
years ago David Friedrich Strauss thought that
he had almost entirely dertroyed the historical
credibility, not only of the fourth, but also of the
first three Gospels as well. The historical criti
cism of two generations has succeeded in restoring
that credibility in its main outlines." * When,
from the external, we turn to the internal evidence,
we are on incontestable ground. The words of Jesus
need no credentials, they carry their own creden
tials ; they authenticate themselves. Christian
men and women reading, e.g., the fourteenth of St.
John's Gospel say within themselves that if these
are not the words of Jesus, a greater than Jesus
is here ; and they are right. The oft-quoted
challenge of John Stuart Mill is as unanswerable
to-day as ever it was. "It is of no use to say,"
he declares, "that Christ, as exhibited in the
Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not

1 What is Christianity? p. Se.

Introductory

how much of what is admirable has been super
added by the traditions of His followers. ...
Who among His disciples, or among their prose
lytes, was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed
to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character
revealed in the Gospels?"1

Assuming, therefore, without further discussion,
the essential trustworthiness of the Gospel records,
let us pass on to consider in this introductory
chapter some general characteristics of Christ's
teaching as a whole.
Mark at the outset Christ's own estimate of
His words: "The words that I have spoken unto
you are spirit, and are life;" "If a man keep My
word he shall never see death;" "Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but My words shall not
pass away;" ".Every one which heareth these
words of Mine and doeth them " — with him Christ
said it should be well ; but " every one that
heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not "
— upon him ruin should come to the uttermost.
Sayings like these are very remarkable, for this is
not the way in which human teachers are wont to
speak of their own words ; or, if they do so speak,
this wise world of ours knows better than to take
them at their own valuation. But the astonishing
fact in the case of Jesus is that the world has
1 Three Essays on Religion, p. 253.

The Teaching of Jesus

admitted His claim. Men who refuse utterly to
share our faith concerning Him and the significance
of His life and death, readily give to Him a. place
apart among the great teachers of mankind. I
have already quoted the judgment of John Stuart
Mill. "Jesus," says Matthew Arnold, "as He
appears in the Gospels ... is in the jargon of
modern philosophy an absolute " * — we cannot
get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the verdict of
Goethe : " Let intellectual and spiritual culture
progress, and the human mind expand, as much
as it will ; beyond the grandeur and the moral
eleyation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines
in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance." a
It would be easy to multiply testimonies, but it is
needless, since practically all whose judgment is
of any account are of one mind.
But now if, with these facts in our minds,
and knowing nothing else about the teaching of
Jesus, we could suppose ourselves turning for the
first time to the simple record of the Gospels,
probably our first feeling would be one of surprise
that Jesus the Teacher had won for Himself such
an ascendency over the minds and hearts of men.
For consider some of the facts which the Gospels
reveal to us. To begin with, this Teacher, un
like most other teachers who have influenced
mankind, contented Himself from first to last
with merely oral instruction: He left no book;
1 Literature and Dogma, p. 10.
2 See Harnack's What is- Christianity? p. 4.

Introductory g

He never wrote, save in the dust of the ground.
Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have
been preserved by the evangelists are, com
paratively speaking, extremely few. Put them
all together, they are less by one-half or two-
thirds than the words which it will be necessary
for me to use in order to set forth His teaching
in this little book. And further, the little we
have is, for the most part, so casual, so un
premeditated, so unsystematic in its character.
Once and again, it is true, we get from the
Evangelists something approaching what may
be called a set discourse ; but more often what
they give us is reports of conversations —
conversations with His disciples, with chance
acquaintances, or with His enemies. Sometimes
we find Him speaking in the synagogues; but
He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the
dinner-table; and, best of all, He loved to speak
in the open air, by the wayside, or the lake shore.
Once, as He stood by the lake of Gennesaret,
the multitude was so great that it pressed upon
Him. Near at hand were two little fishing-boats
drawn up upon the beach, for the fishermen had
gone out of them, and were washing their nets.
" And He entered into one of the boats, which
was Simon's, and asj<ed him to put out a little
from the land. And He sat down and taught
the multitudes out of the boat." It is all so
different from what we should have expected;
there is about it such, an air of artless, homely

10 The Teaching of Jesus
simplicity. Finally, we cannot forget that Jesus
was a Jew speaking to Jews. Son of God
though He was, He was the son of a Jewish
mother, trained in a Jewish home, in all things
the child of His own time and race. Whatever
else His message may have been, it was, first of all,
a message to the men of His own day; therefore,
of necessity, it was their language He used,
it was to their needs He ministered, it was their
sins He condemned. The mould, the tone, the
colouring of His teaching were all largely deter
mined by the life of His country and His time.
Yet this is He concerning whom all ages cry-
aloud, " Never man spake like this man." This
is He before whom the greatest and the wisest
bow down, saying, " Lord " and " Master." How
are we to explain it? Much of the explanation
lies outside of the scope of our present subject ; but
if we will turn back to the Gospels again we may
find at least a partial answer to our question.
II
(i) I said just now that Christ's teaching
was addressed in the first place to the Jews of
His own day. Yet the note of universality is
as unmistakable as are the local tone and
colouring. Christ may speak as the moment
suggests, but His words are never for the moment
only, but for all time. He refused almost sternly
to go unto any save unto the lost sheep of the

Introductory 1 1

house ef Israel ; yet the Gospels make it
abundantly plain that in His own thoughts His
mission was never limited to the tiny stage
within which, during His earthly years, He
confined Himself. " I am the light of the
world," He said ; and in His last great com
mission to His disciples He bade them carry
that light unto the uttermost parts of the earth.
In the great High-Priestly prayer He intercedes
not only for His disciples, but for those who
through their word should believe on Him. " I
will build My church," He declared, " and the
gates of Hades shall not prevail against it."
(2) So, again, too, in regard to the form of
Christ's sayings ; to speak of their artlessness
and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part
of the truth concerning them. They are, indeed.
and especially those spoken in Galilee, and
reported for the most part in the Synoptists,
the perfection of popular speech. How the
short, pithy, sententious sayings cling to the
memory like burs ! Let almost any of them
be commenced, and as Dr. Stalker says, the
ordinary hearer can- without difficulty finish the
sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox.
When, e.g., He said, " Whosoever smiteth thee
on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,"
He was ready to risk the possibility of being
misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that He
might the more effectually arouse men to a
neglected duty. His language was concrete, not

12 The Teaching of Jesus
abstract; He taught by example and illustra
tion; He thought, and taught others to think,
in pictures. How often is the phrase, " The
kingdom of heaven is like unto  " on His lips !
Moreover, His illustrations were always such as
common folk could best appreciate. The birds
of the air, the lilies of the field, the lamp on the
lamp-stand, the hen with her chickens under her
wings, the servant following the plough, the
shepherd tending his sheep, the fisherman drawing
his net, the sower casting his seed into the furrow,
the housewife baking her bread or sweeping her
house, — it was through panes of common window-
glass like these that Christ let in the light upon
the heaped-up treasures of the kingdom of God.
No wonder " the common people heard Him
gladly" ; no wonder they " all hung upon Him
listening" ; or that they " came early in the
morning to Him in the temple to hear Him" !
Yet, even in the eyes of the multitude the plain
homespun of Christ's speech was shot with gleams
of more than earthly lustre. There mingled — to
use another figure — with the sweet music of
those simple sayings a new deep note their ears
had never heard before : " the multitudes were
astonished at His teaching; for He taught them
as one having authority, and not as their scribes."
It was not the authority of powerful reasoning
over the intellect, reasoning which we cannot
choose but obey ; it was the authority of perfect
spiritual intuition. Christ never speaks as one

Introductory 13

giving the results of long and painful gropings
after truth, but rather as one who is at home in
the world to which God and the things of the
spirit belong. He asserts that which He knows,
He declares that which He has seen.
(3) Another quality of Christ's words which
helps us to understand their world-wide influence
is their winnowedness, their freedom from the chaff
which, in the words of others, mingles with the
wholesome grain. The attempt is sometimes made
to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim for.
Christ as the supreme teacher by placing a few
selected sayings of His side by side with the words
of some other ancient thinker or teacher. And
if they who make such comparisons would put into
their parallel columns all the words of Jesus and
all the words of those with whom the comparison
is made, we should have neither right to complain
nor reason to fear. Wellhausen puts the truth
very neatly when he says, " The Jewish scholars
say, ' All that Jesus said is also to be found . in
the Talmud.' Yes, all, and a great deal besides." '
The late Professor G. J. Romanes has pointed out
the contrast in two respects between Christ and
Plato. He speaks of Plato as " the greatest re
presentative of human reason in the direction of
spirituality" ; yet he says " Plato is nowhere in
this respect as_ compared with Christ." While in
Plato there are errors of all kinds, " reaching even
to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings
v * See A. S. Peake's Guide to Biblical Study, p. 244.

14 The Teaching of Jesus
shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares,
in literal truth no reason why any of Christ's
words should ever pass away in the sense of be
coming obsolete. And it is this absence from the
biography of Christ of any doctrines which the
subsequent growth of human knowledge — whether
in natural science, ethics, political economy, or
elsewhere — has had to discount which seems to
him one of the strongest arguments in favour of
Christianity.1. (4) One other quality of Christ's words, which
specially caught the' attention of His hearers in
the synagogue at Nazareth, should not be over
looked : " All bare Him witness, and wondered at
the words of grace which proceeded out of His
mouth." The reference is, as Dr. Bruce says, '
rather to the substance of the discourse than to the
manner. That there was a peculiar charm in the
Teacher's manner is undoubted, but it was what
He said, rather than the way in which He said it
— the message of grace, rather than the gracious
ness of the Messenger — which caused the eyes of
all in the synagogue to be fastened on Him. He
had just read the great passage from the Book of
the prophet Isaiah:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the
poor.
He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
1 Thoughts on Religion, p. 157.
' The Kingdom of God, p. 50.

Introductory 1 5

And recovery of sight to the blind,
To jet at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
Then, when the reading was finished, and He had
given back the roll to the attendant, and was sat
down, He began to say unto them, " To-day hath
this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears." This
was His own programme; this was what He had
come into the world to do — to bear the burden of
1
the weary and the heavy-laden, to give rest unto
all who would learn of Him.
This, then, is the Teacher whose words we are
to study together in these pages. He Himself is
saying to us again, " He that hath ears to hear let
him hear." See that ye refuse not Him that
speaketh. And again He says, " Take heed how
ye hear." Gracious as He is, this Teacher can be
also very stern. " If any man," He says, " hear
My sayings and keep them not, I judge him
not. . . . He that receiveth not My sayings
hath one that judgeth him ; the word that I
speak, the same shall judge him in the last day."
We read of some to whom "good tidings " were
preached, whom the word did not profit. Let us
pray that to writer and readers alike it may prove
the word of eternal life.

CONCERNING GOD

17

"Our Father, who art in Heaven. What meaneth these words?
God lovingly inviteth us, in this little preface, truly to be
lieve in Him, that He is our true Father, and that we are truly
His children ; so that full of confidence we may more boldly
call upon His name, even as we see children with a kind
of confidence ask anything of their parents." — Luther's
Catechism.

18

II
CONCERNING GOD
"Holy Father," — John xvii. n.
IT is natural and fitting in an attempt to under
stand the teaching of Jesus that we should
begin with His doctrine of God. For a man's
idea of God is fundamental, regulative of all his
religious thinking. As is his God, so will his
religion be. Given the arc we can complete the
circle ; given a man's conception of God, from
that we can construct the main outlines of his
creed. What, then, was the teaching of Jesus
concerning God?

In harmony with what has been already
said in the previous chapter, concerning Christ's
manner and method as a teacher, we shall find
little or nothing defined, formal, systematic in
Christ's teaching on this subject. In those theo
logical handbooks which piloted some of us
through the troublous waters of our early theo
logical thinking, one chapter is always occupied
19

20 The Teaching of Jesus
with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the exist
ence of God, and another with a discussion of
what are termed the Divine " attributes." And
for the purposes of a theological handbook doubt
less this is the right course to take. But this
was not Christ's way. Search the four Gospels
through, and probably not one verse can be found
which by itself would serve as a suitable definition
for any religious catechism or theological text
book. Christ, we must remember, did not, in
His teaching, begin de novo. He never forgot
that He was speaking to a people whose were
the law and the prophets and the fathers;
throughout He assumed and built upon the
accepted truths of Old Testament revelation.
To have addressed elaborate arguments in proof
of the existence of God to the Jews would have
been a mere waste of words; for that faith was
the very foundation of their national life. Nor
did Christ speak about the "attributes" of God.
Again that was not His way. He chose to
speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract,
and, therefore, instead of defining God, He shows
us how He acts. In parable, in story, and in
His own life He sets God before us, that so
we may learn what He is, and how He feels
toward us.
Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the
Old Testament. To understand, therefore, the
true significance of His teaching about God, we
must first of all put ourselves at the point of view

Concerning God 21
of a devout Jew of His day, and see how, far he
had been brought by that earlier revelation which
Christ took up and carried to completion. What,
then, did the Jews know of God before Christ
came? They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign:
" Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God."
It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn. Cen
turies had passed before the nation had been
purged of its idolatries. But the cleansing fires
had done their work at last, and perhaps the
world has never seen sterner monotheists than
were the Pharisees of the time of Christ.1 And
He whom thus they worshipped as Sovereign
they knew also to be holy : " The Holy One of
Israel," "exalted in righteousness." True, Phari
saism had degraded the lofty conceptions of the
great Hebrew prophets ; it had taught men to
think of God as caring more for the tithing
of mint, and anise, and cummin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy,
and faith, making morality merely an affair of
ceremonies, instead of the concern of the heart
and the Hfe. But, however Jewish teachers
might blind themselves and deceive their disciples,
the Jewish Scriptures still remained to testify of
God and righteousness, and of the claims which
1 " Christian apologists," says Dr. Sanday, "have often done
scant justice to the intensity of this [monotheistic] faith, which
was utterly disinterested and capable of magnificent self-sacri
fice." — Art. "God," Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, vol. ii,
p. 205.

22 The Teaching of Jesus
a righteous God makes upon His people : " Wash
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your
.doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil;
learn to do well." Nor, accustomed though we
are to think of the God of the Old Testament as
stern rather than kind, were the tenderer elements
wanting from the Jewish conception of Deity.
Illustration is not now possible, but a very little
thought will remind us that it is to the Hebrew
psalmists and prophets that we owe some of the
most gracious and tender imagery of the Divine
love with which the language of devotion has ever
been enriched.
Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice
to a faith which has not always received its due,
even at Christian hands, it is impossible for us,
looking back from our loftier vantage-ground, to
ignore its serious defects and limitations. It was
an exclusive faith. It magnified the privileges
of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God
might be a Father to Israel, but to no other
nation under heaven did He stand in any such
relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize
the barriers which the pride of race had set up
which more than anything else brought Him into
conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And
when once from the mind and heart of the Early
Church the irrevocable word had gone forth,
" God is no respecter of persons ; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteous
ness, is acceptable to Him," the' final breach was

Concerning God 23

made; no longer could the new faith live with
the old. And even within the privileged circle
of Judaism itself men's best thoughts of God and
of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not
of the individual. Here and there elect souls like
the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man
holds fellowship with God, and . spake with Him
face to face, as a man with his friend. But with
the people as a whole, even as with their greatest
prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was
the religious unit.
Such was the Old Testament idea of God.
Now let us return to the teaching of Jesus. And
at once we discover that Christ let go nothing
of that earlier doctrine which was of real and
abiding worth. The God of Jesus Christ is as
holy, as sovereign — or, to use the modern term —
as transcendent as the God of the psalmists and
the prophets. Their favourite name for God was
" King," and Christ spake much of the " kingdom
of God." To them God's people were His
servants, owing to Him allegiance and service
to the uttermost ; we also, Christ says, are the
servants of God, to every one of whom He has
appointed his task, and with whom one day He
will make a reckoning. But if nothing is lost,
how much is gained! It is not merely that in
Christ's teaching we have the Old Testament
of God over again with a plus, the new which
is added has so transformed and transfigured

24 The Teaching of Jesus
the old that all is become new. To Jesus
Christ, and to us through Him, God is " the
Father." It is, of course, well known that Christ was
not the first to apply this name to God. There
is no religion, says Max Miiller,1 which is sufficiently
recorded to be understood that does not, in some
sense or other, apply the term Father to its Deity.
Yet this need not concern us, for though the name
be the same the meaning is wholly different.
There is no true comparison even between the
occasional use of the word in the Old Testament
and its use by Christ. For, though in the Old
Testament God is spoken of as the Father of
Israel, it is as the Father of the nation, not of the
individual, and of that nation only. Even in a
great saying like that of the Psalmist :
"Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him,"
it is still only Israel that the writer has in view,
though we rightly give to the words a wider
application. But there is no need of argument.
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that
its central, ruling idea of God is not Fatherhood,
but Kingship : " The Lord reigneth." Even in
the Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and
worship of the ages before Christ find their finest
and noblest expression, never once is God ad
dressed as Father. But when we turn to the
1 See R. F. Horton's Teaching of Jesus, p. 59.

Concerning God 25

Gospels, how great is the contrast! Though not
even a single psalmist dare look up and say,
" Father," in St. Matthew's Gospel alone the name
is used of God more than forty times. Fatherhood
now is no longer one attribute among many; it is
the central, determining idea in whose revealing
light all other names of God— Creator, Sovereign,
Judge — must be read and interpreted. And the
God of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race
only, but of mankind ; not of mankind only, but
of men. II
It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel
which Christ proclaimed — so great and wonder
ful that all our poor words tremble and sink
down under the weight of the truth they vainly
seek to express. By what means has Christ
put us into possession of such a truth? How
have we come to the full assurance of faith
concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two
ways: by His teaching and by His life; by what
He said and by what He did. _And once more a
paragraph must perforce do, as best it can, the
work of an essay.
To the ear and heart of Christ all nature
spoke of the love and care of God. " Behold the
birds of the heaven," He said ; " they sow not,
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and
your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye
of much more value than they ? " And again He

26 The Teaching of Jesus
said, " Consider the lilies of the field " — not the
pale, delicate blossom we know so well, but " the
scarlet martagon " which " decks herself in red and
gold to meet the step of summer " — " Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil
not, neither do they spin ; yet I say unto you
that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not-
arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so
clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and
to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not
much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Or,
He bade men look into their own hearts and learn.
"God's possible is taught by His world's loving;"
from what is best within ourselves we may learn
what God Himself is like. Once Christ spoke to
shepherds: " What man of you, having a hundred
sheep, and having lost one of them" — how the
faces in the little crowd would light up, and their
ears drink in the gracious argument ! You care
for your sheep, but how much better is a man
than a sheep? If you would do so much for
them, will God do less for you? And once the
word went deeper still, as He spoke to fathers :
" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall
ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if
he shall ask for a fish will give him a serpent?
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more shall
your Father which is in heaven give good things
to them that ask Him ? " Why, Christ asks, why
do you not let your own hearts teach you? If

Concerning God 27

love will not let you mock your child, think
you, will God be less good than you your
selves are ?
But more even than by His words did Christ
by His life • reveal to us the Father. " He that
hath seen Me," He said to Philip, " hath seen the
Father." In what He was and did, in His life
and in His death, we read what God is. We
follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from
Nazareth to Gennesaret, from Gennesaret to Jeru
salem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane, and
to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says
to us, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father." We are with Him at the marriage feast
at Cana of Galilee, and in the midst of the
mourners by the city gate at Nain; we see Him
as He takes the little children into His arms and
lays His hands upon them and blesses them ; we
hear His word to her that was a sinner in the
house of Simon the Pharisee; we stand with
John and with Mary under the shadow of the
Cross; and still, always and everywhere, He is
saying to us, " He that hath seen, Me hath seen
the Father; if ye had known Me "ye should have
known my Father also." Within the sweep of
this great word the whole life of Jesus lies ; there
is nothing that He said or did that does not more
fully declare Him whom no man hath seen at any
time. To read " that sweet story of old " is to
put our hand on the heart of God; it is to know
the Father.

28 The Teaching of Jesus
III
" Yes," says some one, " it is a beautiful creed
— if only one could believe it." Christ took
the birds and the flowers for His text, and
preached of the love of God for man, but is that
the only sermon the birds and flowers preach to
us ? Does not " nature, red in tooth and claw
with ravine," shriek against our creed? And
when we turn to human life the tragedy deepens.
Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain?
Why do the innocent suffer? Why are our
hearts made to sicken every day when we take
up our morning paper? Why does not God end
the haunting horror of our social ills? They are
old-world questions which no man can answer.
Yet will I not give up my faith, and I will tell
you why. " I cannot see," Huxley once wrote to
Charles Kingsley, "one shadow or tittle of evidence
that the great unknown underlying the phenomena
of the universe, stands to us in the relation of a
Father — loves us, and cares for us as Christianity
asserts." And,, perhaps, if I looked for evidence
only where Huxley looked, I should say the
same ; but I have seen Jesus, and that has made
all the difference. It is Pie, and He alone, who
has made me sure of God. He felt, as I have
never felt, the horrid jangle and discord of this
world's life; sin and suffering tore His soul as no
soul of man was ever torn ; He both saw suffering
innocence and Himself suffered being innocent,

Concerning God 29

and yet to the end He knew that love was
through all and over all, and died with the name
" Father " upon His lips. And, therefore, though
the griefs and graves of men must often make me
dumb, I will still dare to believe with Jesus that
God is good and " Love creation's final law."
But while thus, on the one hand, we use
Christ's doctrine of God to our comfort, let us
take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to
our hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever
been a time when the Church has not suffered
through " disproportioned thoughts " of God. To
day our peril is lest, in emphasizing the Divine
Fatherhood, we ignore the Divine Sovereignty,
and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without
either purpose or power to chastise His wilful
and disobedient children. " God is good ; God
is love; why then should we fear? Will He not
deal tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving
us even unto seventy times seven ? " The argu
ment is true — and it is false. As an assurance
to the penitent and to the broken in heart, it is
true, blessedly true; in any other sense it is false
as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us
to call "Father," He also called "Holy Father"
and "Righteous Father." Have we forgotten
Peter's warning — we do not need to ask at
whose lips he learned it — " If ye call on Him
as Father . . . pass the time of your sojourning
in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine
of Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even

30 The Teaching of Jesus
a modification of it ; rather is it an essential part
of any true and complete statement of it. Peter
does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to
be feared ; that is to miss the whole point of his
words ; what he means is, God is a Father, and,
therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows
necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah,
brethren, if we understood Peter and Peter's Lord
aright, we should be not the less, but the more
anxious about our sins, because we have learnt to
call God " Father." " Evil," it has been well
said, " is a more terrible thing to the family than
to the state." 1 Acts which the law takes no
cognizance of a father dare not, and cannot, pass
by ; what the magistrate may dismiss with light
censure he must search out to its depths. The
judgment of a father — there is no judgment like
that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God, for him who all his life
through has set himself against the Divine law
and love, it is a still more fearful thing because
those hands are the hands of a Father.
But this is not the note on which to close a
sermon on the Fatherhood of God. Let us go
back to a chapter from which, though I have only
once quoted its words, we have never been far
away — the fifteenth of St. Luke, with its three
fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The
parables of the chapter are companion pictures,
and should be studied together in the light of the
' A. M. Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, p. 244.

Concerning God 31
circumstances which were their common origin.
" The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying,
This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them."
These parables are Christ's answer. Mark how
He justifies Himself. He might have pleaded the
need of those whom the Pharisees and scribes
had left alone in their wretchedness and sin, but
of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all of
the need of God. The central thought in each
parable is not what man loses by his sin, but
what God loses. As the shepherd misses his lost
sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the
father his lost son, so, Christ says, we are all
missed by God until, with our heart's love, we
satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose
poet shall tell us the rest. We have all read of
Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how
she went into the far country, and what brought
her home again. "It iss weary to be in London"
— this was Flora's story as she told it to Marget
Howe when she was back again in the glen — " it
iss weary to be in London and no one to speak
a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the
crowd that is always passing, and I will not see
one kent face, and when I looked in at the lighted
windows the people were all sitting round the
table, but there was no place for me. Millions
and millions of people, and not one to say
' Flora,' and not one sore heart if I died that
night." Then one night she crept into a church
as the people were singing. " The sermon wass

32 The Teaching of Jesus
on the Prodigal Son, but there is only one word
I remember. ' You are not forgotten or cast off,'
the preacher said: 'you are missed.' Sometimes
he will say, ' If you had a plant, and you had
taken great care of it, and it was stolen, would
you not miss it?' And I will be thinking of my
geraniums, and saying 'Yes' in my heart. And
then he will go on, ' If a shepherd wass counting
his sheep, and there wass one short, does he not
go out to the hill to seek for it ? ' and I will see
my father coming back with that lamb that lost
its mother. My heart wass melting within me,
but he will still be pleading, ' If a father had a
child, and she left her home and lost herself in
the wicked city, she will still be remembered in
the old house, and her chair will be there,' and I
will be seeing my father all alone with the Bible
before him, and the dogs will lay their heads on
his knee, but there iss no Flora. So I slipped
out into the darkness and cried, ' Father,' but I
could not go back, and I knew not what to do.
But this wass ever in my ear, ' missed,' " — and
this was the word that brought her back to home
and God.1
1 On the subject of this chapter see especially G. B. Stevens'
Theology of the New Testament, chap. vi.

CONCERNING HIMSELF

33 d

" Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was
Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no
getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
John Duncan, Colloquia Ptripatetica.

34

Ill
CONCERNING HIMSELF
" Who say ye that I am?" — Matt. xvi. 15.

THIS was our Lord's question to His first
disciples ; and this, by the mouth of Simon
Peter, was their answer : " Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God." And in all ages this has
been the answer of the Holy Catholic Church
throughout all the world. In the days of New
Testament Christianity no other answer was known
or heard. The Church of the apostles had its
controversies, as we know, controversies in which
the very life of the Church was at stake. Division
crept in even among the apostles themselves. But
concerning Christ they spoke with one voice, they
proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the
Christian era were centuries of keen discussion
concerning the Person of our Lord ; but the dis
cussions sprang for the most part from the difficulty
of rightly defining the true relations of the Divine
and the human in the one Person, rather than
35

36 The Teaching of Jesus
from the denial of His Divinity ; and, as Mr.
Gladstone once pointed out, since the fourth
century the Christian conception of Christ has
remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce
and almost ceaseless controversies which have
divided and sometimes desolated Christendom,
and which, alas ! still continue to divide it, the
Church's testimony concerning Christ has never
wavered. The Greek Church, the Roman Catholic
Church, the various Protestant Churches, Luther
ans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
Methodists, Christian men and women out of
every tribe and tongue and people and nation, —
all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the .
words of the ancient Creed : " I believe in one
Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of
God, Light of Light, Very God of very God."
This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the
Christian way of thinking about Christ. But now
the question arises, Was this Christ's way of
thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim
to be one with God ? or, is it only we, His adoring
disciples, who have crowned Him with glory and
honour, and given Him a name that is above
every name? To those of us who have been
familiar with the New Testament ever since we
could read, the question may appear so simple as
to be almost superfluous. Half-a-dozen texts leap
to our lips in a moment by way of answer. Did
He not claim to be the Messiah in whom Old

Concerning Himself 37
Testament history and prophecy found their fulfil
ment and consummation ? Did He not call Him
self the Son of God, saying, " The Father hath
given all judgment unto the Son ; that all may
honour the Son, even as they honour the Father " ?
Did He not declare, " I and My Father are one " ?
and "again, "All things have been delivered unto
Me of My Father : and no one knoweth the Son,
save the Father ; neither doth any know the
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son willeth to reveal Him " ? And when one of
the Twelve bowed down before Him, saying, " My
Lord and my God," did He not accept the homage
as though it were His by right? What further
need, then, have we of witnesses ? Is it not
manifest that the explanation of all that has been
claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles
until now, is to be found in what Christ claimed
for Himself?
This is true ; nevertheless it may be well to re
mind ourselves that Christ Himself did not thrust
the evidence on His disciples in .quite this whole
sale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for us
to scour the New Testament for " proof-texts," and
then, when they are heaped together at our feet
like a load of bricks, to begin to build our theo
logical systems. But Peter and Thomas and the
other disciples could not do this. The revelation
which we possess in its completeness was given to
them little by little as they were able to receive it.
And the moment we begin to study the life of

38 The Teaching of Jesus
Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by day it
passed before the eyes of the Twelve, we cannot
fail to observe the remarkable reserve which, dur
ing the greater part of His ministry, He exercised
concerning Himself. When first His disciples
heard His call and followed Him, He was to them
but a humble peasant teacher, who had flung about
their lives a wondrous spell which they could no
more explain than they could resist. Indeed,
there is good reason to believe, as Dr. Dale has
pointed out,1 that the full discovery of Christ's
Divinity only came to the apostles after His
Resurrection from the dead. At first, and for long,
Christ was content to leave them with their poor,
imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry
their reason by storm ; rather He set Himself to
win them — mind, heart, and will — by slow siege.
He lived before them and with them, saying little
directly about Himself, and yet always revealing
Himself, day by day training them, often perhaps
unconsciously to themselves, "to trust Him with
the sort of trust which can be legitimately given
to God only." 2 And when at last the truth was
clear, and they knew that it was the incarnate
Son of God who had companied with them, their
faith was the result not of this or that high claim
which He had made for Himself, but rather of
"the sum-total of all His words and works, the
united and accumulated impression of all He was
1 Christian Doctrine, p. 77.
' Bishop Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891, p. 13.

