# The Unity of the New Testament: A Modern Paraphrase

*The Unity of the New Testament, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5; reviewed by a human editor.*

## EXTRACT FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

This book is exactly what its title says: a Synopsis. It does not claim to be a commentary, though I examine each book with some care and often point out even small details that seemed to me to reveal the writer's design. But my aim was not to explain particular texts. I believe you cannot really feel the force of individual sentences unless you connect them with the purpose of the book they belong to. So I have looked for that purpose in each Gospel and Epistle I take up. And still more, I have wanted to show that they share one common subject; that they point to a Living Person; and that when read in relation to him they have a unity that no comparing of passages by itself could uncover.

I have not burdened you with what are called practical questions—first, because I have always found them very unpractical; and second, because I do not think it reverent to use the Bible to point a moral or decorate a story of our own. I believe it contains a revelation. What I want to ask is what it reveals.

## LECTURE I.

### PART I.

MARK I. [I.]{.smallcaps}

*The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God*.

*The passage:* This is where the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begins.

In these lectures I will divide the New Testament into three parts. First, the first three Gospels; then the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, together with the Acts that record their doings; and finally all the books ascribed to John.

It may seem an outrageous undertaking to treat such subjects in so little space. But I am glad of the limit; for what I intend, a wide field would tempt rather than help me. I want to ask whether one leading truth runs through these writings, binds them together, and accounts for their differences of form and their apparent contradictions. If such a truth exists, it should show itself on the very surface. It should stand up to close criticism, yet also reveal itself in the general course of the narrative and the discourses. No cleverness should be needed to find it; my only task should be to show that it forces the reader to see coherence in these writings, even when his theories incline him to deny it.

But if that is all I hope to do, why is the argument needed? These books have fed Christian people everywhere for centuries; scholars have poured out their learning on them. Must not the very suggestion that their governing principle still needs to be brought to light in 1846 imply that either the books are untruthful, or the man who offers to explain them is out of his senses?

I think so. If the principle I mean to set forth has never been stated in any Creed, or has held only a minor place there rather than being felt as the central one on which every article rests—if it has had no influence on the order of society in Christendom, and scholars and commentators are now hearing of it for the first time—then I admit it cannot be what I claim, a key to Scripture and to some of its greatest recent difficulties. But all I want is to bring out clearly what most of us already profess to believe, and what, as I hope to show later, has shaped events and the making of society in the modern world from the fall of Jerusalem to now. It seems to me we have gone wrong in studying Scripture not from too much simplicity but from too much refinement—looking far off for what lies at our feet, refusing to take words as they stand and to believe the writers meant what they say. If so, it may be a humble but useful duty to claim the New Testament as the ordinary traveller's own possession. When he grasps it, I am sure he will be readier than ever to acknowledge his debt to the scholar.

Let me explain what I mean. We usually call the first three Gospels biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. We assume they describe the acts and words that showed Him the most perfect of men and the greatest of prophets; that they record miracles proving His mission divine; and that then, by certain valuable phrases scattered through the story but not made prominent, they claim for Him a superhuman nature and origin. We say it was left to the fourth Gospel to declare that nature and origin clearly, and that this Gospel is far more doctrinal, the source of the Creed's high dogmas. We suppose the main support of those dogmas lies in the Epistles, especially Paul's. So we take the great difference to be that the Epistles tell us what to believe while the Gospels set before us a divine example of living. We admit this is not exact—the Epistles are practical too, and the Gospels contain high doctrine—but we think the division good enough for ordinary use, pointing to what to expect in each. The Apocalypse is harder to place: some say it lies beyond the everyday Christian's study; others say it develops one great practical matter treated less clearly elsewhere—the second coming of our Lord, which stands in such contrast to the humble coming the Gospels describe.

I think I have given a fair account of the common views held in this country about these books, which we all regard, more or less clearly, as different in authority and character from all others. I will not dwell on views held abroad by those who deny their authority altogether. But note that even the most extravagant of those views start from the same premise as our popular notions. The modern Tübingen school has pushed further than any other its theories of contradiction among the Apostles and Evangelists: it sets Paul's spiritual school against the Judaical school of James, Peter, and John; it grants Paul only four or five genuine Epistles; it holds Revelation to be genuinely John's *because* it opposes Paul's doctrine; it takes the fourth Gospel for a second-century work that first placed Christian theology on an Alexandrian footing. This school has brought its learning and philosophy to explain the discrepancies of aim and character in the New Testament books that it assumes we all quietly admit while speaking vaguely of them. I do not say that, if the notions our commentators and harmonists have sanctioned and spread through our schools are granted, there is *no* escape but the conclusions of Bauer and his followers. But I confess I think the fight against these scholars will be hard, and finally useless, unless we are ready to reconsider the ground we share with them. We may win a skirmish here and there, catching them twisting church history or misusing their criticism; but onlookers will treat it as a quarrel among critics. Without following the arguments, they will throw their weight to the attacker, saying: "You rest your faith on books that able men, not quite rejecting Christianity, say teach several different faiths. It takes much learning to defend them, if you can. How can you ask ordinary laymen to make such books their guide? Whatever they are, they are not what our fathers thought."

Reaching that conclusion would be harder if no one had tried to explain the Gospel narratives on a principle that treats them as worthless as history. Long tradition and habit shield people from mere critical cleverness; they would say, "These documents must have *some* common meaning; let the opponents show it before asking us to throw them away." But the rationalist knows this demand and has his answer. A writer whose influence among ordinary readers far exceeds that of a learned school like Bauer's set out years ago to show what worth might remain in the life of Jesus even when nearly all its records are taken as mere myth. It shows, he said, a great idea of humanity; it is one of the human spirit's attempts to conceive its own greatness; it explains the well-known human tendency to raise benefactors into kings and gods, as heathen records so often show. It came when other religions were worn out and there was a craving for something more universal and democratic than the old national faiths. Its rise fits everything we know of the world's decay at that time. The Christian mythology replaced the older ones because it had a broader human basis, and because its falsehoods as well as its truths suited its age. "It does not suit ours," these teachers go on. "The same decay, the same timidity and unbelief, now appear in its professors as appeared in the Jewish and heathen worlds when it began. But there is now, among philosophers and even ordinary men, a power to appreciate its kind, human idea that no earlier age had. Now is the time to separate that idea from its surroundings and offer it to the world as the final essence of the facts and doctrines men have so long believed."

No careful observer of our times can suppose one man would have spoken these words so plainly if the same thing were not already working in thousands of hearts. So whatever we make of the assurances of divines in the country where this doctrine first arose—that its teacher has little influence in their schools now, that others have long outrun him in his own direction, that he and his followers have seen how impossible was the half-faith he tried to keep—we may still be sure that all their reasonings, and all the earnest faith behind them, have not made Strauss's dogmas negligible to them or to us. Look, and you find them quietly adopted by a large class of thinking and half-thinking people in every section of our nation, old and young, poor and rich. They hold their ground against all the arguments Paley and his school urged for the authenticity of the Divine Records; indeed they are put forward in popular form before humble audiences as proof that those arguments are outdated. More, their propagators claim Christianity has gained in their hands, that they revere its principles more than we do. They ask: what are our harmonists' accounts of journeys to Nazareth and Capernaum beside their recognition of the living, divine truth in the sayings and life of Jesus? What are our dry attempts to prove His mission by miracle beside their frank admission that His moral teaching overthrew more falsehood and set up more truth than any other man's? What are our endless controversies beside their acknowledgment that He preached and lived an all-embracing charity and humanity?

I hope the existence and spread of such thoughts may excuse the inquiry I now begin. I have said I believe many students who start from the belief that the Gospels are mainly records of our Lord's life as a Teacher of Nazareth, and that the Epistles and fourth Gospel are the chief witnesses to His divinity, will end in Bauer's conclusions about the essential diversity of Gospels and Epistles. And I say now that many practical people, hardly students at all but sharing the habit of thought our popular teaching gives, will flee to Strauss's system and fancy for a while they have gained in faith and sympathy by the exchange. But since I believe neither class knows what it will finally lose—not in religious faith only, but in the love of truth, in any moral basis for personal and social life, and above all in that very humanity for which they would sacrifice everything else; since I think this Straussian doctrine, for all its pretensions, is feeble and narrow, and destroys all the blessings the Gospel has brought and will bring to the poor man, though it seems designed for his sake—I do not care how much I lose their respect, or their opponents', while I try to resist their falsehood by confessing what seems to me a great and dangerous one of our own.

