ll.i.j.l.^l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l.T.I.I.I.I.M.I.I.I.I.I.IJ.I.M.I.I.I.IL'41

Library of the
l£ale IHvinirg Scbool

The Books of
Ifrank Cbamberlain porter
Winkley Professor of
Biblical Theology

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THE TEACHING OF CHEIST

THE

TEACHING OF CHEIST
ITS CONDITIONS, SECRET,
AND RESULTS

BY
THE EIGHT EEV. J. MOOEHOUSE
BISHOP OP MANCHESTER

ILontfon
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YOEK
1891
A 11 rights reserved

FXIO
M1?2±

PEEFACE
i The following Discourses have a common subject —
j the teaching of our Divine Lord and Master. That
' even on the nature and limits of Inspiration is
, intended mainly to throw light on the Inspiration
, by which Jesus spake. Eut obviously our Lord's
\ teaching may be regarded from many different points
; of view, and can indeed only be adequately appre
hended when so approached. Thus, if it had relation,
ras it clearly had, to contemporary beliefs and prac
tices, it must be useful to exhibit these as fully and
plainly as our historical resources will permit. An
effort has accordingly been made to sketch the
religious opinions of the Jews of the first century,
.especially such of them as are glanced at in the
Gospels, in the Discourses on " Christ's Surroundings."
Again, as our Lord's teaching must have been
conditioned subjectively by His own Nature, and
the character of His spiritual intuition, an attempt
has been made, it is hoped reverently, to determine
the relation of our Lord's Divinity to His human
knowledge, in the Sermon on "The Limitations of
our Lord's Knowledge."

vi PREFACE
As, again, it helps us greatly to understand any
system of teaching, if we can penetrate to the master-
thought from which it radiates, and by which it is
pervaded, inspired, and guided, I have sought to
supply to the reader this assistance in the Sermon
on " The Master-Thought of Christ's Teaching."
Finally, in the last Sermon in this volume, I have
endeavoured to display the ethical perfection of our
Saviour's teaching in sharper and clearer outline, by
contrasting it with those imperfect apprehensions of
it which His followers have gained in our own and
former ages.
There are other points of view, I doubt not, from
which the manifold lights of this perfect crystal of
Divine truth might be perceived and enjoyed, but
meantime I trust that those which have been caught
from the stations marked in these Sermons are really
rays from the Divine light of the world, scintilla
tions from the Divine glory, which may serve to
illumine our darkness and to guide our feet into the
way of peace.
Bishop's Coukt, Manchester, 1891.

CONTENTS
PAGE
The Nature and Limits of Inspiration . 1
Limitations of our Lord's Knowledge . 25
The Master-Thought of Christ's Teaching . 49
Christ and his Surroundings —
I.^TheLaw. . . .63
II— The Kingdom . . 87
III— The Unseen "World . . 113
Christ and the Social Revolution . 146

THE NATUEE AND LIMITS OE INSPIEATION
"Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom
teacheth, hut which the spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual
things with spiritual." — 1 Cok. ii. 13.
In respect to the Inspiration of the Scriptures of
the Old Testament, there is a difference of opinion
amongst Christian men, but that difference is not
such as is popularly imagined. It relates not to the
fact of inspiration, but to the nature thereof. It is
agreed that " all Scripture is given by inspiration of
God " ; but the answer to the question " What is that
inspiration by which Holy Scripture is given ? " has
never been precisely determined. The Church has no
where defined inspiration : nor is it perhaps desirable
that a precise definition should be sought. Why then,
it may be asked, meddle with the subject at all ? Why
not leave it in the salutary indefiniteness with which
the Church has been so far satisfied ? Because, I
answer, those who have theories to establish, whether
of extreme orthodoxy on the one hand, or of extreme
unbelief on the other, cannot content themselves
& B

2 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
with such indefiniteness. There are Christians who
are proclaiming loudly that an inspiration which
does not guarantee the authorship of certain books,
and the accuracy of every historical detail in the
earlier Scriptures, is no inspiration at all. And
again, there are unbelievers who for their own
reasons enthusiastically applaud these self-appointed
champions of the faith ; agreeing with them that if
inspiration does not secure all which they claim for
it, it is without either meaning or use.
Now it may be quite true that the clamorous
confidence of both these parties is the offspring and
sign of nothing more respectable than precipitate
unwisdom ; but at the same time this ignorance may
obviously do much temporary injury to modest or
unlearned men, unless its true character be plainly
indicated. Bear with me then, brethren, if I en
deavour, as shortly and clearly as I can, to point out
the unreasonableness of such confident declarations.
They all rest, as it seems to me, upon a funda
mental fallacy: upon the assumption that we are
able to determine the only worthy or useful method
in which it was possible for God to give religious
instruction to mankind.
But who are we, to declare that if God did not
correct the scientific or historical errors of primitive
men, He could not give them such instruction as they
needed upon their relation to Himself? Who are
we to affirm, as if we had been admitted to the
divine council -chamber, that if God left men to

i THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 3
gather such ideas of their past as existing traditions
communicated, He could not teach them so to modify
and transform those traditions as to make them the
vehicle of useful and elevating religious truth ?
The arrogant persons who dogmatise on such sub
jects assume readily enough that their own knowledge
of nature and man may become the effective means of
religious education : forgetting that twenty centuries
hence dogmatists as confident as themselves may
be pouring upon their own ignorance a contempt as
hearty as that which they express for the mistakes
of their ancestors. Surely such a thought should
make us hesitate before we venture to assume, as
some apparently do, that unless God made our
knowledge of the past as objectively adequate as His
own, He could not give us such instruction about
our relation to Himself as might be suitable to our
needs and capacities.
But unless we make such an assumption, who is
to determine the precise degree of historical ignor
ance or error which will inevitably exclude the possi
bility of Divine instruction upon spiritual subjects ?
Nay: does not our present knowledge of the
divine method in creation absolutely condemn all
such rash a priori attempts ? Is not God's method
in nature, wherever we can trace signs of it, a method
of development ; and is it not therefore consonant to
all which we know of His working, to assume that if
He spake at all on spiritual subjects to the spirit of
man, it would be by words which continually grew

4 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION i
plainer and more definite with the process of the
ages? Surely it were reasonable to expect this.
Nor can it be too much to assert that this reasonable
expectation is Scripturally justified, when we are
told by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
that " God of old time spake unto the fathers in the
prophets, in divers portions and in divers manners."
Abandoning then, as too great for us, the pre
sumptuous question how must God have acted ? or
how ought He to have acted ? let us confine ourselves
to the only question which becomes our ignorance —
how did it actually please Him to act ? Did He
teach us spiritual truth in the prattling superstitious
childhood of our race, as a human father gradually
leads his child to higher stages of ordinary know
ledge, by means of the inadequate, erroneous, and
puerile ideas through which at first a child must
picture to himself what is without ? To that question
we may perhaps hope to obtain an approximately
adequate answer.
Let us begin, then, by asking, What was the
relation of the covenant people to the primitive
traditions of mankind ?
We are told in the Old Testament that God
called a special man and his household to leave their
former heathenish surroundings, in order to fulfil a
special Divine mission to the world. . Let us ask
then, whether, as a matter of fact, God used the
existing knowledge of the Abrahamic family as the
basis of His spiritual teaching, or whether, obliterat-

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 5
ing the whole contents of their religious consciousness,
He began His instruction de novo.
In endeavouring to answer this question I must
remind you that in the present generation we have
been made acquainted with the existence of a
Chaldeean literature which had passed from its
mythical to its historical stage long before Abraham
was born. It is certain then that Abraham, who
migrated from Ur of the Chaldees, must have been
acquainted to some extent with that literature.
What then was his relation to it, and especially to
the religious traditions which it contained. Did he
use them, ignore them, or reject them ? In seeking
an answer to these questions, we have to take into
account certain facts.
We find in the early part of the book Genesis
traditions which are substantially identical with
those of Chaldsea. Diligent investigation is continu
ally adding both to the number and closeness of these
correspondences. A few months ago I could only
have said that certain Babylonian figures indicated
the existence of an Accadian story of the fall of man.
Now, however, Mr. Boscawen, in his recent Lectures
at the British Museum, has quoted a Babylonian
legend of the Fall which clearly has a common origin
with that contained in the Bible. It will be sufficient,
however, for my present purpose to call attention to
the Biblical and Babylonian accounts of the Deluge.
No one can compare the two without seeing that
they must have had a common origin. The outward

6 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
framework of both is all but identical. What rela
tion then do they bear to each other? Which of
them is the nearer to the original form of the tradi
tion ? Is the Babylonian a corruption of the Biblical
account; or is the Biblical a purification of the
Babylonian account? We are not altogether with
out the means of giving a probable answer to that
question. We find in the Babylonian account a polytheistic
conception of the Divine Power. Several gods are
mentioned by name, and it is related that when, after
the abatement of the Flood, the Chaldsean Noah
offered his sacrifice of thanksgiving, the gods swarmed
like flies upon the sacrifice. Now was the Hebrew
tribe to which Abraham belonged polytheistic during
its residence in Chaldeea ? because if so, it is natural
to conclude that they possessed and believed this
tradition in its polytheistic form. Upon this point
the Scriptures leave no room for doubtfulness, for we
are told in the 24th chapter of the Book of Joshua
" Your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the river,
even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father
of Nahor, and they served other gods."
This statement agrees perfectly with the con
clusion to which Professor Max Muller was driven
by his philosophical studies : that Abraham was the
first monotheist of whom history speaks — the first
who believed not merely (with the Henotheistic
Aryans of the Vedic age) that there was one Divine
Power, but that there was only one — one to the

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 7
exclusion of every other. But if so, if Abraham were
the first monotheist, and if he already possessed the
polytheistic account of the Deluge, is not the inference
irresistible that, taking the traditional accounts of
the distant past from the literature of the country
where he dwelt, he so modified them as to make
them affirm what the Holy. Spirit had taught him
respecting the nature of God and man's relation to
God ? The question of the still further modification
of the Babylonian tradition by the successive revisers
of the Pentateuch must of course be left open ; but
in concluding with Schrader that Abraham knew
and modified that tradition in a religious direction,
we make ourselves responsible for nothing more than
a reasonable inference from undoubted facts.
But now, let us ask, what is the nature of the
alteration made in the polytheistic tradition by
Abraham, and possibly by other human organs of
divine revelation? First we observe that every
vestige of polytheistic belief has been removed.
Preserving the external framework of the story, the
Hebrew revisers have made it proclaim the power
of one only God. -Secondly, they have conceived
differently the occasion of this tremendous judgment.
So long as men believed in the existence of divine
beings of limited power, of conflicting interests, and
of a character rather animal than ethical, it was
possible to believe also that, owing to inconsiderate
anger or arbitrary caprice, the gods might cause such
terrestrial disturbances as would make men f;heir

8 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
innocent victims. Accordingly, in the polytheistic
account of the deluge the god Bel, who caused it, is
reproached by Hea for slaying in his anger the
innocent with the guilty.
When, however, the Divine Power was conceived
of as Almighty and perfectly just, the conception of
such blind anger was no longer possible. God could
not then make men suffer without a cause, merely
because of his own violent indignation or cynical
carelessness. There must have been, argued the
Hebrew, some sufficient reason for that awful cala
mity, of which the tradition of the Flood preserved
the terrifying memory, and what could that be but
universal sin ?
Perhaps at the present day we might give a
different account of the matter. The Lord Jesus has
taught us that natural calamities do not necessarily
imply the special wickedness of those who suffer
from them ; that innocent men may be crushed by a
tower or slain by a tyrant, and that God "maketh
his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth
his rain on the just and the unjust." And modern
science, echoing this lesson, has taught us so to sepa
rate the natural from the moral order of the world
as to look upon the former as in general unchang-
able. While recognising, then, the horrible moral
confusion of the ancient races, and not even refusing
to admit that He who established and administers
the natural and moral order of the world may in His
wisdom employ the forces of the one order to further

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 9
the righteous aims of the other, still we might hesi
tate to use the decided and unconditional language
of the early chapters of Genesis.
But does this imply that we fail to recognise a
Divine mspiration in the view of the Flood which was
taken by the author of those chapters ? Nay, the
very opposite. That God should have consideration
for the ignorance and weakness of His creatures,
that He should teach them what they were able to
learn, views of their own moral life and of their
relation to Him which were not absolutely but only
approximately true ; this does but prove to us the
Divine wisdom and tenderness of our Heavenly
Father. As late as the time of Job, yea, as late as
the days of our Lord Himself, this question of the
true relation of the moral and natural in man's life
was a very dark and difficult problem. But were
men to be aUowed to make no advance towards its
solution until they could solve it completely?
That has never been God's method with His Church.
To each generation of believers so much has been
disclosed as it needed and could apprehend. And
unquestionably it was an immense advance upon the
heathen view of the Divine capriciousness, when men
first saw and believed that God's relations to them
selves were determined throughout by the moral
qualities of His creatures. That this great truth
should be conceived too absolutely, that its necessary
limitations should hardly come into sight, and that
consequently early views of it should have some-

10 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
times given rise to harsh or mistaken judgments ;
all this is the necessary consequence of a system of
development, of a method of revelation which had
respect rather to the actual wants and thoughts of
living men than to the abstract speculations of
philosophers. Such considerations, while enabling us to re
cognise clearly in these earliest chapters of the
Bible the inspiration of God, throw at the same
time a not unwelcome light on the question now
before us : What is the nature of that inspiration ?
They enable us to see that we should not expect it to
guarantee the scientific or historical accuracy of the
traditions which it adopts, but to make itself felt
mainly, if not solely, in the character of their moral
and religious teaching. In one word, it is the office
of inspiration, I might almost say its sole aim and
purpose, to lead men as they are able to bear it to
truer views of the nature of God, and of the moral
relations of men to God and to one another. I
venture to affirm that this is something more than
a mere speculation; that it is the reasonable, the
almost inevitable inference from such historical facts
as those which I have laid before you.
Nor do these facts stand alone. They are being
gradually confirmed and illustrated from many other
quarters. Consider, for instance, the Hght which is
being thrown on this subject by inquirers into the
probable origin of the sacrificial system of the
Hebrews. The Bible tells us nothing about the

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 11
origin of sacrifices. When they are first mentioned,
they are offered as a matter of course. How then,
we naturally ask, did they originate? What sug
gested the practice ? What ideas did such offerings
first express ? To what end did they look forward ?
It may be long before we can give definite answers
to such questions as these, but already light, if it
be only as yet a dim light, is being thrown upon
certain dark passages of early Semitic history and
practice. Arabia is the natural home and hearth of the
Semites. It is from thence that they poured forth
to Africa on the one hand, and to Babylonia on the
other. And within the very last year we have
heard of the discovery of the remains of an archaic
Arabian civilisation which may reveal to us much of
which we are at present ignorant. The resources are
certainly but scanty, out of which Professor Eobert-
son Smith has endeavoured to fill in his sketch of
early Semitic worship, and yet even so, the picture
is not without its distinct and significant features.
One thing it shows us very clearly, that it was the
central aim of Semitic sacrifices, both in their
earliest and latest phases, to keep up, or to restore
when lost, open and friendly communion between
a god and his worshippers. Further, it is clearly
established that in the offering of sacrifice, the act
which was of special efficiency towards the attain
ment of this end was the sharing by god and
worshipper of the blood of the victim. The method,

12 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
indeed, by which this participation was secured
varied in different ages, from the heathen blood-
draught and aspersion of the sacred pillar to the
most refined form of Israelite sacrifice. Still, at all
times, the central purpose was the same ; to secure,
through the partaking of a common life, open and
gracious communion between earth and heaven.
The blood of the victim was thought to be efficacious
for this purpose, because the blood carried or re
presented the life. This thought comes out not less
clearly in the Hebrew than in the heathen cultus.
Through the offering of the blood, the life of the
offerer was felt to be merged in the life of his
god. It is obvious that such an act as this would have
more or less of spiritual meaning, in proportion as
the life of God and man was conceived of ethically
or physically. If God were thought of as a Just
and Holy Will, which could not take pleasure in
iniquity, and man as a free but perverted will,
fatally warped by sin, but striving to mortify sin,
and to conform itself to the will of God, then
sacrifice would represent the deepest truth of our
life ; that only in free self-surrender to God can any
of us find redemption and blessedness.
No doubt the thoughts associated with sacrifice
among the primitive Semites were far enough as yet
from approaching to this lofty ideal. So long as the
life of God and man was conceived of physically, the
mere act of sharing the blood of a consecrated and

i THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 13
kindred victim would be felt to constitute a binding
tie between the worshipped and the worshipper.
God only demanded an offered life, and was satisfied
by the gift of it. Man only needed the favour of
God, and obtained it by offering the blood of the
victim. Glimpses might no doubt be caught at times
of the profounder thoughts symbolised by the offer
ing, but for the most part men, no doubt, were con
tented with doing an outward act and following a
sacred custom.
It was to rebuke such a feeling in Saul, the
shallow formalist, that the prophet gave utterance to
the memorable oracle, " to obey is better than sacri
fice, and to hearken than the fat of lambs." And
when the religious darkness of an Israel fast lapsing
into heathenism was broken by the dazzling pro
phetic sunrise of the eighth century before Christ, it
was not only idolatry and immorality, but quite as
much a heathen reliance on the physical virtue of
sacrifice, which was rebuked and condemned. " I
will have mercy and not sacrifice," cries Hosea, the
elder contemporary of Isaiah, while Micah, the
younger contemporary of the same prophet, answers
the question, "Will the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams and ten thousands of rivers of
oil ? " by the glorious proclamation, " What doth the
Lord thy God require of thee but to do justly, and to
-love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? "
We must not imagine, however, that such words
as these, or the even more emphatic words of Isaiah

14 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
himself, were intended to require the abolition of
sacrifice. They affirmed simply that sacrifice as a
mere opus operatum was worthless. Its value de
pended on the spiritual understanding and disposition
of him that offered it. Accordingly, we find that it
was just in this and the following centuries that,
under the inspiration of the prophetic schools, a
great reform was effected in the sacrificial cultus of
Israel. For our present purpose we may neglect the
critical dispute as to the comparative age of the
Priest Code and of Deuteronomy, for on either of the
rival hypotheses there can be little doubt that the
present form of those codes is due to the influence of
the great prophetic movement which culminated in
the eighth century before Christ. I believe that it
will be ultimately found that those codes contain a
much larger proportion of Mosaic elements, in the
shape both of definite precepts and of directive
principles, than the extreme school of Kuenen and
Wellhausen are prepared to admit. But not the
less I think that the time has gone by for question
ing the fact that at least three distinct codes of law
are contained in the Pentateuch, and that of these
the two later, those of Deuteronomy and of the
Priests, reflect in their present form the influence of
the prophetic party.
It would no doubt have been as instructive as
interesting if we could have known more of the
constitution and action of that inner spiritual church
which was led in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah by

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 15
Isaiah the prophet and Uriah the priest. But
although unfortunately we know that great band of
religious reformers only or mainly by their work,
yet to the careful student that work alone constitutes
a great historic revelation. It shows the prophets
labouring to exclude those heathenish modes of
thought and life, which their fellow-countrymen had
learnt from their Canaanite neighbours in the dis
solute feasts of the village sanctuaries. To separate
the people from these abominations, the village
festivals and sanctuaries are abolished, and the wor
ship of Israel is confined to a single centre, under
the direction of men who are within reach of the
saintly King and his prophetic counsellors. Nor is
this the only, change. To moralise the teaching of
the religious cultus, a very large extension is given
first to the offering of whole burnt -sacrifices, and
then to those sin and trespass offerings which gave
so awful an impression to the worshipper, both of
the holiness of God and of his own need of pardon
and renewal. If Israel was unable to rise to the
lofty height of purely spiritual teaching, then
the prophets would descend to the level of the
popular worship, and strive to convert that into
a more adequate vehicle of spiritual truth.
Alas ! they were too far still in advance of their"
age. Little as some of us may think of these ritual
reforms, they were found too violent for a people
who looked back with regret to the merry festivals
and immoral indulgences of the village sanctuaries.

16 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
And so, under Manasseh, the unworthy son of
Hezekiah, a bloody reaction set in, which, lasting for
more than half a century, all but obliterated the
work and destroyed the records of the prophetic
reform. A solitary copy of the reformed ritual was found
in the Temple during the reign of Josiah; and al
though many efforts were made to bring the life and
worship of Israel into accord with its provisions,
nothing effectual could be done in this direction
until Israel had learnt the terrible lesson of the
captivity, returning thence with a law still further
moralised, and with a spirit refined by the fires of
persecution to begin a new life among the ruins of
Jerusalem. Now, if I have here given you an account of the
development of the law of sacrifice in Israel which is
even approximately true, how valuable is the instruc
tion which we may derive from it on the scriptural
meaning of inspiration.
We saw that the general institution of sacrifice
was probably inherited by the Hebrews from their
heathen Semitic forefathers. In its general frame
work, therefore, this institution cannot be said to be
the result of a supernatural revelation. But we saw
also that under the influence of truer ideas of the
nature of God and man, and of the spiritual relations
between them, this institution was so changed in
form and circumstance, in spirit and ministration,
that it came to represent on the one hand the awful

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 17
holiness of God, and on the other the deep truth
that man can only become good and blessed when,
by sacrificing all that is selfish in his own desires, he
identifies his will and life with that of the God whom
he worships. Supposing then that it be found that
this profound modification of Hebrew worship was
carried out gradually by the greatest prophetic
spirits in Israel, will the claim of the Old Testament
Scriptures to Divine inspiration be diminished or
increased by such a discovery ? Are there any men
in the Church of the Old Dispensation who have a
better claim to be called inspired than Isaiah and
Micah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel ? Were these men less
truly organs of the Holy Spirit than Moses him
self? But even if, ignoring the personal claims of these
men, we confine our attention to their work, can we
not discern in the large spiritualisation of the simple
primitive rite of sacrifice proof enough that its
authors were directed in their work by the Spirit of
the Highest ? What is the meaning of that con
tinually' deepening sense of sin which the ritual
changes exhibit but a sign of the growing perception
on the one hand of the holiness of God, and on the
other of the obligation of man to conform to that
holiness ? What, again, was the meaning of those
solemn ceremonials whereby on the one hand human
sin was laid on the victim, and on the other the blood
of the victim was applied to the guilty offerer ?
Surely a continually deepening sense that our feeble
c

18 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
human will, our halting human repentance, needed
the support and sanctification of a better victim, and
of a more perfect sacrifice.
Surely in studying this deep subject the current
criticism of modern days affords us a new and most
valuable point of departure. We can now look upon
the latest modification of the sacrificial services, and
upon the prophecies of such men as the second Isaiah
as proceeding, if not from the same individuals, at
least from the same school and stage of spiritual
enlightenment. When, therefore, we find the language
of the latest forms of sacrificial development applied
freely to that servant of God who should bear our
griefs and carry our sorrows, can we not see how the
spiritualisation of sacrifice, not less than of other
elements of Hebrew faith and worship, was leading
men's thoughts towards that Lamb of God who was
slain from the foundation of the world ; towards that
perfect realisation of the sacrifice of the human will
to the Divine which was presented in the life and
death of the Son of God ?
We may find here, I think, in this gradual de
velopment of the primitive institution of sacrifice, an
even better illustration than that afforded by the
religious transformation of archaic traditions, of the
true meaning of Scriptural inspiration. Even more
decisively than in that former case we have discovered
the signs of the directive influence of the Divine
Spirit, not so much in the outward framework of the
institution as in its gradual spiritualisation ; in those

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 19
significant additions, excisions, and adaptations,
through which the coarser earthly elements are made
the vehicles of a lofty spiritual truth. Inspiration
guarantees not the special human authorship of a
passage, or the unimpaired preservation of a formal
institution, but the divine origin and increasing
spirituality of the religious truth which these are
made to symbolise or express.
It would not be difficult, if time permitted, to
illustrate the same truth in the gradual formation of
the historical literature of the Israelites. We should
find, no doubt, that this formation followed lines of its
own with respect even to the outward framework of
the record. There is an utter absence, for instance,
in large portions of the history of our scrupulous
modern regard to dates and claims of authorship.
The prophetic historian may have several imperfect
records before him, some more and some less secular.
Such records he quotes from time to time, sometimes
even enabling us to recognise them without quota
tion from the fidelity with which he copies, or from
the carelessness with which he connects them. He
writes in good faith. He tries to give us — yes, and
as so many Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions
testify, he succeeds in giving us — a substantially
faithful record of the past. He claims the usual
critical licence of a secular historian, without think
ing it necessary to draw attention to the fact. When
a secular historian of modern days finds that contem
porary laws, chronicles, and biographies disagree, he

20 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
is obliged to call in the aid of his critical faculty, and
to give such an account of the course and causes of
events as seems to him to be probably true. The
Hebrew historian does the same, only with less skill
and less independence. His very honesty in copying
and combining apparently contradictory accounts pro
duces those startling discrepancies of which sceptical
critics have made so much. We must remember too
how soon in a non-literary age the origin of accounts
which have a quasi-sacred character is forgotten.
St. Jude, for instance, who lived in an age of
some literary culture, quotes as the prediction of
Enoch, the seventh from Adam, words which we know
to belong to an apocryphal work written in the second
century before Christ. If then an historian like the
author of the Books of the Chronicles, writing in
a ruder age, supposes that the completed law was
known to the earlier kings, this is no more than we
should expect. Nor, again, ought we to be astonished
that having this belief he should endeavour with
little success to combine and reconcile what he
thought to be authorities of equal value. All this is
done with good faith. There is not, I believe, a sign
or suspicion of any wilful intention to deceive. But
at the same time it shows- us beyond doubt that it
was not one of the aims of inspiration to secure a
minute accuracy in the record of events. The in
spiration of the historian is shown not in the accuracy
of his record, but in his interpretation of the religious
meaning and tendency of the acts and incidents which