Concerning Himself 39
and did " upon their sincere and receptive
souls.1 Are there not many of us to-day who would
do well to seek the. same goal by the same path?
We have listened, perhaps, to other men's argu
ments concerning the Divinity of our Lord, con^
scious the while how little they were doing for
us. Let us listen to Christ Himself. Let us
put ourselves to school with Him, as these first
disciples did, and suffer Him to make His own
impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and
receptive souls as were theirs, from us also He
shall win the adoring cry, " My Lord and my
God." Let us note, then, some of the many
ways in which Christ bears witness concerning
Himself. In a very true sense all His sayings
are " self- portraitures." Be the subject of His
teaching what it may, He cannot speak of it
without, in some measure at least, revealing His
thoughts concerning Himself; and it is this in
direct testimony whose significance I wish now care
fully to consider. II
Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks
of God and- of His own relation to Him.
He called Himself, as we have already noted,
"the Son of God." Now, there is a sense in
which all men are the sons of God, for it is to
God that all men owe their life. And there is.
1 J. Denney, Studies in Theology, p. 25.

40 The Teaching of Jesus
further, as the New Testament has taught us,
another and deeper sense in which men who
are not may " become " the sons of God, through
faith in Christ. But Christ's consciousness of
Sonship is distinct from both of these, and cannot
be explained in terms of either. He is not " a
son of God " — one among many — He is " the
son of God," standing to God in a relationship
which is His alone. Hence we find — and we
shall do well to mark the marvellous accuracy
and self-consistency of the Gospels in this matter
— that while Jesus sometimes speaks of " the
Father," and sometimes of " My Father," and
sometimes, again, in addressing His disciples, of
"your Father," never does He link Himself with
them so as to call God " our Father." Nowhere
does the distinction, always present to the mind
of Christ, find more striking expression than in
that touching scene in the garden in which the
Risen Lord bids Mary go unto His brethren and
say unto them, " I ascend unto My Father and
your Father, and My God and your God."
This sense of separateness is emphasized when
we turn to the prayers of Christ. And in this
connection it is worthy of note that though Christ
has much to say concerning the duty and blessed
ness of prayer, and Himself spent much time in
prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He ask
for the prayers of others. " Simon, Simon, be
hold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift
you as wheat : but I made supplication for thee,

Concerning Himself 41
that thy faith fail not." So did Jesus pray for
His disciples ; but we never read that they prayed
for Him, or that He asked for Himself a place
in their prayers. How significant the silence is
we learn when we turn to the Epistles of St.
Paul and to the experience of the saints.
" Brethren, pray for us " — this is the token in
almost every Epistle. In the long, lone fight of
life even the apostle's heart would have failed
him had not the prayers of unknown friends
upheld him as with unseen hands. There is no
stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the
plea for remembrance at the throne of God.
" Pray for me, will you ? " we cry, when man's
best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet
long enough to mock imprisoned miners in their
living tomb. But the cry which is so often ours
was never Christ's.
It has further been remarked that, intimate as
was Christ's intercourse with His disciples, He
never joined in prayer with them.1 He prayed
in their presence, He prayed for them, but never
with them. " It came to pass, as He was pray
ing in a certain place, that when He ceased, one
of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us
to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.
And He said unto them, When ye pray, say  ."
Then follows what we call " The Lord's Prayer."
1 For an admirable statement of the argument of this paragraph
see D. W. Forrest's Christ of History and Experience, chap. i. and
note 4, p. 385,

42 The Teaching of Jesus
But, properly speaking, this was not the Lord's
prayer ; it was the disciples' prayer : " When ye
pray, say  ." And when we read the prayer
again, we see why it could not be His. How
could He who knew no sin pray, saying, " For
give us our sins " ? The true " Lord's Prayer "
is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St.
John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the
holy Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing
to regret. He knows that the end is nigh, but
there are no shadows in His retrospect ; of all
that is done there is nothing He could wish
undone or done otherwise. " I glorified Thee
on the earth, having accomplished the work
which Thou hast given Me to do." It is so
when He comes to die. Among the Seven Words
from the Cross we are struck by one significant
omission : the dying Sufferer utters a cry of
physical weakness — " I thirst " — but He makes
no acknowledgment of sin ; He prays for the
forgiveness of others — " Father, forgive them : for
they know not what they do" — He asks none
for Himself. The great Augustine died with the
penitential Psalms hung round his bed. Fifty or
sixty times, it is said, did sweet St. Catharine of
Siena cry upon her deathbed, Peccavi, Domine
miserere met, " Lord, I have sinned : have mercy
on me." But in all the prayers of Jesus, whether
in life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no
sins to confess.
We are thus brought to the fact upon which

Concerning Himself 43
of recent years so much emphasis has been justly
laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the Gospels
does Christ betray any consciousness of sin.
" Which of you," He said, " convicteth Me of
sin ? " And no man was able, nor is any man
now able, to answer Him a word. But the all-
important fact is not so much that they could
not convict Him of sin ; He could not convict
Himself. Yet it could not be that He was self-
deceived. " He knew what was in man ; " He
read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan
woman, they felt as though He knew all things
that ever they had. done. Was it possible, then,
that He did not know Himself? Not only so,
but the law by which He judged Himself was not
theirs, but His. And what that was, how high,
how searching, how different from the low, con
ventional standards which satisfied them, we who
have read His words and His judgments know
full well. Nevertheless, He knew nothing against
Himself; as no man could condemn Him neither
could He condemn Himself. Looking up to
heaven, He could say, " I do always the things
that are pleasing to Him." l This is not the
language of sinful men ; it is not the language
of even the best and holiest of men. Christ is as
separate from " saints " as He is from " sinners."
1 Cp. Denney's note on St. Paul's description of Christ, " Him
who knew no sin," in 2 Cor. v. 21 : "The Greek negative (m),
as Schmiedel remarks, implies that this is regarded as the verdict
of some one else than the writer. It was Christ's own verdict upon
Himself."

44 The Teaching of fesus
The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, " Woe is
me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of
unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of
unclean lips." The greatest of Christian apostles
laments, " O wretched man that I am ! who shall
deliver me out of the body of this death ? " Even
the holy John confesses, " If we say that we have
no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not
in us." It is one of the commonplaces of Chris
tian experience that the holier men become the
more intense and poignant becomes the sense of
personal shortcoming. " We have done those
things which we ought not to have done ; we
have left undone those things which we ought to
have done : " among all the sons of men there is
none, who truly knows himself, who dare be
silent when the great confession is made — none
save the Son of Man ; for He, it has well been
said, was not the one thing which we all are ; He
was not a sinner.
This consciousness of separateness runs through
all that the evangelists have told us concerning
Christ. When e.g. He is preaching He never
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His
hearers ; He never assumes, as other preachers must,
that His words are applicable to Himself equally
with them. We exhort ; He commands. We
say, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
" Let us go on unto perfection" ; He says, " Ye shall
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
We speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing

Concerning Himself 45
by their side ; He speaks as from a height, as one
who has already attained and is already made
perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in
another way. We all know what it is to be
haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some
course which, under certain trying circumstances,
we have taken. We had some difficult task to
perform — to withstand (let us say) a fellow-
Christian to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at
Antioch ; and we did the unpleasant duty as best
we knew how, honestly striving not only to speak
the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when
all was over we could not get rid of the fear that
we had not been as firm or as kindly as we should
have been, that, if only something had been which
was not, our brother might have been won. There
is a verse in Paul's second letter to the Church at
Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind
of internal conflict. Referring to the former letter
which he had sent to the Corinthians, and in which
he. had sharply rebuked them for their wrong-doing,
he says, " Though I made you sorry with my
epistle, I do not regret it, though I did regret " —
a simple, human touch we can all understand.
Yes ; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were,
go back upon Himself after this fashion ? He
passed judgment upon men and their ways with
the utmost freedom and confidence ; some, such as
the Pharisees, He condemned with a severity which
almost startles us ; towards others, such as she
" that was a sinner," He was all love and tender-

46 The Teaching of Jesus
ness. Yet never does He speak as one who fears
lest either in His tenderness or His severity He
has gone too far. His path is always clear ; He
enters upon it without doubt ; He looks back upon
it without misgiving.
This contrast between Christ and all other men,
as it presented itself to His own consciousness,
may be illustrated almost indefinitely. His fore
runners the prophets were the servants of God ;
He is His Son. All other men are weary and in
need of rest ; He has rest and can give it. All
others are lost ; He is not lost, He is the shepherd
sent to seek the lost. All others are sick ; He is
not sick, He is the physician sent to heal the sick.
All others will one day stand at the bar of God ;
but He will be on the throne to be their Judge.
All others are sinners — this is the great, final dis
tinction into .which all others run up — He is the
Saviour. When at the Last Supper He said,
" This is My blood of the covenant which is shed
for many unto remission of sins " ; and again, when
He said, " The Son of Man came to give His life
a ransom for many," He set Himself over against
all others, the one sinless sacrifice for a sinful
world. There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which
bears carved on its front these words of St. Paul .
" There is one God, and one mediator between
God and man, the man Christ Jesus." I say
nothing as to the fitness of any of Paul's words
for such a place — perhaps we can imagine what

Concerning Himself 47
he would have said ; I pass over any questions of
interpretation that might very justly be raised ; I
have only one question to ask : Why was the
quotation not finished ? Paul only put a comma
where they have put a full stop ; the next words
are: " Who gave Himself a ransom for all" But
how could He do that if He was only " the man
Christ Jesus " ?
" No man can save his brother's soul,
Nor pay his brother's debt,"
and how could He, how dare He, think of His
life as the ransom for our forfeited lives, if He
were only one like unto ourselves ? There is but
one explanation which does really explain all that
Christ thought and taught concerning Himself ; it
is that given by the first disciples and re-echoed by
every succeeding generation of Christians —
"THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST.
THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THE FATHER."

CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH

49

" While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy
trust, confide in nothing else besides ; to this death commit thyself
altogether ; with this shelter thy whole self ; with this death array
thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge
thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and me I cast the death
of our Lord Jesus Christ ; no otherwise can I contend with Thee.
And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch
forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and
Thee. If He say, Thou art worthy of condemnation, say, Lord, I
set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts
and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ought
to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with
thee, say, Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between Thy wrath and me." — Anselm.

5°

IV
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
" The Son of Man came . . . to give His life a ransom for
many" — Mark x. 45.
THE death of Jesus Christ has always held
the foremost place in the thought and
teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes
to the Corinthians, " I delivered unto you first of
all that which also I received, how that Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures,"
he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher
and teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth
century no less than of the first. It is with
some surprise, therefore, we discover when we
turn to the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He
had so little to say concerning a subject of which
His disciples have said so much. It is true that
the Gospels, without exception, relate the story
of Christ's death with a fulness and detail which,
in any other biography, would be judged absurdly
out of proportion. But this, it is said, reveals
the mind of the evangelists rather than the mind
of Christ. And those who love that false com-
5i

5 2 The Teaching of Jesus
parison between the Gospels and the Epistles
of which so much is heard to-day, have not been
slow to seize upon this apparent discrepancy as
another example of the way in which the Church
has misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple
message of the Galilean Prophet.
But, in the first place, as I will show in a
moment, the contrast between the Gospels and
Epistles in this matter is by no means so sharply
defined as is often supposed. And further, grant
ing that there is a contrast — that what in the
Gospels is only a hint or suggestion, becomes in
the Epistles a definite and formal statement — it
is one which admits of a simple and immediate
explanation. Christ — this was Dr. Dale's way
of putting it — did not come to preach the gospel ;
He came that there might be a gospel to preach.
This must not be pressed so far as to imply that
it is only the death and not also the life of Christ
that has any significance for us to-day ; but if
that death had any significance in it at all, if it
was anything more to Him than death is to us,
if it stood in any sort of relation to us men
and our salvation, manifestly the teaching which
should make this plain would more fittingly
follow than precede the death. And they at
least who accept Christ's words, " I have yet
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear
them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of
truth, is come, He shall guide you into all truth "
— they, I say, who accept these words can find

Concerning His own Death 53
no difficulty in believing that part of the revela
tion which it was the good pleasure of the Father
to give to us in His Son, came through the lips
of men who spake as they were moved by the
Holy Spirit. Moreover, when we turn to the
Gospels we see at once that the interpretation
of Christ's death was just one of those things
which the disciples as yet were unable to bear.
The point is so important that it is worth while
dwelling upon it for a moment. So far were the
Twelve from being able to understand their Lord's
death, that they would not even believe that He
was going to die. " Be it far from Thee, Lord,"
cried Peter, when Christ first distinctly foretold
His approaching end ; " this shall never be unto
Thee." When, at another time, He said unto
His disciples, " Let these words sink into your
ears ; for the Son of Man shall be delivered up
into the hands of men," St. Luke adds, " But
they understood not this saying." And again,
after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist
writes with significant reiteration, " They under
stood none of these things ; and this saying was
hid from them, and they perceived not the things
that were said." So was it all through those
last months of our Lord's life. His thoughts
were not their thoughts, neither were His ways
their ways. They followed Him as He pressed
along -the highway, His face steadfastly set to
go up to Jerusalem, but they could not under
stand Him. Why, if as He had said, death

54 The Teaching of Jesus
waited Him there, did He go to seek it ? Think
what utter powerlessness to enter even a little
way into His thoughts is revealed in a scene
like this : Two of His disciples, James and
John, came to Him to ask Him that they might
sit, one on His right hand, and one on His left
hand, in His glory. Jesus said unto them, " Ye
know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink
the cup that I drink ? or to be baptized with
the baptism that I am baptized with ? " And
they said unto Him, " We are able." What
could Jesus do with ignorance like this — ignor
ance that knew not its own ignorance? He
could be " sorry for their childishness " ; but how
could He show them the mystery of His Passion ?
What could He do but wait until the Cross,
and the empty grave, and the gift of Pente
cost had done their revealing and enlightening
work ?
At the same time, as I have already pointed
out, it is altogether a mistake to suppose that
Christ has left us on this subject wholly to the
guidance of others. From the very beginning
of His ministry the end was before Him, and
as it drew nearer He spoke of it continually.
At first He was content to refer to it in language
purposely vague and mysterious. Just as a
mother who knows herself smitten with a
sickness which is unto death, will sometimes
try by shadowed hints to prepare her children
for what is coming, while yet she veils its

Concerning His own Death 55
naked horror from their eyes, so did Jesus with
His disciples. " Can the sons of the bride-
chamber fast," He asked once, '' while the
bridegroom is with them ? . . . But the days
will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken
away from them, and then will they fast in
that day." But from the time of Peter's great
confession at Caesarea Philippi all reserve was
laid aside, and Christ told His disciples plainly
of the things which were to come to pass :
" From that time began Jesus to show unto
His disciples, how that He must go unto
Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed,
and the third day be raised up." And if we
will turn to any one of the first three Gospels,
we shall find, as Dr. Denney says, that that
which " characterized the last months of our
Lord's life was a deliberate and thrice-repeated
attempt to teach His disciples something about
His death."1 Let me try, very briefly, to set
forth some of the things which He said.
I
First of all, then, Christ died as a faithful
witness to the truth. Like the prophets and
the Baptist before Him, whose work and whose
end were so often in His thoughts, He preached
righteousness' to an unrighteous world, and
1 The Death of Christ, p. 28.

56 The Teaching of Jesus
paid with His life the penalty of His daring.
That is the very lowest view which can be
taken of His death. No Unitarian, no un
believer, will deny that Jesus died as a good
man, choosing rather the shame of the Cross
than the deeper shame of treason to the truth.
And thus far Christ is an example to all who
follow Him. In one sense His cross-bearing
was all His own, a mystery of suffering and
death into which no man can enter. But in
another sense, as St. Peter tells us, He has left
us by His sufferings an example that we should
follow His steps. It is surely a significant
fact that the words which immediately follow
.Christ's first distinct declaration of His death
are these, "If any man would come after Me,
let him deny himself, and take up his cross
and follow Me." His death was the supreme
illustration of a law which binds us, the
servants, even as it bound Him, the Master.
In the path of every true man there stands
the cross which he must bear, or be true no
more. Let no one grow impatient and say this
is no more than the fringe of Christ's thoughts
about His death ; even the fringe is part of the
robe, and if, as the words I have quoted seem
clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death
as in any sense at all a pattern for us, let us
not miss this, the first and simplest lesson of
the Cross.
There are few more impressive scenes in the

Concerning His own Death 5 7
history of the Christian pulpit than that in
which Robertson of Brighton, preaching the
Assize Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed
to the judges, and counsel, and jury, and bade
them remember; by "the trial hour of Christ,"
by " the Cross of the Son of God," the sacred
claims of truth : " The first lesson of the Christian
life is this, Be true; and the second this, Be
true ; and the third this, Be true."
II
But though this be our starting - point, it
is no more than a starting-point. If Jesus
was only a brave man, paying with His life
the penalty of His bravery in the streets
of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call Him
" the Saviour of the world." If His death
were only a martyrdom, then, though we may
honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many
another name in the long roll of " the noble
army of martyrs," yet He can no more be
our Redeemer than can any one of them. But
it was not so that Christ thought of His death.
The martyr dies because he must ; Christ died
because He would. The strong hands of
violent men snatch away the martyr's life
from him ; but no man had power to take
away Christ's life from Him : " I lay it down
of Myself," He said. The Son of Man gave
His life. He was not dragged as an unwilling

58 The Teaching of Jesus
victim to the sacrifice and bound upon the
altar. He was both Priest and Victim ; as the
apostle puts it, " He gave Himself up." True,
the element of necessity was there — "the Son
of Man must be lifted up " ; but it was the
" must " of His own love, not of another's
constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs
held Him to the Cross, but His own loving
will. It is important to emphasize this fact
of the voluntariness of our Lord's death, because
at once it sets the Cross in a clearer light. It
changes martyrdom into sacrifice ; and Christ's
death, instead of being merely a fate which He
suffered, becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn
says, a work which He achieved — the work
which He came into the world to do -: " The
Son of Man came ... to give His life."1
Ill
Again, Christ taught us that His death was
the crowning revelation of the love of God for
man. And it is well to remind ourselves of our
need of such a revelation. We speak sometimes
as though the love of God was a self-evident truth
altogether independent of the facts of New Testa
ment history. " God is love " — of course, we say ;
this at least we are sure of, whatever becomes of
the history. But this jaunty assurance will not
bear looking into. The truth is that, apart from
1 The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 408.

Concerning His own Death 59
Christ, we have no certainty of the love of God.
A man may cry aloud in our ears, " God is love,
God is love " ; but if he have no more to say than
that, the most emphatic reiteration "will avail us
nothing. But if he can say, " God is love, and
He so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son " ; if, that is to say, he can point us
to the Divine love made manifest in life, then he
is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not
deceive ourselves and imagine that we can have
Christ's gospel apart from Christ.
Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels,
all Christ's life — all He was and said and did — is
a revelation of the love of God. But the crown
of the revelation was given in His death.- It is
the Cross which was, in a special and peculiar
sense, as Christ Himself declared,1 the glory both
of the Father and the Son. And the apostles,
with a unanimity which can only be explained as
the result of His own teaching, always associate
God's love with Christ's death in a way in which
they never associate God's love with Christ's life.
" God," says St. Paul, " commendeth His own love
toward us, in that . . . Christ died for us."
Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love
of God. -But how does this come to pass ? How
does the death of one prove the love of another ?
If — to use a very simple illustration — I am in
danger of drowning, and another man, at the cost
of his own life, saves mine, his act undoubtedly
1 John xii. 27, 28 ; xiii. 31 ; xvii. I.

60 The Teaching of Jesus
proves his own love ; but how does it prove any
thing concerning God's love ? If the apostle had
said, " Christ commendeth His own love towards
us, in that He died for us," we could have under
stood him ; but how, I ask again, does Christ's
death prove God's love? The question is answer
able, as indeed the whole of the New Testament
is intelligible, only on the assumption of the
Trinitarian doctrine of Christ. If Christ were
indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such
a relation that what He did was likewise the
doing of God the Father, we can understand the
apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his
language is a riddle of which the key has been
lost. A further question still remains to be
answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had
written, "Christ commendeth His own love towards
us, in that He died for us," we could have under
stood Him. But here, also, something is implicit
which requires to be made explicit How does
Christ in His death prove His love for us ? Ob
viously, only in one way : by bearing responsibilities
which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There
must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational
relation between our necessities and what Christ
has done before we can speak of His act as a
proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer's
illustration, a man lose his own life in saving me
from drowning, this is love to the uttermost ; but
if, when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself
into the water and got drowned " to prove his love

Concerning His own Death 61
for me," the deed and its explanation would be
alike unintelligible. We must take care when we
speak of the death of Christ that we do not make
it equally meaningless. How Christ Himself
thought of it as related to the necessities of sinful
men, the next and last division of this chapter
will, I hope, make plain. IV
" The Son of Man came to give His life a
ransom for many;" " This is My blood of the covenant
which is shed for many unto remission of sins!'
These are the two great texts which reveal to us
the mind of Christ concerning the significance of
His death. There has been much discussion of
their meaning into which it is impossible here to
enter. But whatever questions modern scholar
ship may raise, there can be little doubt as to the
sense in which Christ's words were understood by
the first disciples. " His own self," said Peter,
" bare our sins in His body upon the tree."
" Herein is love," said John, " not that we loved
God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to
be the propitiation for our sins." He " loved me,"
said Paul, "and gave Himself for me." It is
open, doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these
apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon
Matthew Arnold's Aberglaube ; but who, it has
been well said, " are most likely to have correctly
apprehended the significance which Jesus attached

62 The Teaching of Jesus
to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul,
or an equal number of scholars in our time, how
ever discerning and candid, who undertake tc
reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to dis
entangle them from the supposed subjective
reflections of His disciples ? Where is the sub
jectivity likely to be the greatest — in the interpre
tations of the eye and ear witness, or in the
reconstructions of the moderns ? " 1
Christ gave His life " a ransom for many."
The truth cannot be, put too simply : " God for
gives our sins because Christ died for them ; "
" in that death of Christ our condemnation came
upon Him, that for us there might be condemna
tion no more ; " " the forfeiting of His free life
has freed our forfeited lives." 2
" Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood ;
Sealed my pardon with His blood ;
Alleluia I what a Saviour 1 "
If this is true, the New Testament has a
meaning, and, what is more, we sinful men have
a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult to
know why the New Testament was written, and
still more difficult to know what we must do to
be saved. It does not help to point us to the
parable of the Prodigal Son, and tell us that
there is a story of salvation without an atonement.
1 G. B. Stevens, Theology of the New Testament, p. 133.
2 I quote once more from Dr. Denney.

Concerning His own Death 63
The whole gospel cannot be put into a parable,
not even into such a parable as this. Besides,
if the argument proves anything, it proves too
much. The parable is not only a story of
salvation without an atonement, it is a story of
salvation without Christ ; and if no more is
needed than what is given here, Christ Himself
is no part of His own gospel, forgiveness can be
had with no reference to Him. But it is not so
the redeemed have learned Christ ; it is not thus
they have received forgiveness. They know that
it is " in Him " they have their redemption,
through His blood ; and apart from Him there is
no salvation and no gospel.
It is time to bring our reasonings to an end.
We are under the shadow of the Cross ; let us
worship and adore. When Christ died on the
tree nineteen hundred years ago, there were some
that mocked, and some that watched and yet saw
nothing — nothing but a miserable criminal's
miserable end ; a few there were that wept, and
"one there was who cried, with lips already white
with death, "Jesus, remember me when Thou
comest in Thy kingdom." And still does that
Cross divide men. Where is our place, and with
whom are we? Not, I think, with them that
mock ; for these to-day are a broken and dis
credited few. We choose rather the centurion's
cry, " Certainly this was a righteous man." But
is this all we have to say ? He who gave His
life-blood for us, shall He have no more than

64 The Teaching of Jesus

this — the little penny-pieces of our respect ? If
we owe Him aught we owe Him all ; and if we
give Him aught let us give Him all — not our
thanks but our souls. " He loved me, and gave Him
self up for me" — there is the secret of the Cross
which no man knows save he who cannot speak
of it without the personal pronouns. Until then
we are but as blind watchers that look and see not.
" Jesus, remember me " — this is the word that
becomes us best. Let us cry unto Him now, and
He who heard the robber's prayer on the Cross
will hear and save us.

CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT

65

" Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire ;
Thou the Anointing Spirit art,
Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart.
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love :
Enable with perpetual light
The dulness of our blinded sight ;
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace ;
Keep far our foes ; give peace at home ;
Where Thou art guide no ill can come ;
Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And Thee of Both, to be but One :
That, through the ages all along,
This, this may be our endless song,
' Praise to Thy eternal merit,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ! ' "
Amen !
Bishop John Cosin.

66

V
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
" / will pray the Father, and He shall give you another
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of
truth." — John xiv. 16.
" It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away,
the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I go, I will send Him
unto you." — John xvi. 7.
IT was the night in which He was betrayed.
Jesus and His disciples were spending their
last hours together before His death. For Him
the morrow could bring with it no surprise. He
knew that His hour was come — the hour to
which all -other hours of His past had pointed ;
and He was ready. Before He left that Upper
Room, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said,
" Father, the hour is come ; glorify Thy Son."
But to the disciples that night was a night of
darkness, and terror, and confusion. They re
membered how He had told them He must
die ; they knew the bloodhounds in Jerusalem
were on His track ; they could see the shadow's
black edge creeping nearer and nearer ; and yet
they could do' nothing; they could not even
67

68 The Teaching of Jesus
persuade Him that anything needed to' be done.
Nay, it almost seemed as if He were taking part
with His enemies against them. " It is expedient
for you," He said, " that I go away " — veiling in
His pity the horror of His going. "Expedient"
for them ? How could He speak like that ?
Was He not everything to them ? If He went
away, what was to befall them ? They would be
as sheep in the midst of wolves, as orphans in an
unkindly world. Is it any wonder that sorrow
filled their hearts ?
And not only to these His first disciples, but
to many of His followers in later days, this word
of Jesus has proved a hard saying. If only, we
think, He were with us as He was with Peter and
James and John ; if only we could hear Him
teach in our streets, or in pur church, as once
He taught in the streets of Jerusalem and the
synagogue at Nazareth ; if only He could enter
our homes, as once He entered the home at
Bethany, how easy it would be to believe ! But,
now He is no longer here, the air is filled with
doubting voices, and faith is very hard.
So sometimes we speak. But, have we
noticed, this is never the language of the New
Testament. To begin with, it is not the language
of Christ. There is an unmistakable emphasis in
His words : " Because I have spoken these things
unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Never
theless, I tell you the truth : it is expedient for
you that I go away." When Paul was a prisoner

Concerning the Holy Spirit 69
in Rome, he wrote to the Philippians, saying,
" I am in " a strait betwixt the two, having the
desire to depart and be with Christ ; for it is very
far better ; yet to abide in the flesh is more
needful for your sake." That is how a good
man, in the prospect of death, naturally feels
towards those who are in any way dependent on
him. But Christ's language is the very opposite
of this ; He says, not that it is needful to abide,
but that it is expedient to depart. And in every
reference to Christ by the apostles after His
Ascension, the same note is struck. It is hardly
too much to say, as one writer does, " that no
apostle, no New Testament writer, ever re
membered Christ."1 They thought of Him as
belonging, not to the past, but to the present ;
He was the object, not of memory, but of faith.
Never do they wish Him back in their midst ;
never do they mourn for Him as for a friend
whom they have lost. On the contrary, they felt
that Christ was with them now in a sense in
which He had never been. There is no hint that
any even of the Twelve would have gone back-
to the old days had it been possible. They had
lost, but they had also gained, and their gain was
greater than their loss. " Even though we have
known Christ after the flesh," they also would
have said, "yet now we know Him so no more.'
Read over again St. Luke's account of our Lord's
Ascension : " He led them out until they were
1 J. Denney, Studies in Theology, p. 154.

yo The Teaching of Jesus
over against Bethany ; and He lifted up His
hands and blessed them. And it came to pass,
while He blessed them, He parted from them,
and was carried up into heaven. And they
worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with
great joy ; and were continually in the temple,
blessing God." Christ had gone from them a
second time, no more to return as before He had
returned from the tomb ; yet now it is not despair
but joy which fills their hearts : " They returned
to Jerusalem with great joy." When in the Upper
Room, Christ had said, " It is expedient for you
that I go away," sorrow had filled their hearts ;
but, now that He is gone, their sorrow is turned
into joy. How shall we explain this strange
reversal ?