Instead of beginning from our Lord simply as the Man of Nazareth, it seems to me that the first three Gospels, just as much as the fourth, begin by assuming Him to be the Son of God and the King of men. Their aim is to show how He fulfilled those characters. All the discourses and acts they attribute to Him are simple and natural on that assumption, and unintelligible on any other. My first lecture will make good these claims, first from the facts common to the three Gospels, then from their characteristic differences. In the next I will try to show that the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, seen together with the events in Acts, present the Gospel of the Son of God and His Kingdom at another stage and under three distinct aspects—but just as personally and livingly as the Evangelists do. Finally, that John's Gospel and Epistles harmonize the aspects traced in the other writers, and that the Apocalypse brings the history to a crisis all the other books had foretold—the full showing of the Son of God and His Kingdom—and reveals that, as this Kingdom fulfilled the meaning of all Jewish institutions and prophecies, so it would be the real foundation of all human society after those institutions dissolved. If the facts, seen plainly, bear out these conclusions, then Bauer's arguments for the diversity and contradiction of the New Testament books will actually establish their unity; and Strauss's arguments that they embody a conception of something supremely human will show that their basis is essentially divine. And belief in their authority will rest not on knowing old traditions or following clever special pleading, but on the testimony of eighteen centuries, which will tell whether the Kingdom the New Testament said would come has in fact come. That last inquiry belongs to a later part of these lectures; today I begin the first.

When I quote records found in all three Gospels, I will take them from Matthew, because his is said to be emphatically the Ebionite Gospel, the one most directly opposed to the doctrine of Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles.

#### THE PREACHING OF JOHN.

1st. The first thing all the Evangelists report is the same: "In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judæa, and saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

The words "kingdom of heaven" confront us at the very start. They seem to be important words. Perhaps the account of John's preaching and actions will help us decide what they mean.

Those who take St. Matthew to have been a narrow Jew who merely grafted a physical Christianity onto his old Hebrew ideas will readily grant that by this phrase he meant a real sovereignty, drawn from the Jewish Scriptures. On their view he was dreaming of the restored kingdom of David, and called it a Kingdom of Heaven because he believed its power came from the Lord God of Israel—but he still meant one to be set up on earth. Such readers, who give Matthew the character the Neological critics assign him, will grant this most readily of him, and also of Mark, and somewhat less of Luke. I cannot see how we can conclude otherwise. It is impossible that a Jew using the word "Kingdom" meant only what modern theologians mean by a "Christian dispensation" or a "divine and miraculous doctrine." Whatever the old Prophets meant by a Divine Kingdom when they linked it with the son of Jesse, or Solomon, or Hezekiah, that same meaning it must have carried for an Evangelist raised on those Books and devoted to them.

What, then, did the words mean when Isaiah or Jeremiah used them? Did the kingdom of Solomon or Hezekiah differ from the kingdom of Pharaoh or Hiram merely in being outwardly more splendid? Take the Jewish kingdom at its most magnificent, just after the temple was built, when silver was reckoned as nothing and the world's treasures poured into Jerusalem. Would not any of the Prophets have felt that its glory lay in the same thing as in its worst oppression—when Sennacherib's armies had destroyed the fortified cities and were besieging Zion—namely, that the visible king was a witness to an invisible one, in whom all real rule dwelt? On what else do the Prophets' warnings rest, when calamity threatened? They tell the people they are not acknowledging the invisible King, that they have forgotten His covenant, that they are bowing before stocks and stones, and they call them to return to the God from whom they have revolted. They declare that He is coming out of His place to prove He is their King and Ruler of the whole earth—that whether king, people, or priests trust Him or not, He will show Himself King of kings and Lord of lords. Does anyone imagine that phrase means less than this: that He rules in a region other kings strive for but cannot reach, that He governs the inner workings of nature and the minds and wills of men? The seer is calling his people to turn from gross, slavish notions of mere outward dominion—the root of all idolatry—to Him in whom all real power dwells without measure. Only so could they see the difference between a king of Judæa and a king of Babylon, and only so could they grasp what the full kingdom was that all their hard discipline was preparing them for.

John, we are told, wore camel's hair and a leather girdle, ate locusts and wild honey, and preached in the wilderness. All these signs testify that he, like any old Prophet, came to draw men from visible things to an invisible Ruler. His stern, simple words hold the very essence of the old prophetic speech, and the people felt it; they went out to him in the wilderness and asked whether he was Elijah. They were sure he had a message for the nation and for each person, and their consciences answered it. They were not openly worshipping idols; nothing in their situation obviously resembled those Elijah had summoned to renounce Baal. Yet their hearts confessed the likeness: they knew they were idolaters as much as their fathers, and that they, with a synagogue in every city, were falling away from the Lord God of Israel as surely as those who had groves on every hill.

John tested that conviction. He came baptizing with water, calling Jews to submit to a rite that admitted Gentiles to the Temple-worship—so they had to confess they needed purifying. And what purifying? John spoke of it as most inward: it was for the remission of sins. He did not shrink from explaining his own sign. The most honored Jews were called a brood of vipers, warned of coming wrath, and told not to say to themselves, "We have Abraham to our father," for God could raise up children to Abraham from the very stones. So that no one could doubt whether the baptism meant washing off outward stains or the deepest inward reformation, they were told the axe was laid to the *root* of the trees, and whatever bore no good fruit would be cut down and burned.

All this language, I submit, is consistent with itself; there is no clumsy patchwork of later refinement grafted onto a Jewish stock. Read it by the light of the Jewish Scriptures—you can read it by no other; but that light shows that at a time when the last trace of native royalty had gone from Judæa, when it bore the shameful marks of a Roman province, when pretenders kept arising to recall the old glories and urge revolt against the oppressor, a voice spoke of the very kingdom all devout Jewish rulers had acknowledged as about to appear. It called that a Kingdom of Heaven because it was a kingdom over the inner man, the spirit and heart; it scorned all exclusive Jewish claims even while asserting the greatness of Jewish privileges; and it announced a crisis at hand that would shake the whole of existing society to its centre.

#### THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST.

*The passage:* John told the people, "I baptize you with water for repentance, but One mightier than I is coming after me, whose shoes I am not fit to carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit"—and Matthew and Luke add, "and with fire."

Whether or not we include those words, the passage means the same. The word *fire*, and the mention of the *fan in the hand* that follows, show us One coming to purge, sift, and judge—One who sees through all appearances and works on the inner heart of society and of each person. But the words "He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost" already carry that meaning, and fix our attention on the kind of power this coming One will use. John's call to repentance was a call to an inward, spiritual act. He says the greater One will do perfectly what he himself did imperfectly, will strike deeper at the root of the tree, will make plain what his own baptism meant, and will give men the energy to do and be what John told them they must. Note that these supposedly carnal, Ebionitish, Jewish Gospels rest our Lord's whole history on this: their foundation is the proclamation, "He comes to baptize with the Spirit and with fire." I point this out as one of the most obvious surface signs of their shared purpose—one needing no skill to find, one no careless reader can miss. And I ask you to watch, as we go on, whether this surface fact is not the sign of something running through the heart of every narrative—something that it is as reasonable to suppose was inserted into them as to suppose a bricklayer inserted the idea of the Parthenon.

The story continues: Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. John tried to stop Him, saying he himself needed to be baptized by Jesus, not the reverse; but Jesus said, "Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness," and John consented. As Jesus came up from the water, the heavens opened, He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and resting on Him, and a voice from heaven said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

All the older heretics saw how central this narrative is to the Gospel history and to Christian doctrine. Every Gnostic had to interpret it and fit it into his theory of the relation between Jesus and the Christ. And those today who reject the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke must, to be consistent, treat this as the start of the Gospel record. Neither group can be wrong in thinking it held a most prominent place in the Gospel writers' minds, and that they connected everything they later tell of His ministry with it. No doubt the narrative itself gives them a pretext for charging these writers with carnal, superstitious notions. If there can be no visible signs of the invisible, and if believing an actual Man to be the Son of God is to be dismissed at once as anthropomorphic, then there is nothing left to debate; the matter is settled by one sweeping begging of the question. But if that is not granted, plain men will not be prevented—by being told the Dove or the Voice are merely Jewish or Pagan ways of projecting our own inner experiences outward—from seeing that this record carries us into the deep, inward ground that philosophy always seeks and never reaches. The Kingdom John said was near is declared to rest on a living Person. He who had always ruled it is now revealed: "This is my beloved Son" *is* the revelation. The Evangelists are to testify of a Son of God, clothed with the Spirit of God so that He may rule the spiritual world and all the inward powers of things. We are to see whether men so simple, raised in so narrow a school, make good their magnificent claims—whether they betray the emptiness of a mere dream by exalting a merely human Friend and Teacher, or whether they truly speak as men commissioned to set forth One who owed nothing to the accidents of His earthly position and everything to His relation to a divine and invisible Father.