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 21
he narrates. No one indeed can read these peculiar
histories without feeling that this latter is the object
which engages and almost engrosses the mind of the
historian. It is little to him that Ahab built an
ivory house and waged successful wars. What he is
anxious to make plain is the relation in which that
monarch stood to the great religious conflict of his
time — that between Jehovah and Baal, between
Elijah and Jezebel. If, then, in considering the
Hebrew accounts of ancient traditions or of sacrificial
institutions, we discerned the signs of inspiration
rather in the religious lessons which such traditional
data were made to express than in the integrity of
their original forms, so in studying the prophetic
history of Israel it is not so much the unimpeachable
accuracy of the formal record as the correctness of its
religious interpretation which we should expect to be
guaranteed by the author's inspiration. Certainly
doubt would be thrown upon the reality of any
writer's mspiration by unquestionable evidence of
wilful bad faith. But of any such evidence I believe
that there is not a trace. With perfect honesty the
sacred historians set down what they beheve to be
true, and then proceed under the guidance of the
Spirit of God to indicate the deep religious meaning
of the acts of heroes and kings, their true relation
to the kingdom of God, their true place in that orderly
progress of Divine guidance and discipline which is
to end in the salvation of the world.
And surely it is the best proof, my brethren, that

22 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
such Divine guidance really existed that it is through
the covenant Church, and through it alone, that the
moral and spiritual renewal of mankind has been
effected. There have been many races more eminent than
that of Abraham for intellectual and social achieve
ments. To the civilised Egyptians the people of
Israel appeared to be nothing better than a multi
tude of ignorant and contemptible slaves. To the
civilised Canaanites they seemed a horde of stupid
and savage conquerors. By the intellectual Greeks
and masterful Eomans they were considered
to be narrow-minded fanatics, as despicable
for their self-conceit as they were hateful for
their inhuman exclusiveness. And yet it was
through them, and through them alone, that the
great spiritual redemption was wrought out, in
which all those proud races were to find their
strength and blessedness.
It was the Jewish monarchy, as prophetically con
ceived and described, which furnished the type of the
King of all the ages. It was the Jewish sacrifices,
as prophetically moulded and idealised, which pre
sented the earthly figure and foreshadowing of the
one sufficient sacrifice of the Son of God. It was the
Jewish prophets, in their threefold capacity of
preachers, psalmists, and historians, who so gradually
and so tenderly completed the picture of the holy
and all-merciful Heavenly Father, that it might be
readily recognised by faithful souls when presented

I THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION 23
in a perfect human form by the Eternal Word,
when inwardly set forth, "not in words which
man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit
teacheth, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual
¦men." It is the Bible and the Bible alone which reveals
to us the long and gracious development through
which this glorious consummation has been reached.
Beginning with the dim dawn of religious history, it
shows us how the light of spiritual revelation has
gradually spread and brightened, until it has filled
the whole heaven of our thought and feehng, and
grown into the perfect day.
Would that record have seemed to you more
precious, fuller of the signs of Divine direction, more
analogous to all which we discover elsewhere of the
Divine education of our race, if the sun of revelation
had gained its noonday strength at dawn, or if the
spirit of holiness had added to his Divine instruction
the lessons of a perfect science, or the methods of a
developed historical criticism ?
That was left to be learnt by man which his
natural powers enable him to learn. That was
taught to man which none but the Divine Spirit
Himself could teach. And the more clearly we dis
cern this, the more firmly we hold fast that which an
unprejudiced examination of Holy Scripture suggests
to us, that to teach us moral and spiritual truth alone
was the extraordinary help of the Holy Spirit vouch
safed to the prophets, the more profitably shall we

24 THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF INSPIRATION I
study the Scriptures, and "through patience and
comfort of God's Holy Word " the more firmly shall
we " embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of
eternal life" which is therein revealed and given
to us.

LIMITATIONS OF OUE LOED'S KNOWLEDGE
"Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels
in heaven, neither the Son, hut the Father. "—Mark xiii. 32.
There is no subject on which it is more difficult to
speak wisely or reverently than on that suggested by
the text. The Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ
is a mystery, which, like that of the creation of all
things, or that of the immanency of the great
Creator in His works, can never be comprehended
by human thought. It may be necessary for us to
know the fact. It can never be possible for us to
understand it.
Why then, it may be asked, do we not content
ourselves to receive the revelation of this great event,
without disturbing our faith or confusing our thought
by rash and scarcely reverent speculations thereon ?
Many of us would only be too happy to pursue such
a course, if we might be permitted. But what are
we to do when those who pride themselves on their
orthodoxy do not scruple to make of their own crude
conceptions on this subject a weapon with which to
assail the careful and reverent critic ? In defence of
the great truth itself which is so abused, we are com-

26 LIMITATIONS OF n
pelled to expose the irreverent rashness which, in
the interest of reaction, seeks to pass itself off for
orthodoxy. The questions suggested for our consideration by
these speculations are mainly two — (1) Did God
become man ? and (2) If so, how far were the limita
tions of our Lord's manhood affected by its union
with the Godhead ?
It may help us, perhaps, in some slight degree to
conceive the credibility of the Incarnation, if we
consider it in connection with the course of modern
philosophical speculation. Our knowledge, as we
are aware, is only of phenomena, only of those
appearances in consciousness which are the result, on
the one hand, of the influence of an external world,
and, on the other, of our own constitutional power of
receiving and presenting that influence. We do not
see things as they are, but only as they have been
modified by our own bodily and mental constitution.
We know,for instance, that the immediate objective
antecedents of our sensations of light, heat, and
sound are simply varying vibrations of our own
nervous molecules. But if we are asked how these
varying vibrations are made to appear to us now as
light, now as heat, and now as sound, we can give no
answer but this, that we are so constituted that when
the precedent nervous conditions are present we
cannot help presenting them to ourselves in those
definite forms. If we try to go further back towards
the objective origin of these sensations, we find that

11 OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 27
our nervous vibrations were simply taken up from
contact with certain external vibrating media — in
the case of light and heat, from contact with an ether ;
as in the case of sound, with the air. What, then,
is the air, and what is that ether which we are
obliged to postulate in order to account for our
sensations ? This question brings us to the very
margin of our knowledge. Inference becomes here
more precarious and speculation more uncertain ; but
still at the imperious impulse of our intellect we are
compelled to go on. So, proceeding with all the care
they can, some of our more eminent physicists have
supposed that the ultimate atoms of matter are but
vortex rings of" ether ; so that if to force we add
ether, we have in very simple forms an account of
the whole of that objective nature which is external
to our own spirit. To some, however, a further
simplification seems to be possible and necessary.
What is ether ? they ask ; and reply, Nothing but a
collection of fixed centres of force. Not then force
and matter but force alone must be taken to repre
sent the objective reality of being. But again, what
is force ? How do we gain the very conception of
it ? Is it not by the experience which we have of
resistance to our own will, the only force of which we
have immediate knowledge ? If then force within
us is will, may not the force without us, the force
which constitutes the universe, be will also ? Two
famous philosophers of Germany — Schopenhauer and
Von Hartmann — using freely the methods and con-

28 LIMITATIONS OF II
elusions of Kant, a greater than either, have come to
the conclusion that the real basis of all being is will.
But of what nature then is that will ? What is
its mspiration? What determines the direction of
its action ? It is, say these philosophers, the blind
impulse to press into ever more concrete forms of
being. The will which is existence is the will to
live, the blind unscrupulous will, taking counsel
neither of wisdom nor of pity, deterred neither by
misery nor ruin to pass into richer life. It is a will
which unconsciously takes for its law the survival of
the fittest, and which must therefore for ever (unless it
be brought to an end, and the Universe with it) go on
producing only evil and misery.
Those who have not studied the works of the great
German pessimists will not easily conceive how many
of the phenomena of nature can be pressed into the
service of this awful theory ; nor how difficult it is
sometimes to resist the conclusion which seems to be
forced upon us, that all the brighter aspects of life are
simply an illusion, set up by the will to live, in order
to make all creatures its blind instruments. Grant
that the real, behind all appearances, is will (as I for
one think is most probable), and then how are we to
escape the conclusion of the pessimists ?
No doubt we can join issue with them upon one
definite ground. The human will, at any rate, is not
simply a blind will to live. It is a will, as we know,
instructed by the understanding and inspired by the
conscience. How, then, can we believe that the will

n OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 29
which evolved or created man is so far inferior to"
that which it created ? Surely there cannot be more
in the effect than there was, at least implicitly, in
the cause. Ex nihilo nihil Jit. Say, however, what
we will in answer to the contention of the pessimist,
it must be acknowledged that the problem of being
will ever present difficulties not only to man, but to
every creature in God's intelligent universe, who
knows only as man knows, by means of limitation. To
aE, then, the question must be of profoundest interest
— to angels as well as to men — what is the nature
of God's will — is it a will to live, or a will to love ?
AU inteUigent creatures may well feel difficulty
in resolving this question from the unassisted re
sources of finite thought.
If, then, it should ever happen, in the process of
the ages, that the circumstances of a special race of
creatures, sharing the divine quality of moral free
dom, should make it possible for the Maker of all to
pass into the limitations of their finite life, and
through those comprehensible limitations to reveal
the fact that His will was a will to love ; that when
it rose in its manifestation, from the mere unconscious
uniformities of nature, to conscious and volitional
hfe, it showed itself to be inspired by love and ruled
by righteousness; how glorious a revelation, how
welcome a deliverance were here.
We believe that it was just such a manifestation
which filled the Christmas heavens with songs of
angelic praise, that it was just such a manifestation

30 LIMITATIONS OF n
which was affirmed by the beloved Apostle, which
was declared to fearful or doubting disciples by the
resurrection from the dead, and which is proclaimed to
a sinful world through the Church by the power of the
Holy Spirit. To men and angels it is declared by these
consentient witnesses that the will, which is God, is a
will to love — a will to seek and save the lost, to teach
the ignorant and bless the children, to meet the oppo
sition of evil with gentleness, and to overcome the
obduracy of error and hatred by illimitable self-
sacrifice. But now, if it be granted that for such reasons as
these God the Eternal became man, how far (is the
question that naturally follows) would this union
of the divine and human affect the limitation of the
humanity of the Eternal Word ? Who of us can
tell ? Who of us even can guess what would be the
conditions and consequences of so transcendent a
fact ? To claim knowledge here is to display an
absolute incapacity to conceive the necessary limita
tions of our thought.
One thing, however, we should be capable of
understanding, that having made an affirmation, we
are bound to avoid any contradiction of the terms
thereof in our subsequent references to it. And this,
alas ! is what many so-called orthodox apologists
seem incapable of doing. We affirm that in the
person of Christ two whole and perfect natures — the
human and the divine — are united. Then in the
person of Christ there must be a whole and perfect

n OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 31
human nature. Whatever belongs essentially to the |
nature of man must be found in the person of Christ.
But assuredly it is of the essence of our human nature
to be limited in faculty. We cannot think at all but
by means of limitation. We cannot gain comprehen
sible conceptions respecting any object of thought
but by contrasting it with others from which it
differs. To affirm, then, that divine modes of thought
belong to the humanity of Christ, as so many do, is
either to be guilty of a contradiction in terms, or to fall
unconsciously into a monophysite denial of our Lord's
true humanity. It is to be either illogical or heretical.
That many well-meaning men, writing to news
papers, should unconsciously impale themselves on
one of the horns of this dilemma, is not, perhaps, very
wonderful. But that professed theologians should do
the same is a subject as much for astonishment as for
regret. A learned professor, writing only last year
on this mysterious subject, expressed himself thus : —
" Knowledge pertains to spirit, not to flesh, and there
fore is not decision for the fallibility of the know
ledge of the Word made flesh, decision against the
Deity of the Word ? " In his own mind the learned
professor divides our Lord's person into two parts —
the Word and the flesh. Knowledge, he says, does
not belong to the flesh ; therefore to affirm ignorance
of the flesh is to say nothing — a mere impertinence.
But as beside the flesh our Lord's person only con
tains the Word, to deny any kind of knowledge to
Christ is to deny it to the Word, and so to question

32 LIMITATIONS OF n
His Divinity. This conclusion obviously depends on
the assumption that our Lord's humanity may be
identified with the flesh, which is incapable of know
ledge — in other words, with our Lord's human body ;
and is thus precisely the same as that of the heretic
Apollinaris, that the person of Christ consisted of a
human body with His Divinity as its soul. This is
but another proof, if we needed another, that nothing
is nearer to heresy than a stiff and narrow-minded
orthodoxy. Still, however, it may be asked, if we admit the
true and limited humanity of our Lord, how are we
to co-ordinate this fact with that other, equally
affirmed by the orthodox faith, that He was God,
endowed with Divine omniscience? How can the
fallible dwell with the infallible, ignorance with
omniscience, in the same personality ? I answer at
once for myself, that the manner of this wondrous
hypostatic union is a mystery too great for me. I
will not pretend to understand what transcends my
finite capacity, but neither will I deny the essential
elements of this mysterious truth, nor any of them,
because I cannot understand the manner of their co
ordination. One thing, however, I can venture to
say, that the difficulty presented by the unique per
sonality of our Lord is not a difficulty which is
pecuhar to theology. A difficulty of the same kind,
if not of the same degree, is presented by the uni
formity of nature and the freedom of the human will.
Dr. Martineau has expressed the idea of the Divine

ii OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 33
immanency in nature in terms not, I think, too definite,
as follows : —
The sole Power in the phenomenal universe is the Divine
intellect and will, eternally transmuting itself in the cosmical
order, and assuming the phases of natural force, as modes of
manifestation and paths of progression to ends of beauty and
of good. But surely it may be urged there is more in the
Divine will than is expressed in the phases of natural
force. In them, it is true, we see majestic order, and
the impressive simplicity of law, but where is the
spontaneousness of affection, or the delicate discrimi
nation of moral judgment ; the loftiest expression of
the Divine love and righteousness ? How can that
Divine will, which embraces so rich a treasure of
ethical purpose, tie itself down in nature to the un
varying sequences of physical existence ?
Dr. Martineau does not hesitate to answer — by
means of voluntary self- limitation. "You cannot
deny," he urges, " the prerogative of will to reduce
itself to lower phases ; to forego its own freedom for
determinate law, and to pass therefore by descending
transmigration into the form of force, vital, chemical,
and mechanical." And again, " the outward world is
God's eternal act of self -limitation, of abstinence from
the movements of free affection moment by moment,
for the sake of a constancy which shall never falter or
deceive. The finite universe is thus the stooping
of the infinite will to an everlasting self-sacrifice."
But if God's self-limitation be thus irresistibly
D

<4i

a nti

34 LIMITATIONS OF Ii
suggested by the uniformities of nature, how much
more by the freedom of man ? We know that we
are free to choose between evil and good, and that
we are responsible for the choice which we make, by
the best of all evidence, that of our own conscious
ness, and of the consentient consciousness of the
whole world. But how can this be, we may well ask,
if aU our powers are but manifestations of the Divine
immanent will ; if in God " we live and move and
have our being " ? How can we be virtuous for a
good choice, if the will which chooses be but a form
of the Divine power, or how can we be guilty for an
evil choice, if the power which chooses in us be that
of the Holy One? We are obliged again to have
recourse to the thought of the Divine self-limitation,
and that in a more stringent form. "To provide,"
says Dr. Martineau, " for this higher class of cases, we
must admit the conception of delegated force, lent
out for a time in order to work the conditions of a
distinct existence." At the same time we must not
forget that " this planting out of power, and storing
it at a single focus to be disposed of from within
under given rules of life, breaks no allegiance to its
sole Fountain Head, and establishes no second source
for it." In a word, while holding fast the immanency
of the Divine will, we must recognise that this will
has subjected itself in the personal life of man to
such limitations, that we can freely direct the portion
of Divine volition lent to us, either to the service of
the selfish will to live or of the Divine will to love.

II OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 35
Such a statement agrees best with all which we
know, but to imagine that it conveys to us a com
pletely comprehensible explanation of the mystery of
human freedom would be to show a strange inattention
to the ideas involved. There is a mystery in the
moral life of man which human thought cannot
fathom. We know that we are free, that we are
responsible to the transcendent God ; but how we are
so we rather dimly divine than fully understand.
Can it be wonderful, then, that when we try to
conceive the conditions of a Divine union with our
nature, so wondrous and unique as that which took
place at the Incarnation, we should find all those
difficulties exaggerated, which confronted us in the
two cases just considered ? At the same time it must,
I think, be admitted that the manner in which these
two cases are treated by one who denies the Incarnation
is exceedingly suggestive and instructive. It is
necessary, we see, for a theist who would give any
rational account of those cases to assume in each a
real self-hmitation of the Divine power — a self-
limitation the more considerable in proportion as
finite life rises towards the ethical stage. Surely,
then, it cannot be out of analogy with the highest
and truest philosophy if we assume, in order to leave
room for the essential limitations of our Lord's
humanity, a voluntary limitation or suppression
within the bounds of His human "consciousness of
the higher attributes of His Divine nature. That
Jesus was and continued to be God throughout His

36 LIMITATIONS OF n
whole. life of humiliation we believe; but we also
believe that in order to make His humanity a real
humanity He so far emptied Himself of His Divine
glory as to leave to His human nature its essential
limitations — its human weakness and ignorance, its
human capacity for growth, probation, and discipline,
its liability to feel the strain of spiritual conflict, and
" to learn obedience by the things which it suffered."
But now, having thus affirmed the reality of our
Lord's limitation, we must not shrink from the
necessary consequence that his human knowledge
was limited. The only other question, indeed, which
is left open to us at this stage of our inquiry is this :
In what direction are we to look for the most evident
signs of this limitation ?
And surely the true answer to that question is
more than suggested to us by the conclusion which
we reached last week as to the nature of inspira
tion. In the parable of the unfaithful husband
man, our Lord represents Himself as the last of that
series of faithful servants who were sent by the
Divine owner of the vineyard to claim its proper
spiritual fruits. They, it is true, were but servants
and He a son : a contrast in unity which is clearly
brought out by the author of the epistle to the
Hebrews, when he says that "Moses was verily
faithful in all his house as a servant ... but Christ
as a son over Hie own house." Not the less, however,
must we regard our Lord as standing in the same
series with the prophets, and as sent to complete the

11 OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 37
same Mission. " God," says the sacred author last
quoted, " who in sundry parts and in divers modes
spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets,
hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son."
If then the Lord Jesus came to continue and complete
that ministry of instruction and redemption which
was begun by the prophets, is it not natural to
assume that the purpose of inspiration in the two
cases would be the same ? If the supernatural aid of
the Spirit were bestowed on the prophets to enable
them to discern spiritual truth, surely the aim and
purpose would be the same in the case of the Son,
who, in respect to truth, came to complete the
mission of the prophets. We must not, of course,
forget that the Spirit was given to the Son without
measure, and only to the servants in such measure
as the needs of their ministry required. While,
therefore, they only taught such truth as Israel could
receive, and the stage of their own development could
apprehend, Jesus taught that truth of God which was
for all nations and all times. Still it was spiritual
truth which He came to teach, the truth in respect
to God's nature and relation to man, and not in
respect to such phenomenal facts of nature and history
as could be discovered by men's natural faculties. This
is more than a reasonable inference. It is a con
clusion in which we are irresistibly led by the form
and substance of the Divine teaching in the Gospels.
How, for instance, do we find our Lord deahng
with the law and traditions of the chosen people ?

38 LIMITATIONS OF n
Does He treat either of them after the method of the
religious teachers of his own time, as ah external
authority not to be questioned : or only as statements
of truth, to be first judged, and then approved or
condemned by His own infallible spiritual intuition?
The elaborate traditions of the Eabbis, and their
sacro-sanct hedge about the law, our Lord rejected
altogether. He told the religious leaders of His
time that they had made the Word of God of none
effect through their traditions, and on His own
authority alone He abolished all those trivial and
burdensome regulations about handwashing and
purification which, as the most recently imposed,
were held in highest esteem. Only those who have
studied the Mishnah and its history can conceive the
horror of startled indignation with which the Scribes
would hear him proclaim that " to eat with unwashen
hands defileth not a man " ; or " Give alms of such
things as ye have, and behold all things are clean
unto you." This meant more than the abolition of
special precepts. It meant the discrediting of power
ful scholastic corporations, the mortification of the
pride of men who felt that proficiency in special studies
raised them above the vulgar, made them objects of
public reverence, and gave them vast power and
authority in the State. Were they to surrender all
this, not because they had been excelled in learning
or vanquished in argument, but simply on the
authority of One who had never passed through the
schools, who had attained no degree, but pretended

ii OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE .39
to discern directly that all their labours were puerile,
and all their conclusions false? It needs a full
acquaintance with the circumstances of our Lord's
time to appreciate the confidence with which He
relied upon the absolute trustworthiness of His own
spiritual intuition.
His treatment of the law, again, is. to us, though
not perhaps to His contemporaries, a still more won
derful indication of the same truth. Never for a
moment does our Saviour treat the law as if it stood
on the same level with tradition. He declared that
the Scriptures testified of Himself. He proved to
two of His disciples from "the law of Moses, the
prophets, and the Psalms," that " it behoved Christ to
suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day." " Not
one jot or one tittle," He said, " should pass from the
law till all was fulfilled." The Scriptures were of
God, a fitting revelation for their own time, an ever-
brightening light of truth, a foreshadowing above all
of the truth which He was sent to reveal, of the
redemption which He was appointed to accomplish,
only to be superseded, to grow obsolete, and to vanish
away, as they were fulfilled in Him. All the more
wonderful, then, is it to find that, trusting to His own
infallible intuition of spiritual truth, He not only
enlarged and altered, but also condemned and re
jected passages from the law itself. It was httle,
perhaps, to extend the law by saying that anger was
murder and lust adultery. So much might perhaps
have been deduced by any spiritual man like St. Paul

40 LIMITATIONS OF li
from the command "Thou shalt not covet." But
what shall we say of our Lord's condemnation of the
law of divorce as only a concession made to the hard
ness of the Jewish heart; or. to his rejection of such
commands as " An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth," and " If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or
swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond ... he
shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his
mouth." Must it not have sounded to many a profane
and unparalleled audacity when Jesus ventured to
say, " Swear not at all," " Eesist not him that is evil,"
'' Let none of you put away his wife saving for forni
cation"; and above all, when He gave no other
reason for these unheard-of innovations than the
arrogant -sounding "I say unto you"? This was
indeed to them the most startling element in all His
teaching. He taught them " as one having authority,
and not as the Scribes " ; not with continual and un
questioning appeal to dead masters, or even to dead
prophets. Can there be a clearer proof to us how utterly
absent from our Lord's mind were all questions about
the age or authorship of special passages in the word
of God ? He did not weigh a truth in what we
should call critical balances. He did not think it
better because Moses, David, or Isaiah wrote it. He
judged it in itself. Did it appear to His spiritual
intuition to affirm an absolute principle of spiritual
truth ? Then He reaffirmed it on His own authority.
Did it appear to state only a partial truth or a truth

n OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 41
for a particular time ? Then He at once altered or
rejected it without the slightest deference to the
human organ through whom it was at first delivered.
In one word, our Lord's practice was precisely what
we should expect it to be, if in His case, as in that
of the prophets, it was only spiritual truth which
formed the subject of Divine inspiration.
Undoubtedly our Lord does in some few cases
quote the names of the authors of special passages
in the Old Testament. But it is to be observed first
that the number of such cases is not great. Ordi
narily He refers to the Old Testament in such general
phrases as " It is written," or " It was said to them
of old time." And He sometimes uses this kind of
language where we should least expect it. Twice
over, in different connections, He quotes the great
oracle from Hosea, " I desired mercy and not sacri
fice"; but in neither case does He mention the
prophet's name. It is the truth of the Divine prin
ciple to which He points, not the authority of the
prophet who first gave it utterance. If indeed the
question had ever been put to our Lord, Was such
a passage written by such a man ? then He would
either have refused to answer such a question, or He
would have resolved the difficulty. Had He pro
nounced His decision I would have beheved Him.
Judging, however, from His ordinary method of
teaching, I should have expected that, just as He
said to the man who desired him to interfere in a
question of inheritance, " Who made Me a judge or