It is to be explained in part, of course, by
the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, but
mainly— and this is the fact with which just now
we are concerned — by the gift of the Holy Spirit
whom Christ had promised to His disciples to
abide with them for ever. But now, what do we
mean when we speak of the gift of the Holy
Spirit ? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is it
that He does for us ? Many of us, I think, must
have felt how extremely unreal, and therefore
unsatisfying, the discussions of this great subject
often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find
a place among the proved realities of our Christian

Concerning the Holy Spirit 7 1
experience. It remains, so to speak, outside of
us, a foreign substance which life has not assimi
lated. And hence it has come to pass that there
is no small danger to-day lest New Testament
phrases about being filled with the Spirit, baptized
with the Spirit, and so forth, become the mere
jargon of a school which wholly fails to interpret
the mind of Christ. Doubtless there are faults
on both sides, the faults of neglect and the faults
of false emphasis, and for both the true remedy
is a more careful study of the teaching of Jesus.
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it
He does for us ? "I will pray the Father,"
Christ said, " and He shall give you another
Comforter," or " another Paraclete." The word
translated " Comforter," which occurs so often in
this discourse of our Lord, is found nowhere else
in the New Testament except in the First Epistle
of St. John, where it is rendered " Advocate " ;
" If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous." And this,
without doubt, is a more faithful rendering of the
word which Christ used than the more familiar
" Comforter." An advocate is one who is called
to our side to be our friend and helper, more
especially to plead our cause in a court of justice ;
and this also is the meaning of the word " Para
clete." Perhaps, however, the word " Comforter "
may be retained without loss, if only we remember
to give it its full and original meaning. To
" comfort " is not primarily and originally to

7 2 The Teaching of Jesus
console, but to strengthen, to fortify ; and the
"Comforter" whom Christ promised to His
disciples was not only one who should soothe
them in their sorrows, but should stand by them in
all their conflicts, their unfailing friend and helper.
Further, Christ said God " shall give you
another Comforter." That is to say, Christ Him
self was a Comforter, and all that He had been
to His disciples the Holy Spirit should be also.
And, if we examine the three chapters of this
Gospel which contain this great discourse of our
Lord, we shall find this idea taken up, and re
peated, and developed in passage after passage.
The Holy Spirit was to come in Christ's name,
as Christ's representative and interpreter. " He
shall not speak from Himself," Christ said ; " He
shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me ;
for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it
unto you." In the presence of the Spirit Christ
Himself would be present : " I will not leave you
desolate," He said ; " I come unto you ; " " I will
see you again, and your heart shall rejoice." And,
for the sake of such a presence, a presence which
was to be not for a little while but for ever,
it was best for His friends that He should leave
them.1 It is in these words, I believe, that we have
the key to the New Testament doctrine of the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ ;
He is sent by Christ ; He comes to continue
1 See W. N. Clarke's Outlines of Christian Theology, p. 373.

Concerning the Holy Spirit 73
the work of Christ. He is, as one writer has it,
Christ's alter ego, or, as it was said long ago,
Christ's "Vicar,'' or substitute, on the earth.1
When, therefore, we speak of the presence of the
Spirit, what we mean, or what we ought to mean,
is the spiritual presence of Christ. In the Holy
Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever, as He
said, two or three are gathered together in His
name. In the Holy Spirit, given to be with us
for ever, He makes good to His disciples the
great word of His promise, " Lo, I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the world." This
is the fact continually to be kept in mind — the
Spirit is the Spirit of Christ ; for, if this be
forgotten, then, as all experience shows, either
the doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the
subject of that vague, unreal way of speaking,
which, alas ! is so often the bane of spiritual
truth. At the same time, what has been said must
not be interpreted so as to suggest that the Holy
Spirit is merely an impersonal influence. On
the contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above
distinctly imply what we call "personality," and
a personality separate from His own. If all that
Jesus really meant to teach was that He would
1 " It is the Holy Spirit who supplies the bodily presence of
Christ, and by Him doth He accomplish all His promises to the
Church. Hence, some of the ancients call Him ' Vicarium Christi,'
' The Vicar of Christ,' or Him who represents His person and
dischargeth His promised work : Operam navat Christo vicariam."
— Owen, Works, vol. iii. p. 193.

74 The Teaching of Jesus
manifest His own invisible presence to His dis
ciples by spiritual influences, we can only con
clude that His words have been tampered with ;
as they stand, it is impossible that this should
exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear wit
ness, to guide, to bring to remembrance, to
declare the things that are to come, — these are
the acts, not of a Power, but of a Person ; and
all these things, Christ said, the Holy Spirit should
do. Indeed, it is not easy to see how language
could have been framed to set forth the idea of
a Divine Person, separate alike from the Father
and the Son, more explicitly than we find it in
these chapters.1 II
We turn now to the second part of our
question : What is it that the Holy Spirit does
for us ? Christ's teaching on the work of the
Spirit may be gathered up under two heads: (i)
His work in the Church ; (2) His work in the world.
(1) When we speak of the Spirit's work in
the Church, it must be understood that the refer
ence is to no particular ecclesiastical organization,
but to the people of Christ generally, " the men
and women in whom the spiritual work of Christ
is going forward." And among these the Holy
Spirit works in two ways.
1 " Our sources with the utmost possible uniformity refer to the
Spirit in terms implying personality." — Stevens, Theology of the
New Testament (p. 215), where the whole question is discussed with
great fulness and fairness.

Concerning the Holy Spirit 75
(a) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Re
membrancer : " He shall guide you into all the
truth ; " " He shall take of Mine, and shall declare
it unto you ; '' " He shall teach you all things, and
bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you."
It is not, it will be observed, all truth, but all the
truth of Christ, with which the Spirit deals — the
truth concerning Him, and the truth which He
taught. Nor is it a new revelation which the
Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect under
standing of that which has been already given in
Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try
all that claims the authority of spiritual truth.
Does it " glorify '' Christ ? Does it lead us into
a fuller knowledge of Him " in whom are all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden " ?
"Whosoever goeth onward," says St. John, in a
remarkable passage, for which English readers are
indebted to the Revised Version, " and abideth
not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God." In
other words, no true progress is possible except
as we abide in Christ. If He be ignored and left
behind, though we still keep the name and boast
ourselves " progressives," we have lost the reality.
On the other hand, every new discovery, every
movement in the life of men, every intellectual
and spiritual awakening which serves to make
manifest the glory of Christ as Creator, or Re-
vealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh fulfilment of His
promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth.
Perhaps our best commentary is the history of the

j6 The Teaching of Jesus
Church. In the New Testament itself we have
the first-fruits of the Spirit's work. There we
may see, in Gospels and Epistles, how the Spirit
took of the things of Christ and showed them
unto His disciples. And all through the varied
history of the Church's long past, that same
Divine Remembrancer has been at work, calling
us through the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or
a Wesley, into the fulness of the inheritance of
truth which is ours in Christ Jesus.
(b) The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power.
" Behold," said the ascending Christ, " I send
forth the promise of My Father upon you ; but
tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with
power from on high." And, again, " Ye shall
receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon
you." Of Jesus Himself it was said by one of
His disciples " that God anointed Him with the
Holy Ghost and with power " ; and of His dis
ciples Jesus said : '' He that believeth on Me, the
works that I do shall He do also ; and greater
works than these shall he do ; because I go unto
the Father." Here, again, our best commentary
is the history of the Church, and especially the
first chapter of that history as it is written in the
Acts of the Apostles. This was the promise,
" Ye shall receive power," and this, in brief, the
story of its fulfilment, " With great power gave
the apostles their witness of the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus." Let any one read the early
chapters of St. Luke's narrative ; let him mark

Concerning the Holy Spirit 7 7
the utter disparity between the " acts " and the
" apostles " — between the things done and the
men by whom they were done — and then let
him ask if there is any explanation which does
really bridge the gulf short of this, that behind
Peter and John and the rest there stood Another,
speaking through their lips, working through
their hands, Himself the real Doer in all those
wondrous " acts " ? When D. L. Moody was
holding in Birmingham one of those remarkable
series of meetings which so deeply stirred our
country in the early 'seventies, Dr. Dale, who
followed the work with the keenest sympathy,
and yet not without a feeling akin to stupefac
tion at the amazing results which it produced,
once told Moody that the work was most plainly
of God, for he could see no real relation between
him and what he had done. Is not this disparity
the very sign-manual of the Holy Spirit's pre
sence ? " Why,", asked Peter, when the multitude
were filled with wonder and amazement at the
healing of the lame man, " Why fasten ye your eyes
on us as though by our own power or godliness
we had made him to walk ? " Work that is really
of God can never be accounted for in that fashion.
There is always a something in the effects which
cannot be traced back to a human cause. Let
" our own power and godliness " be what they
may — and they can never be too great — they are
all vain and helpless apart from the power of
God. " I planted, Apollos watered ; God gave

78 The Teaching of Jesus
the increase." Wherefore let the Church trust
neither in him that planteth nor in him that
watereth, but in God who giveth the increase.
(2) We come now to the Holy Spirit's work
in the world. And, just as in speaking of the
" Church " it was not any visible organization
which we had in mind, so now by the " world " is
not meant merely the persons who are outside all
such organizations. There is, as we are often re
minded nowadays, a Church outside the Churches ;
and, on the other hand, not a little of what Christ
meant by the " world " is often to be found inside
what we mean by the " Church." The " world,"
then, is simply the mass of men, wherever they
are to be found, who are living apart from God.
Now, of this world Christ said it " cannot re
ceive " the Spirit of truth ; " it beholdeth Him
not, neither knoweth Him." If, therefore, there
is a ministry of the Spirit in the world, it must
be wholly different in kind from that spoken of
above. And this is what we learn from Christ's
teaching : " He, when He is come, will convict
the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness,
and of judgment." There is a ring of judicial
sternness in the words ; they call up to our minds
the solemnities of a court of justice — the indict
ment, the conviction, the condemnation. And
yet one can well believe that there were hours in
the after life of the apostles when, of all the
comforting, reassuring words which Christ had
spoken to them in that Upper Room, there were

Concerning the Holy Spirit 79
none more helpful than these. For they knew
now that, when they stood up to bear their wit
ness before a hostile world, they had a fellow-
witness in men's hearts. They could go nowhere
— in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, or the uttermost
parts of the earth — where the gracious ministries
of the Spirit had not preceded them. He, the
Paraclete, was not only with them, their " strong-
siding Champion," He was in the world also, in
the hearts even of them who set themselves most
stoutly against the Lord and against His Anointed,
subduing their rebelliousness and reconciling them
to God. We who teach and preach to-day, do
we think of these things as we ought ? Does
not our message sometimes win a response which
is at once a surprise and a rebuke to us ? We
knew that the seed which we cast into the ground
was the word of God ; but the soil seemed so
poor and thin we scarce had looked for any
harvest ; yet the seed sprang up and grew, we
knew not how. We had forgotten that over all
that wide field which is the world the Divine
Husbandman is ever at work, at work while men
sleep, breaking up the fallow ground, and making
ready the soil for the seed. We need to learn to
count more on God, to grasp more fully the
glorious breadth of promise which He has given
us in His Spirit, to remember that, not only in the
Church, but in the world — which is His world — that
Spirit is always present to testify of God, to convict
men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment

80 The Teaching of Jesus
And yet, while we encourage ourselves with
thoughts like these, we dare not forget that men
may resist, they may grieve, they may quench the
Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is
resisted ; He may be resisted until He is quenched.
It was Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against
the Holy Spirit which " hath never forgiveness."
Is there any more painful, perplexing, and yet
more certain fact in life than this, that man can
resist God ? Is there any that has bound up with
it more terrible and inevitable issues ? " Ye stiff-
necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," cried
the martyr Stephen to his judges, " ye do always
resist the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do
ye." And the end for their fathers and for them
we know. Wherefore the Holy Spirit saith : " To
day, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your
hearts."

CONCERNING
THE KINGDOM OF GOD

81

" The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." — St. Paul.

83

VI
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
" Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth." — Matt. vi. 10.
I
ONE of the most obvious features of the teach
ing of Jesus is the prominence which it gives
to what is called " the kingdom of heaven," or, " the
kingdom of God." And this prominence becomes
the more striking when we turn from the Gospels
to the Epistles where the phrase is only rarely to
be found. With Jesus the kingdom was a kind
of watchword which was continually on His lips.
Thus, e.g., St. Mark begins his account of the
preaching of Jesus in these words : " After that
John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee,
preaching the Gospel of God and saying, The time
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand :
repent ye, and believe in the Gospel." In like
manner, St. Matthew tells us that " Jesus went
about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom."
Parable after parable opens with the formula
83

84 The Teaching of Jesus
" The kingdom of heaven is like unto  ," or,
" So is the kingdom of God as if  ," or, " How
shall we liken the kingdom of God ? " When
Christ sent forth the Twelve, this was His com
mand, " Go . . . and as ye go, preach, saying,
The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Again, when
He sent forth the Seventy, He said, " Into what
soever city ye enter . . . say unto them, The
kingdom of God is come nigh unto you." And
in .the great Forty Days, before He was received
up, it was still of " the things concerning the
kingdom of God " that He spake unto His dis
ciples. Every time a little child is baptized we
call to mind His words, " For of such is the king
dom of God." Every time we repeat the prayer
He taught His disciples to pray we say, " Thy
kingdom come." In all, it is said, there are no
less than one hundred and twelve references to
the kingdom to be found in the Gospels.
When, however, we turn to the Epistles what
do we find ? In the whole of St. Paul's Epistles
the kingdom is not named as often as in the
briefest of the four Gospels. It is mentioned only
once by St. Peter, once by St James, once by the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and not at
all in the three Epistles of St. John. Not only
so, but at least until quite recent times, the Church
of Christ has in the main followed the lead of the
apostles, and has said but little of the kingdom of
God. How is this to be explained ? Does it
mean that the whole Church of Christ, including

Concerning the Kingdom of God 85
the Church of the apostles, has failed to under
stand the mind of the Master, and has let slip
an essential element of His teaching? So some
recent writers do not hesitate to declare. Burke
once said that he did not know how to draw up
an indictment against a whole people ; but these,
apparently, have no difficulty in drawing up an
indictment against the whole Church. "With all
respect to the great Apostle," writes one of them,
"¦one may be allowed to express his regret that
St. Paul has not said less about the Church and
more about the Kingdom."1 To which I hope
one may be forgiven if he is tempted to retort
that the great apostle probably knew what he was
about as well as. his modern critic can tell him.
We shall do well to pause, and pause again, before
we accept any interpretation of the facts of the
New Testament which implies that we to-day have
a better understanding of the mind of Christ than
the apostles had. For my own part, whenever I
come across any writer who tries to correct Paul
by Jesus, I find it safest to assume that he has
mis- read Paul, or Jesus, or both. Moreover,
though we need make no claim of infallibility for
the Church, yet, if we believe in a Holy Spirit
1 John Watson, The Mind of the Master, p. 321. May we
remind Dr. Watson of what he has himself written on the first
page of his Doctrines of Grace : "It was the mission of St. Paul to
declare the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the
nations, and none of his successors in this high office has spoken
with such persuasive power. Any one differs from St. Paul at his
intellectual peril, and every one may imitate him with spiritual
profit."

86 The Teaching of Jesus
given to guide the disciples of Christ into all the
truth of Christ, we shall find it difficult to believe
at the same time that the whole Church has from
the beginning missed the right way, and in a
matter so important as this, failed to apprehend
the thought of Christ.
We are not, however, shut up to any such
unworthy conclusions. There is another and
sufficient explanation of the facts to which refer
ence has been made. It was natural that Jesus,
speaking in the first instance to Jews, should move
as far as possible within the circle of ideas with
which they were already familiar. Now, no phrase
had a more thoroughly familiar sound to Jewish
ears than this of the kingdom of God. It needed,
of course, to be purified and enlargeH before it
could be made the vehicle of the loftier ideas of
Jesus. Still, the idea was there, " a point of
attachment," as one writer says, in the minds of
his hearers to which Jesus could fasten what He
wished to say. But after our Lord's Resurrection
and Ascension, and especially after the fall of
Jerusalem, the whole condition of things was
changed. A phrase which in the synagogues of
the Jews proved helpful and illumining, might
easily become, among the populations of Asia
Minor, of Greece, and of Italy, to whom the
gospel was now preached, useless, and even mis
leading. Is it any wonder, therefore, if the first
Christian missionaries quietly dropped the old
phrase and found others to take its place? Men

Concerning the Kingdom of God 87
who knew themselves guided by the Spirit of Jesus
would not feel compelled to quote the words of
Jesus, if, under altered circumstances, other words
more fittingly expressed His thoughts.1

II
What did Jesus mean when He spoke of the
kingdom of God ? The idea as set forth in the
Gospels is so complex, the phrase .is used to
cover so many and different conceptions, that it is
practically impossible to frame a definition within
which all the sayings of Jesus concerning the
kingdom can be included. The nearest approach
to a definition which it is necessary to attempt is
suggested by the two petitions in the Lord's
Prayer which are quoted above. The second
petition explains the first : the kingdom comes in
proportion as men do on earth the will of God.
For our present purpose, therefore, we may think
of the kingdom as a spiritual commonwealth
embracing all who do God's will. To much that
Christ taught concerning the kingdom — its Head,
its numbers, its growth and development — it is
impossible, in one brief discourse, even to refer.
Here again, it must suffice to single out one or
two points for special emphasis.
1 See, in confirmation of the argument of this paragraph, Orr's
Christian View of God and the World, p. 401 ff., and Art. "The
Kingdom of God," in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible ; Denney's
Studies in Theology, Lect. VIII.

88 The Teaching of Jesus
(i) In the doctrine of the kingdom of God, we
have set before us the social aspect of Christ's
teaching ; it reminds us of what we owe, not only
to Him who is its King, but to those who are our
fellow-subjects. Of particular duties it is impossible
to speak, though these, as we know, fill a large
place in the teaching of Jesus. But let us at least
bring home to ourselves the thought of obligation,
obligation involved in and springing out of our
common relationship as members of the kingdom
of God. The obligation is writ large on every
page of the New Testament — in the Gospels, in
the doctrine of the kingdom ; in the Epistles, in
the corresponding doctrine of the Church. It can
hardly be said too often, that, according to the
New Testament ideal, there are no unattached
Christians. The apostles never conceive of religion
as merely a private matter between the soul and
God. All true religion, as John Wesley used to
say, is not solitary but social. Its t starting-point
is the individual, but its goal is a kingdom. Christ
came to save men and women in order that
through them He might build up a redeemed
society in which the will of God should be done.
We do, indeed, often hear of Christians whose
religion begins and ends with getting their own
souls saved. This simply means that so far as it is
true they are not yet Christian. To think only of
oneself is to deny one of the first principles of the
kingdom. Wesley taught the early Methodists to
sing —

Concerning the Kingdom of God 89
" A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify ;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky j "
and some of his followers, both early and later,
seem to. have thought that this was the whole of
the hymn ; but the verse goes on without a full
stop — "To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfil ;
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master's will ! "
And until we who profess and call ourselves
Christians have learned this lesson of service, and
have entered into Christ's thought of the kingdom,
with its interlacing network of obligations, we have
still need that some one teach us again the rudi
ments of the first principles of the oracles of God.
(2) Again, the kingdom of God, Christ taught,
is present ; it is not of, but it is in, this world, set
up in the midst of the existing order of things.
There are, it is true, passages in which Christ
speaks of the kingdom as in the future, and to
come. Thus, e.g., He speaks of a time when men
" shall come from the east and west, and from the
north and south, and. shall sit down in the kingdom
of God " ; when " the righteous shall shine forth
as the sun in the kingdom of their Father "; when.
they shall " inherit the kingdom prepared for " them
" from the foundation of the world " ; and so forth.
But there is no real contradiction between this and

90 The Teaching of Jesus
what has been already said. The kingdom is a
growth, a movement working itself out in history,
and therefore it may be said to be past, present, or
future, according to our point of view. In the
sense that it has not yet fully come, that its final
consummation is still waited for, it is future ; and
so sometimes Christ speaks of it. But it is simply
impossible to do justice to all His sayings and
deny that in His thought the kingdom is also
present. Its consummation may belong to the
future, its beginnings are here already. When
Christ calls it the kingdom of heaven, it is rather
its origin and character that are suggested than
the sphere of its realization. In parable after
parable He speakf of it as a secret, silent energy
already at work in the world. He called on men
here and now to seek it, and to enter it. So
eagerly were the lost and the perishing pressing
into it that once He declared that from the days
of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven suffered
violence. Not in some future heaven but here
"on earth" He bade His disciples pray that
God's will might be done. " When Jesus said
the kingdom of heaven, be sure He did not mean
an unseen refuge, whither a handful might one day
escape, like persecuted and disheartened Puritans
fleeing from a hopeless England, but He intended
what might be and then was in Galilee, what should
be and now is in England." 1 " Thy kingdom
come" — it is here on earth we must look for the
1 J. Watson, The Mind of the Master, p. 323.

Concerning the Kingdom of God 9 1
answer to our prayer. And every man who him
self does, and in every possible way strives to get
done, God's will among men, is Christ's co-worker
and fellow-builder. " I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
That is the spirit of all the true servants of Jesus.
(3) But the most important fact concerning the
kingdom in Christ's view of it is that it is spiritual.
And, because it is spiritual, it failed wholly to
satisfy the earth-bound ambitions of the Jews.
For generations they had fed their national pride
with visions of a world obedient to Israel's sway,
and when one who claimed to be the Messiah
nevertheless told them plainly that His kingdom
was not of this world, they turned from Him as
from one that mocked. He and they both spoke
of a kingdom of God, but while they emphasized
the "kingdom" He emphasized "God." So
wholly did men fail to enter into His mind that on
one occasion two of His own disciples came to
Him asking that they might sit, one on the right
hand, and one on the left hand in His glory.
And even when He was just about to leave them,
and to return to His Father, the old ambitions
still made themselves heard. " Lord," said they,
" dost Thou at this time restore again the kingdom
to Israel ? " But with all such dreams of temporal

92 The Teaching of Jesus
sovereignty Christ would have nothing to do ; He
had put them from Him, definitely and for ever,
in the Temptation in the wilderness. He com
pletely reversed the current notions concerning the
kingdom. " Being asked by the Pharisees when
the kingdom of God cometh, He answered them
and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation ; neither shall they say, Lo, here ! or,
There ! for lo, the kingdom of God is within
you." And when self-complacent religious leaders
flattered themselves that, of course, the first places
in the kingdom would be theirs, He sternly warned
them that they might find themselves altogether
shut out while the publicans and harlots whom they
despised were admitted. Through all His teaching
Christ laid the emphasis on character. Pride, and
love of power, and sordid ambitions, and all self-
seeking — for these things, and for them that
cherished these things, the kingdom had no place.
" Blessed," Christ said, " are the poor in spirit :
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." " Except ye
turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." "Whoso
ever would become great among you, shall be your
minister ; and whosoever would be first among you
shall be servant of all "• — these are they that are
accounted worthy of the kingdom of God.
The earliest account of Christ's preaching which
has already been quoted, gives us the right point
of view for the interpretation of Christ's idea of
the kingdom as spiritual : " Jesus came into

Concerning the Kingdom of God 93
Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying,
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is
at hand : Repent ye, and believe in the gospel."
He had come to establish a kingdom whose
dominion should be for ever, against which the
gates of hell should not prevail, and the founda
tion of it He laid in the penitent and obedient
hearts of men. This explains why Christ had so
little to do with programmes, and so much to do
with men. If a man's right to the title of reformer
be judged by the magnitude of the revolution
which he has effected, it is but bare justice to call
Him the greatest reformer who ever lived. Yet
He put out no programme ; He made Himself
the spokesman of no party, the advocate of no
social or political reform. To the disappointment
of His friends, as much as to the confusion of His
enemies, He absolutely refused to take sides on
the vexed political questions of the hour. " Unto
Caesar," He said, " render the things that are
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."
But on individuals He spent Himself to the
uttermost. " He is not only indifferent to numbers,
but often seems disinclined to deal with numbers.
He sends the multitude away ; He goes apart into
a mountain with His chosen disciples ; He with
draws Himself from the throng in Jerusalem to the
quiet home in Bethany ; He discourses of the
profoundest purposes of His mission with the
Twelve in an upper room ; He opens the treasures
of His wisdom before one Pharisee at night, and

94 The Teaching of Jesus
one unresponsive woman by the well."1 Always
His work is done not by "external organization or
mass-movements or force of numbers," but from
within : " Repent ye and believe in the gospel."
Now, this was the very last kind of message
that the Pharisees of Christ's day were looking for.
They wanted the world put right — according to
their own ideas of right — it is true ; but to be told
that they must begin with themselves was not at
all what they wanted. Are not many of us in the
same case to-day ? We are all eager for reforms,
at least so long as they are from without. We
have a touching faith in the power of machinery
and organization. We are quite sure that if
Parliament would only pass this, that, and the
other bit of legislative reform, on which our hearts
are set, the millennium would be here, if not by
the morning post, at least by the session's end.
And there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament
can and ought to do for us. Nevertheless, was not
Christ right ? Instead of the old prayer, " Create
in me a clean heart, O God ; and renew a right
spirit within me," some of us, as one writer says,
would rather pray, " Create a better social order,
O God ; and renew a right relation between
various classes of men." We are ready to begin
anywhere rather than with ourselves, at any point
in the big circumference rather than at the centre.
" I don't deny, my friends," wrote Charles Kingsley
to the Chartists, " it is much cheaper and pleasanter
1 F. G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, pp. 88, 89.

Concerning the Kingdom of God 95
to be reformed by the devil than by God ; for
God will only reform society on the condition of
our reforming every man his own self, while the
devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws
and the Parliament, earth and heaven, without
ever starting such an impertinent and ' personal '
request as that a man should mend himself." Yet
without self-reform nothing is possible. " The
character of the aggregate," says Herbert Spencer,
" is determined by the characters of the units."
And he illustrates thus : Suppose a man building
with good, square, well-burnt bricks ; without the
use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain
height and stability. But if his bricks are warped
and cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the
same height and stability. If again, instead of
bricks he use cannon-balls then he cannot build a
wall at all ; at most, something in the form of a
pyramid with a square or rectangular base. And
if, once more, for cannon-balls we substitute rough,
unhewn boulders, no definite stable form is possible.
" The character of the aggregate is determined by
the characters of the units." Every attempt to
reconstruct society which leaves out of account
the character of the men and women who consti
tute society is foredoomed to failure. Behind every
social problem stands the greater problem of the
individual, the redemption of character. We may
get, as assuredly we ought to get, better houses
for the working-classes ; but unless we also get
better working-classes for the houses, we shall not

96 The Teaching of Jesus
have greatly mended matters. And no turn of the
Parliamentary machine will produce these for us.
We can pass new laws ; -only the grace of God can
make new men. " For my part," says Kingsley
once more, speaking through the lips of his tailor-
poet, " I seem to have learnt that the only thing to
regenerate the world is not more of any system,
good or bad ; but simply more of the Spirit of
God." " Except a man be born anew, he cannot see
the kingdom of God!'

CONCERNING MAN

97

H

' Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with difierent powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?"
Tennyson.

98

VII
CONCERNING MAN
" There is Joy in the presence oj the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth." — Luke xv. 10.
THIS is one of many sayings of our Lord
which reveal His sense of the infinite
worth of the human soul, which is the central fact
in His teaching about man, and the only one
with which in the present chapter we shall be
concerned. Other aspects of the truth will come
into view in the following chapter, when we come
to consider Christ's teaching about sin.