#### THE TEMPTATION.

All the neological interpreters say the next step in the story shows the clearest signs of being a myth. It has nothing to do with the regular course of events; like the legends attached to great heroes, it was inserted to give the ordinary happenings significance, but it actually disturbs their sequence and reveals what a curious patchwork the whole composition is. I fully admit that if the Gospels are simply the record of the journeys of Jesus of Nazareth over one, two, or three years, from Judæa to Galilee and back, and if our knowledge of the facts is measured by our skill in dating these journeys and matching them to Jewish festivals, then the Temptation is an awkward obstacle. But if we take the Baptism to be what it appears—if Jesus was there declared to be the Son of God and sealed with the Spirit—then there is exactly the connection between the third and fourth chapters of St. Matthew that the composers of our Litany recognized. The Baptism asserts, "Thou art the Son of God"; the Temptation takes the form, "if Thou be the Son of God." He is endued with the Spirit of a Son and wrestles with the spirit of disobedience. He will not cut Himself off from Mankind by turning stones into bread for Himself, for Man is to live by every word of God. He will not throw Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, for it is written that you shall not tempt the Lord your God. He will not receive the kingdoms of the world from Satan, for it is written that you shall worship the Lord your God. The idea of a Son who claims nothing for Himself, but trusts and obeys His Father in everything, is brought out here with a clearness, definiteness, and simplicity, and with an absence of all verbal pomp and of the usual coloring of a legend, that is at the very least strange. The idea of a spiritual conflict, a battle with a spiritual foe, is set out here without the material devices used by the crudest and the greatest artists alike—something you would hardly expect from a Jewish tax-gatherer, still less if his story had later been embellished by some theological doctor. But, I will be asked, does this not give a personality to the Spirit of Evil, and is that not exactly what one looks for in a legend? Certainly one cannot read the story without feeling that our Lord was engaged in a personal battle with a personal foe. It is no shadow-fight, and nothing in it has the look of a dream or a vision; everything is intensely real. Yet the wonder is that this reality and personality are sustained with such an absence of materialism. No image of the Tempter is offered—neither the kind a medieval painter would give nor the kind belonging to Milton's conception. We feel that the Son of God, clothed in a human body, was not a Person by virtue of that body; and likewise that the personality of the opposing power has nothing to do with an outward shape or visible surroundings. We are led to feel that there is a deep, radical evil, a spirit of evil, underlying all the shapes and forms in which it appears to us on earth; that He who could reach that radical evil and strip those shapes of it could alone assert the dominion of the God of Truth and Love over the world; and that this radical evil is nothing original, nothing God created, but essentially the spirit of disobedience, a perverted, rebel will, so that He who has the true obedient will must be its destroyer and the Redeemer of the Universe from it. Such an opening to a history of successive acts of redemption or deliverance shows no sign of having been transferred from some other record into a place it was never meant for. If it means anything, its meaning belongs right there; and to lack it would be a real cause of perplexity.

#### THE PREACHING OF JESUS.

*The passage:* When Jesus heard that John had been imprisoned, He went into Galilee and began to preach: "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Mark records that He came preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, saying the time was fulfilled, the kingdom near, and that men should repent and believe the Gospel. Luke says Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, His fame spreading through the region, and that at Nazareth He read from Isaiah: the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him, anointing Him to preach good news to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, proclaim freedom to captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the bruised, and the acceptable year of the Lord.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus heard John had been imprisoned, He went into Galilee, and he quotes a passage he says was fulfilled by Christ's coming to the region of Zebulon and Naphtali. From that time Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Mark says that after John was imprisoned, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God: the time is fulfilled, the kingdom is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel. Luke says Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, His fame going out through the whole region, and then describes His coming to Nazareth, where He was raised, and His reading the passage from Isaiah about the Spirit of the Lord being upon Him to preach good news to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, free the captives, give sight to the blind, release the bruised, and proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. A harmonist will reasonably connect these accounts as referring to the same visit to Galilee. But I quote them to point out a deeper and more important agreement, one concerning the nature of our Lord's preaching and its connection with the earlier history. When He comes to Galilee, He begins by preaching the Kingdom of God and calling men to repent because it is at hand. The first two Evangelists give no other words spoken by Him who had been declared the Son of God than these. John the Baptist's message is exactly the message of the Christ: the same announcement of a kingdom, the same call to repentance, the same reference to the fulfilling of the time and an approaching crisis. Only now this announcement is called a Gospel—good news that the kingdom is at hand and the time fulfilled; men are to repent and believe this good news. Luke expands and explains the others. He begins by saying Jesus came in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and shows in one synagogue what kind of preaching it was that elsewhere won Him praise. His preaching announces One able to heal the sick and free the captives because the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him—a Deliverer who could undo chains no one else could undo, a King with dominion over the secret powers and inner being of man, now declared to be at hand. Men were to repent so that they might understand what His government over them was; to confess His dominion over them was to believe the Gospel.

#### CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES.

*The passage:* As Jesus walked by the sea of Galilee He saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and Andrew, casting a net, for they were fishers. He said, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men," and at once they left their nets and followed Him. Going further, He saw two more brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John, in a boat with their father mending their nets. He called them, and they immediately left the boat and their father and followed Him.

St. Matthew tells this story, and St. Mark's account is nearly the same. St. Luke joins it to the miraculous catch of fish, but his key-words, "From henceforth thou shalt catch men," belong just as much to the other two. Suppose we had only these narratives, with everything peculiar to St. Luke left out, and suppose we had heard nothing beforehand of a Kingdom or of a Son of God. Our first conclusion, I think, would be this: told so plainly and in so few words, the story is clearly meant to describe how some royal person claimed authority over the humble men around him, took them into his service, and gave them a high office—one they could scarcely understand, but which implied a remarkable influence and mastery over their fellow human beings. And if we then found that all the earlier records seemed to speak of just such a King, exercising a mysterious authority that He had come to assert and use on behalf of human beings, we would certainly think this narrative stood in a close and natural relation to the rest. On any other supposition—if the writer's mind had been filled with some other conviction—we would expect quite different language: far less direct and simple, and far less majestic.

#### THE MIRACLES.

*The passage:* Jesus went through all Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every kind of sickness and disease. His fame spread through Syria, and people brought Him all who were sick — those tormented by various diseases, those possessed by devils, the lunatic, and the paralysed — and He healed them.

This announcement in St. Matthew comes right after the call of the disciples. In St. Mark (chapter one, verses 21 to 35) you find the same events, with special attention to a man in a synagogue with an unclean spirit, who cried out, "Let us alone; what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God"; then the cure of Simon's wife's mother of a fever, and the healing of many sick and the casting out of many devils. In St. Luke (chapter four, verses 16 to 44) there are the same constant references to cures, the same account of the unclean spirit in the synagogue and the cure of Simon's wife's mother, ending with the words, "Devils also came out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God."

If you compare these passages carefully, nothing strikes me more than how closely the so-called miraculous part is blended with the preaching. St. Matthew: "He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, *and* healed all manner of sickness." St. Mark: "He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes; *and* there was in their synagogue a man having an unclean spirit"; and the people were amazed and asked, "What new doctrine is this? For with authority commandeth He the unclean spirits, and they do obey Him." St. Luke repeats nearly the same words in nearly the same connection, and his fifth chapter, even more than the others, shows the link between the "doctrine," the "word," and these acts of "authority."

Now suppose we take "preaching the Kingdom of God" literally, as I have taken it — suppose the actual King of the world was coming to claim His Kingdom, and He who by His word gave life to every creature was really come to show Himself and claim their homage. Then this connection is exactly what you would expect. You would not expect the Evangelists to say, as we tend to, that Christ delivered a beautiful discourse and then, to prove His commission, put forth strange new powers. You would expect them to say just what they do say: He declared His kingdom, and He healed the sick — using the powers He had always used, and declaring who it was from whom all healing had always come.

Other signs also show which view of Christ ruled the Evangelists' minds. If they were writing the legend of a hero doing more extraordinary things than any man, the acts would be as outward and showy as possible. An ordinary physician works by reaching the hidden source of a disease to overcome its outward symptoms; the legendary miracle-worker acts by touches and charms on the visible ailment before him, and lets the world admire how fast it vanished. But suppose a writer describes One who has dominion over all the secret springs of human life, whose servant the physician has always been. Then you would not be surprised if he told you this Person spoke to something within the man and set that right first; that having given the blessing He did not want it made known; and that He treated the vanishing of outward symptoms merely as proof of a cure at the root. These are indeed the features of the Gospel narratives; everyone notices them. They are cited as signs of the writers' simplicity and their freedom from any straining after display — but they are not, I think, dwelt on as marking the very purpose of the narratives.