42 LIMITATIONS OF n
a divider between you ? " He would have said in
reply to a question about the age or author of a
passage in the Old Testament, Who commissioned
Me to resolve difficulties in historical criticism ?
Anyhow, it is important to remember that such a
question was never submitted to our Lord. It is,
indeed, inconceivable to me that in that age of
credulous traditionalism such a question could have
been put to Him. When, therefore, our Lord refers
to passages of Scripture by the names of their reputed
authors, it is clear that in general He does so simply
for purposes of identification. And if even, as is
once the case, He makes the supposition of special
authorship the basis of an argument, it is clear that
this is nothing more than an argumentum ad hominem
— an argument intended to silence factious and dis
honest opponents by means of their own admissions.
I repeat then, and I repeat it emphatically, the
question of the age or authorship of any passage in
the Old Testament was never either started by our
Lord Himself or raised by His opponents. He did
not come into the world to give instruction on such
subjects. He came to reveal the Father, and to
dehver men from sin. Had He therefore turned
aside from the true object of His mission to waste
time and dissipate attention upon such comparatively
trivial questions as belong to natural science or his
torical criticism — especiaUy had He done so in an
age utterly unprepared to deal with such questions —
modern sceptics might weU have urged that He was

ii OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 43
forgetting the true vocation of the prophet ; that He
was mistaking things of temporal for things of
eternal moment, and was striving ineffectuaUy and
therefore unwisely to rob the human intellect of the
natural and appointed occasions of its exercise.
If then I put once again the question : In what
direction should we expect the limitation of our
Lord's knowledge to be speciaUy displayed ? I think
I shall be now justified in answering, In connection
with those matters which are not naturaUy the
objects of spiritual intuition; in connection with
those phenomena of nature and of human hfe which
belong to the sphere of the senses, and can be
adequately investigated by the human understand
ing. And do not the holy Gospels in their few
direct references to the limitations of our Lord's
knowledge clearly confirm this conclusion? St.
Luke teUs us in general that our Lord increased in
wisdom as in stature ; that His knowledge grew, as
ours grows, from less to more, and by means, as is
suggested, of that common domestic discipline and
education to which we are aU subjected ; while in
the text He points to one of the temporal accidents
of His career — the time of His second coming — as a
thing of which He was ignorant. That He should
return He knew, but when He should return He did
not know. "The times and the seasons the Father
had kept in His own power."
When, however, we affirm our Lord's human
ignorance of natural science, historical criticism, and

44 LIMITATIONS OF n
the like, we are not to be understood as denying the
possibUity of the miraculous communication of such
knowledge; but only the affirmation, so often con
fidently made, that the union of our Lord's humanity
with His divinity necessarily implies the possession
of such knowledge. He might be without it. We
know that in one case He was without it. He never
claimed to possess it; nor did His mission require
that He should possess it.
One question, however, there is to which we
should expect our Lord's answer to be clear and
unambiguous, for it relates to a matter which more
than any other must have pressed itself upon His
notice, and which more than any other it concerns
us to know — what, namely, was His own nature, and
His relation to man and to His heavenly Father.
And upon this question His recorded teaching, even
if we do not pass beyond the synoptists, gives us all
the satisfaction we could desire. He claims first the
supreme love and devotion of all men. " He that
loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy
of me." " He that loseth his life for My sake shall
find it." " Whosoever shaU confess Me before men,
him shall the Son of Man also confess before the
angels of God."
All the highest endowments, again, of the Divine
life — knowledge, comfort, and strength — He promises
to bestow as His own personal gift. Is it knowledge
which His disciples need ? " Settle it in your hearts,"
He says, "not to meditate before what ye shall

n OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 45
answer, for I wiU give you a mouth and wisdom,
which all your adversaries shaU not be able to gain
say or resist." Is it comfort? "Come unto Me,"
He cries, " all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I wiU give you rest." Is it fulness and energy
of Ufe ? " Take, eat," is His invitation at the Last
Supper; "this is My body. Drink ye all of this;
¦ this is My blood."
What can be the nature of the man, we are
impelled to ask, who makes such demands and
promises such gifts ? He must know, for it is pre
cisely this which He . came to realise and reveal.
And if He tells us we must beheve Him, for if any
where in earth or heaven we can find honesty and
faithfulness, it must surely be in Him who Uved to
declare and died to defend the truth.
But has the Lord Jesus told us what He is, and
what is His relation to the Father ? I beheve that
the Gospel caUed by the name of St. John was
written by that Apostle, but for the sake of others I
wiU content myself with quoting, in answer to this
question, words of the Lord which are reported by
more than one of the Synoptists. St. Matthew and
St. Luke record this saying: — "All things are
delivered to Me of My Father, and no man knoweth
the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man
the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son wiU reveal Him." Again, our Lord's answer to
the adjuration of the High Priest is recorded by all
the Synoptists. " I adjure Thee by the living God,"

46 LIMITATIONS OF ii
said the High Priest, "That Thou tell us whether
Thou be the Christ, the Son of God." As all the
false witnesses had failed to prove the truth of their
accusations, our Lord's life depended on His answer
to this question. By His affirmative answer to it He
condemned Himself to the cross, and knew that He
did. Can any words be more solemn than those of
a man at the crisis of his fate, than those by which
He knowingly condemns Himself to death ? If ever
then the Lord Jesus is to be beheved, surely it is at
such a moment as this. And what is His answer ?
"Thou hast said. Nevertheless I say unto you"
(although it may seem to you an empty boast),
"henceforth," from this time and onward, in the
victories of My cross and of My Spirit, " ye shaU see
the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power,
and coming in the clouds of heaven." The judges
held this answer to be blasphemy, to be an injurious
claim to share the incommunicable prerogatives of
God. Jesus knew that they so esteemed it, and yet,
rather than correct their avowed interpretation,
which He was bound to do if He were a mere
creature, He gave Himself up to death. In no more
solemn manner, as it seems to me, could He have
avowed His knowledge that He was the Divine Son
of the Blessed.
There is no deliverance of my own consciousness,
not even its affirmations of axiomatic truth, which I
believe more undoubtingly than I do this solemn
claim of my Lord and my God. I believe it, not

il OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE 47
only or chiefly because its truth was proved by the
Eesurrection, but because, after knowing Him in His
teaching, His Ufe, and His Spirit, I can no more help
beheving Him than I can the fact of my own
existence. And yet, with a conviction of our Lord's Divinity
as unquestioning as that, I declare again that, for the
reasons which I have given you, I beheve that the
eternal Son of God had, during His human life, so
emptied Himself of all those Divine attributes which
would have interfered with the reality of His man
hood, that when He wept over Jerusalem, and at the
graveside of Lazarus, He was really affected by
human sorrow; that when He was tried in the
wUderness or the garden, He reaUy felt the seduc
tive stress of temptation ; and that when He quoted
passages from the Old Testament, He might have no
more knowledge of their age and actual authors than
that which was current in His own time.
I believe with the learned Bishop of Meath that
our Lord
Pierced at once to the real drift the eternal significance
of the legislation, the poetry, the philosophy, the history of
the Old Testament ; but the outer shell, the husk in which
that Divine instruction was lodged, it was not His province
to investigate ; nor may we therefore either forbid or bias
investigation into the nature and texture of the Old Testa
ment, by quoting an authority which has no relevancy to
such questions, and was never meant to touch them.
The more carefully, therefore, we study the

48 LIMITATIONS OF OUR LORD'S KNOWLEDGE ii
Scriptural doctrine of our Lord's dual nature, the
more thoughtfully we compare the mysteries which
it involves with the like mysteries in nature and
man's life, the more reverently and honestly we put
aside all apparently orthodox, but reaUy heterodox
pre-judgments of this question, the more firmly shaU
we hold the reality of our Lord's human limitation
as well in knowledge as in moral energy; and the
more joyfully and gratefully shall we acknowledge,
with the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that
In all things it behoved Him to be made like unto His
brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High
Priest in things pertaining to God; . for in that He
Himself hath suffered, being tempted, He is able also to
succour them that are tempted.

THE MASTEE- THOUGHT OF CHEIST'S
TEACHING
" At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, 0 Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things
fr6m the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes. Even so, Father : for so it seemed good in thy sight.
All things are delivered unto me of my Father : and no man
knoweth the Son, but the Father ; neither knoweth any man
the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
will reveal him." — Matthew xi. 25-27.
In order to understand a great system of religious or
phUosophical teaching, it is necessary to grasp its
master-thought. Without this as the key, it will be
impossible to unlock its mysteries, to interpret its
dark sentences, or to co-ordinate its apparently con
tradictory sayings. It is for want of this master-
thought, for instance, that the religion of Buddha is
so extensively misunderstood. Not long ago the
teaching of the " Light of Asia " was presented to us
in a graceful and fascinating poem, as a kind of pre
lude of Christianity, suffused with Christian feeling,
and replete with Christian thought. Nor is it very
wonderful that the accomplished author of that poem
should find in the ethical teaching of the Buddha an
organ which lent itself easily to the expression of his
E

50 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING in
own inevitably Christian sentiments. The ethics of
the two faiths, so subtly blended in that poem, bear
necessarily a close resemblance to each other, for it
is the main object of each to deliver men from the
tyranny and illusions of the lower hfe of sense.
Hence the numerous exhortations which they have in
common to self-restraint and self-denial, to an austere
repression of all sensual lusts and passions, to the
renunciation of pride and violence, to the cultivation
of meekness, patience, mercy, and benevolence.
Hence also the triumphant proclamation (common to
both) that the saint can enter into his paradise here
below, that deliverance is perfected within the soul,
and consists, not -in the possession of sensuous or
intellectual pleasures, but in a state of the mind and
heart of the believer. Thus, if on the one hand
Nirvana is a state of the soul, on the other the.
Kingdom of God is within us. " He that believeth
hath everlasting life."
These are very deep and real analogies, and they
point to the intense spirituality of the two faiths.
But we must not forget that if their resemblances are
startling their differences are at least equally so.
We have the great advantage, at length, of possessing
a sketch of the life and teaching of the Buddha,
derived exclusively from the most ancient documents
of the society which he founded. And what does
this masterly work of Professor Oldenburg disclose
to us ? That the primitive Buddhism is a religion
without God and without prayer; that dehverance

iii MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 51
from evU must be self-procured ; that its instrument
is rather knowledge than effort ; and that it consists,
in the last resort, in the extinction, not only of
sensuality and pride, but also of thought and love,
and all consciousness. Here we have in most essential
respects, not the likeness but the contradiction of
Christianity. How, then, are we to understand this
resemblance in difference, this agreement in con
tradiction ? AU is dark, perplexing, and incompre
hensible, until we can seize the master-thought of
the religion of Buddha — the clue to the mazes of this
labyrinth. When once, however, we have fairly
grasped the central aim of the great Indian teacher,
as it is revealed in the epoch-making sermon at
Benares (the Buddhistic sermon on the mount), every
thing becomes plain and easy. It was not the object
of the Buddha to teach men their relation to the
infinite reality which lay behind experience, or to
answer the question whether the world is eternal, or
whether the perfected one lived on after entering
Nirvana. Such questions as these, indeed, when
they were propounded to him, the Buddha refused to
answer. They seemed to him useless. They had no
relation to his central purpose, which was simply to
dehver men from suffering. " God and the universe,"
says Dr. Oldenburg, " trouble not the Buddhist. He
knows only one question : How shall I, in this world
of suffering, be delivered from suffering?" His
seemingly sublime ethics have reference simply to
this question. Self-denial is good, because it diminishes

52 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING in
the force of those desires which produce suffering —
not good in itself, not good because it is eternaUy
right and noble, but only because it is a potent
means of allaying suffering. It can do no' more, how
ever. It is a quietive, not a cure. If a man would
extinguish suffering, he must not only practise virtue,
but going forth from everyday hfe into the forest,
he must, as a monk, acquire such a power of mental
concentration and abstraction, that he can at will
bar the entrance of the arena of consciousness against
all thought and feeling whatsoever. When he can
do that, he enters into Nirvana, into that blessed
state where an end is put to the sense -life, to the
possibility of re -birth and to the recurrence of
suffering. This is the key-thought of Buddhism, and
we may see, without difficulty, how its perception
throws hght into the darkest places of that strange
system, and explains at once its likeness and its un-
likeness to the faith of Christ.
Can we, then, it is rational to ask, penetrate with
equal certainty to the master-thought of our Lord's
teaching, that by the aid of this powerful key we may
be able to unlock the strong doors of all doctrinal and
ethical mysteries, so letting in the hght upon our
Lord's dark sayings, revealing the central aim of His
ministry, and establishing a rational unity of all His
scattered precepts ? That our Lord had such a
master-thought, and that it determined the relation of
His teaching, not only to the law which went before,
and to the tradition of the contemporary Eabbinical

ill MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 53
schools, but also to the confused thoughts, hopes,
and antipathies of the restless age in which He was
born, is, to say the least, antecedently probable.
Nor do we need anything beyond this probabUity to
justify our inquiry.
Much has been written, and very beautifully
written, about the secret of Jesus. If, however, we
want really to discover that secret, we must seek its
disclosure from Himself. Is it, then, a mere fanciful
over-boldness of mine — a mere taking of shadow for
substance, of accident for reality — if I discover in
our text a positive declaration of that which we are
seeking ? Certainly our Lord speaks here of a secret,
and thanks his Father that what He had hidden
from the wise and prudent He had revealed to babes.
But what was that, we naturally ask, which remained
hidden to all but the babes of faith, and was to them
revealed ? The 27th verse teUs us, " No man knoweth
the Son, but the Father ; neither knoweth any man
the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son wiU reveal him." Here, as it seems to me, is a
plain discovery of the nature of Christ's secret — of
the central truth which He came to declare to the
world. No man knoweth it but Himself. No man
can learn it unless He teaches it. What God is, and
what He is to man, no man can ever discover unless
the Lord Jesus, who came from behind the veU of the
Eternal Eeality, shall lift it, and show what it conceals.
It is true that psalmists and prophets in the ages
which went before had used this tender word Father

54 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING m
to denote the pitifulness of the Lord God of Israel ;
but this with them was no exclusive designation of
Jehovah. It did not exclude and shut out from view
those sterner aspects of the Apocalypse of Sinai,
whose fitting symbols were the thunder and the
earthquake. God might be a Father to His own, but
He was still the austere and jealous holiness, whom
men might not approach without the dropped sandal
and the covered face and the bleeding sacrifice. No
casual words of psalmist or prophet had greatly
modified the Israelites' habitual feeling towards the
Fear of Isaac and the Holy One of Sinai. More
must be known of Him, of the inmost will and
impulse of His nature, before men could throw off
their servile fear, and cast themselves without reserve
into the Almighty arms.
This more the Lord Jesus told us. Love, He said,
was God's very nature. He so loved, not a particular
race or sect but the whole world, that He gave up
his only-begotten to come into our weakness and
hmitation, and to suffer unto death, in order that by
the full revelation of the Father's tenderness He
might win men to the love of love. God's love was
so all-pervading, our Lord taught, that it went forth
in common to the good and evil; for did He not
"make His sun to shine on the evil and the good,
and send His rain on the just and the unjust " ? The
scope of His Son's mission was indeed determined by
this very fact. "They that are whole," said our
Lord, " need not a physician, but they that are sick.

ill MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 55
I came not to call the righteous but sinners to
repentance." It was by such disclosures as these that our Lord
gave a new meaning and force to the word Father as
applied to God. So explained it denoted a tender
ness never before suspected. It not only became a
name for God, but the name, the almost exclusive
name by which, in future, He was to be known. If
any one should still doubt whether the revelation of
God as the loving Father of aU men was the master-
thought of our Lord's teaching, let him turn to that
Sermon on the Mount which by common consent
contains the pith and substance of His message.
There we find him treating of the three religious
duties of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting, which made
up so much of the religious life of those days. The
question is, how are they to be performed ? And our
Lord's answer is — quietly and in secret. And why ?
Because they are not to be done to win popular
applause, but as the expression of love for our heavenly
Father. Do men find that they can only do well
under the stimulus of reward ? Then let them seek
their reward in heaven. Pray, fast, do your alms, in
secret, and " your Father which seeth in secret shall
Himself reward you openly." Are any anxious about
their worldly fortunes — about wealth and food and
raiment ? Let them remember how their heavenly
Father feeds the birds and clothes the lilies — and
does He not know that they have need of all these
things ? Are they in doubt about the efficacy of their

56 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING in
prayers ? Once more let them think how naturally
their own parental love hastens to supply the need
of their children, and howmuch more inevitably, there
fore, the fatherly tenderness of God must " give good
things" to those who ask them. Do they need a
motive for weU-doing ? The same thought at once
supplies it. " Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works, and glorify your
Father which is in heaven." Do certain claims of
love appear to conflict with natural feeling and
ancient practice ? Surely all appears natural when
men reflect that they are the dear children of the
Love Divine. " I say unto you, Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
you." And why ? " That ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven, for he maketh his
sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth his
rain on the just and unjust." To sum up aU in one
word, " Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which
is in heaven is perfect." Be love, as He is love, and
your love shall be the fulfilling of the law.
All these illustrations are taken out of that short
Sermon on the Mount which is acknowledged by
Christians of every name to be the clearest statement
of our Lord's teaching; and I think you will agree
with me that they set forth, almost beyond contro
versy, as the master-truth of Christ's message to the
world, the fact which is stated so shortly and clearly
in another connection : " One is your Father which
is in heaven, and all ye are brethren."

iii MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 57
But now, if so much be true, it foUows inevitably,
in the first place, that this -truth must be taken as
the measure and explanation of what is distinctively
Christian in the teaching of the Church. If there
be any doctrine of the. Christian faith which is
ambiguously worded, or diversely taken, this truth
must determine its true scope and meaning. Do we
read anywhere of the wrath of God, we are compelled
by our regulative thought to regard this wrath as
nothing but the frown of a father, darkening for a
moment the face of love for a loving purpose — to
warn us, viz., of the deadliness of sin. Do we read
of the election of a nation or an individual, we
know at first sight that this election can only be the
choice of a love which is equity ; an election which
springs, not from capricious favour, but from settled
and righteous purpose, having for its object, not the
weal or woe of individuals, but the blessing and
redemption, through appointed organs, of the whole
human race. Do we read of a future misery, set
forth in dark and terrible symbols, which is the
inevitable consequence of obdurate resistance to
redeeming love, we know that that misery can only
be such as the most loving father might inflict at the
demand of justice, and for the benefit of the sufferer.
Do Christian men differ about the revealed condition
of acceptance with God — whether it be faith alone,
or faith pregnant with works, or faith supplemented
by works — the truth which we have discovered
supplies us at once with the resolution of the

58 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING ill
difficulty. What do earthly fathers require from
their children ? Faith, and faith only : a faith
embracing both trust and self-surrender, and result
ing inevitably in conformity to the father's character,
and glad obedience to his will.
Once again, the discovery of the master -truth of
our Lord's teaching determines for us what in the
philosophical speculation of our own time is Christian,
and what falls short of being so. There are men
amongst us who, like the Buddha, refuse to let their
thoughts dwell on that eternal cause and reality
which is the ground of all our life and thought.
To what purpose, they ask, shaU we think of that
which we cannot comprehend ? Why should we
inquire concerning that which, if it exists, must from
its very nature transcend all the categories of our
thinking ? We must think of it, I answer. At least
we know that it is, if not what it is. And who,
having come within sight of the Infinite, can be
satisfied to shut his eyes, and be as though he had
not seen ? Who can know, as we all do, that the
world of appearances is determined in aU its forms
and fortunes by the Eternal Force which lies behind
it, and then ignore in our thinking the cause and
ground of all that is ? We must think of that which
is the life of our life, and the very support of our
being, and aU profession therefore of satisfaction with
Agnosticism can never be anything better than a
transparent make-believe.
Do you not see that what gives its eternal and
4

ill MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 59
universal interest to Christianity is just this, that it
begins with that which the Buddha, and so many
modern phUosophers, agree to ignore ? With a
might which is His alone, the Lord Jesus lifts the
infinite veil of appearance, and shows us shining
behind it the glory of an Eternal -Father. You
cannot be Christian and ignore that fact; because,
as I have tried to show you, aU which is truly
Christian is a consequence of that fact. You may
have an altruistic system of ethics, but it is not
Christian, if, like that of the Buddha, it be self-
centred, and have respect to nothing but your own
ideas of utility. Christian morality is, first, filial
love of the heavenly Father, as manifested in the
perfect humanity of His Son, and then, for the
Father's sake, brotherly love of all the members of
His human famUy. Only those thoughts and
actions are Christian which have their source and
inspiration in the belief of this truth. And for this
reason it is that many a philosopher in Christian
lands is further removed from the spirit of Christ
than that noble Mussulman, Abd-El-Kader, who
proclaimed his faith to the Tunisian Arabs in these
words of deepest and tenderest truth: "Thus men
are of the famUy of God, and the Lord loves those
who seek to do good to His family. The human
race is very dear to God its Creator, and all His
creatures, from the highest to the lowest, are meant
for the service and benefit of the great whole which
we caU the human kind."

60 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING in
Lastly, let us remember, as indeed these noble
words remind us, that the same master-thought of
our heavenly Lord prescribes to us the nature and
extent of our duty. If all human beings are the
children of God, it is our bounden duty, and should
be our supreme dehght, to make them all conscious
of this truth, and to lift them into the practical
realisation of that loving communion with the
heavenly Father, which that truth imphes and
makes possible. If God loves each smallest chUd,
each lowest sin -stained prodigal, then this fact not
only sets for us the task of our life, but also assures
us of success in its prosecution. Each may be saved.
Each may be lifted into the purity, the blessedness,
the enfranchisement of the fatherly embrace. This
is possible, and what is possible it is ours to realise.
We may never rest in our ceaseless loving labour
until the last, the lowest, the most hapless victim of
sin has been won to the love of God ; untU we have
secured for every chUd of Adam a happy, worthy,
holy human life ; until wholesome food and decent
lodging, and all the spiritual blessings of the King
dom of God, be as securely the possession of each as
the common air and sunshine. A gigantic task !
you may say. Yes ; and one which may demand
ages of time and an enormous expenditure of energy
for its accomplishment. But theD, what are we here
for? Why have we had given to us means and
knowledge and Christian blessedness, but just that
we may make our life one long unceasing effort to
execute the purpose of redeeming love ?

in MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 61
Are you appaUed, perchance, at the immense
difficulties of the task ? Does it seem to you that
you can never be good and strong enough to under
take it, and that even if you were, the resistance of
human selfishness must ever be too determined to be
overcome ? Ah ! then look to your great Master
and Leader in this fight. He is Infinite God, I
know — but I ask you rather to fix your gaze upon
the figure of the perfect, gentle, pitying man. What
inexpressible tenderness one finds in Him, what
immeasurable patience, what invincible truthfulness,
what unspotted purity, what holy enthusiastic con
fidence that, after long working and waiting, the
bitter conflict will be crowned by victory ! One
man, thank God, one at least, has been all which we
desire to become. Human nature, in one person at
least, has proved itseU capable of the patient purity
which is needed for this task.
Yes, and the spirit and power of that holy person
ality may be ours. By faith we may enter into so
real a union with the glorified nature of our Ee
deemer ; by faith we may feed so reaUy on His body
and blood, may absorb so vitally the sap of the
heavenly vine, that Christ's spirit in all its love and
power may fill us with the enthusiastic love and
magical attractiveness of our Master. Then to us,
too, labour shall become a necessity and sacrifice a
joy. No squalor of the slums and no horror of the
crime that haunts them shall repel us ; for under the
foul forms of the very vUest life we shall recognise

62 MASTER-THOUGHT OF CHRIST'S TEACHING in
the infinite value and eternal destiny of our Father's
children. Depraved they may be, and sunken they
may be into the depths of an almost bestial vice, but
with His spirit glowing within us who found apostles
among publicans and disciples among abandoned
women, nothing will daunt our courage or quell
our confidence. The heart of God's child, we shall
tell ourselves, beats beneath the coarsest brutality or
the foulest rags, and it is for us to speak to it, to
wake it up, to thrill it with the electric touch of our
own Christ -quickened souls, and to bring it home
again to the Father's bosom.
Thank God that the fire of this holy consecration
is spreading already among all classes and degrees of
men — that there are even nobles among us, men
whose circumstances might almost seem to exclude
them from such work, who are not only shaming the
wasteful luxury around them by their simple lives,
but are also working hard and faithfully in the most
offensive quarters of our great cities, and even bear
ing patiently, in the strength of their Master, the
taunts and insults of those they seek to save.
May God give us all grace to follow them, as they
follow Christ ; and may He fiU all speakers and
hearers at the great Congress which is about to
assemble here with so mighty a measure of the
saving love of Christ, that when the members of
it break up and go their several ways, they may
carry into the remotest corners of the land the
light of its grace and the peace of its benediction.