"The infinite worth of the human soul" —
this is a discovery the glory of which, it is no
exaggeration to say, belongs wholly to Christ. It
is said that one of the most magnificent diamonds
in Europe, which to-day blazes in a king's crown,
once lay for months on a stall in a piazza at
Rome labelled, " Rock-crystal, price one franc."
And it was thus that for ages the priceless jewel
99

i oo The Teaching of Jesus
of the soul lay unheeded and despised of men.
Before Christ came, men honoured the rich, and
the great, and the wise, as we honour them now ;
but man as man was of little or no account. If
one had, or could get, a pedestal by which to lift
himself above the common crowd, he might count
for something ; but if he had nothing save his
own feet to stand upon, he was a mere nobody,
for whom nobody cared. We turn to the teaching
of Jesus, and what a contrast ! " Of how much
more value," He said, " are ye than the birds ! "
" How much then is a man " — not a rich man,
not a wise man, not a Pharisee, but a man — " of
more value than a sheep ! " " What shall it profit
a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose
his own soul? Or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul ? " It was by thought-
provoking questions such as these that Jesus
revealed His own thoughts concerning man.
And, of course, when He spoke in this way about
the soul, when He said that a man might gain
the whole world, but that if the price he paid for
it were his soul, he was the loser, He was not
speaking of the souls of a select few, but of the
souls of all. Every man, every woman, every little
child — all were precious in His sight. It is man
as man, Christ taught, that is of worth to God.
Consider how much is involved in the bare
fact that Christ came into the world the son of
a poor mother, and lived in it a poor man. " A
man's life," He said, " consisteth not in the

Concerning Man 101
abundance of the things which he possesseth."
And the best commentary on the saying is just
His own life ; for He had nothing. There is
something very suggestive in Christ's use of the
little possessive pronoun " My." We know how
we use the word. Listen to the rich man in the
parable : " My fruits," " my barns," " my corn,"
" my goods." Now listen to Christ. He says :
" My Father," " My Church," " My friends," " My
disciples " ; but He never says " My house,"
" My lands," " My books." The one perfect life
this earth has seen was the life of One who
owned nothing, and left behind Him nothing but
the clothes He wore. And not only was Christ
poor Himself, He spent His life among the poor.
" To believe that a man with £60 a year," Canon
Liddon once said, " is just as much worthy of
respect as a man with £6000, you must be
seriously a Christian." You must indeed. Yet
that which is for us so hard never seems to have
cost Christ a struggle. We cannot so much as
think of mere money, more or less, counting for
anything in His sight. The little artificial dis
tinctions of society were to Him nothing, and
less than nothing. He went to be guest with
a man that was a sinner. A woman that was a
harlot He suffered to wash His feet with her
tears, and to wipe them with her hair. " This
man," said His enemies, with scorn vibrant in
every word, " receiveth sinners and eateth with
them." And they were right ; but what they

102 The Teaching of Jesus
counted His deepest shame was in reality His
chiefest glory.
Now, what does all this mean but simply this,
that it was for man as man that Christ cared ?
Observe the difference in the point at which He
and we become interested -in men. We are
interested in them, for the most part, when, by
their work, or their wealth, or their fame, they
have added something to themselves ; in other
words, we become interested when they become
interesting. But that which gave worth to man
in Christ's eyes lay beneath all these merely
adventitious circumstances of his life, in his naked
humanity, in what he was, or might be, in him
self. This is why to Him all souls were dear.
We love them that love us, the loving and the
lovable ; Christ loved the unloving and the un
lovable. He was named, and rightly named,
" Friend of publicans and sinners." Then were
bad men of worth to Christ ? They were ; for,
as Tennyson says, " If there be a devil in man,
there is an angel too." Christ saw the possible
angel in the actual devil. He knew that the lost
might be found, and the bad become good, and
the prodigal return home ; and He loved men, not
only for what they were, but for what they might be.
It would be easy to show that this high
doctrine of man underlies, and is involved in,
the whole life and work and teaching of Jesus.
It is involved in the doctrine of God. Indeed, as
Dr. Dale says, the Christian doctrine of man is

Concerning Man 103
really a part of the Christian doctrine of God.1
Because God is a Father, every man is a son of
God, or, rather, every man has within him the
capacity for sonship. It is involved in the
doctrine of the Incarnation ; that stupendous fact
reveals not only the condescension of God but
the glory and exaltation of man. If God could
become man, there must be a certain kinship
between God and man ; since God has become
man, our poor human nature has been thereby
lifted up and glorified. The same great doctrine
is implied in the truth of Christ's atonement.
When He who knew Himself to be the eternal Son
of God spoke of His own life as the " ransom " for
the forfeited lives of men, He revealed once more
how infinite is the worth of that which could be
redeemed only at such tremendous cost.
Such, then, is Christ's teaching about man.
And, as I have already said, it was a new thing
in human history. Nowhere is the line which
divides the world B.C. from the world A.D. more
sharply defined than here. Before Christ came,
no one dared to say, for no one believed, that the
soul of every man, and still less the soul of every
woman and child, was of worth to God, that even
a slave might become a son of the Most High.
But Christ believed it, and Christ said it, and
when He said it, the new world, the world in
which we live, began to be. The great difference
between ancient and modern civilizations, one
1 Fellowship with Christ, p. 157.

104 The Teaching of Jesus
eminent historian has said, is to be found here,
that while ancient civilization cared only for the
welfare of the favoured few, modern civilization
seeks the welfare of all. And when we ask
further what has made the difference, history
sends us back for answer to the four Gospels and
the teaching of Jesus concerning the infinite worth
of the soul of man.

II
And now, to bring matters to a practical
issue, have we who profess the faith of Christ
learnt to set, either upon others or upon ourselves,
the value which Christ put upon all men ? Far
as we have travelled from ancient Greece and
Rome, are we not still, in our thoughts about
men, often pagan rather than Christian ? Our
very speech bewrayeth us, and shows how little
even yet we have learnt to think Christ's thoughts
after Him. He declared, in words which have
already been quoted, that " a man's life consisteth
not in the abundance of the things which he
possesseth." Nevertheless, in our daily speech
we persist in measuring men by this very
standard ; we say that a man " is worth " so
much, though, of course, all that we mean is
that he has so much. Again, we allow ourselves
to speak about the " hands " in a factory, as if
with the hand there went neither head nor heart.
If we must put a part for the whole, why should

Concerning Man 105
it not be after the fashion of the New Testament ?
" And there were added unto them in that day "
— so it is written in one place — " about three
thousand souls " — " souls," not " hands." 1 And
we may depend upon it there would be less soul
less labour in the world, and fewer men and
women in danger of degenerating into mere
" hands," if we would learn to think of them in
Christ's higher and worthier way.
Let me try to. show, by two or three examples,
how Christ's teaching about man is needed
through all our life.
(1) -There was, perhaps, never a time when
so many were striving to fulfil the apostle's
injunction, and, as they have opportunity, to do
good unto all men. More and more we busy
ourselves to-day with the good works of philan
thropy and Christian charity. And what we
must remember is that our philanthropy needs
our theology to sustain it. They only will con
tinue Christ's work for man who cherish Christ's
thoughts about man. Sever philanthropy from
the great Christian ideas which have created
and sustained it, and it will very speedily come
to an end of its resources. All experience shows
that philanthropy cut off from Christ has not
capital enough on which to do its business.
And the reason is not far to seek. They who
strive to save their fellows, they who go down
into the depths that they may lift men up, see
1 See Trench's Study of Words, p. 1 00.

106 The Teaching of Jesus
so much of the darkened under-side of human
life, they are brought so close up to the ugly
facts of human baseness, human trickery, human
ingratitude, that, unless there be behind them
the staying, steadying power of the faith and
love of Christ, they cannot long endure the strain ;
they grow weary in well-doing, perchance even
they grow bitter and contemptuous, and in a
little while the tasks they have taken up fall
unfinished from their hands. "Society" takes
to " slumming " for a season — just as for another
season it may take to ping-pong — but the fit
does not last ; and only they keep on through
the long, grey days, when neither sun nor stars
are seen, who have learnt to look on men with
the eyes, and to feel toward them with the
heart, of Jesus the Man of Nazareth.
( 2) " Whoso shall cause one of these little
ones that believe on Me to stumble, it is profitable
for him that a great mill-stone should be hanged
about his neck, and that he should be sunk in
the depth of the sea." Once more is revealed
Christ's thought of the worth of the soul. How
the holy passion against him who would hurt
" one of these little ones " glows and scorches
in His words ! Is this a word for any of us ?
Is there one among us who is .tempting a brother
man to dishonesty, to drink, to lust ; who is
pushing some thoughtless girl down the steep
and slippery slope which ends — we know where ?
Then let him stop and listen, not to me, but to

Concerning Man 107
Christ Never, I think, did He speak with such
solemn, heart-shaking emphasis, and He says that
it were better a man should die, that he should
die this night, die the most miserable and shame
ful death, than that he should bring the blood of
another's soul upon his head. It must needs be
that occasions of stumbling come, but woe, woe
to that man by whom they come, when he and
the slain soul's Saviour shall stand face to face !
Oh, if there be one among us who is playing the
tempter, and doing the devil's work, let him get
to his knees, and cry with the conscience-smitten
Psalmist, " Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O
God, Thou God of my salvation " ; and peradven-
ture even yet He may hear and have mercy.
(3) Let fathers and mothers ponder what this
teaching of Jesus concerning man means for th'em
in relation to their children. There came into
your home a while ago a little child, a gift from
God, just such a babe as Jesus Himself was in
His mother's arms in Bethlehem. The child is
yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, and
it bears your likeness and image ; but it is also
God's child, and it bears His image. What
difference is the coming of the little stranger
making in you ? I do not ask what difference
is it making to you, for the answer would be
ready in a moment, " Much, every way " ; but,
what difference is it making in you ? Does it
never occur to you that you ought to be a
different man — a better man — that you ought

108 The Teaching of Jesus
to be a different woman — a better woman — for
the sake of the little one lying in the cradle?
Do you know that of all the things God ever
made and owns, in this or all His worlds, there
is nothing more dear to Him than the soul of
the little child He has committed to your hands ?
What hands those should be that bear a gift like
that ! Perhaps we never thought of it in that
way before. But it is true, whether we think
of it or not. Is it not time to begin to think
of it ? This night, as we stand over our sleeping
child, let us promise to God, for the child's sake,
that we will be His.
(4) Last of all, we must learn to set Christ's
value upon ourselves. This is the tragedy of
life, that we hold ourselves so cheap. We are
sprung of heaven's first blood, have titles manifold,
and yet, when the crown is offered us, we choose
rather, like the man with the muck-rake, in
Bunyan's great allegory, to grub among the dust
and sticks and straws of the floor. In the times
of the French Revolution, French soldiers, it is
said, stabled their horses in some of the magnifi
cent cathedrals of France ; but some of us are
guilty of a far worse sacrilege in that holy of
holies which we call the soul. " Ye were re
deemed, not with corruptible things, with silver
or gold," but with blood, precious blood, even the
blood of Christ. And the soul which cost that,
we are ready to sell any day in the open market
for a little more pleasure or a little more pelf.

Concerning Man 109
The birthright is bartered for the sorriest mess of
pottage, and the jewel which the King covets to
wear in His crown our own feet trample in the
mire of the streets. The pity of it, the pity of it !
In one of Dora Greenwell's simple and beauti
ful Songs of Salvation, a pitman tells to his
wife the story of his conversion. He had got
a word like a fire in his heart that would not
let him be, "Jesus, the Son of God, who loved,
and who gave Himself for me."
" It was for me that Jesus died 1 for me, and a world
of men,
Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love
again ;
And He didn't wait till I came to Him, but He loved
me at my worst ;
He needn't ever have died for me if I could have
loved Him first"
And then he continues : —
"And could'st Thou love such a man as me, my
Saviour ! Then I'll take
More heed to this wand'ring soul of mine, if it's only
for Thy sake."
Yes, we are all of worth to God, but we must
needs go to the Cross to learn how great is our
worth ; and, as we bow in its sacred shadow,
may we learn to say : " For Thy sake, 0 Christ,
for Thy sake, I'll take more heed to this wander
ing soul of mine." l
1 The chapter entitled " Christ's Doctrine of Man " is one of
the most suggestive chapters in Dr. Bruce's admirable work The
Kingdom of God.

CONCERNING SIN

" O MAN, strange composite of heaven and earth !
Majesty dwarfed to baseness ! fragrant flower
Running to poisonous seed ! and seeming worth
Choking corruption ! weakness mastering power 1
Who never art so near to crime and shame,
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name."
Newman.

VIII
CONCERNING SIN
" When ye pray, say. . . . Forgive us our sins." — Luke xi. 2, 4.
A RECENT writer has pointed out that sin,
like death, is not seriously realized except
as a personal fact. We really know it only when
we know it about ourselves. 'The word " sin " has
no serious meaning to a man, except when it
means that he himself is a sinful man. And
hence it comes to pass that we can still turn
to the penitential Psalms, to the seventh chapter
of Romans, to the Confessions of St. Augustine, or
to the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan, and
make their words the language of our own
broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan
and Augustine and Paul and the psalmists spoke
of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of others,
but their knowledge of themselves ; they looked
into their own hearts and wrote. That is why
their words " find " us to-day. Neverthless, para
dox though it may seem, our greatest Teacher
concerning sin, Himself "knew no sin." Born
without sin, living and dying without sin, Christ
113 I

114 The Teaching of Jesus
yet " knew what was in man," knew-the sin that
was in man, and from His own sinless height
once for all revealed and judged and condemned
it. Let us seek, then, to learn the mind of Christ
on this great matter.
And once more, as 1 have had occasion to
point out in a previous chapter, we must not look
for anything formal, defined, systematic in Christ's
teaching. We cannot open the Gospels, as we
might some modern theological treatise, and
read out from them a scientific exposition of sin
— its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New
Testament is not like a museum, where the
flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils lie
carefully arranged within glass cases, and every
thing is duly classified and labelled. Rather it is
like nature itself, where the flowers grow wild at
our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand
left them, and where each man must do the
classifying and labelling for himself. Museums
have their uses, and there will always be those
who prefer them — they save so much trouble.
But since Christ's aim was not to save us trouble,
but to teach us to see things with our own eyes,
to see them as He saw them, and to think of
them as He thinks, it is no wonder that He has
chosen rather to put us down in the midst of a
world of living truths than in a museum of
assorted and dead facts.

Concerning Sin 115
I
What, then, is the teaching of Jesus con
cerning sin ? His tone is at once severe and
hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that
shake our hearts with fear ; sometimes they
surprise us with their overflowing tenderness
and pity. But however He may deal with the
sinner, we are always made to feel that to Jesus
sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred
over and made light of, but to be faced, and met,
and grappled with. Christ's sense of the gravity
of sin comes out in many ways.
(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He
who made so much of man could not make light
of man's sin. It is because man is so great that
his sin is so grave. No one can understand the
New Testament doctrine of sin who does not read it
in the light of the New Testament doctrine of man.
When we think of man as Christ thought of him,
when we see in him the possibilities which Christ
saw, the Scripture language concerning sin be
comes intelligible enough ; until then it may
easily seem exaggerated and unreal. It is the
height for which man was made and meant which
measures the fall which is involved in his sin.
(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ
set forth the effects of sin. He spoke of men as
blind, as sick, as dead ; He said they were as
sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in
debt which they can never pay, in bondage from

1 1 6 The Teaching of Jesus
which they can never free themselves. The
very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to
Christ's sense of the havoc wrought by sin. Nor
are they metaphors merely ; they are His reading
of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me
refer briefly to two of them, {a) Christ spoke of
men as in bondage through their sin. '' If," He
said once, "ye abide in My word ... ye shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
And straightway jealous Jewish ears caught at
that word " free." " Free ? " they cried, " Free ?
we be Abraham's seed, and have never yet been
in bondage to any man : how sayest Thou, Ye
shall be made free ? " Yet even as they lift their
hands in protest Christ hears the clink of their
fetters : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, every
one that committeth sin is the bond-servant —
the slave — of sin." " To whom ye present your
selves as servants unto obedience, his servants —
his slaves — ye are whom ye obey ; whether of sin
unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness."
Apostle and Lord mean the same thing, true of
us as it was true of the Jews : " Every one that
committeth sin is the slave of sin." (b) Further,
Christ says, men are in debt through their sin.
In one parable He tells us of a certain lender who
had two debtors ; the one owed five hundred
pence, and the other fifty ; but neither had where
with to pay. In another parable we hear of a
servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents —
a gigantic sum, vague in its vastness, " millions "

Concerning Sin 117
as we might say — and he likewise had not where
with to pay. Further, in the application of each
parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is
due. Now, it is just at this point that our sense
of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the
dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our
responsibility toward them that come after us ;
with pitiless insistence they are telling us that the
evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done
with when it is done. Yet, with all this, there
may be no thought of God. It is the conscious
ness not merely of responsibility, but of responsi
bility God-ward, which needs to be strengthened.
When we sin we may wrong others much, we may
wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of
all ; and we shall never recover Christ's thought
of sin until, like the psalmist and the prodigal, we
have learned to cry to Him, " Against Thee have
I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely
something a man does, it is what he is. Go
through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of " the
works of the flesh " : " Fornication, uncleanness,
lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife,
jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, heresies,
envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like."
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter.
Sin is more than the sum -total of man's sins.
The fruits are corrupt because the tree which
yields them is corrupt ; the stream is tainted
because the fountain whence it flows is impure ;

1 1 8 The Teaching of Jesus •
man commits sin because he is sinful. It was
just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively,
with the traditional religion of His time. To the
average Jew of that day righteousness and sin
meant nothing more than the observance or the
non-observance of certain religious traditions.
" For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they
wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the
tradition of the elders : and when they come from
the market-place, except they wash themselves,
they eat not ; and many other things there be
which they have received to hold, washings of cups,
and -pots, and brazen vessels. " Nay," said Jesus,
"you are beginning at the wrong end, you are
concerned about the wrong things, for from with
in, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed,
fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings,
wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, rail
ing, pride, foolishness : all these evil things
proceed from within." Deep in the heart of man
evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing
is done. (4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful.
Of course, He did not say, nor did He imply that
all are equally sinful. On the contrary, He said
plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty
pence, the debt of others is as five hundred pence.
Neither did Christ teach that man is wholly sinful,
in the sense that there is in man nothing that is
good, or that every man is by nature as bad as he
can be. Nor, let it be said in passing, is this what

Concerning Sin 119
theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes
does, about the " total depravity *' of human nature.
What is meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the
depravity which sin has produced in human nature
extends to the whole of it1 If I poison my finger,
it is not only the finger that is poisoned ; the
poison is in the blood, and, unless it be got rid
of, not my finger merely, but my life is in peril.
And in like manner the sin which taints my
nature taints my whole nature, perverting the con
science, enfeebling the will, and darkening the
understanding. But with whatever qualifications
Christ's indictment is against the whole human
race. He never discusses the origin of sin, but
He always assumes its presence. No matter how
His hearers might vary, this factor remained con
stant. " If ye, being evil " — that mournful pre
supposition could be made everywhere. He spoke
of men as " lost," and said that He had come to
seek and save them. He summoned men, without
distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood
as " shed for many unto remission of sins." The
gospel which, in His name, was to be preached
unto all the nations was concerning "repentance
and remission of sins." Even His own disciples
He taught, as they prayed, to say, " Forgive us
our sins." And though it is true He said once
that He had not come to call the righteous but
sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean
to suggest that there really are some righteous
1 Studies in Theology, p. 83.

120 The Teaching of Jesus
persons who have no need of repentance ; rather
was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine
irony to pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men
whose need was greater just because it was
unfelt " All have sinned ; " but once more let us re
mind ourselves, sin is not seriously realized except
as a personal fact. The truth must come home
as a truth about ourselves. The accusing finger
singles men out and fastens the charge on each
several conscience : " Thou art the man ! " And
as the accusation is individual, so, likewise, must
the acknowledgment be. It is not enough that
in church we cry in company, " Lord have mercy
upon us, miserable offenders " ; each must learn
to pray for himself, " God be merciful to me a
sinner." Then comes the word of pardon, per
sonal and individual as the condemnation, " The
Lord also hath put away thy sin."
II
In what has been said thus far I have dwelt,
for the most part, on the sterner and darker aspects
of Christ's teaching about sin. And, as every
student of contemporary literature knows, there
are voices all around us to-day ready to take up
and emphasize every word of His concerning the
mischief wrought by moral evil. Take, e.g., a
passage like this from Thomas Hardy's powerful
but sombre story, Tess : —

Concerning Sin 121
" Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess ? "
" Yes."
"All like ours?"
" I don't know ; but I think so. They sometimes seem
to me like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them
splendid and sound — a few blighted."
" Which do we live on — a splendid one, or a blighted
one?" " A blighted one."
Or, turn to the works of George Eliot. No pro
phet of righteousness ever bound sin and its con
sequences more firmly together, or proclaimed
with more solemn emphasis the certainty of the
evil-doer's doom. " Our deeds are like children
that are born to us," she says ; " nay, children may
be strangled, but deeds never " — this is the note
one hears through all her books. If we have
done wrong, it is in vain we cry for mercy. We
are taken by the throat and delivered over to
the tormentors until we have paid the uttermost
farthing. " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ,
Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
And this is all that writers such as these have
to say to us. Retribution they know, but not
Redemption. " There are no arresting angels in
the path" — only the Angel of Justice with the
drawn sword.
But this is not the teaching of Jesus concern
ing sin. He is not blind, and if we give ear to

122 The Teaching of Jesus
Him He will not suffer us to be blind, either to
"its character or its consequences ; but He says
that sin can be forgiven, and its iron bondage
broken. Jesus believed in the recoverability of
man at his worst. It is a fact significant of much
that the first mention of sin in the New Testa
ment is in a prophecy of its destruction-: " Thou
shalt call His name Jesus ; for it is He that shall
save His people from their sins." And throughout
the first three Gospels sin is named almost ex
clusively in connection with its forgiveness.1 What
Christ hath joined together let no man put asunder.
Herein is the very gospel of God, that Christ
came not to condemn the world, but that the
world, through Him, might be saved. " Do you
know what Christ would say to you, my girl ? "
said a missionary to a poor girl dying. " He
would say, ' Thy sins are forgiven thee.' " " Would
He, though, would He ? " she cried, starting up ;
"take me to Him, take me to Him." Yes, thank
God, we know what to do with our sin ; we know
what we must do to be saved.
Let us go back again for a moment over the
ground we have already travelled. We are in
debt, with nothing to pay ; but Christ has taken
the long account, and has crossed it through and
through. We are in bondage, with no power to
set ourselves free ; but Christ has come to rend
the iron chain and proclaim deliverance to the
captives. We are wrong, wrong within, wrong at
1 See Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, Art. " Sin," vol. iii. p. 533.

Concerning Sin 123
the core ; but again He is equal to Our need, for
concerning Him it is written that He shall take
away not only the " sins " but the " sin " of the
world. Is anything too hard for Him ? Just as
a lover of pictures will sometimes discover a por
trait, the work of an old master, marred and dis
figured by the dirt and neglect of years, and will
patiently cleanse and retouch it, till the lips seem
to speak again, and the. old light shines in the
eyes, and all its hidden glory is revealed once
more, so does Christ bring out the Divine image,
hidden but never lost, in the sinful souls of men.
And all this He can do for all men ; for Christ
knows no hopeless ones.
One of the saddest sights in a great city is
its hospital for incurables. Who can think but
with a pang of pity and of pain of these — old
men and little children joined in one sad fellow
ship — for whom the physician's skill has done
its best and failed, for whom now nothing
remains save to suffer and to die? But in
the world's great hospital of ailing souls, where
every day the Good Physician walks, there is no
incurable ward. He lays His hands on the sick,
and they are healed ; He touches the eyes of the
blind, and they see ; unto the leper as white as
snow his flesh comes again as the flesh of a little
child ; even souls that are dead through their
trespasses and sins He restores to life. But never,
never does He turn away from any, saying, " Thou
art too far gone ; there is nothing that I can do

1 24 The Teaching of Jesus
for thee." " I spake to Thy disciples," cried the
father of the child which had a dumb spirit, " I
spake to Thy disciples that they should cast it
out ; and they were not able." " Bring him unto
Me," said Jesus. Then He rebuked the unclean
spirit, saying unto him, " Thou dumb and deaf
spirit, I command thee, come out of him and enter
no more into him." Verily, with authority He
commandeth even the unclean spirits and they
obey Him.
Therefore let us despair of no man ; therefore
let no man despair of himself. If we will, we
can ; we can, because Christ will. " I was before,"
says St. Paul, " a blasphemer, and a persecutor,
and injurious ; howbeit I obtained mercy." " I
am a wretched captive of sin," cries Samuel Ruther
ford, " yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse
timber." There is no unpardonable sin — none, at
least, save the sin of refusing the pardon which
avails for all sin. " ' Mine iniquity is greater than
can be forgiven.'1 No, Cain, thou errest ; God's
mercy is far greater, couldst thou ask mercy.
Men cannot be more sinful than God is merciful
if, with penitent hearts, they will call upon Him."
We have all read of the passing of William
MacLure in Ian Maclaren's touching idyll. " A'm
gettin' drowsy," said the doctor to Drumsheugh,
"read a bit tae me." Then Drumsheugh put on
his spectacles, and searched for some comfortable
Scripture. Presently he began to read : " In My
1 This is the R.V. marginal rendering of Gen. iv. 13.

Concerning Sin 125
-Father's house are many mansions ; " but MacLure
stopped him. " It's a bonnie word," he said, " but
ifs no' for the like o' me. It's ower guid ; a'
daurna tak' it." Then he bid Drumsheugh shut
the book and let it open of itself, and he would
find the place where he had been reading every
night for the last month. Drumsheugh did as he
was bidden, and the book opened at the parable
wherein the Master tells what God thinks of a
Pharisee and a penitent sinner. And when he
came to the words, " And the publican, standing
afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to
heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God
be merciful to me a sinner," once more the dying
man stopped him : " That micht hae been written
for me, Paitrick, or ony ither auld sinner that hes
feenished his life, an' hes naething tae say for
himsel." Nothing to say for ourselves — that is what it
comes to, when we know the truth about ourselves.
And when at last our mouth is stopped, when our
last poor plea is silenced, when with penitent and
obedient hearts we seek the mercy to which from
the first we have been utterly shut up, then
indeed we " have found the ground wherein
Sure our soul's anchor may remain."
" Not by works done in righteousness, which
we did ourselves, but according to His mercy He
saved us."

CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS

127

" I spend my whole life in going about and persuading you all
to give your first and chiefest care to the perfection of your souls,
and not till you have done that to think of your bodies, or your
wealth ; and telling you that virtue does not come from wealth, but
that wealth, and every other good thing which men have, whether
in public, or in private, comes from virtue." — Socrates.

128

IX
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
"Seek ye first . . . His righteousness." — Matt. vi. 33.
RIGHTEOUSNESS, as it was understood and
taught by Christ, includes the two things
which we often distinguish as religion and morality.
It is right-doing, not only as between man and
man, but as between man and God. The Law
giver of the New Testament, like the lawgiver of
the Old, has given to us two tables of stone. On
the one He has written, " Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind " ; and on the other,
" Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In
these two commandments the whole law is summed
up, the whole duty of man is made known. It is
well to emphasize this two-fold aspect of the truth
at a time when we are often tempted to define
religion wholly in the terms of morality, and, while
insisting on the duties which we owe to each other, to
forget those which we owe to God. If there be a
God righteousness must surely have a meaning in
relation to Him ; it cannot be simply another
129 K

130 The Teaching of Jesus
name for philanthropy. Christ at least will not
call that man just and good who does right to all
except his Maker. In the Christian doctrine of
the good life room must be found for God. At
the present moment, however, it is the subject in
its man-ward aspect that I wish specially to keep
in view, partly because some limitation is obviously
necessary, and partly also because it is this of
which Christ Himself had most to say.