Closely related are the frequent references to casting out devils. The Evangelists connect particular kinds of sickness with diabolical possession, yet somehow leave the impression that all sickness has this origin. At any rate they point to this exercise of power as the most characteristic of Christ, the one that explains all the rest. Commentators generally want to pass this over as a difficulty. Some say the Evangelists adapted themselves to Jewish speech; some say possession belonged to that age; some argue it has not been unknown in any age; some speak of the anthropomorphism and superstition natural in such writers. Those are plausible, high-sounding words, and I doubt those who use them freely have weighed their meaning. By anthropomorphism I mean conceiving the spiritual under a human shape — yet the Evangelists never give the devils a human shape. By superstition I mean putting above us what belongs below, or making our object of worship an object of fear — yet the Evangelists present the devils not as powers above but as powers working within, and present Christ not as teaching men to fear or worship them but as delivering men from them and teaching them to worship God. And if that is the aim of all these acts of power, they agree marvellously with the story that opens these Gospels as a preface to them: He who was proclaimed Son of God and endued with the Spirit of God was led by that Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. He warred with the root-spirit of disobedience that had claimed dominion over men; now He wars with every form in which that evil power works their harm. That power shows itself most directly in whatever affects man personally and morally, whether or not mixed with physical disease. The *unclean* spirit — the spirit of despair that drives a man among the tombs, makes him cry out and cut himself with stones and terrify his fellows, whom no chains can bind — is the most inward tyrant of all. Christ, by commanding him to come out of the man, proclaims that everything diseased or corrupt in body or mind is not from above but from beneath — not part of the original order of the universe, not from God, but from rebellion against God — and is therefore to be undone by the Holy One of God, the Son of God, who comes to establish the Kingdom of God.

So instead of dwelling on the other miracles as the only satisfactory proofs of His mission while trying to avoid the stories of casting out devils as awkward puzzles, we should, if we follow the Evangelists, look in these for the general law of all the miracles, since they explain the nature of His work and the purpose of His coming better than any others. Whatever else they omit or report differently, all three fix our attention on these and keep suggesting their relation to the rest. All three, with some difference of detail, report the cure of the man (or men) among the tombs as the most characteristic. All speak — St. Matthew more than once — of how the Pharisees explained the miracles: "He casteth out devils by the Prince of the devils." All record His answer, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." All record the words, "all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven" — words which, even without St. Mark's explanation that they said He had an *unclean* spirit, lead us to conclude that their sin lay not in denying Christ's power but in calling good evil and evil good, a state of mind that hates the very character of God. All also attribute to Him these words, so baffling to anyone who sees His signs merely as startling portents: "If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore shall they be your judges." In what sense could their sons be their judges? Was their power like His? If He was the true King of the world, all power ever exerted was His power, and He came to show from where such power came; so if His power was evil, then all power ever used by any Jewish physician to heal disease or madness was evil too.

Lastly, all the Evangelists connect faith in the person healed with most, if not all, of these acts of power. Now if the miracles were merely proofs of a divine mission, unconnected with its nature, you would expect the most overwhelming displays where the unbelief was most stubborn — as legends usually arrange it, with faith produced in the most reluctant by the spectacle. But if these signs were tokens of the presence of One who came to claim the human spirit and raise it out of bondage to other masters, then we see at once that there is something more kingly and mysterious in an act that calls the man himself into trust and hope than in one that merely rectifies his body or mind. Not only is the limb straightened and the bleeding stopped, but the person who wields the limb, through whose veins the blood flows, is called into life and health by the voice of the life-giver.

These remarks are not new; they are worth anything only as they order thoughts we all share. No reader of the Gospels has ever doubted that the graciousness of Christ's miracles belongs to their very nature — a quality writers on evidence have laboured over more than was needed, for the heart takes such impressions more readily when they are not forced. The apparent exceptions — the cursing of the fig-tree, the destruction of the swine — have been explained with painful ingenuity, as if we needed convincing that a moral lesson meant to cure human beings may be got through the death of a tree or an animal. What I want is that we follow out the conviction such phrases imply, and admit that the Evangelists saw these miracles as ways in which the great Deliverer revealed Himself as Deliverer, actually breaking the fetters that bound human bodies as well as spirits. Seen this way, all the other miracles they record will be felt to have their own fitness in the divine economy, for later instruction as well as immediate, especially to free men from superstition. That the disciples should learn the winds and waves obeyed their Master, and the multitude feel that it was He who gave them bread, was as needful as feeling that He restored the powers of body and soul. The Jews needed such a lesson, being still prone to tremble before the powers of nature and to think man lives by bread alone and not by the word of God. But what a lesson too lay in store for the worshippers of Neptune, Ceres, and Æsculapius — what a witness that the powers they thought divided among different capricious gods were really gathered up in the one Lord and Friend of man!

#### PUBLICANS AND PHARISEES. THE NEW AND OLD GARMENT.

*The passage:* As Jesus went on, He saw a tax-gatherer named Matthew at his booth and said, "Follow me." Matthew rose and followed. Later, as Jesus ate in the house, many tax-gatherers and sinners sat down with Him and His disciples. The Pharisees asked the disciples why their Master ate with such people. Jesus answered that the healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick do, and told them to learn what "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice" means, for He came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. Then John's disciples asked why they and the Pharisees fasted often, but His disciples did not. Jesus replied that the wedding guests cannot mourn while the bridegroom is with them; but when the bridegroom is taken away, they will fast. He added that no one sews new cloth onto an old garment, for the patch tears away and makes the rip worse, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins, for the skins burst and both are lost; new wine goes into new skins, and both are kept.

All three Evangelists tell this story in nearly the same order, with Levi in two accounts where Matthew stands in the other. I may seem to be joining two passages that have no direct link. But I am trying to follow the Evangelists closely, and where all three keep the same order I assume they felt a connection in the parts of their story and wanted us to feel it. I think even their simplest readers have sensed this: that the question of John's disciples grew naturally out of our Lord's answer to the Pharisees, and that His comparisons of the new and old garments and the new and old wineskins were meant to explain a deep reason for the difference between His disciples and those of the Pharisees or of John.

I. In the call of Levi, or Matthew, we see the same power over the person's will that appeared in the call of Andrew and Simon, James and John. The words are not those of a disciple attaching himself to a master out of preference; they plainly convey One speaking with authority—an authority the conscience and heart recognized, though nothing in His outward appearance supported it.

II. But Matthew is not a fisherman; he is a rich tax-gatherer. As soon as he obeys, he gathers men of his own class and invites his Master to eat with them. This class had more than a bad reputation: many of them must have been extortioners, and the general dislike of them must have thrown them among people who truly deserved the name of sinners. To imagine Matthew's guests were merely people labelled sinners through Pharisaic prejudice is to twist the letter of the Gospel and, still more, to set aside its meaning. The Pharisees do not complain that our Lord showed kindness to wrongdoers, but that He mixed with them as friends, eating and drinking with them. Did not the Law justify their own avoidance of impurity? The Evangelist offers no direct answer to these questions. He overrules them all with the words, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that be sick." If he saw his Master as the King of Men, come to restore an order that had been broken; if he believed that the righteousness all the Law's precepts pointed to dwelt in Him, and that He came to plant that righteousness in the hearts of those who had strayed furthest—then the proverb applied plainly and truly. In other words, if he felt that our Lord's Kingdom was the kingdom over men that had lain beneath all legal rules, and that it asserted its power by fulfilling their purpose even when it seemed to set them aside, we can see how this story fits with all that has gone before. On any other view the Pharisees' objection would seem unanswered.