CHEIST AND HIS SUEEOUNDINGS
I.— THE LAW
The life teaching and character of the Lord Jesus
Christ are the great miracle of history. I do not
mean only that they have produced miraculous
results in the creation of a Christendom, which,
lasting for eighteen centuries, has embodied all
which has been greatest and purest among the
wisest, strongest, and most righteous races of man
kind — though that is true — but that they constitute
in themselves the world's most transcendent wonder.
That Jesus Christ should have been what He was,
and should have taught what He taught in the first
century of our era, is far more wonderful, in my
opinion, than that He should have risen from the
dead, or that He should have been the object of
faith to so many millions of mankind.
Once again, this miracle is one which most
certainly occurred. Men may have doubts about
the occurrence of special events, or about the genuine
ness of records, but they can have none whatever
about the unique personahty of Christ. It stands

64 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS— THE LAW iv
before us to-day as clearly and sharply defined in
the Gospel history as it did before the eyes of the
Apostles in the first century. It is a fact in the
spiritual world, as certain and palpable as are any
geological facts in the physical world. As such it
demands to be accounted for. To what shaU we
attribute it, that Jesus Christ was what He was,
when He was ? He hved in a country and an age
when three great races confronted each other. And
yet He is neither Jew, Greek, nor Eoman. His
character shows no trace of the marked peculiarities
of any of those great peoples. Again, He is no more
of a special age than of a special race. He lived
when Palestine was distracted by civil and religious
commotions, when the Herods were intriguing with
the Eomans, and the Zealots were plotting against
them; when Sadducasan priests were struggling
bitterly for the retention of their privileges, and
when popular scribes were moving heaven and earth
to establish a divine kingdom of Eabbis; when, in
short, aU the wild elements of a terrible revolution
were in active commotion and conflict ; and yet His
teaching and action are as completely independent
of these local influences as if He had Uved in the
cloistered seclusion of some peaceful university.
Those influences came into violent colhsion with
Him, but so far as we can see they faUed to make
Him deviate from His pre-determined course by a
single hair's-breadth.
Once more we see that He is of no class and of

iv THE LAW 65
no special type of character. Poor Himself, He
exhibits none of the limitation of the proletarian, or
of the bitterness • of the demagogue. Pitying the
poor, He shows no hatred to the rich, but laments
with as deep a sorrow the worldliness of the one as
the ignorance of the other. With a soul of wondrous
breadth and opulence, sensitive to every appeal of
human thought and feehng, His character is not
marked by the special prominence of any mental or
moral attribute. As strong as He is tender, as
reasonable as He is fervent, as just as He is gentle, as
pitiful and considerate as He is holy, we see in Him
the harmonious balance and equipoise of all opposite
moral virtues. Did I not say rightly, then, that He
is the great miracle of history ? The Christian is
the less sensible of this, because having accepted his
Master's own account of His mysterious relation to
the heavenly Father, he has an explanation of the
phenomenon which is adequate and satisfactory.
But suppose that we came, as some have come, to
doubt the trustworthiness of our Saviour's conscious
ness. Suppose that we came to believe, or, at least,
to suspect, that Jesus was no more than a man.
Then, indeed, the thought of this wonderful person-
aUty must present itself to us as a portentous diffi
culty. Can we conceive a human being born into
this world with so dazzhng a genius and so mighty
a force of will, that He alone of all mankind can
hold off from His God-like nature all obscurations
of His intuition, aU seductions of His will, aE modi-
F

66 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
fications of His idiosyncrasy ? Then, surely, we
make the man a god in order to deny that God
became a man.
Some, as you know, have recently thought that
they could find a refuge from this difficulty in a
better knowledge and estimate of our Lord's histori
cal antecedents and spiritual surroundings. He may
have been, they suggest, anticipated in the "truths
which He taught. He may have found help and
stimulus for His moral conflict in the community
to which He belonged. Schiirer and Hausrath are
thought to have proved this to us, and so to have at
least diminished the wonder with which we regard
the character of our Lord.
But now let me state clearly at the outset what
it is that has to be proved before our wonder can be
lessened, or our understanding satisfied. It is not
enough to show that particular statements of our
Lord may be found imbedded in early writings,
which consist mainly of foolish superstitions and
childish conceits. It would be strange indeed if,
with the Scriptures in their hands, the great teachers
of Israel never said, or never uttered in pregnant
phrase, any of those lofty spiritual truths which
shine forth from the pages of the prophets. But if
we find, on referring to contemporary literature,
that such references are only like rare jewels shining
amongst vast rubbish heaps of error and superstition,
that they are only like flashes of lightning in an all-
embracing night, then their occurrence in nowise

iv THE LAW 67
diminishes our wonder. The problem only takes
another shape. How is it, we ask, that out of all
this spiritual lumber the soul of Jesus only selected
what was good and great, and rejected all the rest ?
How is it, for. instance, that from the teaching of
HiUel He took (if, indeed, He took anything directly
thence) only what was eternaUy true, rejecting at
the same time all the frivolous ritualism and puerile
casuistry in the consideration of which HiUel spent
his life ?
Eemember, again, that it detracts in nowise from
our Lord's claim to originality, that even His master-
thought had been partially or casually expressed by
those who went before Him. The question to be
decided in our Lord's day was this. Which of aU
the thoughts about God that have passed through
the minds of saints and prophets should become the
master -thought of religion, which should condition
and determine all the rest ? Which, for instance,
should prescribe to us the quality of God's justice,
the purpose of His punishment, and the meaning of
the terms in which that punishment is threatened ?
It would not be true to say that Jesus selected one,
as though He had been passing all in review and
comparing them. No, the truth is that Jesus laid
hold of one by his Divine intuition, in virtue of His
direct insight into the nature of God, and made the
idea of the Father the dominant idea of the universal
faith. The thought that one body might attract
another existed in the world before the days of

68 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
Newton. The originality of that philosopher con
sisted in this : that he took that thought and made
it the governing idea of celestial dynamics. The
thought of the spiritual value of abandoning the
selfish desire for gain existed in the world before the
days of the Buddha. His religious originality con
sisted in this : that he took that thought and made
it the dominant idea of a great religious system. So
the thought that God was a Father to the pious soul,
or to His own people Israel, had been uttered by
psalmist and prophet before Christ was born. Our
Lord's originahty consisted in this : that, taking
that idea and expanding it into the conception of an
eternal and universal Fatherhood, He proclaimed it
the ruhng and creative thought of a new Kingdom
of God. Enough has been said, perhaps, of the task which
stands before those who would account for the Lord
Jesus by means of His surroundings, and now we
must endeavour to consider briefly the success which
has hitherto attended such efforts.
The attempt was made in Germany, some fifty
years ago, to show that our Master owed something
to Greek phUosophy, or at least to that Neo-Platonic
form of it which took shape at Alexandria, and is
represented in the works of Philo, our Lord's con
temporary. I do not deny that one of the evangelists
has felt the influence of this Alexandrian wisdom,
but of the truth of the idea that it reached remote
Nazareth, or entered as a factor into the education of

iv THE LAW 69
the carpenter's son, whose reproach it was that He
had never learned in any famous school, there is not
a tittle of evidence.
With wide and patient learning, Schiirer has
sketched for us the geographical, social, and com
mercial relations of the Jewish people with the
heathen communities which surrounded them in the
first century, within the limits of Palestine. And the
result is shortly this. The Jewish population had an
overwhelming preponderance in the interior regions
of Judsea, Persea, and Galilee. In these parts the
law and civic government were exclusively Jewish,
and whatever heathens dwelt there did so on suffer
ance. On the other hand, the populous and wealthy
coast-towns— with the exception of Joppa, Jamnia,
and Gadara, the independent cities of the Decapolis,
together with Samaria, Panias, and the new Herodian
foundation of Tiberias, in the interior of the country
— were preponderatingly heathen. Their people
worshipped the native deities, and those Greek gods
who had been, so to speak, naturalised under the
government of the Ptolemies and Seleucidse. Many
Jews dwelt in those cities, but for the most part
they had no influence on the civil government, and
as the massacres of the Jewish rebellion showed,
they had made themselves feared and hated by their
energy and exclusiveness. The northern part of the
country beyond the Jordan, again, was almost exclu
sively heathen, while Samaria stood aloof in an
.obstinate and hostile sectarianism. At first sight it

70 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
seems as if the Judaism of our Lord's time, sur
rounded and interpenetrated as it was by wealthy,
speculative, and numerous heathen communities,
must needs have been profoundly affected by GentUe
thought and customs. Nothing, however, could be
further from the truth. Then, as now, the Jew had
a wonderful power of living in the fire, without
suffering the smeU of it to pass upon his garments.
Ever since the successful rising of the Maccabees, it
had been the steadfast aim of the Jewish people and
their teachers to cast out every tincture of Gentile
thought and practice, to draw away from their
neighbours into a contemptuous and almost monastic
exclusiveness, and to fashion their lives, down to the
minutest particulars, according to an exaggerated
idea of the requirements of the Mosaic law. Decade
after decade the Eabbinical schools had been building
round the law what they caUed " a hedge " — a hedge,
that is to say, of minute and vexatious prohibitions
which should make any approach to a breach of the
law impossible. For many a generation after the
destruction of the Jewish temple the extension and
strengthening of this hedge went on, and even in the
time of our Lord, as the Mishnah shows us, this
traditional barrier was already so dense and impene
trable that any social or religious communion with
the Gentile world was wellnigh impossible to a Jew.
It drove even members of the vastly extended Jewish
" dispersion " into a social isolation, which seemed to
contemporary Eoman historians and satirists to be

iv THE LAW 71
savage and inhuman, as hateful as it was despicable.
No doubt there were highly educated Jews then as
now, who, in cities like Eome and Alexandria, were
profoundly versed in the higher forms of heathen
culture ; but the religion of the masses of the Jewish
people appeared to such learned Gentiles as Cicero
to be nothing better than a "barbara superstitio."
So little, indeed, was the Jewish religion understood,
that a man as enlightened as Tacitus could believe
the ridiculous fable that the Jews worshipped the
head of an ass ; while at practices which were more
obvious, such as worship without images, the observ
ance of the Sabbath, and the abstinence from swine's
flesh, satirists like Juvenal were never weary of
discharging the arrows of their ignorant ridicule.
The Jews in the Gentile world continued thus to be
a people apart, scorning their scomers, and shrinking
with horror from the contaminating contact of the
heathen. And thus — in opposition to aU the proba
bilities of the case — it is a fact that the vast streams
of pilgrims, who came from all parts of the Gentile
world to keep the great feasts at Jerusalem, left
nothing of the thought or customs of the lands of
their exile to colour the life and faith of their Pales
tinian co-religionists. Jesus might mix at the great
feasts with Jews from every province of the great
Eoman Empire without hearing a word of the Gentile
wisdom, or seeing a sign of the outlying Gentile life.
But what about the Essenes, it has been some
times asked — those mysterious celibates of the Dead

72 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS IV
Sea desert, with their Parsee sun-worship and their
gnostic angelology ? Might not Jesus, through them,
have felt the stimulating touch of Pythagorean
eclecticism ? In the dark, of course, all things are
possible. And so, in absolute ignorance of the origin
of the Essenic communities, it was even possible for
a time to imagine them debtors to the Buddhists and
Brahmins of India. Criticism, however, with its ever-
enlarging means and insight, has dealt their final
death-blow to all such fantastic dreams. Not only
Bishop Lightfoot, but with equal decision Schiirer
and Hausrath have brushed away aU such fanciful
hypotheses. Nothing is more certain than that
the Essenes, in the main basis of their faith and
practice, were intensely Jewish — Pharisees of the
Pharisees — while for the strange and outlying articles
of their belief there is little doubt that they were
indebted, like their more orthodox brethren, to the
Parsee influences of the captivity. The truth is
that, whatever attraction the moral beauty of their
life may have had for such men as Josephus and
Philo, they lay entirely outside the great stream
of Jewish life and endeavour, with no more in
fluence on its stormy onrush than if they had spent
their blameless days among the mythical Ethiopians.
But for the desperate effort in these days to find
some natural explanation of the person and teaching
of our Lord, it is certain that none would have cared
to revive their dim and faded memory. I only
mention them in order to say that in our days it has

iv THE LAW 73
been concluded by common consent that the Essenes
were not only non-Christian but anti- Christian. In
the words of Hausrath respecting our Saviour, "From
the Essenes His whole conception of the world
separated Him. The world to Him was not impure,
but the perfected creation of the heavenly Father ;
and therefore he did not think of escaping its con
tact by prudent solitariness and anxious asceticism.
Thus, too, He had no secret doctrines to communi
cate, like the masters of the Essenic covenant; no
long registers of angels and strange revelations of
the other world to be confided to adepts under the
seal of awful oaths. That which had been heard in
the darkness was to be spoken in the light, and that
which had been whispered in the ear was to be
proclaimed upon the house-tops." In a word, it
is not benevolent neutrality towards the Essenes,
but utter absence on their part of any theoretic
or practical relation to the work of Christ, which is
represented by the silence of the gospels. Neither,
then, we must conclude, through the heathen
cities of Palestine, nor through the pilgrims of the
Diaspora, nor through the Essenes, nor through any
other known channel, did the spirit of the Gentile
cultus find access to the formative influences of our
Saviour's life. And it is not, therefore, at aU
astonishing that, to use Archdeacon Farrar's words,
"in all the Lord's teaching there is not a single
indisputable aUusion to the literature, phUosophy, or
history of Greece or Eome."

74 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
Clearly, if we wish to discover the forces under
the pressure of which our Saviour grew to be what He
was, we must seek them in the popular teaching and
belief of the Jewish community to which He belonged.
The great teachers of our Lord's days were the
Scribes or Lawyers, and it is one of the great sources
of mistake among those who pride themselves in
seeking the explanation of the Scriptures from the
Scriptures only, that the importance and influence of
the Scribe must be almost unknown to them. In our
Lord's time the voice of prophecy had been silent for
centuries : " there was no open vision." The words
of the prophets were a written record — no longer a
living voice. Again, it had been the teaching of an
elder day that "the lips of the priest should keep
knowledge." But although still the priest had great
social influence, and as the minister of God in the
Temple was looked up to with respect and reverence,
he had, unhappily for himself, resigned the function
of teaching to the Scribe. This was a new figure in
Israelitish history: a figure which found its proto
type, not in Aaron the priest, or Elijah the prophet,
but in Ezra the restorer. The Scribe had been
created by the needs of an age which was without
Divine revelation, and which had been driven by
the aggressive heathenism of the. Seleucidse to
cling with desperate tenacity to the written record
of the revelation of the past. His office, then,
was essentially that of a commentator, interpreter,
and adapter. With the growth of commerce, and

iv THE LAW 75
the inroads of conquering races like the Greeks
and Eomans, life in Israel was growing more
complicated ; and if, in all its perpetually changing
details, it was to be governed by a law which had
been long ago stereotyped, clearly a class of men was
needed who, by profound study of that law and firm
grasp of its principles, should be able to expand and
adapt it to the everyday wants of the people. To
meet this need the schools of the Scribes came into
existence. Humble at first, they gathered influence
every day, as those must ever do who form the minds
and lead the thoughts of their neighbours. But,
alas ! with the influence came also the pride and
pedantry of scholarship. In a dead dry time, when
the waters of religious feeling were no longer a run
ning stream, men put notions for faith, and outward
compliance with precept for the submission of the
heart. In the hands of these teachers religion became
more and more a hard code of commandments.
Thought was life, and as thought was mainly exer
cised in the discernment of nice legal distinctions,
and the application of a keen casuistry to the deter
mination of small practical difficulties, all sense of
proportion between principle and practice, motive
and action, spirit and letter, the greater and the
lesser things of the law, was speedily lost : and with
arrogance as childish as their thought, the Scribes
demanded an obedience to their own puerile decrees,
as absolute and unquestioning as if they had been
ordinances of the Most High. It may be difficult

76 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
to determine precisely how far this process had pro
ceeded in the time of our Saviour : but still we are
not without the means of giving at least a rough
and approximate estimate.
The Mishnah is a record of the opinions and
decisions of the schools of the Scribes, which was
published by Eabbi Jehudah the Holy, in the latter
half of the second century. Its materials, however,
belong to a much earlier time, when decisions were
handed down orally from master to pupil, and it was
forbidden to publish them, lest they might thus gain
an authority which would prejudice free discussion
in the future. Through how many years these
decisions had been passed from mouth to mouth,
before they were reported by the Scribes of the
first and second century, with whose names they
are connected, it is impossible to say. Etheridge
thinks that the majority of them may have origi
nated a century before the birth of the Eedeemer,
others put their origin later; Schiirer, for instance,
considering the period of the Mishnah to extend
from 40 to 150 A.D. One thing, however, is
certain, that HUlel, who was elected president 35
B.C., arranged a complicated mass of traditions,
which are supposed to furnish the basis of the
Mishnah, into six orders; and that the Mishnah
itseU reports discussions of the schools of HUlel
and Shammai, which were contemporary with our
Saviour. We may conclude, therefore, without
much risk of mistake, that the Mishnah embodies

iv THE LAW 77
(perhaps with many additions) the Eabbinical
traditions which were current in the time of our
Lord, opinions and decisions with respect to the
meaning and application of the law, which He
certainly may have heard from the lips of Eabbinical
teachers in the synagogue. What then, let us ask,
was the nature of that popular teaching, which must
have been one of the spiritual influences of His
early life ?
It is exceedingly difficult to give you any idea of
the tedious, prolix, puerile casuistry which fills the
pages of this famous treatise. So exceedingly dreary
and childish is it, that it is difficult to induce modern
students to read it patiently, even in a translation.
Something, however, must be said if you are to
perceive, even dimly, how mighty a spiritual revolu
tion was brought about by the teaching of the
Lord Jesus.
Let us take, then, by way of illustration, some
features of the teaching of the Mishnah upon the
Sabbath and the washing of hands. And first upon
the Sabbath.
As it was necessary to avoid any approach to a
breach of the law, the question was discussed what a
man might do on the evening before the Sabbath.
The principle established was that he might begin no
work on that evening which could not be finished *
before the Sabbath began, and the application of this
principle was pushed into details so minute as to be
ridiculous. A tailor might not go out with his needle,

78 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
nor a scribe with his reed, lest the Sabbath might
come on during his walk, and so he might be tempted
to carry a burden on the holy day. Food prepared
for the Sabbath might not be put to keep warm in
any materials which would increase its heat — for this
would be equivalent to baking or boiling — and so
oU-dregs, manure, salt, chalk, or sand might not be
used for this purpose. Men might not leave vetches
soaking or nets spread on the day before the Sabbath,
for the work of soaking or of catching birds would
thus go on on the Sabbath. On the holy day itself
it was forbidden to put an egg near a boiler lest it
should be unwittingly boiled, or to hide it in the sand,
lest by the heat of the sun it might be accidentally
roasted. They might not put a vessel under a lamp
to catch the oil — that would be doing work ; but they
might thus catch the sparks from the lamp to avoid
danger ; only care must be taken that no water was
in the catch-pan, for then the water would quench
the sparks, and that would be work. Whoever
carried out food on the Sabbath the size of a dried
fig was guilty of death. Sailors and camel-drivers
were forbidden to tie knots, but guilt was not incurred
by reason of a knot which could be untied by one
hand, and women also were permitted to tie the
strings of their caps and girdles.
It would be as tedious as unprofitable to foUow
the Mishnah through all the intricacies of its childish
casuistry upon this subject. Perhaps enough has
been said to justify the remark of Hausrath : " The.

iv THE LAW 79
Eabbis themselves compared the mass of precepts
regarding the Sabbath to a mountain suspended by
a hair; for these precepts were deduced from the
Scriptures through an endless series of consequences,
often only connected with them by the shghtest of
threads. But this mountain, which they regarded
with the delight of the professional, pressed like an
Alp upon the actual life of the people." Men lost
themselves in a hopeless effort to comprehend such
frivolous distinctions, and wasted their strength in
anxious endeavours to avoid the thousand occasions
of offence which beset their path. They became
hard formalists and fierce fanatics — hugging their
chains, proud of their shame, and hating, as only
fanatics can hate, those who neglected or despised
their traditions. " It is more culpable," the Mishnah
declares, " to teach contrary to the principles of the
Scribes than contrary to the Thorah itself." Nay,
further, " He who interprets Scripture in opposition
to tradition has no part in the world to come." This
was the popular teaching with which, from His
earhest years, "our Lord must have been familiar;
these were the practices which He must have
witnessed on every hand. He had been taught
that it was sinful to infringe the least of these
traditions of the elders. He was surrounded by
religious people who* looked upon what they called
a Sabbath -breaker as worse than an infidel. He
was confronted by the stern rebukes of teachers
whose influence has rarely been equalled, and

80 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
whose fanaticism has never been surpassed ; and
yet, with an insight which pierced through all
disguises, and a courage which never quailed in
the deadliest danger, He pubhcly and purposely
transgressed their inhuman statutes; proclaiming
that "it was lawful to do well on the Sabbath
days," that "the Sabbath was made for man, and
not man for the Sabbath"; that it was a means,
not an end ; and only so far good as it was used for
the spiritual welfare of mankind.
In like manner He dealt with that very latest
development of Eabbinical formalism; the regula
tions as to the washing of hands. These directions
are of the more interest to us, as Dr. Edersheim has
shown very clearly that the decree on which they
rest was enacted just before the time of our Lord,
and was only first carried into effect during His life
time. These rules were the newest and latest out
come of the spirit of Eabbinical formalism. All the
more sternly then did the Scribes insist on their
observance, and all the more jealously did they
watch for the least sign of their infringement. The
washing of hands was in the days of Christ what
we should call a "burning" question, or a "test"
question. He who was scrupulous about hand
washing was a good disciple of orthodox Judaism;
he who neglected it was a heretic and an outcast,
who only deserved, like a certain Eabbinical despiser,
to be " buried in excommunication." What wonder,
then, that when a new prophet appeared, certain

iv The law si
Scribes went down from Jerusalem to see how He
behaved on this test question.
Before you can understand their horror at what
they saw, I must teU you something about the
Eabbinical regulations upon this subject. The hands
might be rendered unclean in a variety of ways, and
strange to say, by touching any part of the Word of
God, or even the blank margins of its pages, or the
straps of a phylactery containing any portion of it.
Hence the necessity for carefully washing the hands
before taking meat. In order to remove defilement
two affusions were required ; the first to cleanse the
hands, and the second to cleanse the water of the
first pouring, which itself had contracted defilement
by touching the hands. Here again arose a possi
bility for that legal refinement, which gave to the
Jewish lawyer so delightful a sense of superiority
over the ignorant layman. Suppose, it was asked,
that after the first ablution a man should find a
splinter or small stone on his hand and brush it off,
does the second affusion make his hands clean ? No,
it was replied, the second washing only purifies the
water of the first washing ; when, therefore, it is
poured over a portion of the hand which has not
been already washed, it becomes itself a first wash
ing, which needs to be purified.
If only a man could once persuade himseU that
there was any connection between such petty cere
monialism and real religion, one can easily under
stand the pride which a keen intellect would take in
G

82 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
such distinctions as these. They were the Scribe's
weapons, with which he subjugated the minds of the
laity ; they were the means by which he gained and
kept his great influence ; they brought him personal
respect and public observance; they gave him his
right to the coveted title Eabbi ; they added interest
to studies otherwise arid and repulsive; above aU,
they gave him status and respect among the great
men of the schools.
Can you not, then, understand the rage, the
horror, the deadly malignity with which these
masters of the schools found the disciples of Jesus
utterly neglecting the newest and therefore most
obligatory of their decrees? In their own minds
they had come to see whether Jesus knew the latest
and most subtle developments of their favourite
theory of purification ; whether, in washing, He and
His disciples "held their hands upward or down
ward; whether they moistened them as far as the
elbow, the wrist, the knuckles, or the finger-tips;"
whether, above all, they knew how to deal with the
abstruse difficulty about the splinter on the hand.
And, lo ! they find that, like a heathen or a beast,
His disciples ate without washing their hands at all.
As you think of all this can you not hear a fiercer
ring in the abrupt demand, "Why walk not thy
disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but
eat their bread with defiled hands ? "
It was a question, remember, of hfe and death to
these men ; it involved the credit of the schools by

iv THE LAW 83
which they lived and had their fame. More even
than that, it involved the truth and stability of that
whole system of legal teaching which ever since the
rising of the Maccabees had been developing in
contents and influence, untU it had won the faith and
commanded the reverence of the great mass of the
people. Jesus, we may be sure, felt the gravity and
perU of the crisis as deeply as the most excited of
His foes. He was challenged to speak His mind
about the " traditions of the elders " ; about the
orthodox doctrines of the popular faith; about the
precepts which regulated the whole life of His
people ; about the schools and teachers who swayed
the power of the pulpit, and commanded the rever
ence of all. Eemember that He was a GaUlean
carpenter ; that to oppose to the authority of these
famous Eabbis He had no official dignity from the
Sanhedrim, and no degree of Chaber or Eabbi from
the schools. What in such circumstances would you
expect? Not, perhaps, submission or recantation,
but, were he Uke other men, at least apology or
evasion. WeU, what do you find? The loftiest,
the sternest, the most uncompromising repudiation
both of them and their teaching. " Well did Isaiah
prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written : This
people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart
is far from me ; teaching as their doctrines the
precepts of men." And then, after showing how
they make void the law of God by their traditions
in the matter of the Corban, He cried, in the hearing

84 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
of the multitude, " Hear me, all of you, and under
stand, there is nothing from without the man that
going into him can defile him, but the things that
proceed out of the man [out of his heart, as it
is afterwards explained] those defile him." "This
He said," observes St. Mark, "making all meats
clean." You have heard these quiet words read,
I clare say, many a time, but did you ever realise
what an enormous spiritual revolution they an
nounced and began ? In that precept-ridden world
here is one who declares in the presence of Scribe
and people that disposition is everything, and mere
doing of work and obeying of precepts nothing.
" Give alms," He cries, " of the things that are
within, and behold all things are clean unto you."
Not if the heavens had fallen could those Scribes of
Jerusalem have felt greater horror and amazement
than at those daring and (to them) sacrUegious
words. Here, indeed, was embodied revolution;
one who, if He were not speedily removed, might
turn the world upside down, and bring to ruin both
Scribe and Priest, School and Temple.
Nor were they mistaken in their prevision. A
vast spiritual revolution was indeed near, even at
the doors ; a revolution which would not only sweep
away the traditions of the elders, but everything also
in the law itself which was merely accidental and
disciplinary. No doubt the new prophet had said
that " no jot or tittle should pass from the law, till
all were fulfiUed." But what then did He mean by

IV THE LAW 85
fulfilment ? Can we not see from the whole tenor of
our Lord's teaching that the law was to be fulfilled
by the extrication of its eternal principles, and the
substitution of these for all in it which was of the
nature of necessary but temporary accommodation ?
The righteousness of the disciples of the new king
dom was to exceed the righteousness of the Scribes
and Pharisees, for it was to go deeper, laying its
constraining hand not on action only, but also on
feeling and will. It was to intercept murder at the
stage of anger, and adultery at that of lust. It was
to use prayer and almsgiving and fasting as mere
means towards spiritual ends, and to strip them for
ever of the character of merit-producing works. For
sacrifices and purifications it was to bring in the
spiritual realities of which these were but signs,
submission of the wiU to God, and the perfect
cleansing of all the springs and motives of action.
If in the old law there had been concessions to
human weakness, toleration of what was less than
perfect because of the hardness of men's hearts;
henceforward all these must be swept away by the
authoritative " I say unto you," " Swear not at all,"
" Eesist not him that is evil," " Love your enemies,"
"Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for
fornication, and shall marry another, committeth
adultery." How grand a fulfilment is here: the
substitution of principle for precept, spirit for letter,
disposition for action, perfection for imperfection!
All theology is summed up in the grand announce-

86 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS rv
ments, God is your Father, and redemption is the
utterance of His love ; and all men are your brethren
as children of the same Divine famUy. All ethics
are comprehended in the sublime saying, " Love God
with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself."
You are pressed down beneath a crushing and in
tolerable burden of ordinances — -"Come, then, unto
me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest." " Take my yoke upon you and
learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and
ye shall find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy
and my burden is light." Have we learnt it yet
— this eternal message of love, this good tidings of
spiritual freedom, this charter of heavenly privileges,
this birthright of spiritual blessing ? Nay, rather,
have not we and our fathers so obscured it by
the blinding veil of our dogmatisms, rituahsms,
and sabbatisms, that a weary world is crying out
to us to-day, Eestore to us the Christianity of
Christ ? May God give strength and volume to the
voice of that righteous, that agonised demand, until
we, the teachers, pressed onward by the spirit within
and the urgency without, shall trample underfoot the
galling tradition of the elders, and speak at length
with the accents of Christ's simple love.
But ah, my brethren, as the vision of this majestic
simplicity and sufficiency rises ever more clearly
before our eyes, are we not- also impeUed to put
to ourselves the question of the men of Nazareth,
" Whence hath this man this wisdom ? " Whence

iv THE KINGDOM 87
hath this son of a carpenter, without learning, whose
short life was compressed into the brief span of
thirty-three years — whence- hath He gained this
imperial insight, this unwavering firmness, this
sublime consciousness of authority ? How is it that
from so low a level of contemporary life and thought
He had gained at a single bound truth about God
and man's relation to God which no previous
generation had discovered, and which no subsequent
generation has been able to hold fast and realise.
How is it that until to-day He sits throned above
us all, still calling with the same, voice of mingled
appeal and authority, " Come unto me " ? " Whence
hath this man this wisdom?" Whatever be the
answer which men shall ultimately give to that
greatest question of our time, one thing, I hope,
we have clearly seen to-day. He did not get His
wisdom from Gentile culture, or from the popular
teaching of contemporary Jewish orthodoxy. Not
from these at least, from whatever other quarter
He may have gained it.