What, then, is Christ's idea of righteousness?
In other words, what did He teach concerning the
good life ? Now here also, as in His teaching
about God, Christ did not need to begin de novo.
Those to whom He spoke had already their own
ideals of duty and holiness. True, these were
sadly in need of revision and correction. Never
theless, such as they were, they were there, and
Christ could use them as His starting-point.
Consequently, therefore, we find His ideas of
righteousness defined largely by contrast with
existing ideas. " It was said to them of old time
. . . but I say unto you!' This is the note heard
all through the Sermon on the Mount. The con
trast may be stated in two ways.
(1) In the first place, Christ said that the
righteousness of His disciples must exceed that
of publicans and heathen : " If ye love them that
love you, what reward have ye ? Do not even

Concerning Righteousness 131
the publicans the same r^ And if ye salute your
brethren only, what do ye more than others ?
Do not even the Gentiles the same ? " There
are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly
irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral
principles which they that know not God never
theless acknowledge and obey. It was so in
Christ's time ; it is so still. The popular American
ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching
story of the Drumtochty postman, are familiar
illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by
men of coarse and vicious lives. Nor ought we
to deny the reality of such virtues ; still less ought
we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine
and call them " splendid vices." Such was not
Christ's way. He assumed the existence and
reality of this " natural goodness," and with familiar
illustrations of it on His tongue turned upon His
disciples with the question, " What do ye more ? "
" What do ye more ? " Yet in some respects,
it is to be feared, the morality of the Church
sometimes falls behind that of the world. One
of the most painful passages in St. Paul's epistles
is that in which he tells the Corinthian Christians
that one of their own number had been guilty of
immorality such as would. have shocked even the
conscience of an unbelieving Gentile. And it was
but the other day that I came across this sentence
from the peffJ of an observant and friendly critic
of contemporary religious life : " I am afraid," he
said, " it must be admitted that the idea of honour,

132 The Teaching of Jesus
though in itself an essential part of Christian
ethics, is much stronger outside the Churches than
within them." How far facts justify the criticism
I will not stay to inquire ; but the very fact that
a charge like this can be made should prove a
sharp reminder to us of the stringency of the
demands which Jesus Christ makes upon us.
There is no kind of sound moral fruit which is to
be found anywhere in the wide fields of the world
which He does not look for in richer and riper
abundance within the garden of His Church.
A great Christian preacher has given an admir
able illustration of one way in which we may
examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped
together a number of precepts from the writings
of some of the great heathen moralists, such as
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has
urged the question how far we who profess to be
the disciples of a loftier faith are true even to
these ancient heathen ideals.1 Perhaps, however,
this is not a method of self-examination which
is open to us all. But this, at least, we can
do : we can test ourselves by that moral law,
which God gave to the Jews by Moses, and
which Christ reinterpreted in the Sermon on the
Mount. " Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not
commit adultery" — all these commandments in
their literal meaning we must observe ; yet this is
not enough ; " do not even the publicans the
same ? " and Christ's demand is, " What do ye
1 R. W. Dale, Evangelical Revival and other Sermons, p. 66 ff.

Concerning Righteousness 133
more than others ? " The murderous thought,
Christ says, that is murder ; the lustful look, that
is adultery. " Ye have heard that it was said,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine
enemy : but I say unto you, Love your enemies,
and pray for them that persecute you." As we
listen to words like these must not we also confess,
" Either these sayings are not Christ's, or we are
not Christians " ?
(2) Christ's idea of righteousness is further
defined by contrast with that of the Pharisees :
" Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall
in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."
What was the Pharisees' idea of religion ? Let
us take the words which Christ Himself put into
the lips of a representative of his class : " God, I
thank Thee, that I am not as the rest of men,
extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this
publican. I fast twice in the week ; I give tithes
of all that I get." This is a full-length portrait
of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a
round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a
subjection to the dominion of the letter, which
never touched the heart, nor bowed the spirit
down in penitence and humility before God. The
Pharisee's whole concern was with externals ; but
Christ declared that he who is only right outwardly
is not right at all. There is no such thing, He
said, as goodness which is not from within. The
alms-deeds, the prayer, the fasting of the Pharisee

1 34 The Teaching of Jesus
were all done before men, to be seen of them ; and
so long as that which men saw was right and
seemly, he was satisfied. But Christ went back
behind the outward act to the heart. A man is
really, He said, what he is there. You may hang
grapes on a thorn-bush, that will not make it
a vine ; you may put a sheep's fleece on a wolfs
back, but that will not change its wolfish heart.
And men are what they are within. Just as to
get good fruit you must first of all make the tree
good, so to secure good deeds you must first make
good men. This was the truth which Pharisaism
ignored ; with what results all the world knows.
In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps,
the supreme illustration of the fatal facility with
which religion and morality are divorced when
once the emphasis is laid upon the outward and
ceremonial instead of the inward and spiritual.
All experience helps us to understand how the
system works. There is no deliberate intention
of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so
much easier to count one's beads than to curb
one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent than
to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier
thing gets attached to it an exaggerated import
ance, fidelity in it is allowed to atone for laxity in
greater things, and the last result is Pharisaism,
where we see conscience concerned about the
tithing of garden herbs, but with no power over
the life, and religion not merely tolerating but
actually ministering to moral evil. It was in

Concerning Righteousness 135
the name of religion that the Pharisees suffered a
man to violate even the sanctities of the Fifth
Commandment, and to do dishonour to his father
and mother. The righteous man in their eyes
was not he who loved mercy, and did justly, and
walked humbly with his God, but he who observed
the traditions of the elders. So that, as Professor
Bruce says,1 it was possible for a man to comply
with all the requirements of the Rabbis and yet
remain in heart and life an utter miscreant.
" Outwardly," said Christ, " ye appear righteous
unto men, but • inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy
and iniquity." Is it any wonder that He should
call down fire from heaven to consume a system
which had yielded such bitter, poisonous fruits as
these ?
But let us remember, as Mozley well says,2
there are no extinct species in the world of evil.
The value for us of Christ's condemnation lies in
this, that it is a permanent tendency of human
nature which He is condemning. Pharisaism is
not dead. Have I not seen the Pharisee dressed
in good broad-cloth and going to church with his
Bible under his arm ? And have I not seen him
sitting in church and reading the twenty-third
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and thinking to
himself what shockingly wicked people these men
must have been of whom Christ spoke such
1 The Kingdom of God, p. 203.
2 In his famous sermon on the Pharisees, University Sermons,
p. 3*-

1 36 The Teaching of Jesus
terrible words, and never once supposing that
there is anything in the chapter that concerns
him ? No, Pharisaism is not dead ; and when
we read of those who devoured widows' houses
and for a pretence made long prayers, using their
religion as a cloak for their villainy, let us re
member that Christ says to His disciples to-day,
even as He said to them centuries ago, " Except
your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness
of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise
enter into the kingdom of heaven."
II
Thus far we have considered Christ's idea of
righteousness only in contrast with other ideas.
When we seek to define it in itself we fall back
naturally on the words of the two great com
mandments which have already been quoted :
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind ; " and " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself." Righteousness, Christ says, is love, love
to God and love to man.
But to them of old time it was said, " Thou
shalt love thy neighbour." Where, then, is the
difference between the old commandment and the
new ? It lies in the new definition of " neigh
bour." The old law which said, " Thou shalt
love thy neighbour," said also, " and hate thine
enemy " ; which meant that some are and some

Concerning Righteousness 137
are not our neighbours, and that toward those
who are not love has no obligations. But Christ
broke down for ever the middle wall of partition,
and declared the old distinction null and void.
In His parable of the Good Samaritan He taught
that every man is our neighbour who has need of
us, and to whom it is possible for us to prove
ourselves a friend. As we have opportunity we
are to do good unto all men. The same lesson
with, if possible, still greater emphasis, Christ
taught in the Upper Room : " A new command
ment I give unto you, that ye love one another ;
even as I have loved you, that ye also love
one another." A love that goes all the way
with human need, that gives not itself by measure,
that is not chilled by indifference?, nor thwarted by
ingratitude, that fights against evil until it over
comes it — such was the love He gave, and such
is the love He asks. And in that command all
other commands are comprehended. Christ might
have made His own the daring word of St.
Augustine, " Love, and do what you like."
When first men heard this law of the heavenly
righteousness how wondrous simple it must have
seemed in contrast with the elaborate scribe-
made law which their Rabbis laid upon them.
Pharisaism had reduced religion to a branch of
mechanics, a vast network of rules which closed
in the life of man on every side, a burden grievous
and heavy to be borne, which crustied the soul
under its weary load. This was the yoke of

138 The Teaching of Jesus
which Peter said that neither they nor their
fathers were able to bear it. Was it any marvel
that from such a system men should turn to Him
who cried, " Take My yoke upon you, and" learn
of Me ; for My yoke is easy, and My burden is
light " ? But if Christ's law of love is simpler it
is also far more exacting than the old law which
it superseded. It has meshes far finer than any
that Pharisaic ingenuity could weave. Rabbinical
law can secure the tithing of mint and anise and
cummin, the washing of cups and pots, and many
such like things ; it can regulate the life of ritual
and outward observance ; and after that it has no
more that it can do. But Christ's law of love is
a mentor that searches out the deep things of
man. The inside of the cup and platter, the
things that are within, the hidden man of the
heart — it is on these its eyes are fixed. It gives
heed both to the words of the mouth and the
meditations of the heart. And, sometimes, when
the lips are speaking fair, suddenly it will fling
open the heart's door and show us where, in some
secret chamber, Greed and Pride and Envy and
Hate sit side by side in unblest fellowship. Verily
this law of love is living and active, sharper than
any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing
of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, quick
to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
There is no room to do more than mention
the fact which crowns the revelation of this new
law of righteousness. Christ's words about good-

Concerning Righteousness 1 39
ness do not come to us alone ; they come united
with a life which is their best exposition. Christ
is all His followers are to be ; in Him the
righteousness of the kingdom is incarnate. From
henceforth the righteous man is the Christ-like
man. The standard of human life is no longer a
code but a character ; for the gospel does not put
us into subjection to fresh laws ; it calls us to
" the study of a living Person, and the following
of a living Mind." J And when to Jesus we bring
the old question, " Good Master, what shall I do
that I may inherit eternal life ? " He does not
now repeat the commandments, but He says, " If
thou wouldest be perfect, follow Me, learn of Me,
do as I have done to you, love as I have loved
you." Ill
Such, then, is the good life which Christ
reveals, and to which He calls us. To say that
to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness,
is only to affirm what no one now seriously denies.
John -Stuart Mill has, it is true, alleged certain
defects against Christianity as an ethical system,
yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that " it
would not be easy now, even for an unbeliever,
to find a better translation of the rule of virtue
from the abstract to the concrete, than to en
deavour so to live that Christ would approve our
life." If Christ be not our one Master in the
1 R. W. Church, Gifts of Civilisation, p. 71.

140 The Teaching of Jesus
moral world, it will at least be soon enough to
discuss a rival's claims when he appears ; as yet
there is no sign of him. But the point I am
most anxious to emphasize just now is not simply
that Jesus has put before us an ideal, the highest
of its kind in the world, but that there is nothing
of any kind to be desired before it. To be good
as Christ was good, here in very truth is the
summum bonum of life, the greatest thing in the
world, that which, before all other things, a man
should seek to make his own, There are times,
perhaps, in the lives of all of us when we are
tempted to doubt it — times when the kingdoms
of this world, the kingdoms of wealth and power
and knowledge lie stretched at our feet, and the
whispering fiend at our elbow bids us bow and
enter in. But once again, if we be true men, the
moment comes,
"When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,"
when the sacred, saving faith in righteousness
returns, and we know that Christ was right, that
for ever and for ever it is true that better than to
be rich, or to be clever, or to be famous, is it to
be true, to be pure, to be good.
Yes, goodness is the principal thing ; therefore
get goodness, and with all thy getting — at the
price of all that thou hast gotten (such is the true
meaning of the words) x — get righteousness. Is
1 Prov. iv. 7 : "Get wisdom; and with all thy getting get
understanding," which does not mean simply, " Whatever else you

Concerning Righteousness 141
this what we are doing ? Goodness is the first
thing ; are we putting it first ? Day by day are
we saying to it, " Sit thou on my right hand,"
while we put all other things under our feet?
" Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I remember thee not ; if I prefer not thee
above my chief joy " — is this the kind of honour
that we are paying to it ? " We make it our
ambition," said St Paul, "to be well pleasing
unto Him." 1 Where this is the master ambition,
all other lawful ambitions may be safely cherished
and given their place. But if some lesser power
rule, whose right it is not to reign over us, the end
is chaos and night. " Seek ye first His righteous
ness ; " we subvert Christ's order at our peril.
And this righteousness must be sought. As men
seek wealth, as men seek knowledge, as men seek
power, so must we seek goodness. "Wherefore
giving all diligence " — in no other way can the
pearl of great price be secured ; it does not lie by
the roadside for any lounger to pick up. " With
toil of heart and knees and hands," so only can
the " path upward " and the prize be won.
" Blessed," said Jesus, " are they that hunger and
thirst after righteousness." Blessed, He meant,
are they who long more than anything else to be
get, be sure to get understanding." The marginal reference is to
Matt, xiii.' 44 : wisdom, like the pearl of great price, is to be
secured with, i.e. at the cost and sacrifice of, everything else that
can be gotten. (See J. R. Lumby on " Shortcomings of Transla
tion," Expositor, second series, vol. iii. p. 203.)
1 2 Cor. v. 9 R.V. margin.

142 The Teaching of Jesus
good ; for all such longing shall be abundantly
satisfied. Exalt righteousness, and she shall
promote thee ; she shall bring thee to honour
when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to
thine head a chaplet of grace ; a crown of beauty
shall she deliver to thee.
It is fitting that a chapter on righteousness
should follow one on sin, for this may find some
to whom the other made no appeal. At a
meeting of Christian workers held some years ago
in Glasgow, the chairman invited the late Professor
Henry Drummond, who was present, though his
name was not on the programme, to say a few
words. He accepted the invitation, but said he
would do no more than state a fact and ask a
question. The fact was this, that in recent
revival movements, in which he had had large
experience, there were few indications of that
deep and overwhelming conviction of sin which
had been so characteristic a feature of similar
revivals in past days. And this was the question,
Did it mean that the Holy Spirit was in any way
modifying the method of His operation ? What
answer the wise men of the meeting gave to the
Professor's question I do not know. But fact
and question alike deserve to be carefully pondered.
The Spirit, when He is come, Christ said, " will
convict the world in respect of sin, and of
righteousness, and of judgment." " Will convict
the world of righteousness " — have we not some
times forgotten this? Have we not put the

Concerning Righteousness 143
full stop at " sin," as though the Holy Spirit's
convicting work ended there? Nevertheless,
there are many to-day whose religious life begins,
not so much in a sense of their own sin and guilt
and need, as rather in the consciousness of the
glory and honour of Christ. It is what they find
within themselves which brings some men to
Christ ; it is what they find in Him which brings
others. Some are driven by the strong hands of
stern necessity ; some are wooed by the sweet
constraint of the sinless Son of God. Some are
crushed and broken and humbled to the dust,
and their first cry is " God be merciful to me a
sinner " ; some when they' hear the call of Christ
leap up to greet Him with a new light in their
eyes and the glad confession on their lips, " Lord
I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest."
What, then, shall we say to these things ?
What but this, " There are diversities of workings,
but the same God, who worketh all things in all."
Travellers to the same country do not always
journey by the same route ; and for some of the
heavenly pilgrims the Slough of Despond lies on
the other side of the Wicket Gate. After all, it
is of small moment what brings a man forth from
the City of Destruction ; enough if he have come
out and if now his face is set toward the city
which hath the foundations, whose builder and
maker is God.

CONCERNING PRAYER

145

"Who seeketh finds : what shall be his relief
Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray,
No sense of God, but bears as best he may,
A lonely incommunicable grief?
What shall he do ? One only thing he knows,
That his life flits a frail uneasy spark
In the great vast of universal dark,
And that the grave may not be all repose.
Be still, sad soul ! lift thou no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy being bare
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye :
Wait — and through dark misgiving, blank despair,
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry
Dead plain with light, and life, and vernal air."
J. C. Shairp.

146

CONCERNING PRAYER
" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for
a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give
him a serpent ? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask Him ? " — Matt. vii. 9-1 1.
^T^HERE has been in our day much painful dis-
i~ putation concerning prayer and the laws
of nature. Whole volumes have been written to
prove that it is possible, or that it is impossible,
for God to answer prayer. I am not going to
thresh out again this dry straw just now. Dis
cussions of this kind have, undoubtedly, their
place ; indeed, whether we will or no, they are
often forced upon us by the conditions of the
hour ; but they had no place in the teaching of
Jesus, and I do not propose to say anything
about them now. I wish rather, imitating as far
as may be the gracious simplicity and directness
of the argument of Jesus which we have just read,
to gather up some of the practical suggestions
touching this great matter which are strewn
throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts and
practice of our Lord.

1 48 The Teaching of Jesus

I
First of all, then, let us get fixed in our
minds the saying of Jesus that " men ought
always to pray and not to faint." The very form
of the saying suggests that Christ knew how easy
it is for us to faint and grow weary in our prayers.
Men cease from prayer on many grounds. Some
there are in whom the questioning, doubting
spirit has grown so strong that for a time it has
silenced even the cry of the heart for God. Some
there are who are so busy, they tell us, that they
have no time for prayer ; and after all, they ask,
is not honest work the highest kind of prayer?
And some there are who have ceased to pray,
because they have been disappointed, because
nothing seemed to come of their prayers. They
asked but they did not receive, they sought but
they did not find, they knocked but ho door was
opened to them ; there was neither voice, nor any
to answer, nor any that regarded ; and now they
ask, they seek, they knock no more. And some of
us there are who do not pray because, as one of the
psalmists says, our soul " cleaveth unto the dust."
The things of God, the things of the soul, the
things of eternity — what Paul calls "the things
that are above " — are of no concern to us ; we
have sold ourselves to work, to think, to live, for
the things of the earth and the dust.
Nevertheless, be the cause of our prayerless-
ness what it may, Christ's word remains true.

Concerning Prayer 1 49
Man made in the image of God ought always to
pray and not to faint. And even more than by
His words does Christ by His example prompt us
to prayer. Turn, e.g., to the third Gospel. All the
Evangelists show us Jesus at prayer ; but it is to
Luke that we owe almost all our pictures of the
kneeling Christ. Let us glance at them as they
pass in quick succession before our eyes :
"Jesus having been baptized, and praying, the
heaven was opened" (iii. 21).
" He withdrew Himself in the deserts, and
prayed " (v. 1 6).
" It came to pass in these days, that He went
out into the mountain to pray ; and He continued
all night in prayer to God " (vi. 1 2).
" It came to pass, as He was praying alone,
the disciples were with Him" (ix. 18).
" It came to pass about eight days after these
sayings, He took with Him Peter and John and
James and went up into the mountain to pray.
And as He was praying the fashion of His coun
tenance was altered, and His raiment became
white and dazzling" (ix. 28, 29).
" It came to pass, as He was praying in a
certain place, that when He ceased, one of the
disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray,
even as John also taught his disciples" (xi. 1).
" Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have
you, that he might sift you as wheat ; but I made
supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not"
(xxii. 32).

1 50 The Teaching of Jesus
" And He kneeled down and prayed, saying,
Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from
Me : nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done.
. . . And being in an agony He prayed more
earnestly, and His sweat became as it were great
drops of blood falling down upon the ground "
(xxii. 41, 44).
" And Jesus said, Father, forgive them ; for
they know not what they do " (xxiii. 34).
And if thus I.j, the Redeemer, prayed, how
much greater need have we, the redeemed, always
to pray and not to faint ?
" But we are so busy, we have no time." Then
let us look at another picture. This time it is
Mark who is the painter. He has chosen as his
subject our Lord's first Sabbath in Capernaum.
The day begins with teaching : " He entered into
the synagogue and taught." After teaching comes
healing : " There was in their synagogue a man
with an unclean spirit;" him, straightway, Jesus
healed. Then, " straightway, when they were
come out of the synagogue, they came into the
house of Simon and Andrew, with James and
John. Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a
fever, and straightway they tell Him of her ; and
He came and took her by the hand, and raised
her up." So the day wore on toward evening and
sunset, when " they brought unto Him all that
were sick, and them that were possessed with
devils. And all the city was gathered together
at the door. And He healed many that were sick

Concerning Prayer 151
with divers diseases and cast out many devils."
So closed at last the long day's busy toil. " And
in the morning, a great while before day, He rose
up and went out and departed into a desert place,
and there prayed ;" as if just because He was so
much with men the more did He need to be with
God. Laborare est orare, we say, " work is prayer."
And, undoubtedly, " work may be prayer " ; but we
are deceiving ourselves and hurting our own souls,
if we think that work can take the place of prayer.
And if there is one lesson that these earthly years
of the Son of Man — busy as they were prayerful,
prayerful as they were busy — can teach us, it is
surely this, that just because our activities are so
abounding, the more need have we to make a
space around the soul wherein it may be able to
think, and pray, and aspire.
One of the best- known pictures of the last
half century is Millet's "Angelus." The scene is a
potato-field, in the midst of which, and occupying
the foreground of the picture, are two figures, a
young man and a young woman. Against the
distant sky-line is the steeple of. a church. It is
the evening hour, and as the bell rings which
calls the villagers to worship, the workers in the
field lay aside the implements of their toil, and
with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a
moment in silent prayer. It is a picture of what
every life should be, of what every life must be, which
has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in which
work and prayer are blent like bells of sweet accord.

152 The Teaching of Jesus
II
Another saying of Christ's concerning prayer,
not less fundamental is this : " When ye pray,
say, Our Father, which art in heaven." How
essential to prayer is a right thought of God
it can hardly be necessary to point out. " When
ye pray say  " what? All depends on how
we fill in the blank. Our thought of God deter
mines the character of all our intercourse with
Him. If " God " is only the name which we give
to the vast, unknown Power which lies behind the
visible phenomena of the universe, if He is only
a dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a
collection of attributes- whose names we have
learned from the Catechism, our prayers will soon
come to an end. When Jesus prayed He said
always " Father " ; and the Father to whom He
prayed, and whom He revealed, He it is to whom
our prayers should be offered.
This is a matter the practical importance of
which it would be hard to exaggerate. Think,
e.g., of the questions concerning prayer which
would be answered straightway, had we but made
our own Christ's thought of God. We are all
familiar with the little problems about prayer with
which some good people are wont to tease them
selves and their friends and their ministers : Is it
right to pray for rain, for fine weather, for the re
covery of health, for the success of some temporal
enterprize, and so forth ? How shall we meet

Concerning Prayer 153
questions of this sort ? Shall we draw a line and
say, all things on this side of the line we may
pray about, all things on that side of the line we
may not pray about ? This will not help us.
Rather we must keep Christ's great word before
us : " When ye pray, say, Father." There or
nowhere is the answer to be found. Just as every
wise father seeks to train his child to make of
him his confidant, to have no secrets from him, to
trust him utterly, and in everything, so would God
have us feel towards Him ; as free, as frank, as
unfettered, should our fellowship with Him be.
To put it under constraint, to fence it about with
rules, would be to rob it of all that gives it worth.
And, therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I do
not want any man to tell me, what we may pray
for, or what we may not pray for. "When ye
pray, say, Father ; " and for the rest let your own
heart teach you. But if we are left thus free shall
we not ask many things which we have no right
to ask, which God cannot grant? Undoubtedly
we shall, just as a boy of five will-ask many things
that his father, because he lpves him, must refuse.
Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check
the childish prattle. There is nothing that he
values more than just these frank, uncalculating
confidences, for he knows that it is by means of
them that the shaping hands of love can do their
perfect work. And the remedy for our mistakes
in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules,
telling us what to pray for and what not to pray

154 The Teaching of Jesus
for, but rather a deeper insight into, and a fuller
understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the
Divine Fatherhood. Ill
Passing now from these preliminary counsels
concerning prayer, let us note how great is the
importance which, both by His precepts and His
example, Christ attaches to the duty of inter
cessory prayer. I have been much struck of late
in reading several books on this subject, to note
how one writer after another judges it needful to
warn his readers against the idea that prayer is no
more than petition. What they say is, of course,
true ; prayer is much more than petition. But,
unless I misread the signs of the times, this is not
the warning which just now we most need to hear.
Rather do we need to be told that prayer is more
than communion, that petition, simple asking that
we may obtain, is a part, and a very large part of
prayer. " Who rises from prayer a better man,"
says George Meredith, " his prayer is answered."
This is true, but it is far from being the whole
truth. The duty of intercession, of prayer for
others, is writ large on every page of the New
Testament ; but intercession has simply no mean
ing at all unless we believe that God will grant
our requests as may be most expedient for us and
for them for whom we pray. Let me illustrate
the wealth of Christ's teaching on this matter by
two or three examples.

Concerning Prayer 155
(1) We have all read Tennyson's question —
" What are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friends ? "
" For themselves and those who call them friends '
— but Christ will not suffer us to stop there.
" Bless them that curse you," He said ; " pray for
them that despitefully use you." So He spoke,
and on the Cross He made the great word luminous
for ever by His own prayer for His murderers :
" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what
they do."
(2) Christ prayed for His disciples and for His
Church : " I pray for them . . . neither for these
only do I pray, but for them also that believe on
Me through their word." " I will pray the Father
and He shall give you  ." Only once are the
actual words recorded, but they cover, we are sure,
great stretches of Christ's intercourse with God.
And when once in their work for Him they had
failed, He puts His finger on the secret of their
failure thus : " This kind can come out by nothing
save by prayer." Do we pray for our Church ?
We find fault with it ; but do we pray for it ?
We blame its office - bearers and criticize its
ministers ; but do we pray for them ? We go to
the house of God on the Sabbath day ; but no
fire is burning on the altar, the minister has no
message for us, we come away no whit better than
we went. Whose is the blame ? Let the man in

1 56 The Teaching of Jesus
the pulpit take his share ; but is it all his ? Must
not some of it be laid at the door of his people ?
How many of them during the week had prayed
for him, that his eyes might be opened and his
heart touched, that as he sat and worked in his
study he might get from God to give to them ?
Dr. Dale used to say that if ever he preached a
good sermon, a sermon that really helped men, it
was due to the prayers of his people as much as
to anything he had done himself. If in all our
churches we would but proclaim a truce to our
bickerings and fault-findings, and try what prayer
can do !
(3) Christ prayed for the children : " Then were
there brought unto Him little children that He
should lay His hands on them, and pray. . . .
And He took them in His arms, and blessed them,
laying His hands upon them." It is surely need
less to dwell on this. What man is there who, if
he have a child, will not speak to God in his be
half? "And all the people said unto Samuel,
Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that
we die not. . . . And Samuel said unto the
people, God forbid that I should sin against the
Lord in ceasing to pray for you." God have
mercy on him who has little children who bear
his name, but who never cries to heaven in their
behalf ! " He blessed them," i.e. He invoked a
blessing, God's blessing, upon them. And we are
sure the prayer was heard, and the little ones were
blessed. And will not God hear our prayers for

Concerning Prayer 157
our children ? When Monica, the saintly mother
of Augustine, besought an African bishop once
and again to help her with her wilful, profligate
son, the good man answered her, " Woman, go in
peace ; it cannot be that the child of such tears
should be lost." " God's seed," wrote Samuel
Rutherford to Marion M'Naught about her
daughter Grizel, " shall come to God's harvest." It
shall, for the promise holds, and what we have
sown we shall also reap.
(4) And, lastly, Christ prayed for individuals :
" Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have
you," — all of you," that is ; the pronoun is plural —
" that he might sift you as wheat ; but I made
supplication for thee " — " thee, Peter " ; now the
singular pronoun is used — " that thy faith fail not."
The words point to a definite crisis in the experi
ence of Peter, when the onset of the Tempter was
met by the intercession of the Saviour. To me
Gethsemane itself is not more wonderful than this
picture of Christ on His knees before God, naming
His loved disciple by name, and praying that, in
this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not
utterly break down. " Making mention of thee in
my prayers" — does this not bring us near to the
secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to be
individual and particular ; we lose ourselves in large
generalities, until our prayers die of very vagueness.
There is surely a more excellent way. " My God,"
Paul wrote to the Philippians, " shall fulfil " — not
merely " all your need," as the Authorized Version

158 The Teaching of Jesus
has it, but — " every need of yours." There is a
fine discrimination in the Divine love which sifts
and sorts men's needs, and applies itself to them
^ne by one, just as the need may be. And when
in prayer we speak to God, let it be not only of
" all our need," flung in one great, careless heap
before Him, but of " every need of ours," each one
named by its name, and all spread out in order
before Him. IV
And as Christ teaches us to pray for others,
so also does He teach us to pray for ourselves.
Two points only in this connection can be noted.
(1) Let us pray when we enter into our Geth
semane ; for every life has its Gethsemane. Some
there are who have not yet entered it ; they are
young, and their way thus far has been among the
roses and lilies of life. But for them, tod, the path
leads to Gethsemane, and some day the)- also will
lie prostrate in an agony, under 'the darkening
olive trees. And some there are to whom life
seems but one long Gethsemane. In that dread
agony God help us to pray ! Nay, what else then
can a man do but, as Browning says, catch at
God's skirts and pray? But that he can do.
Death may build its dividing walls great and
high, such as our feet can never scale ; it cannot
roof them over and shut us out from God. We
remember how it was with Enoch Arden, stranded
on an isle, " the loneliest in a lonely sea " : — ¦

Concerning Prayer 159
" Had not his poor heart
Spoken with That, which being everywhere
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude."
Were it not for the doors opened in heaven what
should man that is born of a woman do ? But
when in our Gethsemane we offer up " prayers and
supplications, with strong crying and tears," it is
after Christ's manner that we must pray. I said
just now that there are some to whom life seems
one long Gethsemane. Can it be because hither
to they have only prayed, " O my Father, if it be
possible, let this cup pass away from me " ? Not
until with ' Christ we bow our heads and say,
" Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt,"
will the iron gates unfold and the shadows of the
Garden lie behind us.
(2) " Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
temptation." And if there be some to whom my
last word had little or no meaning, here, at least,
Christ speaks to all. And this time I have nothing
of my own to add by way of comment ; but I copy
out this passage from Charles Kingsley's Yeast, for
every young man who reads these words to lay to
heart : " I am no saint," says Colonel Bracebridge,
" and God only knows how much less of one I may
become ; but mark my words — if you are ever
tempted by passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to
form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and
nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you
down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating

160 The Teaching of Jesus
yourself and hating the chain to which you cling-
in that hour pray — pray as if the devil had you bj
the throat — to Almighty God, to help you out o
that cursed slough 1 There is nothing else for it l~
pray, I tell you ! '

CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS
OF INJURIES

161 M

"She, who kept a tender Christian hope,
Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
' Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'
Said, ' Love, forgive him : ' but he did not speak ;
And silenced by that ..silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,
And how they mar this little by their feuds."
Tennyson.