III. If this explanation is right, then the difficulty raised by John's disciples—though quite different from the Pharisees'—had a similar solution. John's disciples might recall that their master had won a readier hearing from publicans and sinners than from scribes and Pharisees, and that he had called some who came to his baptism a "generation of vipers." But was not his most obvious mark self-restraint, indifference to fleshly comforts? Would he not most wish his disciples to imitate that, even if it meant adopting the practices of the Pharisees? The new Teacher's eating and drinking seemed directly opposed to this. It was not so much the company that startled them as that a Teacher of righteousness should go to feasts at all. Why should fasting not mark His followers as it marked earlier schools? The first answer is, "The bridegroom is with them"—a strange expression for the head of a school, quite outside the associations such a role suggests. Yet it was no new idea to those who had read the forty-fifth Psalm, who had heard of a King delighting in the beauty of his promised Bride, riding on for truth and meekness and righteousness, and of her leaving her father's house to dwell with him. I do not now weigh the full force of these words. I only say that such language would inevitably make a Jew connect the one who used it of himself with ideas of royalty and divinity. His disciples could not fast because they had already reached the end fasting was meant to serve—the finding of the Lord and Ruler of their spirits. A time would come when they would feel deprived of Him, and then they would fast.

But the idea comes out more fully in the second part of the answer. No one has ever doubted that the old garment and old wineskins mean the institutions of the ancient order, and the new ones those Christ would establish. All have seen that our Lord meant, in some way, that it would be harmful merely to re-enact the old forms and customs until the substance and life beneath them had been revealed. But surely, unless His Kingdom was the everlasting Kingdom that all Jewish institutions had imperfectly displayed, these comparisons and the argument on them would not hold. He would be swapping new wineskins for old, not pressing out the wine to fill them. No more beautiful picture could be found of the claim that the Kingdom of God, once unfolded, would produce a clothing fitted to itself, and not merely keep the clothing it wore while still undeveloped. If that were not the Evangelists' meaning, then they used illustrations of the plainest, most natural kind with a most artificial and unreal significance.

#### THE APPOINTMENT OF THE APOSTLES.

*The passage:* Jesus called his twelve disciples and gave them power to cast out unclean spirits and to heal every kind of sickness. Their names are listed. He sent these twelve out with instructions: do not go to the Gentiles or into any Samaritan city, but go to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, preach that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, cleanse lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils; you received freely, so give freely. Carry no gold, silver, or brass, no bag, no second coat, no shoes, no staff — the workman deserves his food. When you enter a city or house, find who is worthy and stay there. Salute the house; if it is worthy, let your peace rest on it, and if not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not receive you or hear you, shake the dust off your feet as you leave.

This passage differs in a few details from the matching accounts in Mark and Luke. Both of them separate the calling of the Apostles from their being sent to work. Our Lord's commands are far more detailed in Matthew chapter ten than in Mark chapter six or Luke chapter nine, and Luke assigns some of them instead to the seventy disciples. But the words I have quoted — except those about the Gentiles and Samaritans — appear in all three. I need not labor how much importance the Evangelists attach to this commission; everyone feels and admits it. It would waste time to prove that our Lord constantly speaks to His Apostles as heralds of a Kingdom, as men entrusted with spiritual powers, as the founders of a society, as men whose immediate task was to prepare the way for far higher tasks given them later. Someone will say this is exactly what we would expect — a list of directions written after the fact. The Evangelists wrote knowing what the Apostles had done, and so read back into this scene events they themselves may have seen or been told of. What I want to point out is simply that this narrative fits exactly with all that came before. John the Baptist came announcing a Kingdom was near; our Lord preached that the Kingdom of Heaven was near; the twelve were sent with the same message. The Kingdom John announced was plainly a Kingdom over the human spirit — he said the one coming after him would baptize with the Spirit. All the acts by which Christ testified of His Kingdom were acts of spiritual power, of dominion over spirits, and the same powers are said to be given to the Apostles for the same purpose. Everything in the Evangelists — their tone, their deliberate words and their accidental ones, where they agree and where they differ — shows a settled conviction that they are describing the acts of a Ruler: One who had ruled in the past and would give mightier proof of His rule to come, who had called out the twelve tribes as His national witnesses, and who was now preparing men to represent those tribes and carry their purpose to all the families of the earth. There is no wavering on this point, no lapse into some other idea; it is the assumption running through the whole narrative — never forced on us anywhere, yet felt everywhere.

#### THE SABBATH-DAY.

*The passage:* Jesus walked through the cornfields on the sabbath, and His hungry disciples plucked and ate ears of corn. The Pharisees objected that this was unlawful on the sabbath. Jesus answered: had they not read how David, when hungry, ate the shewbread reserved for the priests? And that the priests in the temple work on the sabbath yet are blameless? Here, He said, is One greater than the temple. Had they understood the words "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice," they would not have condemned the guiltless, for the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbath. Later, seeing a man with a withered hand, they asked whether it was lawful to heal on the sabbath, hoping to accuse Him. He replied that any of them would lift a sheep out of a pit on the sabbath — and a man is worth more than a sheep — so it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.

The stories of the cornfields and the man with the withered hand appear in all three Evangelists. Each stresses these and other Pharisee complaints about Jesus neglecting the sabbath, and all present this as the first great provocation that led them to plot His destruction. Mark says this was when Jesus looked round on them with anger, grieved at their hard hearts. Luke returns to the theme repeatedly — in his fourth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters. Given how brief the Gospels are, it is striking how much room they give this subject, and how necessary they felt it was to showing what Jesus' life was. But why should that be? The sabbath was one of the most memorable Jewish institutions. If the Pharisees observed it to extravagant excess, we might have expected a great teacher to warn also of the opposite danger, the laxity the Sadducees were probably prone to. This was not a mere tradition of the elders but a positive commandment, like honoring father and mother. Yet the whole weight of Jesus' example and authority seems thrown onto the side of permission and toleration — the side we would think already heaviest.

"The Son of Man," says Matthew, "is Lord also of the sabbath-day." "The sabbath was made for man," says Mark, "not man for the sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath." Luke repeats these last words, tying them directly to David eating the shewbread. Here the Evangelists themselves explain why they weigh these dialogues so heavily. He who had instituted the sabbath, and to whom it had borne witness, had come to claim His own dominion over it and to declare what He had meant by it. The Pharisees denied that lordship and set aside that meaning entirely. Their fault was not an error of excess but a fatal contradiction of the whole nature of this commandment, and of every commandment. They had no sense that the sabbath was made for man; so how could they feel the force of "Thou shalt rest, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the stranger that is within thy gates"? The Pharisee cared nothing for the servant or the stranger; he cared only for the day itself, stripped bare of all its life, and to it the servant and the stranger were to be sacrificed. How then could such men see the Son of Man — who came as King and Deliverer of servants and strangers — as Lord of this day? How could they welcome a Person come with such a purpose, when their whole spirit was fixed on the husk of the institution? I say the husk, not the letter, for they could not read the letter. The letter witnessed against them: it spoke of the relation between man and God, of God sharing man's labor and man sharing God's rest — the very truth they denied when they called Christ a blasphemer. All the hidden inhumanity and real atheism of the Pharisee lay wrapped up in his feelings about the sabbath. No wonder they plotted against Christ for the acts and words that exposed those feelings; no wonder the holiest anger was roused by men turning God's commandment into a practical denial of Him. But all this profound morality, this assertion of the very principle the Pharisees were undermining, becomes meaningless if the Gospels are not what they claim to be: throughout, the history of a Son of God and a King of Men.

#### THE PARABLES.

Almost the whole of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew is given to our Lord's parables. Many more appear in later chapters; Mark records only a few. Nothing so distinguishes Luke from the other two Evangelists as his choice of parables. Three are found in all three Gospels: the Sower, the Mustard-seed, and the Lord of the vineyard and the husbandmen.

I intend to examine each of these, together with as much of the surrounding text as all the Evangelists thought needed to explain them.

I. In every Gospel the Sower is treated as a specimen of this way of teaching, and its explanation is tied to the reason for speaking in parables. So it deserves close attention. From it we may learn whether our Lord's teaching confirms or weakens the conclusion we drew from His baptism, temptation, miracles, and arguments with opponents. We may begin with His answer to the disciples' question prompted by this parable, "Why speakest Thou unto them in parables?" — "Because unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but unto them it is not given."

These words link the parables to the phrase we have met so often, "the kingdom," which so far has kept a fixed meaning. But here for the first time the word "mysteries" is joined to "kingdom." Joined how? Were the Apostles not to preach the kingdom of God? Was what their Master told them about it secret knowledge, meant only for themselves or for a circle of initiates they would gather? If so, the use of parables could not be squared with the rest of the record — and no charge of pretence or self-glorification laid on the Evangelists would ease that difficulty. Everywhere else they present their Master, in contrast to the learned Jewish doctors, as the Teacher of the poor and ignorant. Here they would be needlessly confessing that they had received special private instruction, which in the same breath they were foolishly making public. And the discourse itself makes this view still harder to hold. The interpretation of the Sower was plainly what they were to make their hearers know *by every possible means*. They were taught the obstacles that keep the Word from taking root and bearing fruit, precisely so they could warn others. He speaks in parables because the people cannot receive His lesson any other way. The thing is hidden from them, and His discourse tells why it is hidden, where the veil lies, and how and by whom it was drawn. The people's own inner life was hidden from them because their hearts had grown gross and their ears dull. The hidden work going on within them was just what they could not perceive. The rule exercised over their own hearts could only be shown them through the outward things their eyes were used to — and even those they saw poorly, often not at all. It was a revelation to remind them of the secret processes by which seed becomes stalk, ear, and full corn. The natural world was almost as a landscape to a blind man's eye; yet they could not be wholly unaware of facts they handled daily. They might be awakened to notice these, to see an order in the familiar works of nature and of man, and thence to discover an order and dominion nearer still to themselves, working always for their discipline and deliverance.