II.— THE KINGDOM.
In my last lecture I endeavoured to show you what
was the relation of our Lord's teaching to that of
the Scribes upon the Thorah — that great coUection
of precepts which is commonly caUed the Law of
Moses. This was the Law under which the Jewish
people hved, and in the observance of which they

88 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
not only took pride, but believed also that they should
find their best title to future reward. It has been
profoundly observed by Schiirer that in proportion
as religion is made to consist in work rather than in
disposition, interest is transferred from the centre to
the circumference, from that state of heart which is
religion to those supposed future consequences which
are to be experienced in some other world than this.
It is thus in the decay and decline of spiritual.
religion that speculation about future events and a
future world flourish most vigorously. The state of
Jewish belief and expectation in our Lord's time is a
very striking example of the operation of this law.
As good works, or works thought to be good, were
wrought then in the hope of a future reward, the
nature of that reward (as conceived by the Jewish
teachers and people) partook of the externality of the
things which were to lead to it. Prophetic figures
which . seemed to refer to a triumphant future for
God's people, in this world and the next, were
literalised, secularised, and expanded into all kinds of
fanciful extravagances. As might have been expected,
these dreams of the unseen and the future commonly
taking the form of a so-called kingdom of God, in
which the chosen people were to enjoy exceptional
privileges, dignities, and delights were exceedingly
popular. The law was a burden to a common man,
even though it might be a burden of the exclusive
right of bearing which he might be proud — but the
future kingdom was a glory and a joy. The more

iv THE KINGDOM 89
earthly it was in conception, the more strongly it
appealed to his prevaUing desires — the more passion
ately, the more confidently he beheved that it would
one day be reahsed. If the yoke of the law was
hard, the yoke of the kingdom would be easy. These
two words, the law' and the kingdom, represent, in
fact, the two main streams of influence, the learned
and the popular, which told upon our Saviour's life
and development. What was the nature of the
former I indicated in the last lecture, and now I must
endeavour to give you some idea of the character of
the latter; of that popular hope and dream which
fired the hearts of the great mass of the people.
For the form which it took in our Lord's days it
was indebted in the first place to the prophecy of
Daniel, " not only," as Dean Stanley has happily said,
" the first germ of the apocalyptic literature (of the
New Testament and of New Testament times), but
also the first attempt, rude and simple, but most
impressive, at a phUosophy of history, the first per
ception of the continuous succession of ages (of the
fact) that the story of humanity is not a mere dis
jointed tale, but is a regular development of epochs,
one growing out of another, on a majestic plan, in
which the Divine economy is as deeply concerned as
is the fate of the chosen people."
The fact that the fortunes of the Jewish nation
were connected with those of the neighbouring
states — with the Egyptians who had oppressed it,
and with the Assyrians who had been the rod of

90 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
God's anger to punish it — had been already declared
by the elder prophets. In addition to this, the
Israelites learnt from the Book of Daniel that this
connection was not merely casual or temporary, but
divinely determined, forming part of a vast cosmical
design and process, of which all the parts were
morally related, and led on to a definite predestined
end. Things did not happen by chance. The future
did not lie at the mercy of accident. A Divine hand
guided all things, and would so order and over-rule
them that they should issue at length in the estab
lishment of the Kingdom — not of Assyria, or Persia,
or Greece, or Eome, but of heaven and God. Nor
was the method by which this great result would be
reached any longer doubtful. The leader of the
spiritual war was already appointed. " I saw in the
night visions," says Daniel, " and, behold, there came
with the clouds of heaven one lik e unto a son of man,
and he came even to the Ancient of Days, and they
brought him near before him. And there was given
him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all
peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall
not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not
be destroyed."
Here the old idea of the Messiah received that
more precise determination and sublime enlargement,
which formed the point of departure for all future
developments. Such developments were to be ex
pected, because of the great popularity of this

iv THE KINGDOM 91
canonical type and source. Josephus calls Daniel
"the chosen friend of God," and declares that his
prophecy was the favourite book of his own time.
" AU things," he says, " happened to him as to one of
the greatest of the prophets, and thus, not only while
he was living did he enjoy the greatest esteem and
honour from both kings and the multitude, but also
after his death he was held in perpetual remem
brance. For he unfolds to us, not only the future,
as other prophets do, but he determines the exact
time when these things shall occur ; and whilst the
other prophets foretell misfortune, and on that
account are hated by princes and people, Daniel was
a messenger of peace to them, so that he was beloved
of all, on account of the glad prospects which he
announced." Here, in his most naive way, Josephus enables us
to anticipate the direction which apocryphal prophecy
might be expected to take. The people desired to
know "the times and the seasons," and they wished
more especially to have a larger and more detailed
description of that glorious future in which they were
to share. The demand created its own supply in what
have been called the pseudepigraphic writings —
that is, in the writings falsely ascribed to some great
patriarch or prophet of old. The authors of these
works were, as their writings show, pious men, who,
sharing that defect of the historic sense which was
common to their time and region, and being desirous
to encourage their brethren to look forward with

92 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS rv
vivid faith to the fulfilment of the Divine promises,
endeavoured to add that authority to their anticipa
tions which their own obscure names could not have
given them, by ascribing them to some sacred hero
of the past: to Enoch or Moses, or Solomon or
Baruch, or Ezra. Perhaps the most famous of these
apocalypses was that Book of Enoch, which is
quoted as an authority in the canonical Epistle of
Jude. That book was frequently referred to by the
Church fathers, but having been lost in the Middle
Ages, it was only recovered in an Ethiopic translation
by the traveller Bruce, almost in our own times. It
is a book which has been frequently interpolated by
writers of different ages, but critics have had little
difficulty in determining that its earliest portion was
probably written about the end of the second century
B.C., while certain famous prophecies which it con
tains are probably to be attributed to the latter days
of Herod the Great, not long before the beginning of
the Christian era. These portions of it, then, may
be taken with some confidence, as one of the sources
of that popular expectation of a Kingdom of God,
which prevailed in the first century, and which clearly
influenced, though in a peculiar way, our Divine
Master's teaching on that subject. There is much in
the book which in these days would only excite a
smile. Enoch, for instance, is said to have been
shown by an angel not only the Paradisaic tree of
knowledge, of which he tells many wonderful things,
but also the winds " which constitute the pUlars of

iv THE KINGDOM 93
Heaven," and " which turn the sky," and even " the
receptacles of the moon, from which the moons
come." It is not, however, with such chUdish dreams
as these that we are concerned, but rather with
those representations of the future Kingdom of God
which fired the imaginations of our Lord's con
temporaries. In these the unknown author literalises,
localises, and enlarges several of the detaUs of that
prophecy of Daniel from which he adopts the titles
" Ancient of Days " and " Son of Man." He says of
the " Son of Man " that his name was invoked in the
presence of the Ancient of Days, " before the sun and
the signs were created, before the stars of heaven
were formed." He calls Him also "the Elect and
the concealed One, who existed in God's presence
before the world was created." This exalted Son of
Man shaU be sent in the latter days " to be a support
for the righteous to lean upon," and " to be the light
of the nations." He shall be the King and Leader of
Israel. " He shall sow the congregation of the saints
and the elect, and all the elect shaU stand before Him
in that day." Great mountains of gold and silver
and iron and copper are provided " for the dominion
of the Messiah, that He may command and be
powerful upon the earth." In the latter days also
"the old Jerusalem shall be done away with, and
God shall bring a new Jerusalem and place it on the
spot where the old one stood. In this new Jerusalem
the pious Jews shaU dwell, and the heathen shall do
them homage." Before this consummation, however,

94 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
there will be a decisive battle, when " the blood of
sinners will flow even to the breasts of their horses,"
and when " Israel will be given the victory over all
the Gentiles." Then the Son of Man " shall break
in pieces the teeth of sinners and hurl kings from
their thrones and their dominions." " In those days,"
says Enoch, in the name of God, " shall the kings of
the earth and the mighty men who have gained the
world by their achievements be in subjection to
those whom I have chosen. I will cast them like
hay into the fire, and like lead into the water. Then
shall they burn in the presence of the righteous,"
"in a deep place, full of fire, flaming, and full of
pillars of fire." I have gathered together these
features of the prophecy into something like a con
nected picture, from different parts of the Book, and
it is only right to add that they are interspersed in
places, with far more spiritual views of the kingdom of
God, as when Enoch declares that " God has preserved
the lot of the righteous," not simply because they are
of the chosen people, whose sinners indeed shaU share
the punishment of God's enemies, but " because they
have hated and rejected the world of iniquity, and-
have detested all its works and ways."
A similar picture of the future may be gathered
from the so-called Psalter of Solomon, which was
probably written in the time of Pompey, more than
fifty years B.C. Gleams of high spiritual feehng shine
forth on the pages of this volume, as when the author
declares that God will smite the earth, not with the

iv THE KINGDOM 95
sword, " but with the word of His mouth," and that
" He will lead all His people in holiness." Still it
contains that familiar picture of the exaltation of
Israel, which did so much to foster Jewish pride and
embitter Jewish exclusiveness. For the psalmist
hopes " that God will raise up a prince of David to
rule over Israel, to crush their enemies and to cleanse
Jerusalem from the heathen. He wiU gather a holy
people, He wUl divide them in the land according to
their tribes, and no stranger shall dwell among them.
The heathen nations wiU serve Him, and will come
to Jerusalem to bring the wearied children of Israel
as gifts, and to see the glory of the Lord."
The " Assumption of Moses " is another of these
pseudepigraphic writings, which purports to contain
an address of Moses to Joshua upon the future
fortunes of the people of Israel, concluding with an
account of the ascent of the great prophet. It was
probably written in the first decade after the death of
Herod the Great. This is the book from which,
according to Origen, the quotation in the Epistle of
Jude is taken, concerning the conflict of the Arch
angel Michael and Satan over the body of Moses.
Unfortunately we only possess a fragment of the
original work, and the part missing is the end, where,
of course, the passage quoted by St. Jude would
naturaUy be found. As, however, the existing frag
ment contains the prophecy of Moses about the last
days, we know that, in its measure, this book con
tributed to foster that expectation of a great Jewish

96 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
empire which was so mighty a popular force in the
days of our Lord. Herod the Great is referred to in
it as an "insolent monarch, not belonging to the
family of the' priests," who shall reign for thirty-four
years. After him shall come a great Eoman com
mander, referred to as " a powerful monarch of the
west, who will conquer God's people, and take them
captive, and destroy a part of their temple with fire,
while some of them he will crucify around their city;"
aU which things QuintUius Varus did, doubtless in the
days of the writer. " After this," he says, " wiU come
the end of the times." " And then will God's kingdom
appear throughout the whole creation. Then wUl the
DevU have an end, and sorrow will disappear along
with him. For the Heavenly One will rise up from
His throne. And the earth will tremble, the sun
will withhold its light, and the horns of the moon
will be broken. For God the Most High will appear,
and He wiU punish the GentUes. Then wUt thou be
happy, 0 Israel, and God wiU exalt thee."
Another singular product of the times before
Christ was the Jewish book of the so-caUed Sibyl-
lines, in which the prophecies about the Messianic
Kingdom are put into the mouth of the heathen Sibyl.
This book has been much interpolated by Christians
and others. The oldest portion of it, however, is
assigned with much probability to the middle of the
second century B.C., and its Messianic predictions
are summarised by Schiirer as foUows : " At the
appearance of Messiah the kings of the heathen

iv THE KINGDOM 97
assemble for an attack upon God and the Holy
Lamb. But God will speak to them with a mighty
voice, and they will all perish by the hand of the
Immortal. The heathen nations will perish by war,
sword, and fire, because they lifted up their spears
against the Temple. Then will the children of God
live in peace and quietness, because the hand of the
Holy One protects them. And the heathen nations,
seeing this, wiU be encouraged to bless and praise
God, to send gifts to His Temple, and to accept His
law. Then wiU God set up an eternal Kingdom
over all men. Men wiU bring offerings to the
Temple of God from all parts of the earth, and God
will dwell upon Zion, and universal peace will prevail
upon earth."
The last prophetic book which it wiU be necessary
for me to notice, in order to complete the Messianic
picture which glowed before the eyes of the Jewish
multitude in the days of our Lord, is the Book of
Jubilees, a free version of the Book of Genesis, with
Haggadistic additions, which was probably composed
before the destruction of Jerusalem, and so may well
represent the views of the Galilean Zealots. In this
book the seed of Jacob was promised possession of
the whole earth ; they would " rule over all nations
according to their pleasure, and after that draw the
whole earth unto themselves and inherit it for ever."
At the time of the redemption we are told that " the
days will begin to lengthen, and the children of men
will grow older from generation to generation, until
H

98 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS rv
the duration of their life will be 1000 years. And
there wUl be no more an old man or one weary of
hfe among them ; but they will all be as children and
youths, and will complete their days in peace and
joy, and live as though there were no Satan or any
other destroyer." To complete this golden dream
of the new world, Philo, our Lord's contemporary,
tells us that in the Messianic kingdom " lions, bears,
panthers, Indian elephants, and tigers, wUl graduaUy
lay aside their wildness, and regard mankind as
their teachers ; scorpions and serpents will lose their
poison, while even crocodiles and hippopotami will, in
their reverence for holiness, refuse to meddle with
the virtuous."
From the sketch which I have here given you of
the wUd and extravagant pictures of that quasi-
sacred Uterature which Was current during the first
century, I have carefully excluded everything which
is probably of a later date than the great Jewish
rebellion. It is not, therefore, unreasonable to con
clude that we have now before us the source of
most of those fanatical hopes which drove the Jews
into revolt, and which found expression even in the
circle of the Apostles. If we were asked what
relation these apocryphal predictions bear to the
prophecies of the canonical books, we should be
prepared, I think, to answer that they expand, in a
fanciful manner, aU the merely external and sym
bolical features of those prophecies, and that in so
doing they literalise, secularise, and locaUse them,

iv THE KINGDOM 99
turning poetry into prose and figures into facts, thus
completely missing and misrepresenting their true
meaning. They are related to the prophecies, very
much as the traditions of the elders are to the law,
overlaying the sacred original with a mass of carnal
and puerUe conceits, which obscure its meaning and
pervert its intention. In some respects, however,
they are undoubtedly superior -to the dry and
mechanical precepts with which I have compared
them. They breathe a deeper spirit of piety, they
bid men to look for redemption, not from the merit
of a multitude of petty acts of self-righteousness,
but from the aid of a Heaven-sent Deliverer, and for
the drudgery of a burdensome present they sub
stitute the bright hopes of a better future.
We can scarcely be astonished to find that their
influence upon the mass of an excitable people was
profound and widespread. It was, in fact, deepened
by the spirit of the times. When the Eoman yoke
pressed more heavily, or when tyrannical emperors
and procurators wantonly outraged some cherished
national habit or conviction, the smouldering dis
content of the people, especially in martial Galilee,
broke out into open revolt, or into acts of fierce and
sanguinary reprisals. The Eomans might be mighty
and numerous, but so had been those Syrian hosts in
the days of the Maccabees, which had been scattered
like sheep by the sword of their fathers. Who were
these GentUe dogs that they should dare to oppress
God's chosen people, and even to profane the sacred

100 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
courts of His sanctuary ? Were they not doomed ?
Were they not to perish in the great fight of Arma
geddon ? Had not the prophets declared that
Messiah was at hand, that He should come to His
people on the clouds of heaven, and lead them to
battle, to slaughter, and to victory ? So reasoned
and so spake many a leader like Judas the Gaulonite.
So reasoned and so fought many a gaUant swordsman
of Galilee, as full of valour as of fanaticism, and
more firmly believing the promises of the Book of
Enoch than ever his fathers had believed those of an
Isaiah, a Joel, or a Haggai. Eevolts, it is true, were
suppressed again and again, and the leaders of them
put to death with unheard-of barbarities, but nothing
could crush out the spirit of revolt. It lived on — it
burnt on — a hot, dark, indignant discontent, nour
ishing itself on the Messianic hope, and ready at
any moment to burst into a blaze at the touch of
enthusiastic fanaticism. The spirit of this militant
expectation spread to the members of aU classes in
the community, and took as many forms as there
were differences of education and character. As
Dean Milman has said, " Each region, each rank, each
sect, the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Palestinian,
the Samaritan, the Pharisee, the Lawyer, the Zealot,
arrayed the Messiah in those attributes which suited
his own temperament. To different men the Messiah
was man or angel, conqueror or reformer, Metatron,
or Word of God ; a more victorious Joshua, a more
magnificent Herod, a wider-ruhng Caesar, a wiser

iv THE KINGDOM 101
Moses, or a holier Abraham." To the Galilean,
however, He was above aU things the great military
leader, who, supporting the valour of God's chosen
by the hghtnings of His own supernatural power,
should tread under foot the insolence of Gentile
oppressors, and lay the foundation of His own
everlasting kingdom on the ruins of a vanquished
world. When Jesus began His peaceful ministry in
Galilee, it was amongst a people whose hearts
throbbed with such hopes as these, and who expected
Messiah to come " from Edom, with dyed garments
from Bozrah, treading the wine-press in His wrath."
How then, let us ask, did the Lord deal with this
expectation ? What influence did it exert upon His
presentation of the Kingdom of God? There can
be little need to summarise at length the teaching of
our Lord upon the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole
Gospel is full of it, and it is a teaching with which
you are all famUiar. It was the first announcement
made equaUy by the disciples of Jesus and those of
John that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. So
distinguishing a characteristic, indeed, is that of the
new teaching, that the Gospel itself is called, more
than once, " the Gospel of the Kingdom." But while
seizing thus upon a popular conception as the basis
of His teaching, our Lord, we know, entirely trans
forms that conception. We have seen what it was
in the minds of the Jewish people. It was a con
ception arrived at by literalising and secularising

102 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
the symbolical representations of the prophets. Our
Lord goes back for the form of His teaching to the
same canonical Scriptures, but He completely re
verses the proceedings of the Scribes and contem
porary Eschatologists. He explains and spiritualises
the prophetic symbolism. The Kingdom of God is
indeed to be set up on earth ; it is to be a state into
which men may be admitted here and now; into
which the rich and wise and great find it hard to
make entrance, but which opens its doors wide to the
meek and merciful, the pure in heart, and poor in
spirit. It is no earthly monarchy, with its pomp and
display, its armies and earthly conquests. Men
shall not say of it, lo ! here, or, lo ! there, for " the
Kingdom of God is within you." It consists, not in
meat and drink, not in an elaborate system of fast
ing, tithing, sacrifices, and purifications, but, as says
St. Paul, " in righteousness and peace and joy in the
Holy Ghost." It is, in point of fact, a new spiritual
constitution of humanity. This is why its advance
should be, like that of leaven, in secret, beneath the
surface of social customs and political movements.
This is why men must dig for it as for hid
treasure ; why they must search for it as for pre -
cious pearls. This also determines the condition of
its future increase ; demanding that the soU shall be
favourable to the seed, that there shall be no sinful
hardness, no sensuous shaUowness, no worldly care in
those who would enter it. Considered as to its cause
it begins in a new and deeper perception of our

iv THE KINGDOM 103
relation to God and man, in the thought, the belief,
the conviction that God is our Father, and that all
His human chUdren are our brethren. Considered.
in its effects, it will have come when aU men do the
wUl of the Father on earth as it is done in heaven.
But if God be our Father, it foUows, of course, that
it is only with a chUdlike heart that we can enter
into blessed communion with Him. Therefore the
Lord warns us, " Except ye turn [from your earthly
self-reliance and self-seeking] and become as little
chUdren, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of
heaven." Again, if men be our brethren, that fact
already implies that the law of the kingdom is the
law of service. And hence the glorious rule, " Who
soever wUl be great among you, let him be your
minister; and whosoever will be chief among you,
let him be your servant ; even as the Son of Man
came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
to give His life a ransom for many."
" The Bharisees," as Hausrath says, " had turned
the ancient prophetic promise into a political pro
gramme, which was to be carried out by battles won
against the Eomans and zealous agitation against
the aristocracy. Their idea of the kingdom needed
first of aU a revolution in the sense of the Maccabean
wars of freedom, and then a miracle from God on
high in addition." Jesus, on the other hand; founded
it, " on the message never heard before, that God is
the Father of aU men, that He loved them from the
beginning, not on account of their performances, but

104 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
out of His own Fatherly goodness and mercy ; that
an eternal compassion is poured upon the world;
that an eternal love watches over the turmoU of
human life, as much as over the stillness of the lonely
hillside." This . love flows forth spontaneously,
eternally, and to aU creatures. The sins of men
cannot stop it. It " maketh its sun to rise on the
evil and the good, and sendeth its rain on the just
and the unjust." No insignificance of being can be
too small for its care. It paints the lily, it feeds the
raven, it determines the fall of a sparrow, and num
bers the very hairs of its children. This deep and
tender, this wide and sublime conception of God's
nature and work, none had entertained before the
Lord Jesus. It was the secret which He revealed to
the sons of men. " The thought, which from blunt
ing custom, passes by to-day like a dull sound on the
ear of the, multitude, was for that world a word of
creative power."
"And with the new heaven," says Hausrath,
" there came a new earth. If the Kingdom of God
be a fihal relation to God, then is it for men a king
dom of brotherliness. They are brothers because they
have one Father ; and among them it is not law and
statute which prevail, but the commandment of love :
of a love which does more than is demanded. It
yields the coat as well as the cloak, it goes two miles
with him who requires one, it forgives unto seventy
times seven, and accuses no one but itself. And this
love prevails, not only among the members of the

rv THE KINGDOM 1.05
covenant, or the rank, or the party. The man is to
be loved because he is a man, because he is a
brother. The ancient world paid little heed to the
thought that the poor, the lowly, the insignificant,
had also hearts to feel pain and pleasure ; that they
also had been born for freedom, love, and happiness."
But the deep glance of Jesus pierces beneath all the
poor coverings of rank, education, and social polish,
to that which is purely human, and promises equally
to king and peasant, to Brahmin and Pariah, to
learned and stupid, the regeneration, the everlasting
blessedness of the new life of love.
You have seen what the thought of the kingdom
was among our Lord's contemporaries. Whence,
then, hath this man this wisdom? Where did He
gain His wonderful insight, His unearthly power of
disentangling the kernel from the husk, the pure
heavenly from its obscuring earthly surroundings?
Hausrath may in many respects be called a rational
ist, and therefore you shall hear his answer to that
question. "The new that is coming into existence
can no longer be derived in any way from existing
conditions, but springs immediately from the personal
spiritual hfe of Jesus. How Jesus came to recognise
God as the Father is a question which men have al
ready attempted to answer on purely contemporary
historical grounds. From contemplating the errors
into which Judaism feU when seeking to reconcile
her angry God, say some. But then, others also had
seen these aberrations, and yet had not cried ' Abba,