162

XI
CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF
INJURIES
" Then came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times ; but,
until seventy times seven." — Matt, xviii. 21, 22.
^^HIS would seem to-be plain enough, even
though we had nothing more from the
lips of Jesus concerning the duty of forgiveness.
In point of fact, however, the lesson of these
words is repeated a full half-dozen times through
out the Gospels. It may be well, therefore, to
begin by bringing together our Lord's sayings on
the subject I
We turn first to the Sermon on the Mount :
"Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy ; but
I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for
them that persecute you." Then, in the Lord's
Prayer we have the familiar petition, " Forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass
163

164 The Teaching of Jesus . .
against us." And it is surely a fact full of
significance that at the close of the prayer our
Lord should single out this one petition from
the rest with this emphatic comment : " For if
ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly
Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive
not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses." The words quoted thus
far are taken from the first Gospel. Similar
teaching is found in the second and third. Thus,
in Mark, we read : " And whensoever ye stand
praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any
one ; that your Father also which is in heaven
may forgive you your trespasses ; " and in Luke :
" If thy brother sin, rebuke him, and if he repent,
forgive him. ' And if he sin against thee seven
times in the day, and seven times turn again to
thee, saying, I repent ; thou shalt forgive him."
Again, we have the teaching recorded by Matthew,
out of which Peter's question sprang — " If thy
brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault
between thee and him alone ; if he hear thee,
thou hast gained thy brother" — followed by the
parable of the Unforgiving Servant, with its
solemn warning of immitigable doom : " So shall
also My heavenly Father do unto you, if ye for
give not every one his brother from your hearts."
And, finally, all these words are made fast for
ever in the minds and consciences of men, by
the great act on the Cross when the dying
Redeemer prayed for the men who slew Him :

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 165
" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what
they do."
The meaning of all this is unmistakable. No
child could miss the point of the solemn parable
to which I have referred. At the same time, it
may not be out of place to point out that there
are not a few instances in which people may feel
themselves wronged, which, nevertheless, do not
come- within the scope of Christ's teaching about
forgiveness. An illustration will best explain my
meaning. It sometimes happens, both in business
life and in the Church, that two- men, equally
honourable and true, but with almost nothing else
in common, are often thrown into each other's
company. They have to deal with the same
facts, but they look upon them with wholly
different eyes, they approach them from wholly
different points of view. The results are obvious.
There are not only widely differing opinions,
but occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes
sharper words than ought ever to pass between
Christian men. Now, to say broadly that one is
right and the other wrong, that the one owes con
fession and the other forgiveness, is simply not
true ; what is true is that the men are different,
different in temperament, different in training,
different in their whole habits of thought and life.
And what is needed is that each should learn
frankly to recognize the fact. This is not a case
for rebuking, and repenting, and forgiving, but
for mutual forbearance. There are multitudes

1 66 The Teaching of Jesus
of good people, people whose goodness no one
who knows them would ever question, whom yet
we cannot take to our bosoms, and treat as
intimate personal friends. Even religion does
not all at once straighten out all the twists
in human nature, nor rub down all its hard
angularities. And, as I say, it is our simple,
common-sense duty to recognize the fact ; and if
sometimes we find even our fellow - Christians
"very trying," well, we must learn to bear and
forbear, always remembering that others probably
find us no less trying than we sometimes find
them. But where grave and undeniable injury
has been done, immediately Christ's teaching
comes into operation. The injured one must
banish all thought of revenge. Never must we
say, " I will do so to him as he hath done to
me ; I will render to the man according to his
work." Rather must we strive to overcome evil
by good, and by the manifestation of a forgiving
spirit to win the wrong-doer to repentance and
amendment II
When, now, we take these precepts of Jesus
and lay them side by side with the life of the
world, or -even with the life of the Church, as
day by day it passes before our eyes, our first
thought must be, how little yet do men heed the
words of Jesus, how much mightier is the pagan
spirit of revenge than the Christian spirit of for-

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 167
giveness. Indeed, of all the virtues which Christ
inculcated, this, perhaps, is the most difficult. True
forgiveness — I do not speak of the poor, bloodless
phantom which sometimes passes by the name :
" Forgive ! How many will say ' forgive,' and find
A sort of absolution in the sound
To hate a little longer,"
— not of such do I speak, but of true forgiveness,
and this, I say, can never for us men be an easy
thing. Perhaps a frank consideration of some of
the difficulties may contribute to their removal.
(1) One chief reason why Christ's command
remains so largely a dead letter is to be found in
our unwillingness to acknowledge that we have
committed an injury. That another should have
wronged us we find no difficulty in believing ;
that we have wronged another is very hard to
believe. Look at the very form of Peter's
question : " How oft shall my brother sin against
me, and I forgive him ? " " My brother " the
wrong-doer, myself the wronged — that is what
we are all ready to assume. But what if it is I
who have need to be forgiven ? But this is what
our pride will not suffer us to believe. That
" bold villain" Shame, who plucked Faithful by
the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought
to persuade him that it is a shame to ask one's
neighbour forgiveness for petty faults, or to make
restitution where we have taken from any, is
always quick to seize his opportunity. And he is

1 68 The Teaching of Jesus
especially quick when acknowledgment is due to
one who is socially our inferior. If an employe
be guilty of some gross discourtesy towards his
master, or a servant towards her mistress, the
master or mistress may demand a prompt apology
on pain of instant dismissal. But when it is the
servant or employe" who is the injured person he
has no such remedy ; yet surely, in Christ's eyes,
his very dependence makes the duty of confession
doubly imperative. "If," Christ said, "thou art
offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest
that thy brother hath aught against thee " — note
exactly Christ's' words ; He did not say, " If thou
rememberest that thou hast aught against thy
brother " ; alas, it is very easy for most of us to
do that; what He said was, "If thou rememberest
that thy brother hath aught against thee." Whom
did I overreach in business yesterday? Whose
good name did I drag through the mire? What
heart did I stab with my cruel words ? <( If thou
rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go
thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and
then come and offer thy gift"
(2) If the difficulties are great when we have
committed the wrong, they are hardly less when
we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once
he saw a mother threatening to beat her little
child for not rightly pronouncing the petition in
the Lord's Prayer, " Forgive us our trespasses, as
we forgive them that trespass against us." The

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 1 69
child tried its best, but could get no nearer than
" tepasses," and " trepasses." " Alas ! " says Fuller,
it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue wherein
there is a confluence of hard consonants together ; "
and then he continues, "What the child could not
pronounce the parents do not practise. O how
lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close
of this petition : As we forgive them that trespass
against us." In the old Greek and Roman world,
we have been told, people not only did not forgive
their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor think
better of themselves for having done so. That
man considered himself fortunate who, on his
death-bed, could say, on reviewing his past life,
that no one had done more good to his friends or
more mischief to his enemies. And though we
profess and call ourselves Christians, how strong
in many of us still is the old heathen desire to be
" even with " one who has wronged us, and to
make him smart for it. Many of us, as Dr. Dale
says,1 have given a new turn to an old text. In
our own private Revised Version of the New
Testament we read : " Whosoever speaketh a word
or committeth a wrong against God, it shall be
forgiven him ; but whosoever speaketh a word or
committeth a wrong against me, it shall not be
forgiven him ; certainly not in this world, even if
it is forgiven in the world to come." Resentment
against moral evil every good man must feel ; but
when with the clear, bright flame of a holy wrath
1 Laws of Christ for Common Life, p. 59.

1 70 The Teaching of Jesus
there mingle the dark fumes of personal vindictive-
ness, we do wrong, we sin against God.
Nowhere in Scripture, perhaps, have we such a
lesson on the difficulty of forgiveness as in the
reference to Alexander the coppersmith, in St.
Paul's last letter to Timothy. Even if we read
his words in the modified and undoubtedly accurate
form in which they are found in the Revised
Version, we still feel how far short they come of
the standard of Christ. " Paul," says Dr. Whyte,
" was put by Alexander to the last trial and
sorest temptation of an apostolic and a sanctified
heart." 1 And with all the greatness of our regard
for the great apostle, we dare not say that he came
out of the trial wholly unscathed. Did ever any
man come out of such a fire unhurt — any save
One ? Yet it is not for me to sit in judgment on
St. Paul ; only let us remember we have no
warrant from God to hate any man and to hand
him over to eternal judgment even though, like
Alexander, he heap insult and injury, not only upon
ourselves, but upon the cause and Church of Christ.
(3) And then to this native, inborn unwilling
ness to forgive there comes in to strengthen it
our knowledge of the fact that forgiveness is some
times mistaken for, and does, in fact, sometimes
degenerate into, the moral weakness which slurs
over a fault, and refuses to strike only because it
dare not. Nevertheless, though there be counter
feits current, there is a reality ; there is a forgiving
1 Bible Characters ; Stephen to Timothy, p. 95.

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 171
spirit which has no kinship with cowardice or
weakness or mere mushiness of character, but
which is the offspring of strength and goodness
and mercy, in short, of all in man that is likest
God. And it is this not that which God bids us
make our own ; and not the less so because in the
rough ways of the world that so often passes for
this. Ill
It would be easy to go on enumerating diffi
culties, but long as the enumeration might be,
Christ's command would still remain in all its
explicitness, the Divine obligation would be in no
way weakened. We must forgive ; we must
forgive from our hearts ; and there must be no
limit to our forgiveness. Nor is this all. The
whole law of forgiveness is not fulfilled when one
who has done us an injury has come humbly
making confession, and we have accepted the con
fession and agreed to let bygones be bygones.
We should be heartless wretches indeed, if, under
such circumstances, we were not willing to do as
much as that But we must do more : " If thy
brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault
between thee and him alone ; if he hear thee,
thou hast gained thy brother." We, we who have
been wronged, must take the first step. We must
not wait for the wrong-doer to come to us ; we
must go to him. We must lay aside our vin-
dictiveness, and earnestly, patiently, making our

172 The Teaching of Jesus
appeal to his better self, by every art and device
which love can suggest, we must help him to take
sides against the wrong which he has done,
until at last forgiving love has led him captive,
and our brother is won. This is the teaching of
Jesus. Let me suggest, in conclusion, a three-fold
reason why we should give heed to it
Let us forgive for our own sake. A man of an
unforgiving spirit is always his own worst enemy.
He " that studieth revenge," says Bacon, " keeps
his own wounds green, which otherwise would
heal and do well." "If thou hast not mercy for
others," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet be not
cruel unto thyself; to ruminate upon evils, to
make critical notes upon injuries, is to add unto
our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our
enemies." There is no misery worse than that of
a mind which broods continually over its own
wrongs, be they real or only fancied. There is no
gloom so deep and dark as that which settles on
a hard and unrelenting soul. And, on the other
hand, there is no joy so pure, there is none so
rewarding, as that of one who, from his heart, has
learned to say, " I forgive." He has tasted the
very joy of God, the joy of Him of whom it is
written that He delighteth in mercy. Just as
when a sea-worm perforates the shell of an oyster,
the oyster straightway closes the wound with a
pearl, so does a forgiving spirit heal the hidden
hurt of the heart, and win for itself a boon even at
the hands of its foe.

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 173
Let us forgive for our brother's sake. " What,"
asks George MacDonald, " am I brother for, but to
forgive ? " And how much for my brother my
forgiveness may do ! All love, not Christ's love
only, has within it a strange redemptive power.
We often profess ourselves puzzled by that hard
saying of Jesus concerning the_ binding and loosing
of men's sins. Yet this is just what human love,
or the want of it, is doing every day. When we
forgive men their sins, we so far loose them from
them ; we help them to believe in the power and
reality of the Divine forgiveness. When we refuse
to forgive, we bind their sins to them, we make
them doubt the love and mercy of God. Have
we forgotten the part which Ananias played in
the conversion of Saul of .Tarsus ? St. Augustine
used to say that the Church owed Paul to the
prayers of Stephen. Might he not have said, with
equal truth, that the Church owed Paul to the
forgiveness of Ananias ? For three days, without
sight, and without food or drink, Saul waited in
Damascus, pondering the meaning of the heavenly
vision. Then came unto him, sent by God, the
man whose life he had meant to take : " Ananias
entered into the house ; and, laying his hands on
him, said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, who
appeared unto thee in the way which thou earnest,
hath sent me." "Brother Saul" — how his heart must
have leapt within him at the sound of the word !
It was a voice from without confirming the voice
within ; it was the love and forgiveness of man

1 74 The Teaching of Jesus
sealing and making sure the love and forgiveness
of God. Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our
sullen refusal to forgive, we be thrusting some
penitent soul back into the miry depths, whence,
slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the
light and love of God.
Let us forgive for Christs sake, because of that
which God through Him has done for us. When,
day by day, we pray, " Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive them that trespass against us," what
we are asking is, that God will deal with us as we
are dealing with others. Do we mean what we
say ? Are we showing a mercy as large as we need?
Chrysostom tells us that many people in his day
used to omit the words, " As we forgive them that
trespass against us." They did not dare to ask
God to deal with their sins as they were dealing
with the sins of those who had wronged them,
lest they brought upon themselves not a blessing
but a curse. And would it not go hardly with
some of us, if, with the measure we mete, God
should measure to us again ? Yet there is no
mistaking Christ's words : " If ye forgive not men
their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive
your trespasses." Therefore, let me think of myself,
of my own sin, of the forgiveness even unto
seventy times seven which I need ; and then let
me ask, can I, whose need is so great, dole out
my forgiveness with a grudging hand, counting
till a poor " seven times " be reached, and then
staying my hand ? Rather, let me pray, Lord,

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 175
"Make my forgiveness downright— such as I
Should perish if I did not have from Thee."
" Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and
clamour, and railing, be put away from you, with
all malice ; and be ye kind one to another, tender
hearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in
Christ forgave you."
" O man, forgive thy mortal foe,
Nor ever strike him blow for blow ;
For all the souls on earth that live
To be forgiven must forgive,
Forgive him seventy times and seven :
For all the blesse'd souls in Heaven
Are both forgivers and forgiven."

CONCERNING CARE

i77 N

" My spirit on Thy care,
Blest Saviour, I recline ;
Thou wilt not leave me in despair,
For Thou art Love Divine.
In Thee I place my trust,
On Thee I calmly rest ;
I know Thee good, I know Thee just,
And count Thy choice the best
Whate'er events betide,
Thy will they all perform ;
Safe in Thy breast my head I hide,
Nor fear the coming storm.
Let good or ill befall,
It must be good for me,
Secure of having Thee in all,
Of having all in Thee."
H. F. Lytk.

178

XII
CONCERNING CARE
" Be not anxious for your life . . . nor yet for your body. . . .
Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat t or, What shall we
drink t . . . Be not anxious for the morrow." — Matt. vi. 25,
3'. 34- I
" 7^ AKE no thought for your life " is the more
familiar rendering of the Authorized Ver
sion. And if the words conveyed the same
meaning to us to-day as they did to all English-
speaking people in the year 1 6 1 1 , there would
have been no need for a change. A great student
of words, the late Archbishop Trench, tells us
that " thought " was then constantly used as
equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care ; and he
gives three illustrations of this use of the word
from writers of the Elizabethan age. Thus Bacon
writes : " Harris, an alderman in London, was put
in trouble, and died with thought and anxiety
before his business came to an end." Again, in one
of the Somer's Tracts, we read, " Queen Katharine
Parr died of thought " ; and in Shakespeare's
Julius Casar, " Take thought and die for Caesar,"
179

1 80 The Teaching of Jesus
where " to take thought " is to take a matter so
seriously to heart that death ensues.1 In 161 1,
therefore, the old translation did accurately re
produce Christ's thought. To-day, however, it is
altogether inadequate, and sometimes, it is to be
feared, positively misleading. For neither in this
chapter nor anywhere in Christ's teaching is there
one word against what we call forethought, and
they who would find in the words of Jesus any
encouragement to thriftlessness are but misrepre
senting Him and deceiving themselves. Every
man, who is not either a rogue or a fool, must take
thought for the morrow ; at least, if he does not,
some one must for him, or the morrow will avenge
itself upon him without mercy. What our Lord
forbids is not prudent foresight, but worry : " Be
ye not anxious!' The word which Christ uses
(fiepifivare) is a very suggestive one ; it describes
the state of mind of one who is drawn in different
directions, torn by internal conflict, "distracted,"
as we say, where precisely the same figure of
speech occurs. A similar counsel is to be found
in another and still more striking word which only
Luke has recorded, and which is rendered, " Neither
be ye of doubtful mind." There is a picture in
the word (fiereeopL^eade'), the picture of a vessel
vexed by contrary winds, now uplifted on the
crest of some huge wave, now labouring in- the
trough of the sea. " Be ye not thus," Christ says
to His disciples, "the sport of your cares, driven
1 On the Authorized Version of the New Testament, p. 14.

Concerning Care 181
by the wind and tossed ; but let the peace of God
rule in your hearts, and be ye not of doubtful
mind." It cannot surprise us that Jesus should speak
thus ; rather should we have been surprised if it
had been otherwise. How could He speak to
men at all and yet be silent about their cares ?
For how full of care the lives of most men are !
One is anxious about his health, and another about
his business ; one is concerned because for weeks
he has been without work, and another because
his investments are turning out badly ; some are
troubled about their children, and some there are
who are making a care even of their religion, and
instead of letting it carry them are trying to carry
it ; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we
are like a string of Swiss pack-horses, such as one
may sometimes see, toiling and straining up some
steep Alpine pass under a blazing July sun. Poor
Martha, with her sad, tired face, and nervous,
fretful ways, "anxious and troubled about many
things," is everywhere to-day. Nor is it the poor
only whose lives are full of care. It was not a
poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid
his riches, who, in Christ's parable, put to himself
the question, " What shall I do ? " The birds of
care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace
as readily as in the thatched roof of -a cottage.
The cruel thorns — " the cares of this life," as Jesus
calls. them — which choke the good seed, sometimes
spring up more easily within the carefully fenced

1 82 The Teaching of Jesus
enclosure of my lord's park than in the little
garden plot of the keeper of his lodge. On the
whole, perhaps, and in proportion to their number,
there is less harassing, wearing anxiety in the
homes of the poor than in those of the wealthy.
And what harsh taskmasters our cares can be !
How they will lord it over us ! Give them the
saddle and the reins, and they will ride us to
death. Seat them on the throne, and they will
chastise us not only with whips but with scorpions.
It is no wonder that Christ should set Himself to
free men from this grinding tyranny. He is no
true deliverer for us who cannot break the cruel
bondage of our cares. II
Let us listen, then, to Christ's gracious
argument and wise remonstrances. What, He
asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it
do for us ? " Which of you by being anxious can
add one cubit unto his stature ? If, then, ye are
not able to do that which is least, why are ye
anxious concerning the rest ? " " But, the morrow !
the morrow ! " we cry. " Let the morrow," Christ
answers, "take care of itself; sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day
at a time." " Our earliest duty," says a great
writer of our day, " is to cultivate the habit of not
looking round the corner ; " which is but another
version of Christ's simple precept. And the say
ing, simple and obvious as it may seem, never fails

Concerning Care 183
to justify itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely
turns out as our fears imagined it. Our very
anxiety blurs our vision, and throws our judgment
out of focus. We see things through an atmo
sphere which both magnifies and distorts. We
remember how it was with Mr. Fearing : " When
he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, I thought "^it is Greatheart
who tells the story — " I should have lost my man :
not for that he had any inclination to go back, —
that he always abhorred ; but he was ready to die
for fear. Oh, the hobgoblins will have me ! the
hobgoblins will have me ! cried he ; and I could
not beat him out on't." Yet see how matters fell
out " This I took very great notice of," goes on
Greatheart, " that this valley was as quiet while he
went through it as ever I knew it before or since."
And again, when Mr. Fearing "was come at the
river where was no bridge, there again he was in
a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be
drowned for ever, and so never see that face with
comfort, that he had come so many miles to
behold." But once more his fears were put to
shame : " Here, also, I took notice of what was
very remarkable : the water of that river was
lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my
life. So he went over at last, not much above
wet-shod." And even though the morrow should prove as
bad as our fears, Christ's precept is still justified,
for the worst kind of preparation for such a

184 The Teaching of Jesus
day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of
machinery, means waste, waste of power. Anxiety,
it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow
of its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its
strength. Therefore, let us not be anxious. Let
us climb our hills when we come to them. God
gives each day strength for the day ; but when,
to the responsibilities of to-day we add the
burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of
two days in the strength of one, we are making
straight paths for the feet of failure and dis
appointment. All the many voices of reason and
experience are on Christ's side when He bids us,
" Be not anxious."
Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is !
When the tides of care are at the flood they will
overrun and submerge all such counsels as these,
as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which
children build by the sea-shore. "We know it is
no good to worry," people will tell us, half-
petulantly, when we remonstrate with them ;
" but we cannot help ourselves, and if you have
no more to say to us than this, you cannot help
us either." And they are right. Care is the
cancer of the heart, and if our words can go no
deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be
cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement,
which calls for something more than little bits of
good advice in order to put it right. And if,
again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall
find the needed something, more is given. The

Concerning Care 185
careworn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of
itself. " Oh the bliss of waking," says some one,
" with all one's thoughts turned outward ! " It is
the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned,
one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need;
and Christ will show us how it may be ours.
"Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side
by side with this negative precept He lays this
positive one : " Seek ye first the kingdom of
God." Christ came to establish a kingdom in
which " all men's good " should be " each man's
rule," and love the universal law. When, there
fore, He bids the anxious seek the kingdom, what
He means is that they are to find an escape from
self and self-consuming cares in service. " When
you find yourself overpowered by melancholy,"
said John Keble, " the best way is to go out and
do something kind to somebody or other." And
thousands who are sitting daily in the gloom of
a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the
spirit drawn, if they would but " go out " and
begin to care for others, would speedily cease
their miserable care for themselves. " When I
dig a man out of trouble," some One quaintly
writes, "the hole he leaves behind him is the
grave in which I bury my own trouble." x This is
not the whole cure for care ; but if the mind is to
be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own
fears and anxieties, it must be set resolutely -and
1 I am indebted for these two quotations to Bishop Paget's
Spirit of Discipline, p. 66.

1 86 The Teaching of Jesus
constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ
in His gospel summons us all.
The care-worn, Christ says, must think of
others ; and, most of all, they must think of God.
" Let not your heart be troubled . . . believe."
This is the great argument into which all other
arguments run up. This is the larger truth,
within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's
words concerning care. We are not to care
because we are cared for, cared for by God.
There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties
between ourselves and God. We, on our part,
make it our daily business to get God's will done
on earth as it is done in heaven ; He, on His,
undertakes that we shall not want
" Make you His service your delight,
He'll make your wants His care."
Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's
doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood. It is not so
much because our anxiety is useless, or because
it unfits us for service, but because God is what
He is, that our worry is at once a blunder and
a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that
cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is —
God. Ill
But now a difficulty arises. Christ's doctrine
of the Divine Fatherhood is, without doubt,
fundamental ; but is it true ? A God who

Concerning Care 187
clothes the blowing lilies with their silent beauty,
without whom no sparrow falleth to the ground,
who numbers the very hairs of our head — it is
a glorious faith, if one could but receive it. But
can we ? It was possible once, we think, in the
childhood of the world ; but that time has gone,
and we are the children of a new day, whose
thoughts we cannot choose but think. So long
as men thought of our earth as the centre of the
universe, it was not difficult to believe that its
inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator.
But astronomy has changed all that ; and what
once we thought so great, we know now to be but
a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The
old question challenges us with a force the
Psalmist could not feel : " When I consider Thy
heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and
the stars which Thou hast ordained ; what is man
that Thou are mindful of him ? and the son of
man that Thou visitest him ? " The infinity of
God, the nothingness of man : the poor brain
reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask,
that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should
care for us even as we care for our children ? So
the question is often urged upon us to-day. But
arguments of this kind, it has been well said, are
simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination,
and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer
admirably says : " We know little or nothing of
the rest of the universe, and it may very well
be that in no other planet but this is there

1 88 The Teaching of Jesus
intelligent and moral life ; and, if that be so, then
this world, despite its material insignificance,
would remain the real summit of creation. But
even if this be not so, still man remains man — a
spiritual being, capable of knowing, loving, and
glorifying God. Man is that, be there what
myriads of worlds there may, and is not less
than that, though in other worlds were also
beings like him. . . . No conception of God is
less imposing than that which represents Him as
a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by
the immensity of His possessions as to have lost
the sense of the incalculably greater worth of
the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of
them."1 But this is not the only difficulty ; for some
it is not the chief difficulty. We have no
theories of God and the universe which bar the
possibility of His intervention in the little lives
of men. There is nothing incredible to us in
the doctrine of a particular Providence. But
where, we ask, is the proof of it ? We would
fain believe, but the facts of experience seem too
strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians
butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a
whole city buried under a volcano's fiery hail,
countless multitudes suffering the slow torture
of death by famine — can such things be and
God really care? Nor is it only great world
tragedies like these which challenge our faith.
1 P. Carnegie Simpson, The Fact of Christ, pp. 116, 117.

Concerning Care 189
The question is pressed upon us, often with
sickening keenness, by the commonplace ills of
our own commonplace lives : the cruel wrong
of another's sin, the long, wasting pain, the
empty cradle, the broken heart. How can we
look on these things and yet believe that Eternal
Love is on the throne?
Except we believe in Jesus we cannot ; if we
do, we must. For remember, Jesus was no
shallow optimist ; He did not go through life
seeing only its pleasant things ; He was at Cana
of Galilee, but He was also at Nain ; over all
His life there lay a shadow, the shadow of the
Cross ; He died in the dark, betrayed of man,
forsaken of God ; surely He hath borne our
griefs and carried our sorrows. And yet through
all, His faith in God never wavered. He prayed,
and He taught others to pray. When He lifted
His eyes towards heaven, it was with the word
" Father " upon His lips ; and in like manner He
bade His disciples, " When ye pray, say ' Father.' "
He took the trembling hands of men within His
own, and looking into their eyes, filled as they
were with a thousand nameless fears, " Fear not,"
He said, " your heavenly Father knoweth ; let
not your heart be troubled, neither let it be
afraid." " Learn of Me . . . and ye shall find rest
unto your souls ; " herein is the secret of peace.
But it is not enough that we give ear to the
words of Christ ; we must make our own the

1 90 The Teaching of Jesus
whole meaning of the fact of Christ. " God's in
His heaven," sings Browning ; " all's right with
the world." But if God is only in His heaven,
all is not right with the world. In Christ we
learn that God has come from out His heaven
to earth ; and in the Cross of Christ we find the
eternal love which meets and answers all our
fears. Fear not, " Or if you fear,
Cast all your cares on God ; that anchor holds."
" Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
be afraid."

CONCERNING MONEY

191

" Now I saw in my dream, that at the further side of that
plain was a little hill called Lucre, and in that hill a silver-mine,
which some of them that had formerly gone that way, because of
the rarity of it, had turned aside to see ; but going too near the
brink of the pit, the ground being deceitful under them, broke, and
they were slain ; some also had been maimed there, and could not
to their dying day be their own men again." — John Bunyan.