Those, on the other hand, who were groping, however confusedly, for the light that most concerned themselves — who cared less for the earth and its seeds than to be freed from their ignorance and made right and true within, hearts craving guidance, seeking a resting-place, children crying for a Father — these had an immediate hold on the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; to them it was given to know them. The others saw those mysteries only cast outward into the visible world.

Some such view of these words is, I think, the usual one. I do not want to offer anything new, but only to show how exactly it fits and carries out the idea of a Kingdom whose first and highest work is in man's inner being, but which reaches into every part of his life, through society, and through the whole intellectual and living universe. Suppose the actual King of men had come to make plain the nature of His government — to show what rule He had been exercising over them and to what ends, how it was thwarted, and why they did not perceive it; and suppose that King of men were also King of nature, the Creator and Lord of the world in which man lives, who made that world especially for man, set him at its centre, and ordered it by laws that show themselves fully only as they bear on man's character and acts — then we should see why the Sower is the key to all parables, why it sets forth a mystery of the kingdom of heaven and at the same time a mystery of the kingdom of earth, why it belongs to each man's life and is closely bound to the history of the race.

That the Son of Man plants His word in a voluntary being who can stop it from having its natural effect — this is the plain doctrine of the parable. The matching fact in nature is that someone puts seed in ground whose qualities may make it barren. In both cases we are reminded that fruitfulness is the law and barrenness the anomaly, the result of some perversity — yet a perversity likely to appear, and needing a power beyond the human or natural subject to remove it. Each is meant to receive that power and submit to it; then its hidden capacities are unfolded, and in due season the results become visible. In both the processes are secret and orderly; in both the failure comes from the productive power not reaching deep enough; in both what finally appears on the surface looks quite unlike its cause. Hold these great landmarks of the discourse together in your mind, and you reach such a sense of the reality of the distinction and the resemblance between the two great spheres of our universe as no definition or philosophical scheme can give. And you feel at the same time that these spheres must be under a Person's authority, that "Kingdom" applies to them literally, not by metaphor, and that no other word could replace it without being feeble and awkward.

II. I said the Sower concerns the life of the race as well as the individual. If it is the history of the Divine Will working on human wills, it cannot be confined to particular experiences; the history of man must be in it. Still, I readily grant the common feeling that it bears less obviously on the movements and growth of human society than some other parables. The Mustard-seed I gladly admit is, as commonly said, a prophecy of the future unfolding of the Church as a whole. But note that the character of this unfolding is essentially the same as before. The mustard-tree was not the greatest or stateliest of trees; its size is not the point. The point is clearly the growth, first of a herb, then of a tree, out of the smallest of seeds. Underground processes are implied here too. The Apostles had already heard the Sower and taken in something of its spirit; they would apply its interpretation here as well, supposing that this seed, like the corn, was sown and watched by a Divine husbandman, planted in human spirits, and that these were somehow brought into such unity that they could be pictured as one great tree with many branches. I do not suppose elaborate reasoning went on in the minds of Galilean fishermen. The beauty of this teaching was that no such reasoning was needed: the natural image joined to their inner experience took its place. The Divine Teacher had already written His lessons on the visible world; He had only to open His disciples' eyes to read them there. The one tree with its branches, and the birds lodging in them, though only an imperfect picture of spiritual unity and its diverse living forms, came far closer to that reality than any school discussions of unity could. The image showed that no artificial combination of persons and wills — like no combination of leaves and branches — could produce the oneness; it must have a root beneath the soil, an original unity as the ground of the diversity, not its result. So the Mustard-seed shows the kingdom of heaven under a new aspect, yet with the same essential mark: there is One who rules, in whom it consists, from whose secret life all its varied energies come.

III. Still, one element of the Gospel narratives seems missing from both these parables. The sower is said to be the Son of Man; the mustard-seed's growth is a kingdom's growth, implying a king. But is this Son of Man, this King of men, the Son of God? Can we say such a person is declared the source of all the agencies at work in human society and in nature? There is a third parable common to the three Evangelists, which each stresses strongly as the one that struck most directly at the consciences of the chief priests and scribes, which they felt was aimed at them, and which stirred them to seek revenge. A vineyard was let to husbandmen; the owner sent servant after servant to ask for the fruits; one was beaten, another stoned. Last he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But the husbandmen said, "This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and seize his inheritance," and they cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. When the owner comes, what will he do to them? They answer that he will destroy those wicked men and let the vineyard to others who will render the fruits in their seasons. Jesus then asks them whether they had never read, "The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."

This passage, you will see, agrees strikingly with all we have already considered. (1) A Son comes after a succession of servants, yet it is plainly meant that the Son was before the servants. The first agent in all God's works declared Himself last; the power to whom all the rest were subordinate, and from whom they came, was revealed. (2) He came, like those before Him, to seek the fruits of the vineyard — or, as our Lord interprets it, to see whether those entrusted with the kingdom of God were worthy of the trust. (3) The crowning act of rebellion sprang from wanting to claim the inheritance. The husbandmen would not acknowledge the Son because they would not acknowledge a Father. They wished to seize as their own what belonged to Him, which they could hold only as the son held it — by faith in Him, by renouncing themselves. (4) So this parable, like John's preaching, like our Lord's own preaching, His discourses, and His miracles, looks forward to a judgment near at hand, declaring that the axe is laid to the root of the tree, and that, bearing no good fruit, it will be hewn down and burned. The more we look into these parables — those found in the first three Gospels but not the fourth — the more the truth comes home that the Evangelists' first aim was not to show us a human teacher with a set of maxims and examples, but to declare a King of men and a Son of God, who came to reveal the kingdom implied in the Jewish kingdom, and to overthrow the one by establishing the other.

#### HEROD HEARING OF CHRIST.

*The passage:* At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the reports about Jesus and told his servants: this is John the Baptist, risen from the dead, and that is why these mighty works are at work in him.

This announcement, with some variations, appears in all three of the first Evangelists; in the first two the story of John's death is added to it. I bring it in because I do not want to pass over any passage the three share, even if it seems trivial. I do not think this one is trivial, especially when it is joined to a passage we shall meet shortly, and to some we shall look at later in the fourth Gospel. The question of the relation between our Lord and John the Baptist bears in a striking way on the history of early Christian opinions, and touches closely on our subject. I will say no more of it here, except this: Herod's wish to connect Christ with John, or with some old Prophet, shows the restless fear that ran through his whole family—the fear that the teacher might turn out to be a king. They would happily let the people entertain any notion, even the loftiest, about a favorite teacher, so long as it spared them that dangerous alternative.

#### THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN.

*The passage:* The Pharisees and Sadducees came to test Jesus, asking Him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered that they could read the sky — red at evening means fair weather, red and lowering in the morning means storms — yet they could not read the signs of the times. He called them hypocrites: a wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, and none will be given it but the sign of the prophet Jonah. Then He left them. Mark records the same event, adding that Jesus sighed deeply and asked why this generation seeks a sign, saying none would be given it. Luke gives the corresponding words, that as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so shall the Son of Man be to this generation.