106 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
Father.' Was it, then, from contemplating the glory
which God had poured over the world? But the
lilies of GalUee had bloomed for others also, and the
heavens were equally blue for Pharisee and Sadducee.
Consequently, aU such attempts at derivation are
futile. It is the personality which is the source
whence the historical surroundings immediately
spring, and where the interpretation of the operating
conditions ends." But if these new, vast, creative
ideas originated in the personality of Jesus, what
shall we say of the nature of that personality ?
" This," answers Hausrath, " we can say, this strength
of the filial consciousness could have been developed
only in a mind which was pure, blameless, and
sinless in the eyes of Deity. The sinful man, the
stained — or even the disturbed — conscience must
always see God opposed to himself — as wrathful and
avenging, but the revelation that God is the Father
of men could only arise in a mind in which the
image of God was reflected undisturbed, because the
mirror was without blemish." But U Jesus were
absolutely sinless, with a range of vision so im
perially wide, and with a spiritual discrimination so
sure that with a touch it could infaUibly separate
the religiously true from the false, the morally right
from the wrong, how is that He alone, of mortal men
exhibited these qualities? If His soul alone is
normal, while the souls of all- His brethren are
abnormal, must not this startling difference of
quality and achievement depend on some equally

iv THE KINGDOM 107
startling difference of nature ? Let us inquire a
little further.
We see, as we should expect, that for some time
Jesus practised a certain reticence as to His personal
claims. He did not at once caU Himself the Son
of David, He did not claim to be Messiah; yea,
when in an exalted moment of far-seeing faith, St.
Peter proclaimed Him to be the Anointed of God, He
bade the disciples " to tell no man that He was the
Christ." This reserve was necessitated, not so much
by the prospect of danger as by the risk of misunder
standing. In the mind of the multitude, the claim
to be Messiah would have meant a claim to the
throne of David, a caU to revolution, a summons to
the impatient swordsmen of Galilee. And thus,
although Jesus concealed nothing of the nature of
His kingdom, He hesitated at first to call Himself
the promised King. In the nature of things, how
ever, this prudent silence must some day be broken.
Jesus knew what His countrymen expected and
desired. At a critical period of His life, when He
had fed the hero-worshipping people in the wilder
ness, they tried to take Him by force and make Him
a king, and the effect of His resistance, of His strange
attempt to put the bread of heaven above the manna
of the wilderness, to put the bread of the soul above
the food of the body, was to provoke a great and
almost universal defection. The Zealots of Galilee,
again, held in especial detestation those apostate
Israelites, who, under the name of publicans, coUected

108 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
taxes for the foreign oppressor, and when Jesus, in
accordance with His doctrine of universal brother
hood, not only received such men, but even ate with
them, He inflicted a terrible shock on the patriotic
feelings of His countrymen. Once again, in ac
cordance with His lofty spiritual conception of the
nature of His Father, He had declared that the
worship of the future must be independent of local
distinctions ; that God, because He was a spirit,
must be worshipped, neither on Gerizim, nor at
Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth. Nay, He had
even let fall expressions which seemed to imply the
destruction of the Temple, that pride of the Jew's
heart, and centre of his glowing visions of the future.
This was flat blasphemy. It outraged every deepest
feeling of the patriot, and was one of the principal
charges, by means of which the chief Priests excited
against Him, at last, the wrath and hostility of the
people. Thus, inevitably, as time went on, the develop
ment of our Lord's teaching stirred up suspicion and
distrust, and led finally to estrangement, enmity, and
the murderous fury of the end. From the first He
felt and predicted that it would be so. Unless the
people could be induced to abandon their dearest
hopes, to forsake their most trusted teachers, and to
disbelieve their most popular prophets, sooner or
later they must be driven into bitter hostility. The
sure prevision of this had clearly fiUed our Lord's
mind at the beginning of His ministry, and had

iv THE KINGDOM 109
formed the occasion of His temptation. Loving His
people intensely, and desiring above all things the
salvation of the lost sheep of the house of Israel, our
Lord yet saw that the gospel which He was com
missioned to proclaim would most surely offend and
alienate them. They desired a sign from heaven —
a Son of God flashing down upon them into the
crowded temple courts upon a cloud of glory; a
conquering hero, who should lead their hosts to
battle against the legions of Eome and the horsemen
of Parthia. Could He not become something like
what they desired ? Could He not make some con
cession to their prejudices ? Could He not consent,
for their sakes, to obscure somewhat the brightness
of His ideal, to abate somewhat from the keen
spirituahty of His demands ? For love's sake, could
He not be a little less loving? For Israel's sake,
could He not consent to do the wide world some
wrong? Such, I believe, was the nature of the
mystic conflict and controversy in the wilderness —
a conflict repeated again and again at moments of
spiritual tension, and culminating at last in the
agony of Gethsemane.
Not without just cause has it been said by Dr.
Edersheim — The ideas of the Jews about the King
dom "are presented in the evangelic record as the
suggestions of Satan, as the temptation of Christ.
The Messiah of Judaism is the Anti -Christ of the
Gospels." Does this statement sound somewhat
harsh to any one ? It is, remember, no harsher than

110 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
the words which Christ addressed to His chief
Apostle, when that Apostle sought to deprecate the
inevitable consequence of persisting in the truth.
"Get thee behind me, Satan," cried the suffering
Saviour, " thou art a stumbling-block to me, for thou
mindest not the things of God, but the things of
men." The nature of our Lord's terrible agony at Geth
semane has been obscured by aU kinds of arbitrary
and irrelevant hyotheses. Some have suggested
that He dreaded the tortures of His approaching
death ; others that He came then, in some mystical
way, under the burden of the universal guilt. Such
suggestions appear to me, I confess, to be nothing
better than the after-thoughts of dogmatic theology,
arising in no way either from the course of our
Lord's history or the general aim of His teaching and
activity. Plainly that agony arose from the struggles of a
divided heart. The Father had sent Him to pro
claim the coming of the heavenly kingdom, to offer
its grace and peace and freedom to aU mankind, to
realise its holiness in His own spotless life, and to
raise all other men to that same holiness by the gift
of His spirit, the communion of His body and blood.
As an essential means to that end, it was necessary
that He should suffer nothing to dim the brightness,
or taint the purity of His Gospel, but that He
should reject and denounce everything which was
contrary to the will of His Father, everything which

iv THE KINGDOM 111
might hinder the unrestricted outflow of the Divine
love to its objects. A harder and sterner task it is
impossible to conceive.
Our Lord's heart was full of love and tenderness
towards His people. " 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem,"
He cried once, amidst blinding tears, "how often
would I have gathered thy children together, as
a hen gathereth her chickens beneath her wings,"
when the dark shadow of the falcon flashes by, " and
ye would not." He saw the Eoman eagle poising
for His blow. He knew that the heedless chickens
might have been safe under the wings of His love,
and it broke His heart to leave them to the talons of
the destroyer. But what was the Lord to do ? He
could not degrade them by robbing them of the gift
of moral freedom. Might He then be unfaithful to
His Father by concealing the truth ? Might He be
cruel to the world by abridging its blessedness ?
But then how could He become God's perfect Son —
the world's perfect Saviour? It was a conflict of
love against love — of that vaster love which is divine
against the human love, which is intense in propor
tion to the nearness of its objects. Oh, what shall be
the issue ? Could the mother love the whole human
family more dearly than her own child ? Could the
patriot love the whole world so well as to provoke the
enmity of his fatherland ? And can Christ love so
well the image of His Father in the universal human
heart as to brave the hatred, the scorn, the murderous
frenzy of His own Israel ? It is not natural, it is

112 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
scarcely human, it is a thing so hard to do even for
Him, that it wrings from Him the bitter cry, " If it
be possible, let this cup pass from me." But, ah !
in spite of all, this pure heart of Christ is so vast in
its capacity, that it can find way even for the wide
sweep of those tides of love which come from the
eternal sea. And so, when the hour has passed,
when the cup of self-sacrifice has been drained to the
dregs, when the partial love of Israel has lost itself
in the love which is God, He goes forth with the
calm of a saint, with the steadfast fearless patience of
an angel, to His last conflict and victory. Think of
it, brethren, " when the most evident promises of
Scripture remained unfulfiUed ; when aU the oaths of
men proved false to Him ; when the disciple of Eock
denied Him ; when, for one hour, there was no one,
not even one, who believed in Him; when even
God seemed to have forsaken Him ; " even then He
never wavered, pressing to His pale lip the bitter
cup of self-renunciation which He had taken, and
winning the redemption of man against all odds, with
a truth which was mightier than hate, and a love
which was stronger than death.
A great German phUosopher has found (truly
found, as I believe) the reahty which lies behind
this visible universe, in -will. Misled (as I also
believe) by deceptive appearances, he has called that
Divine Eeahty the will to live— the will to come
into concrete being by unscrupulously trampling
under foot all which resists it. That will to live is

iv THE KINGDOM 113
what our Master calls £?atan; reserving for the
Divine Eeality, the name of Father — tenderest
symbol of the will to love. But now if God Himself
be the will to love, to love widely all which He has
created, to love unchangeably even the thankless
and evil, where will you find a more complete
realisation of that will to love, than in Him who so
loved aU men that He could brave the hate of His
own, and so loved His own, even in their hatred,
that He prayed with His last breath, " Father, forgive
them, they know not what they do " ?
If you ask me to describe my dearest Master, I
know no words which wUl more exactly do it than
these : He was the Incarnation of the will to love.
If then " the will to love " be the best definition of
God, must not Jesus be, what the Church has always
known Him to be, " the Incarnation of God " ? Here
then, at last, is the answer to the question, " Whence
hath this Man this wisdom, this power, this super-
abounding life ? " He has it from those infinite
depths of the Deity in which He dweUs, in the
communion of the Father.

Ill— THE UNSEEN WOELD
I have endeavoured to show you that in the
substance of His teaching on the law and the king
dom, our Lord owed nothing, or next to nothing, to
His surroundings ; that, on the contrary, He acted in
I

114 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
f
direct antagonism to both the authorised teaching
and the popular expectations of His day. When He
spoke of our relation to God and man and Himself
in this world, He spoke out of the fulness of His
own intuition. He was original in this part of His
teaching, not only in the substance, but for the most
part also in the very form of His doctrine. It is
otherwise, however, with respect to that other part
of our Lord's teaching which relates to the unseen
world. In this, it must be admitted that He was
largely indebted for the forms in which He clothed
His thought to the religious symbolism which was
in use among His fellow-countrymen ; and thus, at
times, it becomes exceedingly difficult to determine
how far He adopted contemporary modes of thought
of His own, and how far He simply employed them
as a vehicle of instruction, which would be intelligible
to those who heard Him. Very humbly, then, and
with a deep sense of my own grave responsibility,
I must now address . myself to this task, entreating
you to take what I say on this mysterious subject,
not as authoritative teaching on the faith, but rather
as brotherly help and suggestion for the guidance of
your own thoughts. Before, however, proceeding to
the direct consideration of our Lord's teaching on the
unseen world, it may be of service to us to recall to
our minds the manner in which He employed cur
rent religious conceptions in His treatment of less
mysterious themes.
I endeavoured to show you, in my last lecture,

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 115
how our Lord treated the current idea of the King
dom of God. At bottom, that idea was a true one.
It based itself on the great promise to David, and it
got many of its concrete determinations from the
visions of- later prophets. - Instead, however, of follow
ing the true line of spiritual development, it turned
aside — nay, even turned back — towards what was
frivolous, secular, and selfish. In this state of things
we saw that our Lord boldly cast off aU the parasit
ical growths of error and evil, and extricating the
central idea, which they threatened to strangle, He
set it in its pure spiritual beauty before the eyes of
the world. In a word, He took the most general
form of the current ideal — that it was a Kingdom of
God and of Heaven — and then emptying it of false
and misleading contents, refilled it from the inex
haustible resources of His own spiritual intuition.
We can discern, again, the same method of
procedure in His treatment of the popular behef in
the near advent of the Messiah. No chapter of the
New Testament has presented greater difficulties to
the expositor than that 24th chapter of St. Matthew,
in which our Saviour predicts His speedy coming.
He wiU come, He says, to execute the judgments
threatened in that chapter before the existing gene
ration shaU have passed away. It is not difficult to
see that very much of what is here predicted was
fulfilled within the lifetime of men then present, in
the Jewish rebellion and its terrible catastrophe.
But there are certain expressions of this prophecy

116 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
which seem to be of a scope so large, and of an
import so tremendous, that nothing but a great
cosmical calamity could adequately correspond to
them. " Immediately," says our Saviour, " after the
tribulation of those days shaU the sun be darkened,
and the moon shaU not give her light, and the stars
shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens
shall be shaken : . . . 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." Now, say those who find diffi
culties here, when have these tremendous cosmical
phenomena been displayed, and when have the
inhabitants of the earth seen the Son of man coming
on the clouds of heaven ? Surely these were not
experiences of the men of that generation! Such
difficulties are the offspring of our prosaic Western
minds, and of our neglect of the study of prophecy.
If we turn to the 13th chapter of the prophecy of
Isaiah, we shall find a prediction of the ruin of
Babylon, in which occur these words : " The stars of
heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give
their light, the sun shaU be darkened in his going
forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to
shine. ... I wiU make the heavens to tremble, and
the earth shaU be shaken out of her place." These
things, if UteraUy accomplished, would, of course,
imply the wreck of the whole material creation ; and
yet they are employed as features of a vision which
is designed to set forth nothing more than the

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 117
destruction of Babylon by the Medes. Again, in
the 34th chapter of the same prophecy, in denounc
ing judgments against the enemies of Israel, and
especially against Edom, Isaiah uses the following
words : " The host of heaven shaU be dissolved, and
the heavens shaU be rolled together like a scroll, and
all their host shall fade away as the leaf fadeth from
off the vine, and as a fading leaf from the fig tree."
Here is precisely the same imagery as that adopted
in our Lord's prophecy, and yet, although employed
to describe nothing more than a local judgment, to
an Oriental mind it would offer no difficulty what
ever. Instinctively he would perceive that the lights
of the political firmament were represented by the
greater lights of heaven, while the orderly institutions
of a commonwealth were compared to the solid earth
beneath. The shaking of that earth and the quench
ing of those lights meant national ruin, precisely such
a ruin as befel to the Jewish state, capital and temple,
in the days of Titus.
But where, you may ask, are we to discover the
fulfilment of the prediction that the enemies of the
Christ should see Him coming on the clouds of
heaven? Our Lord Himself informs us. When
He stood before the Sanhedrim, and was asked by
the High Priest whether He was the Christ, the
Son of God, He answered thus, "Henceforth" — not
hereafter as in the old version, but " henceforth" from
this time and onwards, " ye shall see the Son of man
sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in

118 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
the clouds of heaven." That word " henceforth " is
our Lord's comment on the much misunderstood
words of Daniel, and it shows clearly what he meant
them to convey, as applied to Himself — that His
enemies should see Him reigning in the supreme
seat of divine dominion, and coming in the sight of
all men, through all the ages, on the glory clouds of
His spiritual victories.
I have considered this difficulty at some length,
because it sets before us so clearly what it is essential
that we should recognise — the method in which our
Saviour uses the forms of prophetic representation.
He takes them as the clothing of His new creative
thought, because they have been consecrated by the
holiest associations of the past, and are the familiar
drapery of the common religious thought of His
contemporaries. In dealing, then, with the popular ideas of His
own time as to the unseen world, we may expect
that our Lord will employ the same method. In
this department, also, of His didactic work, He will
take the current forms of thought, as the only vehicle
of spiritual teaching, which is at once famihar to
Himself and intelligible to His hearers ; but also we
may expect that He wiU fill those forms, as in the
other instances to which I have referred, with purer
and more richly spiritual contents. Let us take
these conclusions with us, then, in considering His
teaching as to our relation to the unseen world,
first in the present, and secondly in the future.

iv • THE UNSEEN WORLD 119
First, then, let us ask what is our Lord's teaching
as to our relation with the unseen world in the
present, and especially how far was that teaching
determined by the ideas of His contemporaries. Of
His views respecting our relation to God and to our
fellow-men I have spoken already. On those sub
jects, therefore, nothing more need be said. But it
is natural to ask, do our connections with God and
man exhaust our relations to the unseen world, even
in the present Ufe ? In all God's universe are there
no other spiritual beings but our Creator and our
selves ? Are we the only creatures made in the
image of our Father's thought and freedom ? Can
this wonderful cosmos be so void and poor on its
spiritual side, when it is so opulent of life and beauty
on its physical side ? A materialist might perhaps
believe this, but surely no one else. A materialist,
I said ; but how many thorough -going materialists
are now left among " the masters of them that know" ?
So long as men suspected that they could derive 'sen
sation from mere physiological processes, they might
have hoped, perhaps (though even then the hope
would have been desperate) to build up a world of
thought and moral feeling on the revelations of
physiology. But now, when the greatest biologists
and philosophers of our own time have acknowledged
that it is impossible to conceive of the simplest sen
sation as a mere continuation of molecular vibrations;
when, in order to explain our sensations of light, heat,
sound, and the like, they are obliged to add to the

120 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
physical process an unknown capacity within us of
changing that process into a sensation, the whole
structure of materialistic thought is shattered at the
base. Common sensualists may continue to call
themselves materialists because they wish to be so,
and because they cannot, or do not think ; but for
men who can think, and who know aU that is to be
known, I venture to say that materialism is becoming
a wellnigh impossible creed.
But if so — if there be, indeed, an unseen spiritual
world behind this visible material one — if an Al
mighty Spirit, who wills, is the eternal reaUty behind
aU phenomena, and if we are spirits made in the
image of that reality — then it is all but impossible
to beUeve that, in the whole of God's fair universe,
there are no other creatures who share with us this
high prerogative."' But if so — if we must believe that
the real eternal world is rich with free intelligences
— then surely we must stand in some kind of -rela
tion to such intelligences, as we do to God and the
spirits of men. What then is that relation? Of
ourselves we can give no certain answer to that
question. But surely one who, like our Lord, lived
in continual open communion with the Father of
Spirits, may know more than we do. If among non-
human spirits there be some who are good, and
some who are evU, some who submit their wills
to God's order for them, and some who stand off
from that order in a vicious self-determination,
would it not seem strange to us, if one of such keen

IV THE UNSEEN WORLD 121
spiritual insight as Jesus of Nazareth should be un
conscious of that fact? Eemember, again, that He
could not avoid the consideration of this question ;
that the men of his own day had very definite beUefs
upon it; and that in His office of Eedeemer and
Healer He was necessarily brought into contact
with those who beheved themselves to be under the
control of evil spirits. Something, then, He must say
— something He must do in reference to such beliefs.
Let us then inquire, first, what was the common
belief of the Jews of our Lord's time upon the
possibility of what is known as demoniacal posses
sion. This was not a behef of Old Testament times.
With the exception of the Book of Job, which lies
outside the course of the covenant history, and of
two of the canonical books which are of later date
than the captivity, no part of the Old Testament
contains any express reference even to Satan, the
great adversary ; and to the control of the human
wiU by subordinate agents of the kingdom of dark
ness there is no reference anywhere. Whatever,
then, the belief of our Lord's time might be on this
subject, it was a modern belief, derived largely,
there is good reason for thinking, from the acquaint
ance of the Jews of the captivity with the Persian
system of dualism. A belief in the existence of
malevolent spirits, who delight in injuring men,
appears in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, where we
are told of a wicked spirit, or devil, which, loving
a Hebrew maid, had slain seven men to whom she

122 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
had been given in marriage. The Book of Enoch,
too, ascribes to the influence of evU spirits such
accidents as " the stroke of the embryo in the womb,
the stroke of the soul, the bite of the serpent, and
the stroke that happens at midday." Josephus
again, expanding a hint of the sacred history, in
forms us that King Saul had been tormented by evil
spirits, which desired to suffocate and choke him.
These are but incidental notices of a deeply-rooted
and widespread belief, which prevailed, especially in
Galilee, in the days of our Lord, that malevolent
spirits were the authors of many of the evils from
which men suffered ; and that in certain cases they
might gain so complete a control over a human
being as to dominate his wiU and direct his actions.
This last, indeed, would seem to have been the
special symptom by which, in the time of our Lord,
people distinguished possession from mere disease.
If a man were simply dumb or epileptic the Gospels
show that he was deemed to be diseased ; but if, in
addition to the ordinary symptoms of such maladies,
he exhibited a kind of double consciousness, some
times speaking in his own name and sometimes in
that of a daemon — thus acting occasionally as if his
will had escaped from his own control, and was
under foreign direction, then without doubt he was
pronounced to be possessed. In his case there was
added, it was thought, to disorder and distemper of
the body, a strange breaking up and overthrow of
the balance and harmony of the mind,

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 123
We should clearly be mistaken if we pronounced
the demoniacs of the Gospels to be necessarily
amongst the worst of men — for how, then, could
we explain the fact that it is said of one of the
demoniacs that he had been such "of a child"?
The demonised, on the contrary, are represented to
us not as the most guUty, but as the most un
happy, of our race. As Archbishop Trench has
said, " We should not speak of Iago as ' daimonizo-
menos/ however all the deadliest malignity of hell
was concentrated in him. Much more nearly we
should find analogies to this state in some moments
of the life of Hamlet." The symptoms seem always
to point to some diseased or weakened condition of
the nervous system, laying the patient open to the
oppressive influence of any foreign wiU that might
seek to bring him into bondage.
Whatever, then, weakened the nervous system —
whether it were lavish sensual sin, or the inheritance
of the enfeebled nature of sinful parents, or such ex
cessive mental toU or excitement as overstrained and
overtasked the nervous centres — any of these things
would predispose a man to what was then called
demoniacal possession. And certainly if this be so,
then the first century was a period when such pheno
mena might be expected to abound; for an age of
more abandoned Ucentiousness the world has never
seen, whether we have regard to the Eoman Empire
as a whole, or to that particular province of it in
which our Saviour lived. Of the inhabitants of this

124 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
latter Josephus declares that "no generation ever
existed more prolific in crime," and that "if the
Eomans had deferred the punishment of these
wretches, either the earth would have opened and
swaUowed them up, or they would have shared the
thunderbolts of the land of Sodom." This judgment
of Josephus is supported by that of the author of the
Psalter of Solomon, who gives a picture of the moral
dissoluteness of those who hved at Jerusalem half a
century before the birth of Christ, quite as dark as
that drawn of it by the Jewish historian as long after
our Master's death. It should excite no astonish
ment, then, that such soul maladies as those described
in the Gospel should be less common now in
Christian lands than they were in the first century of
our era. The atmosphere of Christian truth is not
favourable to the maintenance or spread of such dis
eases, to say nothing of the fact that the energy of
Christian life is naturally antagonistic to the bodily
conditions which favour them. Nothing is, indeed,
more certain, as Hecker has shown in his Epi
demics of the Middle Ages, than that maladies
like the dancing mania, with its demoniacal delu
sions, grow up and flourish in ages which provide
the appropriate physical and spiritual soU for them,
and that then, having exhausted their natural
support, they die away, and are heard of no more.
So may it have been with the demoniacal posses
sions of our Lord's time.
But what, after all, you will ask, is the probability

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 125
that these peculiar mental diseases were due in any
degree to those demoniacal influences which the Jews
supposed to be their causes ? Apart altogether from
Scriptural evidence, I certainly am not prepared, as
readily as many who seem to think that they know
everything in earth and heaven, to give a resolutely
negative answer to that question. For whatever
doubt may hang around the conclusions of such in
quirers as have formed themselves into our psychical
societies, the greatest sceptics amongst us wiU
scarcely caU in question either the rigidly scientific
method, or the absolutely trustworthy reports of those
experiments at the Salpetriere which are described to
us by M. Binet. And what is the substantial result
of those inquiries ? It is to establish the fact (and
that beyond the reach of contradiction) that in a cer
tain hysterical condition of the nervous system, one
human being may be absolutely at the mercy of the
will of another. There is no crime which a patient
may not be compeUed to commit, even when his
moral nature, while he is in a normal condition,
revolts from it. Let the operator will it, and the
patient will forget entirely that the crime was ever
suggested him ; let the operator further wUl it, and
he will suspend the commission of the crime for hours
and days after the suggestion was made to him. To
use the words of M. Binet, " Although the subject is
quite himself, and conscious of his identity, he cannot
resist the force which impels him to perform an act
which he would, under other circumstances, condemn.