192 '

XIII
CONCERNING MONEY
'• How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom
of God I For it is easier for a camel to enter in through a needle's
eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." —
Luke xviii. 24, 25. I
THE most significant thing in the teaching
of Jesus concerning money is the large
place which it fills in the records of our Lord's
public ministry. How large that place is few of
us, perhaps, realize. Even religious writers who
take in hand to set forth Christ's teaching in
detail, for the most part, pass over this subject in
silence. In Hastings' great Dictionary of the Bible
we find, under " Money," a most elaborate article,
extending to nearly twenty pages, and discussing
with great fulness and learning the coinage of
various Biblical periods ; but when we seek to
know what the New Testament has to say con
cerning the use and perils of wealth, the whole
subject is dismissed in some nine lines.
Very different is the impression which we
receive from the Gospels themselves. It is not
193 o

194 The Teaching of Jesus
possible here to bring together all Christ's words
about money, but we may take the third Gospel
(in which the references to the subject are most
numerous) and note Christ's more striking sayings
in the order in which they occur. In the parable
of the sower, in the eighth chapter, the thorns
which choke the good seed are the "cares and
riches and pleasures of this life." Chapter twelve
contains a warning against covetousness, enforced
by the parable of the rich fool and its sharp-
pointed application, " So is he that layeth up
treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."
The fourteenth chapter sheds a new light on the law
of hospitality : " When thou makest a dinner or a
supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor
thy kinsmen, nor rich neighbours . . . but when
thou makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed,
the lame, the blind ; and thou shalt be blessed."
Chapter fifteen tells how a certain son wasted his
substance with riotous living. Chapter sixteen
opens with the parable of the unjust steward ;
then follow weighty words touching the right use
of "the mammon of unrighteousness." But the
Pharisees, who were lovers of money, when they
heard these things, "scoffed at Him." Christ's
answer is the parable of Dives and Lazarus, with
which the chapter closes. Chapter eighteen tells
of a rich young ruler's choice, and of Christ's
sorrowful comment thereon : " How hardly shall
they that have riches enter into the kingdom of
God." And then, lastly, in the nineteenth chapter,

Concerning Money 195
we hear Zacchaeus, into whose home and heart
Christ had entered, resolving on the threshold of
his new life that henceforth the half of his goods
he would give to the poor, and that where he had
wrongfully exacted aught of any man he would
restore four-fold. It is indeed a remarkable fact,
the full significance of which few Christians have
yet realized, that, as John Ruskin says, the subject
which we might have expected a Divine Teacher
would have been content to leave to others is the
very one He singles out on which to speak .parables
for all men's memory.1 II
The question is sometimes asked how the
teaching of Jesus concerning money is related to
that strange product of civilization, the modern
millionaire. The present writer, at least, cannot
hold with those who think that Christ was a com
munist, or that He regarded the possession of wealth
as in itself a sin. Nevertheless, it is impossible
not to sympathize with the feeling that the accumu
lation of huge fortunes in the hands of individuals
is not according to the will of Christ. Mr. Andrew
Carnegie is reported to have said that a man
who dies a millionaire dies disgraced ; and few
persons who take their New Testament seriously
will be disposed to contradict him. But, inas
much as all millionaires are not prepared like Mr.
1 Time and Tide, p. 224.

1 96 The Teaching of Jesus
Carnegie to save themselves from disgrace, the
question is beginning to arise in the minds of
many, whether society itself should not come to
the rescue — its own and the rich man's. No
man, it may be pretty confidently affirmed, can
possibly earn a million ; he may obtain it, he
may obtain it by methods which are not techni
cally unjust, but he has not earned it. Be a
man's powers what they may, it is impossible that
his share of the wealth which he has helped to
create can be fairly represented by a sum so vast.
If he receives it, others may reasonably complain
that there is something wrong in the principle of
distribution. And unless, both by a larger justice
to his employes, and by generous benefactions to
the public, he do something to correct the defects
in his title, he must not be surprised if some who
feel themselves disinherited are driven to ask
ominous and inconvenient questions.
This, however, is a matter which it is impossible
now to discuss further. Turning again to Christ's
sayings about money, we may summarize them in
this fashion : Christ says nothing about the making
of money, He says much about the use of it, and
still more about its perils and the need there is
for a revised estimate of its worth. Following
the example of Christ, it is the last point of which
I wish more especially to speak. But before
coming to that, it may be well briefly to recall
some of the things which Christ has said touching
the use of wealth. Wealth, He declares, is a trust,

Concerning Money 197
for our use of which we must give account unto
God. In our relation to others we may be pro
prietors ; before God there are no proprietors, but
all are stewards. And in the Gospels there are
indicated some of the ways in which our steward
ship may be fulfilled. I will mention two of them.
(1) "When thou doest alms" — Christ, you
will observe, took for granted that His disciples
would give alms, as He took for granted that they
would pray. He prescribes no form which our
charity must take ; we have to exercise our judg
ment in this, as in other matters. Obedience is
left the largest liberty, but not the liberty of dis
obedience ; and they who open their ears greedily
to take in all that the political economist and
others tell us of the evils of indiscrimiriate charity,
only that they may the more tightly button up
their pockets against the claims of the needy, are
plainly disregarding the will of Christ. If what
we are told is true, the more binding is the
obligation to discover some other way in which
our alms-giving may become more effective. The
duty itself no man can escape who calls Christ
Jesus Lord and Master.
(2) But wealth, Christ tells us, may minister
not. merely to the physical necessities, but to the
beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was
invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee,
when Matthew the publican made for Him a feast
in His own house, He did not churlishly refuse,
saying that such expenditure was wasteful and

198 The Teaching of Jesus
wicked excess. When in the house of Simon the
leper Mary " took a pound of ointment of spike
nard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus,"
and they that sat by murmured, saying, " To what
purpose is this waste ? for this ointment might
have been sold for above three hundred pence
and given to the poor," Jesus threw His shield
about this woman and her deed of love : " Let
her alone ; why trouble ye her ? She hath wrought
a good work on Me." These words, it has been
well said, are " the charter of all undertakings
which propose, in the name of Christ, to feed the
mind, to stir the imagination, to quicken the
emotions, to make life less meagre, less animal,
less dull."1 Do not let us speak as though the
only friends of the poor were those who gave them
oatmeal at Christmas, or who secure for them
alms-houses in their old age. There is a life
which is more than meat, and all heavenly charity
is not to be bound up in bags of flour. He who
strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives
of the toilers of our great cities the sweet, refining
influences of art, and music and literature, he who
helps his fellows to see and to love the true and
the beautiful and the good, is not one whit less
a benefactor of his kind than he who obtains for
them better food and better homes. Man shall not
live by bread alone, and they who use their wealth
to minister to a higher life serve us not less really
than they who provide for our physical needs.
1 F. G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Problem, p. 219.

Concerning Money I 99

III
Much, however, as Christ has to say con
cerning the noble uses to which wealth may
be put, it is not here, as every reader of the
Gospels must feel, that the full emphasis of His
words comes. It is when He goes on to speak
of the perils of the rich, and of our wrong estimates
of the worth of wealth, that His solemn warnings
pierce to the quick. Christ did not live, nor does
He call us to live, in an unreal world, though
perhaps there are few subjects concerning which
more unreal words have been spoken than this.
The power of wealth is great, the power of con
secrated wealth is incalculably great ; and this the
New Testament freely recognizes ; but wealth is
not the great, necessary, all-sufficing thing that
ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it to
be. And when we put it first, and make it the
standard by which all things else are to be judged,
Christ tells us plainly that we are falling into a
temptation and a snare, and into many foolish
and hurtful lusts ; we are piercing ourselves
through with many sorrows. For once at least,
then, let us try to look at money with His eyes
and to weigh it in His balances.
Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother
was what to-day we should call a working-man's
wife, and probably also the mother of a large
family. When, as an infant, Jesus was presented
in the Temple, the offering which His parents

200 The Teaching of Jesus
brought was that which the law prescribed in the
case of the poor : " a pair of turtle doves or two
young pigeons." When He came to manhood,
and entered on His public ministry, He had no
home He could call His own. In His Father's
house, He said, were many mansions ; but on
earth He had not where to lay His head. Women
ministered unto Him of their substance. We
never read that He had any money at all. When
once He wanted to use a coin as an illustration,
He borrowed it ; when, at another time, He needed
one with which to pay a tax, He wrought a miracle
in order to procure it. As He was dying, the
soldiers, we are told, parted His garments among
them — that was all there was to divide. When
He was dead, men buried Him in another's tomb.
More literally true than perhaps we always realize
was the apostle's saying, " He became poor."
Who, then, will deny that a man's life con
sisteth not in the abundance of the things which
he possesseth ? Yet how strangely materialized
our thoughts have become ! Our very language
has been dragged down and made a partner with
us in our fall. When, for example, our Authorized
Version was written in 1 6 1 1 , the translators could
write, without fear of being misunderstood, " Let
no man seek his own, but every man another's
zuealth" (i Cor. x. 24).1 But though the nobler
1 Emerson had surely overlooked this nobler meaning of the
word when he wrote, " They [the English] put up no Socratic
prayer, much less any saintly prayer, for the queen's mind ; ask

Concerning Money 201
meaning of the word still survives in " well " and
" weal," " wealth " to-day is rarely used save to
indicate abundance of material good. When
Thackeray makes '' Becky Sharp " say that she
could be good if she had ^4000 a year, and when
Mr. Keir Hardie asks if it is possible for a man
to be a Christian on a pound a week, the thoughts
of many hearts are revealed. There is nothing
to be done without money, we think ; money is
the golden key which unlocks all doors ; money
is the lever which removes all difficulties. This
is what many of us are saying, and what most of
us in our hearts are thinking. But clean across
these spoken and unspoken thoughts of ours,
there comes the life of Jesus, the man of Nazareth,
to rebuke, and shame, and silence us. Who in
His presence dare speak any more of the sovereign
might of money ?
This is the lesson of the life of the Best Is
it not also the lesson of the lives of the good in
all ages? The greatest name in the great world
of Greece is Socrates ; and Socrates was a poor
man. The greatest name in the first century of
the Christian era is Paul ; and Paul was a working-
man and sometimes in want. It was Calvinism,
Mark Pattison said, that in the sixteenth century
saved Europe, and Calvin's strength, a Pope once
declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for
him. John Wesley re-created modern England
neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, 'grant her in health
and wealth long to live ' " (English Traits').

202 The Teaching of Tesus
and left behind him " two silver teaspoons and
the Methodist Church." The " Poets' Corner "
in Westminster Abbey, it has been said, com
memorates a glorious company of paupers. And
even in America, the land of the millionaire and
multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on
the nation's heart, and which men delight to
honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds,
but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and Webster,
and Clay.
This is not mere "curb-stone rhetoric"; I
speak the words of soberness and truth. Would
that they in whose blood the " narrowing lust of
gold" has begun to burn might be. sobered by
them ! In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and of
all the noblest of the sons of men, let us deny
and defy the sordid traditions of mammon ; let us
make it plain that we at least do not believe "the
wealthiest man among us is the best" " Godli
ness with contentment," said the apostle, " is great
gain ; " and though these are not the only worthy
ends of human effort, yet he who has made them
his has secured for himself a treasure which faileth
not, which will endure when the gilded toys for
which men strive and sweat are dust and ashes.
It is further worthy of note that it was always
the rich rather than the poor whom Christ pitied.
He was sorry for Lazarus ; He was still more
sorry for Dives. " Blessed are ye poor. . . .
Woe unto you that are rich." This two-fold note
sounds through all Christ's teaching. And the

Concerning Money 203
reason is not far to seek. As Jesus looked on
life, He saw how the passionate quest for gold
was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men
were concentrating their souls on pence till they
could think of nothing else. For mammon's sake
they were turning away from the kingdom of
heaven. The spirit of covetousness was breaking
the peace of households, setting brother against
brother, making men hard and fierce and relent
less. Under its hot breath the fairest growths of
the spirit were drooping and ready to die. The
familiar " poor but pious " which meets us so often
in a certain type of biography could never have
found a place on the lips of Jesus. " Rich but
pious " would have been far truer to the facts of
life as He saw them. " The ground of a certain
rich man brought forth plentifully," and after that
he could think of nothing but barns : there was
no room for God in his life. " The Pharisees who
were lovers of money heard these things ; and
they scoffed at Him ; " of course, what could their
jaundiced eyes see in Jesus? And even to one
of whom it is written that Jesus, " looking upon
him loved him," his great possessions proved a
magnet stronger than the call of Christ. It was
Emerson, I think, who said that the worst thing
about money is that it so often costs so much.
To take heed that we do not pay too dearly for it,.
is the warning which comes to us from every page
of the life of Jesus. Are there none of us who
need the warning ? " Ye cannot serve God and

204 The Teaching of Jesus
mammon ; " we know it, and that we may the
better serve mammon, we are sacrificing God and
conscience on mammon's unholy altars. And to
day, perhaps, we are content that it should be so.
But will our satisfaction last ? Shall we be as
pleased with the bargain to-morrow and the day
after as we think we are to-day ? And when our
last day comes — what ? " Forefancy your death
bed," said Samuel Rutherford ; and though the
counsel ill fits the mood of men in their youth
and strength, it is surely well sometimes to look
forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the
long look back. " This night is thy soul required
of thee ; and the things which thou hast prepared
whose shall they be ? " — not his, and he had
nothing else. He had laid up treasure for him
self, but it was all of this world's coinage ; of the
currency of the land whither he went he had none.
In one of Lowell's most striking poems he pictures
the sad retrospect of one who, through fourscore
years, had wasted on ignoble ends God's gift of
life ; his hands had
" plucked the world's coarse gains
As erst they plucked the flowers of May ;"
but what now, in life's last hours, are gains like
these ?
" God bends from out the deep and says,
' I gave thee the great gift of life ;
Wast thou not called in many ways ?
Are not My earth and heaven at strife ?

Concerning Money 205
I gave thee of My seed to sow,
Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?'
Can I look up with face aglow,
And answer, ' Father, here is gold ' ? "
And the end of the poem is a wail :
" I hear the reapers singing go
Into God's harvest ; I, that might
With them have chosen, here below
Grope shuddering at the gates of night"
Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things
that are upon earth ; let us covet earnestly the
best gifts ; let us seek first the kingdom of God ;
and all other things in due season and in due
measure shall be added unto us.1
1 To those who are interested in the subject of this chapter
Prof. Peabody's book already referred to, and an article entitled
" The Teaching of Christ concerning the Use of Money " (Expositor,
third series, vol. viii. p. ioo ff.) may be recommended.

CONCERNING THE SECOND
ADVENT

207

" Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving
Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,
Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea ; —
So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet."
F. \V. H. Myers, Saint Paul.

208

XIV
CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
" They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory. . . . Of that day and hour knoweth
no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father
only." — Matt. xxiv. 30, 36.
THE doctrine of our Lord's Second Coming
occupies at the present moment a curiously
equivocal position in the thought of the Christian
Church. On the one hand by many it is wholly
ignored. There is no conscious disloyalty on
their part to the word of God ; but the subject
makes no appeal to them, it fails to "find"
them. Ours is a sternly practical age, and any
truth which does not readily link itself on to the
necessities of life is liable speedily to be put on
one side and forgotten. This is what has happened
with this particular doctrine in the case of multi
tudes ; it is not denied, but it is banished to what
Mr. Lecky calls " the land of the unrealized and
the inoperative." But if, on the one hand, the
doctrine has suffered from neglect, on the other
it has suffered hardly less from undue attention.
Indeed of late years the whole subject of the
209 F

2 10 The Teaching of Jesus
" Last Things " has been turned into a kind of
happy hunting-ground for little sects, who carry
on a ceaseless wordy warfare both with them
selves and the rest of the Christian world. Men
and women without another theological interest
in the world are yet keen to argue about Mille-
narianism, and to try their 'prentice hands on
the interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic
literature of both the Old Testament and the New.
As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken
up with the second coming of our Lord that they
forget to preach the first So that one hardly
knows which to regret more, the neglect and
indifference of the one class, or the unhealthy,
feverish absorption of the other.
As very often happens in cases of this kind
each extreme is largely responsible for the
other. Neglect prepares the way for exaggera
tion ; exaggeration leads to further neglect.
Moreover, in the case before us, both tendencies
are strengthened by the very difficulty in which
the subject is involved. Vagueness, uncertainty,
mystery, attract some minds as powerfully as
they repel others. And, assuredly, the element
of uncertainty is not wanting here. In the first
place, this is a subject for all our knowledge of
which we are wholly dependent upon revelation.
Much that Christ and His apostles have taught us
we can bring to the test of experience and verify for
ourselves. But this doctrine we must receive, if
we receive it at all, wholly on the authority of

Concerning the Secpnd Advent 211
One whom, on other grounds, we have learned to
trust. Verification, in the nature of the case, is
impossible. Further, we have gone but a little
way when revelation itself becomes silent; and,
as I have said, when that guide leaves us, we.
enter at once the dark forest where instantly the
track is lost.
Let us seek to learn, then, what Christ has
revealed, and what He has left unrevealed, con
cerning His coming again.

As to the fact of Christ's coming we are
left in no doubt. Our Lord's own declarations
are as explicit as language, can make them.
Thus, in Matthew xvi. 27 we read that "the Son
of Man shall come in the glory of His Father
with His angels ; and then shall He render urito
every man according to his deeds." In the great
discourse on the Last Things, recorded by all the
Synoptists, after speaking of the fall of Jerusalem,
Christ goes on, " Then shall appear the sign of
the Son of Man in heaven ; and then shall all the
tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the
Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory." And again, in the
Upper Room, He said to His disciples, " I go
to prepare a place for you. And if I go and
prepare a place for you, I come again, and will
receive you unto Myself; that where I am ye

212 The Teaching of Jesus
may be also." The hope of that return shines
on every page of the New Testament : " This
Jesus," said the angels to the watching disciples,
"which was received up from you into heaven,
shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him
going into heaven." The early Christians were
wont to speak, without further definition, of " that
day." St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians how
that they had " turned unto God from idols, to
serve a living and true God, and to wait for
His Son from heaven." Maran atha — " our Lord
cometh " — was the great watchword of the waiting
Church. When, at the table of the Lord, they
ate the bread and drank the cup, they proclaimed
His death " till He come." " Amen ; come, Lord
Jesus," is the passionate cry with which our English
Scriptures close.
For all those, then, to whom the New Testa
ment speaks with authority, the fact of Christ's
return is established beyond all controversy. But
what will be the nature of His coming? Will
it be visible and personal, or spiritual and unseen ?
Will it be once and never again, or repeated?
Will Christ come at the end of history, or is He
continually coming in those great crises which
mark the world's progress towards its appointed
end ? These questions have been answered with
such admirable simplicity and scriptural truth by
Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote
his words : " It may be frankly admitted," he
says, "that the return of Christ to His disciples

Concerning the Second Advent 2 1 3
is capable of different interpretations. He came
again, though it were but intermittently, when He
appeared to them after His resurrection. He
came again, to abide with them permanently,
when His Spirit was given to the Church at
Pentecost. He came, they would all feel who
lived to see it, signally in the destruction of
Jerusalem, when God executed judgment histori
cally on the race which had rejected Him, -and
when the Christian Church was finally and
decisively liberated from the very possibility of
dependence on the Jewish. He comes still, as
His own words to the High Priest suggest — From
this time on ye shall see the Son of Man coming
— in the great crises of history, when the old
order changes, yielding place to the new ; when
God brings a whole age, as it were, into judg
ment, and gives the world a fresh start. But all
these admissions, giving them the widest possible
application, do not enable us to call in question
what stands so plainly in the pages of the New
Testament, — what filled so exclusively the minds
of the first Christians — the idea of a personal
return of Christ at the end of the world. We
need lay no stress on the scenery of New Testa
ment prophecy, any more than on the similar
element of Old Testament prophecy ; the voice
of the archangel and the trump of God are like
the turning of the sun into darkness and the
moon into blood ; but if we are to retain any
relation to the New Testament at all, we must

214 The Teaching of Jesus
assert the personal return of Christ as Judge
of all." J
So far I think is clear. It is when we come
to speak of the time of our Lord's return that our
difficulties begin. It appears to me impossible
to doubt that the first Christians were looking
for the immediate return of our Lord to the earth.
At one time even St. Paul seems to have expected
Him within his own life-time. Nor does this
fact in itself cause us any serious perplexity.
What does perplex us is to find in the Gospels
language attributed to Christ which apparently
makes Him a supporter of this mistaken view.
E.g., we have these three separate sayings, recorded
in St. Matthew's Gospel : " But when they perse
cute you in this city, flee into the next ; for verily
I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through
the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come "
(x. 23); "Verily I say unto you, There be some
of them that stand here, which shall in no wise
taste of death, till they see the Son of Man com
ing in His kingdom" (xvi. 28); "Verily I say
unto you, This generation shall not pass away,
till all these things be accomplished" (xxiv. 34).
This seems plain enough ; and if we are to take
the words as they stand, we seem to be shut up
to the conclusion that our Lord was mistaken,
that He ventured on a prediction which events
have falsified. Let us see if this really be so. I
leave, for the moment, the words I have quoted
1 Studies in Theology, p. 239.

Concerning the Second Advent 2 1 5
in order to cite other words which point in a quite
different direction.
To begin with, we have the emphatic state
ment : " But of that day and hour knoweth no
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the
Son, but the Father only." We remember also
Christ's words to His disciples, on the eve of the
Ascension, " It is not for you to know -times or
seasons, which the Father hath set within His
own authority." There is, further, a whole class
of sayings, exhortations, and parables, which seem
plainly to involve a prolonged Christian era, and,
consequently, the postponement to a far distant
time, of the day of Christ's return. Thus, there
are the passages which speak of the preaching of
the gospel to the nations beyond : " Wheresoever
the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole
world, that also which this woman hath done shall
be spoken of for a memorial of her " (Mark xiv. 9);
" This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in
the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations ;
and then shall the end come" (Matt. xxiv. 14).
There is the parable which tells of the tarrying
of the bridegroom till even the wise virgins
slumbered and slept. " After a long time," we
read in another parable, " the Lord of those
servants cometh and maketh a reckoning with
them." What is the significance of the parable
of the leaven hid in three measures of meal, and
still more, of that group of parables which depict
the growth of the kingdom — the parables of the

2 1 6 The Teaching of Jesus
sower, the wheat and tares, the mustard -seed,
and the seed growing gradually ? Does not all
this point not to a great catastrophe nigh at
hand, which should bring to an end the existing
order of things, but rather to just such a future
for the kingdom of God on earth as the actual
course of history reveals ? And this, and no
other, was, I believe, the impression which
Christ desired to leave on the minds of His
disciples. What, then, are we to make of those other
and apparently contrary words which I have
quoted, but meanwhile have left unexplained ?
They constitute, without doubt, one of the most
perplexing problems which the interpreter of the
New Testament has to face,1 and any suggestion
for meeting the difficulty must be made with
becoming caution. I can but briefly indicate the
direction in which the probable solution may be
found. Our Lord, as we have already seen,
spoke of His coming again, not only at the end
of the world, but in the course of it : in the
power of His Spirit, at the fall of Jerusalem, in
the coming of His kingdom among men. But
the minds of the disciples were full of the thought
of His final coming, which would establish for
ever the glory of His Messianic kingdom ; and
it would seem that this fact has determined both
1 " There is no subject on which it is more difficult to ascertain
the teaching of Christ than that which relates to the future of the
kingdom." — A. B. Bruce, The Kingdom of God, p. 273.

Concerning the Second Advent 217

the form and the setting of some of Christ's
sayings which they have preserved for us.
Words which He meant to refer to Israel's
coming judgment-day they, in the ardour of
their expectation, referred to the last great day.
In the first Gospel, especially, we may trace
some such influence at work. When, e.g., Matthew
represents our Lord as saying, " There be some
of them that stand here which shall in no wise
taste of death till they see the Son of Man
coming in His kingdom," it is evident, both from
the words themselves and from the context, that
he understood them to refer to the final return.
Luke, however, speaks only of seeing "the
kingdom of God," and Mark of seeing "the
kingdom of God come in power." And if these
words were our only version of the prophecy they
would present no difficulty ; we should feel that
they had received adequate fulfilment in the
events of the great day of Pentecost. We con
clude, therefore, "that of the three reports before
us the second and third, which are practically the
same, reproduce more correctly the words actually
spoken by Christ ; and that the account given
in the first Gospel was coloured by the eager hope
of the early followers of Christ for their Master's
speedy return." 1
To sum up in a sentence the results of this
brief inquiry : Christ's teaching concerning His
return leaves us both in a state of certainty and
* J. Agar Beet, The Last Things, p. 46.

2 1 8 The Teaching of Jesus
uncertainty. " We believe that Thou shalt come
to be our Judge " — that is our certainty ; " Of
that day and hour knoweth no one " — that is our
uncertainty. And each of these carries with it
its own lesson.

II
" Of that day and hour knoweth no one ; "
and we must be content not to know. There are
things that are " revealed " ; and they belong to us
and to our children. And there are " secret things,"
which belong neither to us, nor to our children,
but to God. Just as a vijitor to Holyrood Palace
finds some rooms open and free, through which
he may wander at will, while from others he is
strictly excluded, so in God's world there are
locked doors through which it is not lawful for
any man to enter. And it is our duty to be
faithful to our ignorance as well as to our know
ledge. There is a Christian as well as an anti-
Christian agnosticism. To pry into the secret
things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to
remain ignorant of what He has been pleased to
make known. The idly inquisitive spirit which is
never at rest save when it is poking into forbidden
corners, Christ always checks and condemns.
" Lord," asked one, " are there few that be saved ? "
But He would give no answer save this : " Strive to
enter in by the narrow door." " Lord, and this man
what ? " said Peter, curious concerning* the un-

Concerning the Second Advent 219
revealed future of his brother apostle. But again
idle curiosity must go unsatisfied : " If I will that
he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? Follow
thou Me." " Lord dost Thou at this time restore
the kingdom to Israel ? " But once more He will
give no answer : " It is not for you to know the
times or seasons which the Father hath set
within His own authority." And yet, strangely
enough, that which Christ has seen good to leave
untold is the one thing concerning His coming on
which the minds of multitudes have fastened. It
says little, either for our religion or our common-
sense, that one of the most widely circulated re
ligious newspapers of our day is one which fills its
columns with absurd guesses and forecasts con
cerning those very "times" and "seasons" of which
Christ has told us that it is not for us to know.
Christ has given us no detailed map of the future,
and when foolish persons pester us with little
maps of their own making, let us to see to it that
they get no encouragement from us. Let us dare
always to be faithful to our ignorance.
But if there is much we do not know, this we
do know : the Lord will come. And, alike on
the ground of what we know and of what we do
not know, our duty is clear : we must "' watch," so
that whether He come at even, or at midnight, or
at cock-crowing, or in the morning, He shall find
us ready. Christ's solemn injunction left an in
delible mark on the mind of the Early Church.
"Yourselves know perfectly," St. Paul writes in

220 The Teaching of Jesus
the first of his apostolic letters, " that the day of
the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night ... so
then let us not sleep, as do the rest, but let us watch
and be sober." As St. Augustine says, " The last
day is hidden that every day maybe regarded." But
what, exactly, is the meaning of the command to
" watch " ? It cannot be that we are to be always
" on the watch." That would simply end in the
feverish excitement and unrest which troubled
the peace of the Church of Thessalonica. The
true meaning is given us, I think, in the parable
of the Ten Virgins. Five were wise, not because
they watched all night for the bridegroom, for it
is written " they all slumbered and slept," but
because they were prepared ; and five were
foolish, not because they did not watch, but
because they were unprepared. " The fisherman's
wife who spends her time on the pier-head watch
ing for the boats, cannot be so well prepared to
give her husband a comfortable reception as the
woman who is busy about her household work,
and only now and again turns a longing look
seaward." 1 So Christ's command to " watch "
means, not " Be ye always on the watch," but,
' Be ye always ready."
Spurgeon once said, with characteristic humour
and good sense, that there were friends of his to
whom he would like to say, " Ye men of Ply
mouth, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ?
Go on with your work." He who in a world like
1 Marcus Dods, The Parables of our Lord (first series), p. 238.

Concerning the Second Advent 22 r
ours can sit and gaze with idly folded hands —
let not that man think he shall receive anything
of the Lord. A lady once asked John Wesley,
" Suppose that you knew you were to die at
twelve o'clock to-morrow night, how would you
spend the intervening time ? " " How, Madam ? "
he replied ; " why just as 1 intend to spend it
now. I should preach this night at Gloucester,
and again at five to-morrow morning. After that
I should ride to Tewkesbury, preach in the after
noon, and meet the societies in the evening. I
should then repair to friend Martin's house) who
expects to entertain me, converse and pray with
the family as usual, retire to my room at ten
o'clock, commend myself to my heavenly Father,
lie down to rest, and wake up in glory." This is
the right attitude for the Christian. The old cry
must not fade from our lips, nor the old hope
from our heart : Maran atha, " our Lord cometh."
But meanwhile He hath given to every man his
work ; and we may be sure there is no prepara
tion for His coming like the faithful doing of
the appointed task. " Blessed is that servant
whom His Lord when He cometh shall find so
doing."

CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT

223

"I often have a kind of waking dream; up one road the image
of a man decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried up
by rejoicing and exulting friends, who praise his goodness and
achievements ; and, on the other road, turned back to back to it,
there is the very man himself, in sordid and squalid apparel,
surrounded not by friends but by ministers of justice, and going
on, while his friends are exulting, to his certain and perhaps awful
judgment." — R. W.- Church.

..'-: |

XV
CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT
" When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the
angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory : and
before Him shall be gathered all the nations : and He shall separate
them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the
goats: and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats
on the left." — Matt. xxv. 31-33.
HE, the speaker, will do this. It is the most
stupendous claim that ever fell from
human lips. A young Jewish carpenter whose
brief career, as He Himself well knew, was just
about to end in a violent and shameful death,
tells the little, fearful band which still clung to
Him, that a day is coming when before Him all
the nations shall be gathered, and by Him be
separated as a shepherd separateth the sheep
from the goats. In the world's long history there
is nothing like it
That Jesus did really claim to be the Judge of
all men, it is, I believe, impossible to doubt The
passage just quoted is by no means our only
evidence. In the Sermon on the Mount, which
foolish persons who love to depreciate theology,
sometimes speak of as though it were the pith
225 Q

226 The Teaching of Jesus
and marrow of the Christian gospel, Christ says,
" Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord,
did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy
name cast out devils, and by Thy name do many
mighty works ? And then will I profess unto
them, I never knew you : depart from Me, ye
that work iniquity." Again, He says, " Whosoever
shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this
adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man
also shall be ashamed of Him when He cometh
in the glory of His Father with the holy angels ; "
and again, " The Son of Man shall come in the
glory of His Father with His angels ; and then
shall He render unto every man according to His
deeds." The fourth Gospel also represents Him
as saying, " Neither doth the Father judge any
man, but He hath given all judgment to the Son
. . and He gave Him authority to execute judg
ment because He is the Son of Man." And if
still further evidence be necessary it would be
easy to show both from the Acts and the Epistles
that from the very beginning all the disciples of
Jesus believed and taught that He would come
again to be their Judge.
Consider what this means. Reference has
already been made in an earlier chapter to Christ's
witness concerning Himself, to His deep and un
wavering consciousness of separateness from all
others. But more striking, perhaps, than any
illustration mentioned there is that furnished by
the fact before us now. What must His thoughts

Concerning the Judgment 227
about Himself have been who could speak of
Himself in relation to all others as Christ does
here? When men write about Jesus as though
He were merely a gentle, trustful, religious genius,
preaching a sweet gospel of the love of God to
the multitudes of Galilee, they are but shutting
their eyes to one half of the facts which it is ther
duty to explain. Speaking generally, we do well
to distrust the dilemma as a form of argument ;
but in this case there need be no hesitation in
putting the alternative with all possible bluntness :
either Christ was God, or He was not good.
That Jesus, if He were merely a good man, with
a good man's consciousness of and sensitiveness to
His own weakness andTimitations, could yet have
arrogated to Himself the right to be the supreme
judge and final arbiter of the destinies of mankind,
is simply not thinkable. And the more we ponder
the stupendous claim which Christ makes, the
more must we feel that it is either superhuman
authority which speaks to us here or superhuman
arrogance. Either Christ spoke out of the depths
of His own Divine consciousness, knowing that
the Father had committed all judgment unto the
Son ; or He made use of words and put forth
claims which were, and which He must have
known to have been, empty, false, and blasphemous.
Such is the significance of Christ's words in
their relation to Himself. It is, however, with
their relation to ourselves that we are primarily
concerned now. Of the wholly unimaginable cir-

228 The Teaching of Jesus
cumstances of that day when the Son of Man
shall come in His glory and all the nations be
gathered before Him I shall not attempt to speak.
As Dean Church has well said,1 no vision framed
with the materials of our present experience could
adequately represent the truth, and, indeed, it is
well that our minds should be diverted from
matters which lie wholly beyond our reach, that
they may dwell upon the solemn certainties which
Christ has revealed. Let us think, first of the
fact, and secondly of the issues, of Judgment

The persistent definiteness with which the
fact of judgment is affirmed by the New Testa
ment we have already seen. Nor is the New
Testament our only witness. The belief in a
higher tribunal before which the judgments of time
are to be revised, and in many cases reversed,
may be said to be part of the creed of the race.
Plato had his vision of judgment as well as Jesus.
And in the Old Testament, and especially in the
Book of Psalms, the same faith finds repeated
and magnificent utterance : " Our God shall come,
and shall not keep silence ; a fire shall devour
before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous
round about Him. He shall call to the heavens
above, and td the earth, that He may judge His
people ; " and again, " For He cometh, for He
1 Cathedral and University Sermons, p. 10.

Concerning the Judgment 229
cometh to judge the earth : He shall judge the
world with righteousness and the peoples with
His truth."
Here, then, is the fact which demands a place
in the thoughts of each of us — we are all to be
judged. Life is not to be folded up, like a piece
of finished work, and then laid aside and for
gotten ; it is to be gone over again and examined
by the hand and eyes of Perfect Wisdom and
Perfect Love. . Each day we are writing, and
often when the leaf is turned that which has been
written passes from our mind and is remembered
no more ; but it is there, and one day the books
— the Book of Life, of our life — will be opened,
and the true meaning of the record revealed. Life
brings to us many gifts of many kinds, and as it
lays them in our hands, for our use and for our
blessing, it is always, had we but ears to hear,
with the warning word, " Know thou, that for all
these things, God will bring thee into judgment."
It is, indeed, a tremendous thought. When
Daniel Webster was once asked what was the
greatest thought that had ever occupied his mind,
he answered, " the fact of my personal account
ability to God." And no man can give to such
a fact its due place without feeling its steadying,
sobering influence through all his life. Lament
is often made to-day, and not without reason, of
our failing sense of the seriousness of life. A
plague of frivolity, more deadly than the locusts
of Egypt, has fallen upon us, and is smiting all

230 The Teaching of Jesus
our green places with barrenness. Somehow, and
at all costs, we must get back our lost sense of
responsibility. If we would remember that God
has a right hand and a left hand ; if we would
put to ourselves Browning's question, " But what
will God say ? " if sometimes we would pull
ourselves up sharp, and ask — this that I am
doing, how will it look then, in that day when
" Each shall stand full-face with all he did below " ?
if, I say, we would do this, could life continue to
be the thing of shows and make-believe it so
often is ? It was said of the late Dean Church
by one who knew him well : " He seemed to live
in the constant recollection of something which is
awful, even dreadful to remember — something
which bears with searching force on all men's
ways and hopes and plans — something before
which he knew himself to be as it were con
tinually arraigned — something which it was strange
and pathetic to find so little recognized among
other men." But, alas ! this is how we refuse to
live. We thrust the thought of judgment from
us ; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a
disturber of our peace ; we block up every
approach by which it might gain access to our
minds. We do not deny that there is a judgment
to come ; but our habitual disregard of it is verily
amazing. " Judge not," said Christ, " that ye be
not judged ;" yet every day we let fly our random
arrows, careless in whose hearts they may lodge.
" Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall

Concerning the Judgment 231
give account thereof in the day of Judgment ; "
yet with what superb recklessness do we abuse
God's great gift of speech ! " We shall all stand
before the judgment-seat of God ; " yes, we know
it ; but when do we think of it ? What difference
does it make to us ?
What can indifference such as this say for
itself? How can it justify itself before the bar
of reason ? Do we realize that our neglect has
Christ to reckon with ? These things of which
I have spoken are not the gossamer threads of
human speculation ; they are the strong cords of
Divine truth and they cannot be broken. "You
seem, sir," said Mrs. Adams to Dr. Johnson, in
one of his despondent hours, when the fear of
death and judgment lay heavy on him, " to forget
the merits of our Redeemer." " Madam," said
the honest old man, " I do not forget the merits
of my Redeemer ; but my Redeemer has said
that He will set some on His right hand and
some on His left." Yes, it is the words of Christ
with which we have to do ; and if we are wise,
if we know the things which belong unto our
peace, we shall find for them a place within our
hearts.

II
The issues of the Judgment may be summed
up in a single word — separation : " He shall
set the sheep on His right hand, but the' goats

232 The Teaching of Jesus
on the left." Stated thus broadly, the issue of
the Judgment satisfies our sense of justice. If
there is to be judgment at all, separation must
be the outcome. And in that separation is
vindicated one of man's most deep-seated con
victions. As right is right and wrong is wrong,
and right and wrong are not the same, so neither
can their issues be the same. " We have a robust
common -sense of morality which refuses to
believe that it does not matter whether a man
has lived like the Apostle Paul or the Emperor
Nero." We " can never crush out the conviction
that there must be one place for St John, who
was Jesus' friend, and another for Judas Iscariot,
who was His betrayer." x This must be,
" Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is."
We must be sure that God has a right hand and
a left, that good and evil are distinct, and will for
ever remain so, that each will go to his own
place, the place for which he is prepared, for
which he has prepared himself, or our day would
be turned into night and our whole life put to
confusion. So far, Christ's words present no difficulty.
To many, however, it is a serious perplexity to
find that Christ speaks of but two classes into
which by the Judgment men are divided. There
are the sheep and the goats, the good and the
1 John Watson, The Mind of the Master, pp. 203, 204.

Concerning the Judgment 233
bad, and there are no others. To us it seems
impossible to divide men thus. They are not,
we think, good or bad, but good and bad. " I
can understand," some one has said, " what is to
become of the sheep, and I can understand what
is to become of the goats, but how are the
alpacas to be dealt with ?"1 The alpaca, it
should be said, is an animal possessing some of
the characteristics both of the sheep and the goat,
and the meaning of the question is, of course,
what is to become of that vast middle class in
whose lives sometimes good and sometimes evil
seems to rule ?
Now it is a remarkable fact that Scripture
knows nothing of any such middle class. Some
men it calls good, others it calls evil, but it has
no middle term. Note, e.g., this typical contrast
from the Book of Proverbs : " The path of the
righteous is as the light of dawn, that shineth
more and more unto the noon-tide of the day.
The way of the wicked is as darkness ; they
know not at what they stumble." Or listen to
Peter's question : " If the righteous is scarcely
saved, where shall the ungodly and sinner
appear ? " In both instances the assumption is
1 See T. G. Selby's Imperfect Angel and other Sermons, p. 211.
Cf. Zachariah Coleman in "Mark Rutherford's" Revolution in
Tanner's Lane: "That is a passage that I never could quite
understand. I never hardly see a pure breed, either of goat or
sheep. I never see anybody who deserves to go straight to heaven
or who deserves to go straight to hell. When the Judgment Day
comes it will be a difficult task."

234 The Teaching of Jesus
the same : there, on the one hand, are the
righteous ; and there, on the other, are the
wicked ; and beside these there are no others.
The same classification is constant throughout the
teaching of Jesus. He speaks of two gates, and
two ways, and two ends. There are the guests
who accept the King's invitation and sit down in
His banqueting hall, and there are those who
refuse it and remain without. In the parable of
the net full of fishes the good are gathered into
vessels, but the bad are cast away. The wheat
and the tares grow together until the harvest ;
then the wheat is gathered into the barn, and the
tares are cast into the fire. The sheep are set on
the right hand, and the goats on the left hand ;
and there is no hint or suggestion that any other
kind of classification is necessary in order that all
men may be truly and justly dealt with.
All this may seem very arbitrary and impos
sible until we remember that the classification
is not ours but God's. It is not we who have to
divide men, setting one on the right hand and
another on the left ; that is God's work ; and it
is well to remind ourselves that He invites none
of us to share His judgment-throne with Him, or,
by any verdict of ours, to anticipate the findings
of the last great day. And because to us such a
division is impossible, it does not therefore follow
that it should be so to Him before whom all hearts
are open and all desires known. We cannot
separate men thus because human character is so

Concerning the Judgment 235
complex. But complexity is a relative term ; it
depends on the eyes which behold it ; and our
naming a thing complex may be but another
way of declaring our ignorance concerning it.
We all know how a character, a life, a course of
events, which, on first view, seemed but a tangled,
twisted skein, on closer acquaintance often smooths
itself out into perfect simplicity. And there is
surely no difficulty in believing that it should be
so with human life when it is judged by the per
fect knowledge of God. Life is like a great tree
which casts forth on every side its far-spreading
branches. Yet all that moving, breathing mystery
of twig and branch and foliage springs from a
single root. To us the mystery is baffling in its
complexity : we have looked at the branches. To
God it is simple, clear : He sees the hidden root
from which it springs. So that, to go back to
our former illustration, it is only our ignorance
which compels us to speak of " alpacas " in the
moral world. To perfect knowledge they will
prove to be, as Mr. Selby says, either slightly-
disguised sheep or slightly-disguised goats.
There is a further fact also to be taken into
account in considering Christ's two-fold classifica
tion. Since it is the work of infinite knowledge
and justice it will have regard to all the facts of
our life. God looks not only at the narrow pre
sent, but back into the past, and forward into the
future. He marks the trend of the life, the bent
and bias of the soul. He chalks down no line

236 The Teaching of Jesus
saying, " Reach this or you are undone for ever."
He sets up no absolute standard to which if a
man attain he is a saint, or falling short of which
he is a sinner. And when He calls one man
righteous and another wicked, He means very
much more than that one has done so many
good deeds, and another so many evil deeds ;
" righteous " and " wicked " describe what each is
in himself, what each will decisively reveal himself
to be, when present tendencies have fully worked
themselves out. There are two twilights, the
twilight of evening and the twilight of morning ;
and therefore God's question to us is not, how
much light have we? but, which way do we face?
to the night or to the day ? Not " What art
thou ? " but " What wilt thou ? " is the supreme
question ; it is the answer to this which sets some
on the right hand and some on the left
Let us close as we began, remembering that
it is Christ who is to be our Judge. Therefore
will the judgment be according to perfect truth.
We know how He judged men when He was
here on earth — without respect of persons, unde
ceived by appearances, seeing things always as
they are, calling them always by their true names.
And such will His judgment be hereafter. On
the walls of the famous Rock Tombs of Thebes,
there is a group of figures representing the judging
of the departed spirit before Osiris, the presid
ing deity of the dead. In one hand he holds a

Concerning the Judgment 237
shepherd's crook, in the other a scourge ; before
him are the scales of justice ; that which is weighed
is the heart of the dead king upon whose lot the
deity is called to decide. The pictured symbol is
a dim foreshadowing of that perfect judgment
which He who looketh not at the outward appear
ance but at the heart will one day pass on all the
lives of men. And yet an apostle has dared to
write of " boldness in the day of Judgment " !
Surely St. John is very bold ; yet was his boldness
well-based. He remembered the saying of his
own Gospel : " The Father hath given all judg
ment unto the Son . . . because He is the Son
of Man." Yes ; He who will come to be our
Judge is He who once for us men, and for our
salvation, came down from heaven, and was made
man, and upon the Cross did suffer death for our
redemption. Herein is the secret of the "bold
ness " of the redeemed.
" Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress ;
'Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.
Bold shall I stand in that great day,
For who aught to my charge shall lay ?
Fully absolved through these I am,
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame."

CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE

239

' My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim ;
But 'tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with Him."
Richard Baxter.

240

XVI
CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
" Where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves
do not break through nor steal. " — Matt. vi. 20.
" Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." —
Mark ix. 48.
THESE are both sayings of Christ, and each
has reference to the life beyond death ;
together they illustrate the two-fold thought of the
future which finds a place in all the records of our
Lord's teaching.
Popular theology, it is sometimes said, seriously
misunderstands and misinterprets Jesus. And so
far as the theology of the future life is concerned
there need be no hesitation in admitting that, not
unfrequently, it has been disfigured by an almost
grotesque literalism. The pulpit has often for
gotten that over- statement is always a blunder,
and that any attempt to imagine the wholly
unimaginable is most likely to end in defeating
our own intentions and in dissipating, rather than
reinforcing, our sense of the tremendous realities
of which Christ spoke. Nevertheless, much as
theology may have erred in the form of its teaching
241 R

242 The Teaching of Jesus
concerning the future, its great central ideas have
always been derived direct from Christ. It has
not, we know, always made its appeal to what is
highest in man ; it has sometimes spoken of
" heaven " and " hell " in a fashion that has left
heart and conscience wholly untouched ; neverthe
less, the time has not yet come — until men cease
to believe in Christ, the time never will have
come — for banishing these words from our vocabu
lary. Unless Christ were both a deceiver and
deceived, they represent realities as abiding as God
and the soul, realities towards which it behoves
every man of us to discover how he stands. In
the teaching of Jesus, no less than in the teaching of
popular theology, the future has a bright side and it
has a dark side ; there is a heaven and there is a hell.

That there is a life beyond this life, that
death does not end all, is of course always assumed
in the teaching of Jesus. But it is much more
than this that we desire to know. What kind of
a life is it ? What are its conditions ? How is it
related to the present life ? What is the " glory "
into which, as we believe, " the souls of believers at
their death do immediately pass " ? Perhaps our
first impression, as we search the New Testament
for an answer to our questions, is one of disappoint
ment ; there is so much that still remains un-
revealed. We do indeed read of dead men raised

Concerning the Future Life 243
to life again by the power of God, but of the
awful and unimaginable experiences through which
they passed not a word is told.
" • Where wert thou, brother, those four days ? '
There lives no record of reply.
• ..*¦•
Behold a man raised up by Christ I
The rest remaineth unreveal'd ;
He told it not ; or something seal'd
The lips of that Evangelist."
How much even Christ Himself has left untold !
At His incarnation, and again at His resurrection,
He came forth from that world into which we all
must pass ; yet how few were His words concern
ing it, how little able we still are to picture it !
Nevertheless, if He has not told us all, He has
told us enough. Let us recall some of His words.
He spoke of " everlasting habitations " —
" eternal tabernacles " — into which men should be
received. Here we are as pilgrims and sojourners,
dwelling in a land not our own.
"Earth's but a sorry tent,
Pitched but a few frail days ;"
and the chances and changes of this mortal life
often bear heavily upon us. But there these
things have no place. Moth and rust, change and
decay, sorrow and death cannot enter there.
" The day 's aye fair
P the land o' the leal."
Again, Christ said, " I go to prepare a place for

244 The Teaching of Jesus
you." Just as when a little child is born into the
world it comes to a place made ready for it by
the thousand little tendernesses of a mother's love,
so does death lead us, not into the bleak, in
hospitable night, but into the " Father's house," to
a place which love has made ready for our coming.
" Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit."
Into Thy hands — thither Jesus passed from the
Cross and the cruel hands of men ; thither have
passed the lost ones of our love ; thither, too, we
in our turn shall pass. Why, then, if we believe
in Jesus should we be afraid ? " Having death
for my friend," says an unknown Greek writer,
" I tremble not at shadows." Having Jesus for our
friend we tremble not at death.
Further, Christ taught us, the heavenly life is a
life of service. Every one knows how largely the
idea of rest has entered into our common con
ceptions of the future. It is indeed a pathetic
commentary on the weariness and restlessness of life
that with so many rest should almost have come
to be a synonym for blessedness. But rest is far
from being the final word of Scripture concerning
the life to come. Surely life, with its thousand
fold activities, is not meant as a preparation for a
Paradise of inaction. What can be the meaning
and purpose of the life which we are called to pass
through here, if our hereafter is to be but one
prolonged act of adoration ? We shall carry with
us into the future not character only but capacity;
and can it be that God will lay aside as useless

Concerning the Future Life 245
there that which with so great pains He has sought
to perfect here? It is not so that Christ has
taught us to think : " He that received the five
talents came and brought other five talents, saying,
Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents : lo, I
have gained other five talents. His lord said unto
him, Well done, good and faithful servant : thou
hast been faithful over a few things, I will set thee
over many things : enter thou into the joy of thy
lord." God will not take the tools out of the
workman's hands just when he has learned how
to handle them; He will not "pension off" His
servants just when they are best able to serve
Him. The reward of work well done is more
work ; faithfulness in few things brings lordship
over many. Have we not here a ray of light on
the mystery of unfinished lives ? We do not
murmur when the old and tired are gathered
to their rest ; but when little children die,
when youth falls in life's morning, when the
strong man is cut off in his strength, we know not
what to say. But do not " His servants serve
Him " there as well as here ? Their work is not
done ; in ways beyond our thoughts it is going
forward still.1
.One other question concerning the future with
which, as by an instinct, we turn to Christ for
answer is suggested by the following touching
little poem :
1 See the very striking and beautiful chapter entitled "The
Continuity of Life " in Watson's Mind of the Master.

246 The Teaching of Jesus
" I can recall so well how she would look —
How at the very murmur of her dress
On entering the room, the whole room took
An air of gentleness.
That was so long ago, and yet his eyes
Had always afterwards the look that waits
And yearns, and waits again, nor can disguise
Something it contemplates.
May we imagine it ? The sob, the tears,
The long, sweet, shuddering breath ; then on her breast
The great, full, flooding sense of endless years,
Of heaven, and her, and rest."
Can we quote the authority of Jesus for thoughts
like these? The point is, let it be noted, not
whether we shall know each other again beyond
death, but whether we shall be to each other what
we were here. At the foot of the white marble
cross which his wife placed upon the grave of
Charles Kingsley are graven these three words :
Amavimus, Amamus, Amabimus (" We have loved,
we love, we shall love "). After Mrs. Browning's
death her husband wrote these lines from Dante
in her Testament : " Thus I believe, thus I affirm,
thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall
pass to another better, there, where that lady lives,
of whom my soul was enamoured." Will Christ
counter-sign a hope like this ? I do not know any
" proof-text " that can be quoted, yet it were pro
fanation to think otherwise. There are many
flowers of time, we know, which cannot be trans
planted ; but " love never faileth," love is the true
immortelle. And whatever changes death may

Concerning the Future Life 247
bring, those who have been our nearest here shall
be our nearest there. And though, as I say, we
can quote no " proof-text," our faith may find its
guarantee in the great word of Jesus : " If it were
not so, I would have told you." This is one of
the instincts of the Christian heart, as pure and good
as it is firm and strong. Since Christ let it pass
unchallenged, may we not claim His sanction for
it ? If it were not so, He would have told us.
II
* I turn now to the reverse side of Christ's
teaching concerning the future. And let us not
seek to hide from ourselves the fact that there is
a reverse side. For, ignore it as we may, the fact
remains : those same holy lips which spoke of a
place, "where neither moth nor rust doth con
sume," spoke likewise of another place, "where
their worm dfeth not, and the fire is not quenched."
In considering this solemn matter we must
learn to keep wholly separate from it a number
of difficult questions which have really nothing
to do with it — with which, indeed, we have
nothing to do — and the introduction of which
can only lead to mischievous confusion and error.
What is to become of the countless multitudes in
heathen lands who die without having so much as
heard of Christ ? How will God deal with those
even in our own Christian land to whom, at least
as it seems to us, this life has brought no adequate

248 The Teaching of Jesus
opportunity of salvation ? What will happen in
that dim twilight land betwixt death and judg
ment which men call " the intermediate state " ?
Will they be few or many who at last will be for
ever outcasts from the presence of God? These
are questions men will persist in asking, but the
answer to which no man knows. Strictly speak
ing, they are matters with which we have nothing
to do, which we must be content to leave with
God, confident that the Judge of all the earth will
do right, even though He does not show us how.
What we have to do with, what does concern us,
is the warning of Jesus, emphatic and reiterated,
that sin will be visited with punishment, that
retribution, just, awful, inexorable, will fall on all
them that love and work iniquity.
" But why," it may be asked, " why dwell upon
these things ? Is there not something coarse and
vulgar in this appeal to men's fears ? And, after
all, to what purpose is it? If men are not won
by the love of God, of what avail is it to speak to
them of His wrath ? " But fear is as real an
element in human nature as love, and when our
aim is by all means to save men, it is surely
legitimate to make our appeal to the whole man,
to lay our fingers on every note — the lower
notes no less than the higher — in the wide gamut
of human life. The preacher of the gospel,
moreover, is left without choice in the matter.
It is no part of his business to ask what is the
use of this or of that in the message given to him

Concerning the Future Life 249
to deliver ; it is for him to declare " the whole
counsel of God," to keep back nothing that has
been revealed. And the really decisive conr
sideration is this — that this is a matter on which
Christ Himself has spoken, and spoken with
unmistakable clearness and emphasis. Shall,
then, the ambassador hesitate when the will of
the King is made known ? More often — five
times more often, it is said J — than Jesus spoke
of future blessedness did He speak of future
retribution. The New Testament is a very
tender book ; but it is also a very stern book,
and its sternest words are words of Jesus. " For
the sins of the miserable, the forlorn, the friend
less, He has pity and compassion ; but for the
sins of the well-taught, the high-placed, the rich,
the self-indulgent, for obstinate and malignant
sin, the sin of those who hate, and deceive, and
corrupt, and betray, His wrath is terrible, its
expression is unrestrained." 2 " Jesu, Thou art all
compassion," we sometimes sing ; but is it really
so? St. Paul writes of "the meekness and
gentleness of Christ " ; and for many of the
chapters of Christ's life that is the right head
line ; but there are other chapters which by no
possible manipulation can be brought under that
heading, and they also are part of the story. It
was Jesus who said that in the day of judgment
it should be more tolerable for even Tyre and
1 See T. G. Selby's Ministry of the Lord Jesus, p. 279.
* R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions, p. 103.

250 The Teaching of Jesus
Sidon than for Bethsaida and Chorazin ; it was
Jesus who uttered that terrible twenty-third
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, with its seven
times repeated " Woe unto you, scribes and Phari
sees, hypocrites ! " it was Jesus who spoke of the
shut door and the outer darkness, of the worm
that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched,
of the sin which hath never forgiveness, neither
in this world, nor in that which is to come, and
of that day when He who wept over Jerusalem
and prayed for His murderers and died for the
world will say unto them on His left hand,
' Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal
fire which is prepared for the devil and his
angels." These are His words, and it is because
they are His they make us tremble. He is
"gentle Jesus, meek and mild" ; that is why His
sternness is so terrible.
These things are not said in order to defend
any particular theory of future punishment — on
that dread subject, indeed, the present writer has
no " theory " to defend ; he frankly confesses
himself an agnostic — but rather to claim for the
solemn fact of retribution a place in our minds
akin to that which it held in the teaching of our
Lord. We need have no further concern than to
be loyal to Him. Does, then, such loyalty admit
of a belief in universal salvation ? Is it open to
us to assert that in Christ the whole race is pre
destined to "glory, honour, and immortality"?
The " larger hope " of the universalist —

Concerning the Future Life 251
" that good shall fall
At last— far off — at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring "—
is, indeed, one to which no Christian heart can be
a stranger ; yearnings such as these spring up
within us unbidden and uncondemned. But
when it is definitely and positively asserted that
'' God has destined all men to eternal glory, irre
spective of their faith and conduct," " that no
antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensi
bility to the Divine love, can prevent the eternal
decree from being accomplished," we shall do well
to pause, and pause again. The old doctrine of
an assured salvation for an elect few we reject
without hesitation. But, as Dr. Dale has pointed
out,1 the difference between the old doctrine and
the new is merely an arithmetical, not a moral
difference : where the old put " some," the new
puts " all " ; and the moral objections which are
valid against the one are not less valid against
the other also. I dare not say to myself, and
therefore I dare not say to others, that, let a man
live as he may, it yet shall be well with him in
the end. The facts of experience are against it ;
the words of Christ are against it. " The very
conception of human freedom involves the possi
bility of its permanent misuse, of what our Lord
Himself calls ' eternal sin.' " If a man can go on
successfully resisting Divine grace in this life,
1 In a striking article entitled "The Old Antinomianism and
the New" (Congregational Review, Jan. 1887).

252 The Teaching of Jesus
what reason have we for supposing that it would
suddenly become irresistible in another life?
Build what we may on the unrevealed mercies
of the future for them that live and die in the
darkness of ignorance, let us build nothing for
ourselves who are shutting our eyes and closing
our hearts to the Divine light and I ve which are
already ours.
" Behold, then, the goodness and severity of
God ;" and may His goodness lead us to repent
ance, that His severity we may never know. This
is, indeed, His will for every one of us : He has
"appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the
obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus
Christ." If we are lost we are suicides.

THE END