This matter of signs comes up so often, and the Evangelists stress it so strongly, that it deserves careful thought. The Pharisees clearly believed they were asking for a proof quite unlike anything Jesus had already given them. Healing the sick and casting out devils did not count, in their minds, as adequate proof of His power. It showed He had *some* power, but was it power from *heaven*? To settle that, there had to be a visible token in the *heavens* showing He came from there and drew His power from there. This is the crucial test that reveals what they thought heaven was. However their rabbis divided the first, second, and third heaven, all of these had the same sense-bound character. However they condemned heathen idolatry, they were themselves worshipping a mere God of nature, a cloud-driver, as much as any Greek did. What they wanted was a visible sign in a visible sky; that alone counted with them as a sign from God. Must not He who came preaching the Kingdom of heaven, His Father's Kingdom, have sighed deeply when the very people chosen from all nations to witness to the true God showed they could no longer recognize any God but a God of the senses? His words say exactly what that sigh meant: a wicked and adulterous generation seeks a sign — a generation wholly given over to the senses and to self, unable to look on heaven except as a shadow cast by the earth, which alone seemed to them real. And the words "no sign shall be given them but the sign of Jonah the prophet" match exactly what we have found in the preaching of the Baptist and of Jesus. Whatever else the sign of Jonah may mean, its first and plainest sense is the one these passages give, the one Matthew and Luke put forward most prominently, and the one that explains Mark's flat "no sign" — for if the only sign given was Jonah's, then no sign would be given in the sense the Pharisees wanted. Jonah came preaching repentance to the Ninevites, calling them to turn from their evil ways or see their long-standing city destroyed. That marked him as a prophet from heaven. The people accepted him because he spoke to their consciences and exposed their evil. The scribes and Pharisees would not accept *this* mark of a prophet. The other kind of sign would come to them in due time: there would be signs in heaven and earth that the city of David was to be left desolate, a horror and a hissing to all peoples. This discourse about signs is thus important for showing the purpose of the three Evangelists, and for showing how far they were from being the crude materialists that the clever men of our day suppose them to have been.

#### THE LEAVEN OF THE SECTS.

*The passage:* Jesus warned His disciples to take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

The warning is reported somewhat differently in each Gospel. Matthew names the Pharisees and Sadducees. Mark (chap. ix. ver. 15) names "the leaven of the Pharisees and of the leaven of Herod." Luke (chap. xii. ver. 1) speaks of only one sect: "Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy." In Matthew and Mark the warning is tied to the disciples' having forgotten to bring bread; they imagined He was afraid of poison. In Luke the words belong to a general discourse, and the reason given is that nothing covered will stay hidden, but all will be revealed and known.

The word "leaven" might naturally have suggested to the disciples a suspicion that was not wholly groundless, given what they knew of these sects' practices and their special malice against Jesus. Yet the use of the word in their own Scriptures, read in light of the Passover, should have shown them—had they entered into their Master's spirit—that this was not the meaning He most likely intended. He rebukes them directly for not trusting Him to give them the bread they needed, after all the proof of His power they had seen; and He rebukes them by implication for seeing nothing in its inward meaning and everything in its coarse, fleshly sense. In doing so He also makes clearer what mixture the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians all introduced into their teaching, however sharply they differed and opposed one another. The Pharisee's leaven was especially, as Luke says, hypocrisy. Ordinary bread is leavened, yet leaven is thought to make it less pure—it gives the other elements consistency, but in a sense by destroying their proper qualities. So the Pharisee mixed the earthly with the heavenly until the whole substance was changed. God's Law and Covenant were meant to separate a man from his evil nature and bring him under a new principle; the Pharisee instead fused the Law and Covenant with that evil nature, using its motives and tendencies to hold together the maxims of the Divine Law and make it work. So his whole life, outwardly consistent, became one great practical contradiction. He was an actor. A mask made in imitation of the true, living, divine Form took its place. His inner being died a little more each day, because what should have kept it alive had itself been turned into the instrument of its destruction. To the Pharisee the words applied above all: what is hidden shall be known, what is covered shall be revealed. The secret ground of his heart, the inner man growing ever more unknown to itself, buried under outward practices and hidden by fleshly desires and religious self-deceit, would be brought into the open. The man would be exposed to himself, and by his evil acts to the world; and a clear line would be drawn between the divine bread he had defiled and the leaven he had mixed into it. All this fit the Pharisee most exactly—he was emphatically *the* hypocrite, since no other sect recognized, and so perverted, divine spiritual principles in the same way or degree. But the Sadducee and the Herodian were each, in his own way, also leavening the divine food given for the nourishment of themselves and all Israel. The one did it with the maxims of merely earthly, prudential morality, the other with the rules of state-expediency, both turning God's righteousness into a human system useless for guiding men, serving their pride, and favoring dishonesty. They too were hypocrites, though not religious ones like the Pharisee. Each had a reputation to keep up—the Sadducee for wisdom and freedom from vulgar prejudice, the Herodian for political shrewdness and for wanting to preserve Jewish custom and religion alongside submission to the Cæsars. Each tried to blend contradictions, to reconcile the traditions of their fathers with their own narrow, corrupt, grovelling aims. This was the leaven the disciples had to beware of. It belonged to no single sect or opinion, but was sure to debase anyone who did not take pains to shut it out; no notions or practices guarded against it. They could be saved from it only by remembering that they had a Lawgiver and King always with them, who was working to separate the chaff from the wheat—the part of them that wanted truth from the part that clung to earth and nature, the divine seed from the evil seed an enemy had sown in their hearts.

#### PETER'S CONFESSION.

*The passage:* When Jesus came to the region of Cæsarea Philippi, He asked His disciples what people said He, the Son of Man, was. They answered that some said John the Baptist, some Elias, some Jeremias or one of the prophets. Then He asked what they themselves said He was, and Peter answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." All three Evangelists give nearly the same account. In Mark the answer is simply "Thou art the Christ"; in Luke, "Thou art the Christ of God." All three agree that He then charged His disciples to tell no one that He was the Christ.

No one can doubt how much weight each Evangelist gives this story, and I think there is little disagreement about its main meaning. As all the Gospels indicate — Matthew most clearly — Peter had somehow reached a conviction that the people generally did not share, even those who thought most highly of Jesus. They could believe He was a prophet, or a miraculous figure, or someone long dead returned, or John the Baptist raised with new powers. But the idea of a Son of God, the Christ of God, had not occurred to them; they could not say He was this. And the disciples were told not to make it known — He strictly charged them not to. Why? Was it not the very purpose of John the Baptist, and of the miracles, parables, and life of Jesus, to declare the Christ? Yes — to declare the King who was ruling *invisibly* over men's hearts and spirits. So while He was visibly present, He was not to be *proclaimed* as the Christ; announcing it that way would have lost the whole power and mystery of the words. In acts of healing love, in the Gospel to the poor, in His smallest acts, in His face, the truth came out as truth. Turned into a bare proposition and offered to carnal hearts, it would have been turned outward and made false. The time for that form would come later, when the preacher's main message would be "Jesus is the Christ." For now the message was "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," and the disciple was to make the nature of that kingdom felt. To do more would be to set up the kingdom of a Herod or a Cæsar, not of a Christ. One can see how well Matthew's words fit this — "Flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven" — and equally how the rebuke fits, "Get thee behind me, Satan; for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men," spoken when the same Peter showed he still could not reconcile the King with the sufferer. I will not go into the famous words about the rock, since they belong only to Matthew, nor dwell on the rebuke of Peter, since Luke does not mention it. I say this much because the very next passage, common to all three and linked by them all to the question at Cæsarea Philippi, holds the essence of that rebuke. I hope I have shown, without adding anything new to the usual explanation, that these three Evangelists were possessed by the sense that the Kingdom they spoke of was, in the highest sense, spiritual, and that they never thought of Jesus as anything other than the Son of God.

#### TAKING UP THE CROSS.

*The passage:* Jesus told His disciples that anyone who would follow Him must deny himself, take up his cross, and come after Him. Whoever tries to save his life will lose it; whoever loses his life for Christ's sake will find it. What good is it to gain the whole world and lose your own soul? What could a man trade for his soul? For the Son of Man will come in His Father's glory with His angels, and reward each person according to what he has done. And some standing there would not die before they saw the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom. The three Evangelists agree here more closely than almost anywhere else. The only notable differences are that in Matthew Jesus speaks to His disciples, in Mark He calls the crowd along with His disciples, and in Luke He speaks "to them all" — apparently meaning the disciples; and that Mark and Luke add here the important words, "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed," words that had already appeared in a slightly different form in Matthew's tenth chapter.