126 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
Hurried on by this irresistible force, the subject feels
none of the doubts and hesitations of a criminal who
acts spontaneously. He behaves with a tranquillity
and security which would insure the success of the
crime." But if thus under peculiar nervous condi
tions the will of one man can be utterly subjugated
by the will of another, how can it be said to be
impossible that, under certain peculiar and unknown
conditions of the nervous system, the human will
may be dominated and directed by the will of an
intelligence not human ? Of course, if you assume,
in spite of probabilities, that no such evil beings can
exist, you cut the knot of the difficulty. But at
least it must be owned that, in the light of our latest
knowledge, the probabihty of demonic possession is
not less than that of demonic existence.
Nay more, I believe that there are certain phe
nomena of madness which irresistibly suggest that
demonic possession may not be so utter an impossi
bility, even in these days, as rash sciolists would
have us believe. I have myself heard a madman in
a railway train repeating, in a low, level voice, hour
after hour, as if his tongue had passed out of his
own control, obscene blasphemies, so foul and awful
that it almost stains the soul to recall them. There
was no purpose in it, no passion in it, no shame in it,
nothing human in it. It sounded hke nothing but a
voice from the pit — the voice of one who only lived
to hate purity and to blaspheme God. It made me
feel shudderingly — though I am certainly not one

IV THE UNSEEN WORLD 127
of the most credulous of mankind — that there are
frightful abysses of evil, beneath the thin crust of
our distracted nature, into which it is a horror and
almost a madness to look.
In the light of such facts, I do not think that
even Dr. Tylor's able and learned history of the
crudities and cruelties of the belief in demoniacal
possession among savage and semi -civilised races,
compels us to believe that Satanic influence is an
impossibility. That ignorant fanatics have sur
rounded this subject with absurd and mischievous
superstitions is no more a proof that there is no
kingdom of evU, than are the same kind of supersti
tions respecting the nature and acts of their deities
a proof that there is no God. In each case the
presumption seems to me to be in the directly
contrary direction.
But now, you may say, what we want to know,
after all, is not so much the natural possibility of
demoniacal possession, as our Saviour's own view
and treatment of its supposed existence. Did He
believe in it ? and if so, how did He treat it ?
I think we must conclude, from His words and
actions, that He did believe in the existence of an
invisible kingdom of evil. The theory of accom
modation to the beliefs of His hearers (though not
without its measure of truth) does not seem to me
to offer a complete explanation of the facts. Mental
aberration is often called lunacy; and this word
certainly points back to a time when men thought

128 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
the moon to be the cause of mental disease. But if
any physician in these days professed to cure mad-.
ness by a solemn address to the moon, we should
accuse him, I think, either of folly or untruthfulness.
Now, in healing demoniacs, our Lord does directly
address, not the man, but the demon; and this
seems to me to imply that He believed in the
existence of a kingdom of darkness. It does not,
however, necessarily follow that He held the super
stitious views of His contemporaries respecting the
nature of that kingdom or the influence of its
ministers. Nay, there are certain peculiarities in
His language and action which imply that He
rejected and discountenanced aU such superstitions.
One of the ablest and most profound of modern
theologians, Dr. Martensen, Bishop of Seeland, has
in fact deduced, mainly from a consideration of our
Lord's teaching, a theory of Satanic influence very
different from that which is popularly taught. He
believes that primarily the Satan of Scripture is a
principle and not a person, a spirit and a power
which seeks to realise itself in persons, not unlike
in its nature what we call the spirit of a tribe or a
nation. His account of it irresistibly reminds one
of Schopenhauer's will to live ; the will to gain selfish
ends, without regard to the loss or suffering it may
inflict on others in gaining them. This will to live
must by its very nature come into constant conflict
with that Almighty will to love, which is God. The
devil, so defined, says Martensen, "hungers after

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 129
fulness of life, and must come for his substance, for
the material on and in which he works, to the world
of man." Quite in conformity with this definition
he holds that Satan has obtained personality in the
world both of angels and men. Amongst the angels
there is one, he believes, who, on account of his vast
capacity, and of his utter surrender of his will to the
evil principle, has become its perfect impersonation,
so that " he is called not a devU but the devil ; the evil
principle in persond." That same evU principle has
further realised itself in the unseen world, in inferior
spirits; and in the human world, in evil men. His con
clusion is "the evil principle has in itself no personality,
but attains a progressively universal personality in its
kingdom ; it has no individual personality, save only
in individual creatures, who inanespecialmanner make
themselves its organs; but among these is one creature
in whom this principle is so hypostasised, that he has
become the centre and head of the kingdom of evil."
Surely this theory illuminates for us, with welcome
hght, some of the obscurest sayings of our Divine
Master. Have we not felt it strange that He should
address' His chief apostle as Satan — and that at the
very time when He had just entitled him the
disciple of rock ? But if Satan be for our Lord the
evU spirit of worldly self-seeking, can we not see
how St. Peter had made himself the organ of that
spirit, when he sought to dissuade his master from
sacrificing Himself for the good of the world ? Then
again, in the wUderness, .what was it by which our
K

130 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
Master was tempted, but just that principle or spirit
of national self-seeking, which had embodied itself, in
the Jews of the first century. It was that spirit
which suggested that He should flash forth to the
sight of the people " on the clouds of heaven," and
again that, yielding to their eager desire, He should
lead them to battle, and win by their swords " all the
kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." This
view does not exclude the perception on our Lord's
part that the evil cosmical principle had embodied
itself in human and super-human personalities, but
it enables us to gain a deep glance into his intuition
of the evil power opposed to Him.
Again, that our Lord was free from all gross
Jewish superstitions on this subject is apparent from
the contrasts between His methods of healing and
theirs. The expulsion of a demon by burning the
heart and hver of a fish, described in the Book of
Tobit, is but a specimen of the magical means adopted
in our Lord's days for the cure of the demonised.
The Book of Enoch tells us that these spirit-maladies
were cured by the plants of the earth, and Josephus
describes a mysterious root caUed Baara, growing in
a lonely valley near Machoerus, which being brought
near to the possessed, could expel the demon. He also
tells us that he saw a demoniac cured in the presence
of Vespasian by a Jew named Eleazar, who recited cer
tain incantations of Solomon, and put to the nostrils.
of the patient a ring containing one of the magic
roots which Solomon had prescribed for such cases.

rv THE UNSEEN WORLD 131
How different from all such magical proceedings
was the method of the Lord Jesus. His whole in
fluence was exerted by His look of power and His
word of authority. He wraps' the raging distracted
soul in the calm of His own holy love, and by no
other magic than His assured ascendency over the
powers of evil, restores the poor victim to his right
mind. The figure which these accounts bring before
us is not that of the crafty pretentious enchanter,
but that of the holy Eedeemer, mighty to save ; not
that of the crazy fanatic, intoxicated by the fumes
of his own mad enthusiasm, but that of the calm,
strong, spirituaUy-minded Prophet, living consciously
in the unseen world, and wielding its powers with the
confident authority of the Son of God.
Here again, then, we see that, as in the case of the
Kingdom and of the legal traditions of the scribes,
our Lord so far adopts the thoughts and phrases of
his contemporaries as they serve to give expression
to spiritual truth, while at the same time He purges
them from every taint of error and superstition.
But now, having inquired into the relation of our
Lord's teaching to that of His contemporaries, in
respect to the present relations of man with the
unseen world, let us proceed next, as I proposed, to
make the like inquiry in respect to our future
relations to that world.
Much of the imagery and phraseology by means
of which the future punishment of the wicked was
represented in our Lord's time was a creation of the

132 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
days which foUowed the captivity. Gehenna, for
instance, with its fire and its worm — the common
designation for the future abode of the wicked — was
in the Old Testament nothing more than a geographical
expression. It meant literally the Valley of Hinnom,
and was the name of a deep gorge to the south-east
of Jerusalem, which, having been the scene of the
horrible sacrifices to Moloch, was polluted by Josiah,
and became afterwards the common laystill of the
city. Its sombre appearance, its dark associations,
and its lurid fires (kept burning to consume the offal
and rotting carcases that were thrown into it), made
it a place of horror, a fitting symbol of the future
dwelling-place of the lost. We must not forget, then,
that to the Jew the name of this valley must always
have been a strong safeguard against mistake. However
in after times he might come to literalise the symbol,
and to use it technically as we now use the name
hell, still the very words " VaUey of Hinnom " would
recall to his mind the well-known gorge under the
waUs of Jerusalem, and remind him that Gehenna
was a figure and not a fact. So would it have been
with us if our Protestant forefathers in their horror
of the fires of Smithfield had given the name of the
place where those fires were kindled to the prison of
the condemned. However familiar usage might in
time have duUed our sense of the primary meaning
of the term, yet so long as there remained in London
a Smithfield which we knew, we could never have
said that a wicked man had gone to Smithfield, with-

rv THE UNSEEN WORLD 133
out the feeling that this word of horror was no more
than the earthly image of an unknown dread.
As then we might expect from the derivation of
this significant term alone, the after history of Jewish
thought in relation to a future life exhibits clear
traces of development. At first, as Dean Plumptre
has said, " Popular conceptions were hazy and dim
and vague ; and there was no dogmatic teaching on
the subject." We find some of the earliest gleams
of the sunrise of eternal hope in certain of the later
Psalms, and these gleams again pass on into the steady
light of day in the definite statement of Daniel,
"Many that sleep in the dust of the earth shall
awake, some to iEonian life, and some to shame and
iEonian contempt." In the Apocryphal Books of the
Old Testament the sentiments of the writers vary
widely, from the sad hopelessness of the son of
Sirach, to that well-known outburst of the Wisdom of
Solomon, " The souls of the righteous are in the hand
of God, and there shaU no torment touch them . . .
for though they be punished in the sight of men, yet
is their hope full of immortality." As, however, the
Wisdom of Solomon has been supposed to be the
work of ApoUos, and certainly was not written till
half a century after the beginning of the Christian
era, we can scarcely suppose its teachings on the
future Ufe to have been one of the sources of the
opinions which prevailed in the days of our Lord.
The actual well-head of all the later streams of
eternal hope in Ealestinian Judaism is to be found in

134 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
the time of the Maccabees ; when, out of the heroic
devotion of those who were caUed on to die for their
faith, there sprang forth that joyous and confident
hope of a life beyond the grave, which finds expression
in the second Book of Maccabees. The testimony of
Josephus would be valuable if it were not for the
well-founded suspicion that his account of the opinions
of the Pharisees is coloured by his own classical
culture. Much more reliable, and more directly in
the true Une of the development of Jewish behef, is
a passage from the Eosh Hashanah, which represents,
in the opinion of that ripe Talmudical scholar, Dr.
Edersheim, the teaching of the schools of HiUel and
Shammai before the time of our Lord. Here we are
told that " Israelites " who sin with their body, and
also Gentiles, descend into Gehenna, and are judged
there for twelve months. After the twelve months
their body is consumed and their soul is burnt, and
the wind scatters them under the soles of the feet of
the righteous. But heretics and informers and
epicureans ... all such go down into Gehenna and
are judged for generations of generations. This pas
sage, according to Dr. Edersheim, represents the
teaching of the school of HiUel ; but that of Shammai,
although expressed in more general terms, would
appear to be of a slightly more charitable kind. These
Eabbis divided the dead into three classes — " (1) The
perfectly righteous, who are immediately written and
sealed to eternal life ; (2) the perfectly wicked, who
are immediately written and sealed to Gehenna : and

Iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 135
(3) an intermediate class, who go down to Gehenna,
and moan, and come up again."
In respect to the local relations of the different
parts of the unseen world, it was taught that Sheol,
or Hades, was divided into two regions : Paradise or
Abraham's Bosom, on the one hand, and Gehenna on
the other. It is expressly said in the recovered-
fragment of the Fourth Book of Esdras, " A lake of
torment shall appear, and over against it a place of
rest : and the oven of Gehenna shall be shown, and
over against it a paradise of delight." There is a
great gulf fixed between these two departments of
Hades, so that during their destined terms of residence
the inhabitants of the one cannot pass to the other.
But it was taught, again, not only that the denizens
of these two regions were within sight and hearing of
each other, but that Gehenna was only separated
from Paradise " by a space of two hand-breadths," and
that in the end " Gehenna itself should be purified
and made fit for the habitation of the blessed." It
need only be added, to complete our sketch of the
Jewish teaching on this subject, that, in conformity
with the more merciful views of the school of
Shammai, it was believed respecting those Jews who
belonged to the intermediate class of sinners, that
they might be delivered from the impending anni
hilation by the prayers of their friends.
Such, in short, were the views of our Lord's Jewish
contemporaries upon the future lot of the dead. Let
us then ask how the Lord Jesus dealt with this teach-

136 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
ing. First, He adopted the word Gehenna as the
name of the place of punishment. He uses this word
eleven times, although it only occurs twelve times in
the whole of the New Testament. We have seen
that it carried its symbolic meaning on its face ; and
therefore we must assume that its fire and worm
stand for the spiritual torments of those who have
wUfully separated themselves from God. But now,
does our Lord introduce any modification into the
natural meaning of this word ? I cannot see that He
does. In all the eleven passages but one it is simply
mentioned as the place of punishment ; and in that
one place where the Lord adds something to the
simple name, it is by the statement that " its worm
dieth not and its fire is not quenched." Strictly
interpreted, this is nothing more than the affirmation
that the punishment of Gehenna is continuous, that
it admits while it lasts, however long that may be, of
no remission or alleviation. Although, however, we
cannot say that our Saviour introduces any change
into the meaning of the term Gehenna, yet in His
discourses about the future condition of the rejected,
He certainly does much, by the introduction of other
forms of expression, to break down any technical or
conventional meaning which may have attached itself
to the common symbol. His free variation of the
symbolism would make His hearers feel that it was
no more than symbolism. In the 24th chapter of
St. Matthew's Gospel, where the conduct of the sinner
is compared to that of a disobedient slave, the punish-

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 137
ment is also represented as that which a slave would
receive. His master shaU cut him asunder, or, as the
margin has it, shall scourge him severely, casting him
into that prison where is " the weeping and gnashing
of teeth." In the parable of the talents again, in
accordance with the imagery of another parable, that
of the Foolish Virgins, spoken at the same time, the
churlish servant is represented as cast into "the
outer darkness," where, as before, is " the weeping and
gnashing of teeth." Once more, in the parable of the
wheat and tares, as the end of the tares is to be
burned, so also the punishment of the wicked is
represented under the figure of being cast into the
furnace of fire, where again is "the weeping and
gnashing of teeth." The only figure which is con
stant in these representations is "the weeping and
gnashing of teeth," made more emphatic by the correct
translation of the definite article. The great reality
represented then, is the sorrow and despair which
must arise from obdurate resistance to the wiU of
God, but the forms under which this retributive
chastisement is represented vary — now it is a scourg
ing, now a shutting out into darkness, and now again
a casting into the furnace of fire — the particular form
in each case being clearly determined by the imagery
of the context.
But if such be the nature of future punishment,
can we gather anything certainly from our Lord's
teaching as to its duration ? You saw, I reply, what
were the ideas of the Jews of our Saviour's own time

138 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
upon this matter. They believed that the worst
sinners would be "sealed to Gehenna," or, as the
school of HiUel put it, "judged for generations of
generations." This, however, would seem to be a
special case, as it is only those guilty of exceptional
sins who incur such a doom. The mass of sinners,
Jew and Gentile, are to be punished in Gehenna for
twelve months, and then, according to the school of
HiUel, annihilated, — according to that of Shammai,
after their moaning brought up again. Now what
impressions would men with these ideas in their
minds gain from such words of our Lord as these —
that the servant who knew not his Lord's will
should be beaten with few stripes, that the penalty
of Tyre and Sidon, even of Sodom and Gomorrah,
should be more tolerable than that of the cities to
which He had preached ; that there was one sin
which had not forgiveness either in this aeon or in
that to come. Our Saviour knew that His hearers
believed in release from Gehenna, in degrees of
punishment, in forgiveness after death ; when, there
fore, He separated one sin from all others for its
special heinousness, and declared that it had no
forgiveness in the coming aeon, must they not neces
sarily have inferred that all other sins might have
forgiveness then ? Would not the fewer stripes and
the more tolerable penalty sound to them Uke echoes
of their own belief, that some who had descended to
Gehenna and moaned there should rise up again?
It is not without significance, again, in this con-

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 139
nection, that the word chosen by our Lord to re
present aeonian punishment (kolasis) is a word which
literaUy means pruning, correction, chastisement —
that is to say, punishment inflicted with a view to
the improvement of him that suffers it.
Yes, you may perhaps object, but does not our
Lord definitely put an end to such hopes by threaten
ing an eternal punishment ? It may perhaps astonish
some of you to be told that our Lord only thrice
uses the word asonian in connection with condemna
tion — once in St. Mark's Gospel to qualify a sin,
once in St. Matthew's in connection with fire, and
once again in the latter Gospel to characterise the
chastisement of which I have just spoken. Indeed,
if we exclude the mysterious and highly symbolical
Book of the Eevelation,, and the aUied Epistles of
St. Jude and 2 Feter, which are so closely akin to
it in Apocalyptic character, there is absolutely only
one other passage in the rest of the New Testament
(2 Thess. i. 9) which mentions that eternal suffering
or punishment of which some sermons are so full.
StiU I acknowledge that in the one principal passage
to which I have referred (our Lord's account of the
Last Judgment) the occurrence of the phrase " aeonian
chastisement " is a matter which gravely concerns us
all. What, then, is the meaning of aeonian ? I can
not enter largely into this much- debated question,
but must content myself with setting before you
certain directive facts.
The substantive aion, from which the adjective

140 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
aionios is derived, is susceptible of several different
meanings. In its earliest classical use, as Dean
Plumptre says, " it seems to convey the thought of a
period, complete in relation to the object with which
it is connected." When a man dies he is said " to
bring his aeon to a close," a meaning which is illus
trated by the exclamation of CEschylus, " Who,
except the gods, lives all the time of his aeon without
suffering?" I believe that from this primitive
signification of the word, all its modified meanings
may readily be derived and explained. Thus, the
aeon of a doctrine will be that in which it runs
its complete course of development and prevalence ;
the seon of an economy will be that period in which
it completes the purpose for which it was established ;
the aeon of a nation will be that either of the whole,
or of some very marked period of its existence ; the
aeon of the world wiU be the complete period in
which it accomplishes the purpose of its creation;
and the aeon of God will be that in which He fulfils
the never-beginning and never-ending course of His
Infinite Life. In this sense of completeness we can
understand how the life of God is said to be aeonian.
The life of the flesh is a broken, scattered, desultory
form of being, but that life of God which is in Jesus
Christ our Lord returns upon itself into the com
pleted circle of the fulfiUed image of the Maker.
As, again, there have been many aeons in the past,
and shall be many in the future, we can understand
how the times in'which the apostles lived are called

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 141
those "upon which the ends of the 330ns have come,"
and how God can be called "the King of all the
aeons." The phrase, then, " unto the aeons," or " unto
the aeons of aeons," is by no means equivalent to our
"for ever," or "for ever and ever." We mean by
these expressions an endless time, but "unto the
aeons" means only a time indefinitely long. That
this is so seems to me to be proved by the occurrence,
in the Septuagint version of the prophecies of Daniel
and Micah, of the phrase " unto the aeons and yet
further." It would be impossible for us to say " for
ever and yet further."
If now we have got a correct idea of the meaning
of aion, it will not be so difficult to understand the
meaning of the adjective aionios. As applied to life
it means not endless Ufe, but cyclic life, either that
which runs its course in the great coming aeon, or
that which is as complete in its nature as the aeon
in duration. That aeonian is not to be considered
synonymous with endless is apparent from the use,
in the Epistles to Titus and Timothy, of the phrase
(rightly translated in the Eevised Version) " before
eternal times," or better stiU " before ceonian times."
If aeonian meant here that which has neither begin
ning nor end, it would be absolute nonsense to talk
of what was before that which had no beginning.
iEonian life, then, may mean either " the Ufe of the
great cycle of the future " or " the hfe that has
Divine unity and completeness," but " the life that
is endless " it cannot mean. I think we can see that

142 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
in the New Testament the phrase " eternal life "
frequently wavers between the two meanings which
I have said are possible ; between " life in the great
future aeon " and " life in Him who embraces all aeons
in His own." It is our Saviour who definitely raises
this phrase from a temporal to a spiritual significance,
even as before we saw that He spiritualised the
Jewish ideal of the Kingdom. " This is hfe eternal,"
said our blessed Lord in His last great address in
the Supper Chamber, " That they should know Thee,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast
sent." Here the veil is lifted from the deepest
mystery of our Saviour's teaching, and we learn to
caU His life eternal, not because of its duration, but
because of its quality ; because it is the life which
comes from knowing God and His dear Son. This
enables us to understand how our Lord could say,
" He that heareth my word and believeth in me," or,
as it runs in another place, " He that eateth my flesh
and drinketh my blood " — " hath aeonian life." There
is no need to wait for death before entering into it.
Through our faith, through our communion with
Christ, we have it now; we have that life of God
which is real and complete, the life, as St. Paul says
to Timothy, " which is life indeed."
With this interpretation of our Lord to help us,
I think that we must give to the phrase " aeonian
chastisement " either the meaning " the chastisement
which belongs to the great aeon of the future," or
"the chastisement that is complete in itself, as a

Jv • THE UNSEEN WORLD 143
divine retributive discipline." In any case we must
give up the meaning "endless," and leave the
question of the future duration of retributive chas
tisement in the vagueness which our Saviour did
not dispel. Whether God shall finally restore all
sinners to Himself I do not profess to know. St.
John does, indeed, say that " Christ came to destroy
the works of the devil," and St. Paul anticipates a
time when, at the close of the Mediatorial Kingdom,
" God shall be aU things in all creatures." That may
well be a grand prophecy of the ultimate triumph of
Divine love over creaturely wUfulness. But the
words are as vague as they are grand, and they are
not the words of Christ. If all men are to be saved
at the last, this, at least, is certain — that they cannot
be saved by that method of force which, robbing
them of freedom, would leave them incapable of
virtue and goodness. And if not by force, then it
must be as possible always, as it is now, for the finite
will to resist the Infinite. To me, I confess, that
thought does not present either the difficulty or the
dread which some have found in it. I know that
the dead are in the hands of an Almighty Father,
who, being the will to love, must love them, and seek
to make them loving wherever they are. On the
other side of the veU, as on this side of it, always
and everywhere, it must be true of God that "He
willeth aU men to be saved ; " that " He is not wiU-
ing that any should perish, but that aU should come
to repentance." God cannot wish the torment of any

144 CHRIST AND HIS SURROUNDINGS iv
of His creatures. He cannot but desire to make the
worst better and happier. Over the vilest rebel in
Gehenna He must brood with a fatherly everlasting
love. If He ceased to love, He must cease to be —
for He not only has love, but is love. To suppose
an endless torment, for no purpose but to satisfy
God's wrath or God's holiness ; to suppose that He
could inflict it, who, as Jeremy Taylor says, "in
finitely loves His creatures, who died for them, who
pardons easily, and pities readily, and excuses much,
and delights in our being saved, and would not have
us die, and takes little things in exchange for great "
— to think any such thing is to blaspheme God's
love, in the name of His justice, and to plunge into
thick darkness that whole glorious manifestation of
God as the Father of aU the aeons, and of aU the
creatures therein, which our Blessed Master was sent
into the world to make known. My dead are with
Him who loves them more tenderly than I, at my
best, and in His arms I could trust them even in the
smoke of Gehenna. I have seen something of the
glory of infinite love ; have known something of the
multitude of its mercies; and I would ask you, if
you fear for the departed, as Dean Church once
asked in his great Cathedral, " Can we be so com
passionate and so just, and cannot we trust Him
to be so, unless He shows us how ? "
I have done, my brethren, and with one other
question I will close. I have tried to carry you in
these lectures round the whole circle of our Lord's

iv THE UNSEEN WORLD 145
teaching, not shunning even its darkest places. You
have heard what He taught about His Heavenly
Father, about the eternal kingdom, about aeonian life
and aeonian chastisement ; and now, when you think
of the truth -which He taught, and of the errors
which He rejected ; when you compare His sur
roundings and His work, His opportunities and His
achievements ; what answer will you give to the
question, "Whence had this man this wisdom?"
The riddle may be too hard for you ; but if on these
Sundays while we have been taking sweet counsel
together you have learnt to trust the Lord Jesus, and
to see reflected from the clear mirror of His unerring
intuition the purest forms of eternal truth ; then you,
at least, believing Ahat He must have known better
than all else, better, because more immediately than
aU else, the truth about His own nature, will trust
His witness herein, as you trust the voice of God.
' Hear, then, our Lord's own answer to that question,
remembering that it is an answer reported by the
Synoptic Evangelists : " All things have been de
livered unto me of my Father, and no one knoweth
the Son save the Father ; neither knoweth any one
the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son wUleth to reveal Him." That is the
testimony of our Master concerning His nature and
authority, and whoso believeth that testimony will
have solved for himself the problem of Christ and
His surroundings.

CHEIST AND THE SOCIAL EEVOLUTION
" We know in part, and we prophesy in part." — 1 Cos.. xiii. 9.
It is universally acknowledged amongst us that in
the religious teaching of the Old Testament we can
discern a gradual development. God not only spake
to the fathers in the old time " in many parts and in
many modes," but also with a largeness of truth
and spirituality of feeling which, on the whole, in
creased through the ages untU the great revelation of
the fulness of the times. So much is admitted. The
law of development unquestionably prevailed under
the old covenant. Shall we then say that it ceased
to have validity when that covenant came to a close,
or that it passed over as a rule of the new order at
the coming of the Christ ? In one respect this must
be denied. The revelation given to us of the nature
of God and of His relation to us in Jesus Christ was
final and complete. The great spiritual truths of our
Lord's teaching are as unchangeable as His divinity.
The age wUl never come when it wiU be less true
than it is to-day that God is our Father, that man is
our brother, that love is the law of our life, that

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 147
Christ died to save us from our sins, and that from
His throne above He sent His Holy Spirit to make
us partakers of His holiness. Nay more, whatever
changes time may bring in the scope of our ethical
thought and practice, it will never obhterate those
eternal Unes of human duty which have been laid
down once for all in the Sermon on the Mount.
But although the revelation of the Father in the
Son be thus final and unchangeable, it by no means
follows that our understanding and exposition of that
revelation are so. " We know in part, and we pro
phesy in part." Our Lord's words may be simple
and plain, but too often we read them without intel
ligent apprehension. A kind of mist rests on them,
springing from the steaming marsh of our own worldly
life; or our spiritual vision is obscured by narrow
capacity, and the misleading suggestions of current
habits and opinions. Thus, although the Lord's
words may admit neither of change nor improve
ment, it may weU be that His Church's grasp and
representation of them, like the teaching of the
prophets of old time, may be the subject of growth
and development.
Now, an imperfect apprehension and statement of
the truth wiU necessarily contain good and evil, per
fect and imperfect elements.
Such a combination is manifestly susceptible of
improvement, and will, in fact, approach more nearly
to the truth which it has only partiaUy expressed, if
in process of time it drops more and more of those

148 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
evil or imperfect elements which have been added by
the sin or error of human interpreters. Is there,
then, reason for hoping that this may actually be the
course of Christian thought — that as the centuries
pass it will drop more and more of the impure mix
tures of human haste and prejudice, and come nearer
in love and insight to the simple teaching of our
Divine Master ?
I think that such a hope is plainly suggested by
the promise of the Lord Jesus that He will be with
His people " all the days, even till the end of the
age ; " and yet more plainly by His promise of
another Comforter whose office it should be " to bear
witness of Him ; to bring to remembrance all which
He had said ; to take of His, and show it to His
disciples." Under the guidance and illumination of
this Spirit, then, we may confidently hope that the
reason and conscience of the Christian Church will
constantly strive to exclude whatever of false or evil
has come down to it from darker or less faithful
ages ; and that though this struggle may be often
frustrated or hindered by unbelief or misfortune, it
will never cease. Eemembering, indeed, the weak
ness of man and the vicissitudes of history, we must
not expect too much from it in any special age.
There will naturaUy be ebbings and flowings in that
tide of Christian thought which seeks to cover with
its fertilising waters the waste places of the world's
ignorance. Even when heathen resistance has been
overcome obstacles may arise from the immaturity of

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 149
Christian thought and feeUng. BeUefs which the
reason suspects and chaUenges may have become so
dear and venerable by long entertainment, may have
offered so grateful a shade to the generations which
they sheltered, that the heart will cUng to them in
spite of misgivings.
This conservatism, indeed, of the emotions, while
appearing to retard the progress of truth, may not be
whoUy without its use and place. It holds back the
stronger and more eager spirits, and prevents them
from rushing forward so fast and so far as to pass out
of the sight and reach of the lagging masses of the
race. It thus helps to keep up the soUdarity of
humankind, and secures that unity of thought and
interest without which such a thing as corporate
development would be impossible.
In spite, however, of aU these drawbacks of
human weakness, error, and affection, I believe it to
be true, as has been said by a weU-known philosopher
of our own time, that " our historical inheritance of
religion is richer in the elements of moral truth and
power than any ever entrusted to any previous age."
Nay, I think that it is not impossible to indicate
roughly the great stages of progress through which
that inheritance has been reached. I do not, of
course, mean that there has been a regular and con
tinuous succession of such stages, or, again, that
there has ever been any one age in which many of
the essential aspects of Christian truth have been
totally obscured.

150 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
He who ventured on such a statement would
speedily be contradicted by enthusiastic specialists,
who would have no difficulty in showing him that
even in the darkest times individuals or small com
munities recognised clearly what the majority of their
fellow-Christians were neglecting. In spite, however,
of all such exceptions and irregularities, it will not
be difficult, I believe, to discern in the history of the
Church the traces of a real development of Christian
doctrine. This development, it is true, has often been
of a very partial kind.
Of the contents of revelation different ages have
taken special portions as the object of their careful
study and exposition. They have spent their whole
energy upon the task of exploring and determining
the precise meaning of some single class of truths,
and have too often not only suffered other fundamen
tal verities to be neglected, but (their own self-
imposed task accompUshed) have sunk into mental
and spiritual lethargy, leaving the future work of
development to be undertaken by another and un
exhausted generation of believers.
Thus it was the special task of the early centuries
of the Christian era to determine the Scriptural
doctrine upon the nature and relations of the Three
Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Then, with the
irruption of the barbarians, a dense cloud of darkness
passed over the rational heaven of the Church, and
the great problem of the nature of man, and of its
relation to the grace of God, already opened and

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 151
illuminated by the genius of Augustine, was dropped,
with much else ; while minds were narrowed, and
knowledge dwindled, and worship hardened into
formality, and thought lost itself in scholastic triviali
ties. It was a period of rational ebb and decline.
The ages, however, as they passed were not altogether
unfruitful. Noxious weeds of superstition might,
indeed, flourish in the darkness, but at the same time
minds were gathering power, spiritual needs and
aspirations were making themselves felt, and in the
great schools of the later middle age men began to
ask once more what were the spiritual means and -
benefits of redemption, and what the conditions of
their use and attainment by sinful men. It is no
more than might have been expected, that in that
age of rudimentary spiritual development attention
should have been largely directed to those outward
means and ordinances through which the life of
Christ was offered to human faith ; or that in an
exaggerated estimate of the value of these the minister
should have become the priest, and the sacraments
supposed scenes and channels of magical operations.
The less these earth-bound souls felt within them
selves the power to see and grasp the spiritual and
heavenly, the more did they long to have their con
scious spiritual impotence supported by something
which was perceptible to sense.
Once again, in the dawn of the Eenaissance, human
thought went forth eagerly on the quest, of truth in
every direction, and in none with greater boldness

152 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
and enthusiasm than in that which was so famihar,
the way of revealed religion. After ages of neglect
the newly-opened Word of God spoke to them with
the force and freshness of an audible voice from
heaven. It reached depths of their souls which had
hardly yet been sounded, it touched feelings and
stimulated capacities which had slumbered for
centuries ; thus fiUing life with interest and work
with sanctity. In the dazzling light of this intel
lectual re-birth priestly authority and sacramental
miracles became not only less credible, but less de
sirable. Awakening to new spiritual needs and
capacities, men sought a directer and a diviner mode
of communion with heaven, and they found in St.
PauFs gospel of salvation by faith the very revelation
which they sought.
The centre of interest and effort was suddenly
changed. It was found not in the Church and the
sacraments, valuable and necessary as these might
be, but in the believing soul, the living temple of
God, that consecrated scene of penitent efforts and
divine approaches and joy-inspiring triumphs, which
angels desired to look into.
Once again, tired by its mighty effort, and losing
interest in what it thoroughly grasped and defined,
the reason and conscience of the Church seemed to
sink into a kind of lethargy. Thought lost its free
dom, and the heart its joy, and to the dry, dogmatic
age which followed the Eeformation the Bible became
little better than a miraculous oracle, and Ufe nothing

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 153
more than a petty theatre of mean secular interests,
in which at length men felt it hardly worth their
whUe to play a part. Then came the great Evan
gelical revival, taking aU kinds of outward forms,
now known as Quietism, now as Methodism, and
now as Evangelicalism ; but everywhere essentially
the same — a revival rather than an advance.
As at an earlier time, it concentrated attention on
the individual soul, on the subjective appropriation
of salvation — stopping too often at the gaining of
heavenly gifts and experiences, without going on to
insist decisively on the appointed divine end of such
gains. Had the great change come ? Was the man
converted ? Had he laid hold on Christ ? Had he
experienced the joy of adoption? These were the
main questions, and with the answers to these interest
and effort too often ended. Nay, so blind were many
good men of that period, and so proud of their blind
ness, that the very imperfection and fragmentariness
of their conceptions seemed to them a special merit.
To confine attention to the work of Christ, to the
offer of pardon and life in Him, and to the accept
ance of that offer by faith was called preaching the
Gospel. To go further, to caU attention to' the fact that
the work of Christ, the ministry of the Spirit, the
ordinances of the Church, yea, and the subjective
moods of mind and heart which appropriated the
benefits of these were all only means to an end — the
reproduction in each man of the image of Christ ;

154 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
and hence to make much of the revealed features of
that image, and of the daily Divine discipline, effort,
and abstinence by which it might be perfected ; all
this was looked upon with suspicion, as a departure
from the simplicity of the truth, as legalism, for
malism, or even a magnifying of human merit to the
disparagement of the grace of God. What wonder
that so crippling and injurious a mistake provoked a
violent reaction, and even a contempt which would
have been more loudly expressed but for the re
spect inspired by the characters of good and holy
men? But now once more, in our own days we are
beholding what I believe is not merely a revival of
lost truths, but a distinct advance in the human
apprehension of the Gospel. Without losing sight
of the vast importance of past gains, of the dogmatic
definitions of the early centuries, of the later discovery
of the preciousness of the means of grace, or of the
mighty grasp of reforming times upon the critical
importance of a realising faith ; we are now discern
ing, I believe, more clearly than ever before, that all
these are concerned mainly with what is preparatory
and instrumental, with what looks forward to a great
spiritual end: the realisation in the heart, in the
Church, and in the State, of the ideal set before us
in our Lord's life and teaching. The signs of such a
development may be discerned, I beheve, in many
directions. First, in the much greater proportion of attention

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 155
which is directed to the personal teaching and
example of our Divine Master.
We feel instinctively that the dogmatic teaching
of St. Paul's Epistles, though by no means exhausted,
has been very largely apprehended and realised.
True, it is not the less important for that ; but it is
on this account a less necessary and interesting object
of attention. In the teaching and life of our Divine
master, on the other hand, we feel that there are
depths which have never yet been sounded, lessons
which have never yet been learnt, light for our per
plexity which has yet to spring forth and illuminate
the heaven of our thought and practice.
It is with us in this respect very much as it was
with the Hebrews in respect of our Lord's priesthood
and sacrifice. No one can say that the doctrines of
" repentance from dead works," of " faith toward
God," of " resurrection from the dead," and of " eternal
judgment," are not of firstrate and eternal signifi
cance ; but they had been apprehended and realised,
and so to the Hebrews had become rudimentary and
almost self-evident. There was Uttle need of insist
ing upon them. Powerful temptations had given a
greater claim upon attention to the true meaning of
that priestly and sacrificial system of the law of
Moses which threatened to draw away the thoughts
of believers from the one aU- sufficient Sacrifice, and
to re-impose the broken yoke of the ceremonial law.
It was necessary, then, in order to secure what
had been already gained, that an advance should be

156 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
made to the better knowledge of other truths, as yet
but imperfectly apprehended.
Unless I am greatly mistaken, a like necessity is
felt in the Church of the present day, a necessity
which proclaims itself in such exclamations as these
— " Christianity is a personal religion," " Christ is
Christianity," " We want now not St. Paul, but St.
Paul's Divine Master." Nay, the urgency of this
need is felt not only in the old Churches of Europe,
but also in those heathen lands which are being
awakened from the sleep of centuries by the light,
now painfully striking upon weak eyes, of European
thought and civilisation. What is the report with
which missionaries have been lately startling the
minds of thoughtful Christians ? That they are met
everywhere, in India and Africa alike, with the
demand, " Tell us about Jesus ; tell us what He said
and did; let us hear the words of love which go
straight to our hearts ; which are so like what is good
in our old creeds, and yet so much better than the
best which they taught us." All this surely means
that the four Gospels will be studied in our days as
they have never been studied before : with an eager
ness and a seriousness which have their birth in the
felt needs of a larger thought and a deeper humanity.
Secondly, I believe that the social movements of
our own time — themselves largely due to the Gospel
— are enabling us to gain a better understanding of
the meaning of Christ's words. For ages we have
been so much under the dominion of prevaihng

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 157
thoughts and habits that we have been literally
unable to believe that the Lord meant what He said.
Men who loved Him lived lives so utterly unlike
that which He set forth by His teaching and example,
that we have felt it necessary to bring- precept and
practice into some sort of tolerable harmony by all
kinds of ingenious and non-natural interpretations.
The Lord could not — so it has seemed to us — He
could not have meant His words to be taken literally.
Such an acceptance of them would involve nothing
less than a social revolution, a change which would
unsettle everything, and let loose upon the children
of peace all the destructive forces of selfish passion.
That the Lord intended to create a vast social change,
that He meant by the arms of love to conquer all the
wild impulses of selfish passion, seems hardly to
have been conceivable. I cannot say that aU this
has been changed — that would mean what is called
the millennium — but assuredly all is changing.
I have lived for more than sixty years, and I can
remember the time when to have required employers
to consider, in fixing wages, in arranging workshops,
in building cottages, in determining the hours of
labour, not only profits, but also and more, the
physical, moral, and spiritual welfare of working-
men, would have been looked upon as a kind of
lunacy. Christ might indeed have said that one
human soul was of more value than the whole world,
but that, no doubt, was a kind' of Oriental figure,
and at any rate it was no concern of those who took

158 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
the trouble of prosecuting worldly labours in order
to make money. No change whatever has been
made in the words of Christ, but how much more
those words have come to mean to us, through the
reluctant recognition which has been forced upon all,
partly by the teaching of great humanitarians, and
partly by the combination of labourers, that after all
man is more than money, that character is greater
than possessions, that human truth and honour,
purity, and love, are more than all the victories of
war or the accumulations of peace. What, again,
could seem to be more Utopian than our Lord's
command, "When thou makest a dinner caU not
thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen,
nor thy rich neighbours, . . . but caU the poor, the
maimed, the lame, and the blind?" We are far
enough yet, it is true, with all the luxuries and
extravagances of our London seasons, from laying
that precept to heart, but at least the movements of
our time have brought some kind of obedience to it
within more measurable distance. We do see rich
ladies in large numbers going down into the poorest
slums of our cities, to carry to the least fortunate of
the race the help of Christian love and the light of
Christian refinement. We do see noble-hearted men
giving up all the enjoyments of a brilliant society to
live in the midst of the wretched and depraved, and
to find a deeper delight in the restoration to miserable
outcasts of the lost image of God than any which the
world can offer. We do see colleges and public

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 159
schools establishing or assisting Christian missions
to the ignorant, the depraved, and the fallen, and
eagerly contributing not only money, but sympathy
and personal aid to make the love of Christ a living
succour where succour is most needed. In the light
thrown upon our Master's words by such movements
as these, we are almost beginning to beheve that He
meant what He said; and that perhaps, after aU,
armed Europe will never suppress the aggressions of
selfishness by the cannon and the sword, nor indeed
in any other way than that which Christ has dis
closed to us, by " doing good to those who hate us
and by praying for those who despitefully use us and
persecute us," so overcoming evil by good.
But, thirdly, in whatever degree modern, social,
and industrial movements have contributed to dispel
the mists of prejudice which cling to Christ's words,
it is impossible to conceal from ourselves the selfish
motives by which such movements are often dis
figured and defeated. Do we not know forms of
socialism which are Uttle better than political mate
rialism, prescribing the worship of gold as a god,
turning the State into a providence, and taking the
equal division of loaves and worldly advantages for
salvation ? Have we not recently seen these mean,
secular aspirations too faithfully reflected in the
savage threats and lawless violence of some, who, in
their eagerness to win a larger share of the products
of labour (possibly in some cases their due), have not
hesitated to infringe personal liberty and to imperil

160 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION ' v
social order ? Never does organised oppression wear
so ugly a look as when it is practised by those who
inscribe hberty and fraternity on their banner ; and
never does the contemptible cry, Bern quocunque modo
rem, sound so forbiddingly, as when it comes from
the lips which have cursed so bitterly the unscrupu
lous greed of the employer. If these blind feelings-
forth after a juster and more loving order of human
life are to escape their present perils, and to win real
blessings for the poor and wretched, they must seek
nobler motives, a higher point of view, and an
ampler justification of their claims.
If God and Christ and the eternal world are to
be ignored or denied, if man is to be the highest
object of regard, if the best pleasures are held to
be the pleasures of sense, and if the ultimate law of
human life is to be gathered from the order of nature,
then all the lofty theories of the socialist are baseless,
and all his efforts are foredoomed to failure. For
men are not born equal, but unequal in every quality
of body and mind ; the forces of nature do not favour
the survival of the poor and feeble, but only of the
fittest ; and so long as men are incapable of prizing
character above strength, and self-sacrifice above the
pleasures of sense, aU clamorous assertions of equality,
and all State decrees for the equal payment of labour,
will only end in the dismal and heart-breaking failure
of M. Louis Blanc's State workshops. It is Christi
anity, and Christianity alone, which can at once
justify, elevate, and direct the industrial efforts and

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 161
aspirations of our time. If all are members of one
great spiritual famUy, with one Heavenly Father,
one Saviour Brother, and one destiny of redemption
from sin, then all are brethren and equal, then the
laws of the lower natural order are seen to have no
exclusive sway and currency in this high moral
sphere, then money is of no value but to lighten
labour, to give leisure for improvement, and to
remove the hindrances to moral. and spiritual de
velopment. Then violence will be as impossible as
oppression, and idleness as covetousness, for all wiU
seek not their own, but another's wealth, and find the
only true greatness and happiness in service. Strange
as it sounds, it is profoundly true that we shall never
succeed in our efforts to secure a juster distribution
of wealth, until we come to feel that wealth in itself
is of no intrinsic value. He alone could sell all that
he has and give to the poor who has found his
treasure in heaven. And, therefore, whether men
see it or not, the only true law of Hfe for our in
dustrial future is that which has been formulated by
Christ for all time, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all these things shaU be
added to you."
Here we have a formal statement of the summum
bonum of man. Is it a true statement ? No question
at the present day presses more urgently for settle
ment. For how can we determine which of aU the
modern attempts at social reconstruction are possible
and hopeful, worth thought and assistance, until we
M

162 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
know the goal which we should endeavour to attain ?
We cannot be agnostic on this question in such an
age as ours without the deadhest peril, for if we
refuse to incur the trouble and responsibility of its
consideration our senses wUl settle it for us, to the
corruption and degradation of our life. What, then,
is supremely good for us, what is the one thing
needful ? Is it the love of God, or the praise of man ?
Is it character or possessions ? Is it what we are, or
what we have ? Is it the food of the senses, or the
eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ? We
must gain a complete and final answer to that
question, if we would rid our Ufe of perplexity,
vacillation, and disappointment. Do we believe, as
our Divine Master taught us, that we are the children
of an Omnipotent Fatherly Love, which is the source
and basis alike of our life and the life of aU creatures?
Do we believe that to restore to us the broken com
munion with that love the Lord Jesus Uved and died ?
Then, surely, we shaU acknowledge that to live in
the light of that love, to reflect its brightness, to feel
its warmth, to share its impulses, and to do its work
is the highest fehcity whether of earth or heaven !
To wiU as God wills is to be noble and happy. It is
to have the rare power of finding in aU outward
things the occasion of lofty thought and feeling, to
see the goodness of the Divine love in the impartial
sun and rain, to behold its beauty in the hue of the
lily and the far shining of the sea, to realise the out
goings of its sympathy and pity in the innocence of

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 163
the chUd and the patient faith of the sufferer, to
recognise the touch of its redeeming discipUne in the
pain' of remorse, the stirrings of compunction, and
the birth-throes of better resolve. So to live is to
win back again clearness of vision and readiness for
self-sacrifice, to rise into a sphere so lofty that its
clear air is never obscured by the mists of selfishness,
to have a heart sensitive to every touch of Divine
feehng, and an intellect which is the willing servant
of the loftiest principles of truth. Then, if social
troubles arose, how prompt and easy would be their
solution. CapitaUsts would ask, not how can we get
as large a share as possible of the products of human
toil and prudence, but how can we so moderate our
just claim as to secure our fellow -creatures the op
portunity of a good and noble Ufe ? And labourers,
on their part, with the same lofty conception of the
true aim of existence, would consult, not how to
wring the last possible farthing from the capitalist,
but how so to frame their requirements as to conform
to the necessities of trade, to the advance of the
common interest, and to the progress of mutual
confidence and love. AU this may seem perhaps to
some of you the merest Utopian dream. CaU it
what you please ; still if it be accordant with the
will and the teaching of Christ I believe that it will
one day be realised by redeemed men on this earth.
For I beUeve in a true development as weU of good
ness as of truth. Nay, more, I see the signs of such
a development in the course of Christian history and

164 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
in the movements of our own time, and, above all, in
that promise of our Divine Master, " Lo, I am with
you all the days, even unto the end of the age."
If He be here, if His Spirit of love dwell in the heart
of our struggling Christendom, I know that it must
be pressing us forward in the direction marked out
in the Divine counsel, and that in spite of human
ignorance, sin, and opposition it wiU one day bring
us to the appointed goal.
Do you ask me how long I think it will be ere the
Spirit of God has thus taken of the things of Christ,
and made them blessed realities in the thought and
life of the world ? I cannot, of course, presume to
answer such a question. I know how suddenly
moral influences which have been slowly gathering
force sometimes leap to their triumph. I know how
in the history of the kingdom of God the darkest
night has been sometimes broken by a supernatural
sunrise of grace. In some such sudden movement
and victory I expect that the world will see the
fulfilment of Christ's promise of His return. But of
course if we set aside, as we have no business to
do, that Divine promise of help and demand of
expectation, and if we construe the rate of moral
progress in the future by that in the past, we shaU
be constrained to admit that it may be slow and
variable, continuing through long ages and genera
tions, with many a halt, many a deviation — aye, and
many a falling back. But even so, even in the most
unfavourable event, is it nothing to believe in dark

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 165
and chaotic times that we are moving after all under
Divine guidance to a divinely determined goal?
What of defeat is too shameful for endurance, or
what of misfortune is too heart-breaking to be borne,
if only we may hope that aU things are working
together, both effort and opposition, both faith and
unbehef, for the establishment of that kingdom 'of
which Christ is the Ught and Ufe ?
I conclude by three short words of counsel which
are naturally suggested by our subject.
First, it is necessary to advance in order to
preserve what is of eternal value and significance
in our teaching. At all times the human mind
naturally strives to find a rational relation between
the various particulars of its knowledge. It en
deavours to bring them into a reasonable harmony,
to include them within a single intelligible scheme.
It follows, then, that in any given age the eternal
verities of religion wiU be brought into rational
relations with what in that age is looked upon as
historical and scientific truth. When, however, as
time goes on, doubt is thrown upon those historical
and scientific conclusions, that doubt wiU be reflected
on those eternal truths of religion which human
reason has associated with them. Then a new need
arises. We must carefuUy separate that which is
certain and essential in our historical inheritance
of religion from that which was merely accidental,
which was only added to it to serve the needs of
inteUectual harmony.

166 CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION v
The necessity for what I may call this " advance
of separation" is specially great in our own time,
because more than in almost any previous age what
is merely human in our religious traditions and
doctrines is being caUed in question. To save, then,
what is eternally true, we must not hesitate to ad
vance in the separation from it of what is accidental
and already more or less discredited.
Secondly, while not hesitating to advance, we
must be satisfied to advance slowly and prudently,
so as not to overrun the will or capacity of those we
seek to take with us. However true may be our
principles, and however benevolent our aims, we
shall fail if we reckon on moral capacity which does
not exist, or on Christian knowledge which has not
yet been realised. If we would raise men we must
keep within reach of them, and count it a higher
thing to bring the whole of Christendom one step
nearer to Christ's ideal life in a decade, than to
dart forward to the end in thought and imagination
in a moment. For the moral redemption of the race,
then, insight is not more necessary than patience,
that tender consideration of the true shepherd who
restrains his own impatience that he may carry
the lambs in his arms and gently lead those that
are with young.
And, Lastly, in all circumstances, whether our
advance be slow and halting, or swift and hopeful,
we must make ceaseless endeavours to reach the
appointed goal. The way to it may be strait and

v CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 167
hard, but at least it is plain and unmistakable, for it
has been marked out for us by the pierced feet
of Him who waits to welcome us at the end. Many
a time, no doubt, human pride, folly, or wilfulness
wiU stray from it into the crooked paths of falsehood
and selfishness, but not the less must we strive
unceasingly to press back into the appointed path.
Our place is among our brethren, however far
they may stray. We are to be their memory and
their conscience, the living voice which ever cries in
their midst, " This is the way, walk ye in it." And
though sometimes the star of our hope may look dim
and distant, may seem to our straining eyes to waver
and flicker and almost disappear, we must still press
onward with a faith which is stronger than sight and
surer than reason. We have a sure aUy in the
divinely implanted instinct of human aspiration.
For it is true, as one has nobly said, that "an eternal
longing, an unwearied pressure, a beating of the
labouring wings, however far the height and lone the
track, mark the spiritual tendencies of Christendom."
It is for us to appeal to this Divine witness and im
pulse, and in the days of doubt and danger, when
foes are many and shadows are dark and hopes are
low, to stay our souls upon that promise of Him to
whom aU human power is weakness and all human
wisdom foolishness; — "As I Uve, saith the Lord,
every knee shall bow to Me, and every tongue shall
confess to God."

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