No passage is quoted more often than this, as though it were a stand-alone maxim or proverb; but I think its meaning can hardly be grasped if we forget where it stands in all the Gospels — between Peter's confession and the Transfiguration. It is striking how each Gospel brings in the title Son of *Man* right after the declaration, "Thou art the Son of *God*." This shows, more plainly than any words could, the very nature of our Lord's own self-denial, and so points to what He asks of His followers. He accepts His Apostle's confession as true and rejoices in it; yet at that very moment He shows that the glory of the Son of God consists in giving up all self-subsisting greatness, in choosing to have nothing of His own, in sharing man's sufferings and death. How this fits with the story of the Temptation, and how it bears on the Baptism, will, I think, commend itself to everyone's conscience. But the point I chiefly want to press is the difference between the morality of the passage seen this way and the morality of it taken as an independent maxim that tells Christ's disciples to look after their souls and count nothing so precious as themselves. No one who reveres Him can deny that obeying His words in their fullest sense saves the soul, and forgetting them loses it. But we must not overlook His actual language in order to reach that result faster by a notion of our own. This very passage says that whoever saves his soul shall lose it. I will not settle how we ought to render ψυχή; but I do say that however we read it in one part of the passage, we must read it the same way in another. We cannot make it animal life where He speaks of losing it, and something wholly different, even opposite, where He speaks of saving it. In some sense He tells us that everything belonging to us — animal life, intellectual life, spiritual life, our very selves — must be given up and lost if we would have it saved, and if we would be His disciples. To use this passage as a ground for constantly urging men simply to seek the safety of their souls involves a dangerous contradiction, and risks setting aside both the letter and the spirit of the command. But if the whole context is kept in view — if Christ, the King of men and the Son of God, is truly seen as the great self-denier, not because these glories were not His but because they were, and because He could only assert and display them by glorifying His Father and giving up Himself — then the self-denial of His disciples is seen to consist likewise in giving up everything that is individually theirs, owning it as wholly their Lord's, realized, possessed, and enjoyed only in Him.

#### THE TRANSFIGURATION.

*The passage:* Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun and His clothes became as white as light. Moses and Elijah appeared, talking with Him. Peter said, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, let me build three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah." While he spoke, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear Him." The disciples fell on their faces in fear, but Jesus touched them and said, "Arise, do not be afraid." When they looked up they saw only Jesus.

However hard commentators have worked to fit the Gospels into schemes of passovers and journeys to and from Galilee, they have not been able to miss that this event, supernatural as it is, is one of the great landmarks in the three Evangelists—one all of them felt bound to record, and which they saw not as standing apart from the history but as explaining both what comes before and what follows. No wonder the follower of Strauss seizes on such an event as proof that myth is mixed with ordinary earthly narrative. On his starting assumption it must simply be discarded as having nothing to do with the life of Jesus of Nazareth—only one of those grand inventions by which the human spirit has expressed its sense of its own dignity and deified itself. But anyone who has followed my inquiry so far will ask whether every narrative we have looked at does not rest on the same principle as this one, and must stand or fall with it. And anyone who studies the narrative itself, without leaning toward either Strauss's scheme or mine, will ask whether the human spirit ever found so strange a way of expressing its reverence, for itself or for a hero, as what appears here. There is no pomp of words in any of the Gospels, no attempt to startle the reader by the writer's own excitement; the language is orderly, calm, plain to the point of bareness—yet it is such a description as the greatest painters have felt held an awe they scarcely dared to render. The vision is preceded by words of humiliation and nothingness and followed by words and acts of the same kind; in its outward form it is fleeting, almost momentary, leaving behind only the words heard at the Baptism, "This is my beloved Son," and those other words showing that His Word, which spoke to the inward heart, was mightier and more divine than the face shining like the sun or the garments shining like light—indeed, that it was the invisible, inward glory that produced the change in the bodily form which the eye could hardly bear. If this passage were one of the exaggerated departures from the ordinary story that Strauss supposes, it is strange that the crude, blundering Galileans, the earthly, sense-bound Hebrew, managed to keep so entirely to the style of ordinary speech and to avoid all inflation; stranger still that the writer seems afraid to linger on this outward manifestation, and eager to show that the greatness of the Son of God rested on higher proofs than these. But if we grant that the purpose of all these narratives is to set forth the Son of God—declared throughout as possessing a power that begins in the innermost region and is meant to spread through to the most outward and sensible, renewing the human form and at last the whole earth with the heavenly life poured into it—then to omit a passage like this would be a mark of weakness and incompleteness; the heart would look for something it did not find, and the Gospels would not truly be Gospels of the Kingdom of God.

#### THE EPILEPTIC BOY.

*The passage:* A man knelt before Jesus, begging mercy for his son, who was lunatic and badly afflicted, often falling into fire or water. The man had brought the boy to the disciples, but they could not cure him. Jesus said, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him here to me." He rebuked the devil, it left the boy, and the child was cured from that hour.

Raphael's fine instinct saw at once that this event had to be joined with the very different scene we have just discussed. He felt that both the unity of place and the unity of time had to be given up for the sake of a deeper and more mysterious unity that all three Evangelists had seen — the unity that made them set the earthly crowd and the faithless disciples at the foot of the mountain as part of the same picture with the still and awful scene at its top. If the painter broke the formal rules of his art, he did so, I think, in obedience to a higher principle of art — not to make a glaring contrast, but to give reality to our sense of the Transfiguration and to connect it with ourselves. This was his daring experiment. All rules of art rest, I suppose, on some ground deeper than themselves, which they point to but cannot reach. And the theological truth embodied in this meeting of opposites lies at the very heart of Christianity: a truth words cannot express, seen fully only in the life of Christ, which we can grasp even faintly only when we acknowledge that the one who suffers alongside man and delivers man is, first and in His inmost being, the well-beloved Son of God. This illustration of the principle I am pressing is too remarkable to leave out. But since I have already spoken of our Lord's miracles in general, I have no reason to dwell on the details of this one, striking as its circumstances are.

#### PROPHECY OF THE PASSION.

*The passage:* While they were staying in Galilee, Jesus told them that the Son of Man would be handed over to men, who would kill Him, and that on the third day He would rise again. And they were very sorrowful.

Connected with this narrative is another of Christ's prophecies of His death and resurrection, kept by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and apparently placed by all of them at the same time. The words of all three evangelists — St. Mark and St. Luke even more than St. Matthew — leave no doubt that they saw the Transfiguration as the appointed prelude, not to a single discourse, but to a whole series of discourses on this subject; that from this point on it became the main theme of our Lord's teaching among His own disciples; and that this prepared them for His final entrance into Jerusalem. Anyone who compares the brief passages about this period will, I think, agree that even for the chronology of the Gospels they are the most important we can find. I do not claim to shed any light on that chronology, but I am convinced the light must come from where commentators have looked for it least — from the parts of the narrative that are most plainly supernatural and heavenly.

#### THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

*The passage:* The disciples came to Jesus and asked who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. He called a little child, set him among them, and said that unless they turned and became like little children they would not enter the Kingdom; whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest, and whoever receives one such child in his name receives him.

The same conversation appears in Mark, at the ninth chapter, verse thirty-three, where the occasion is put a little differently: in the house Jesus asked what they had been disputing on the road, and they were silent, because they had argued which of them should be greatest. Luke, in the ninth chapter, verse forty-six, follows Mark with a slight change: a reasoning arose among them about who should be greatest, and Jesus, perceiving the thought of their hearts, took a child. In Matthew the discourse begins from the child's face and winds on for some time; in Mark and Luke it is soon broken off by John's words, that they had seen someone casting out devils in Jesus' name and had forbidden him. References both to the disciples' dispute and to the subject itself occur often in the Evangelists—one very memorable instance in Luke's account of the Paschal Supper. But the face of the child shows that these three narratives refer to the same conversation, even where details of time and place do not agree.

John, our Lord, and the disciples he sent out had all proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Anyone would expect such an announcement to work powerfully on those who heard it, and still more on those who had spoken it: the Kingdom has been at hand a long while—is it not now actually coming? The Transfiguration, preceded by the words that some standing there would not taste death till they saw the Kingdom of God coming with power, must have greatly heightened the expectation of its speedy appearance, and the warnings about their Master's rejection and death, which the Apostles could not understand, would hardly quiet it. So everyone has seen in the Gospels signs of a growing impatience in the disciples to know when the promise would be fulfilled and what their own places would be when the new reign began. And nearly everyone has seen that our Lord's discourses, especially once he set his face toward Jerusalem, were aimed at just this feeling. But the point most worth noting is that he never once changes the language he had used before. He never suggests that it is not a Kingdom in the strict ordinary sense that he has come to set up. He only frees his Apostles from certain common but perfectly natural notions about a kingdom, which they shared with most of their countrymen—Pharisees as much as Publicans—and with most people in every age and land. They tied to the idea of a kingdom the triumph of the few over the many, rivalry among those few, and the dominance of one. These have indeed always been the accidents of earthly kingdoms, but they were its destructive accidents. No kingdom ever lasted by the ambition of the few, the weakness of the many, the rivalry of the great, or the eventual tyranny of the shrewd or lucky chief. It lasted by its power to resist these forces, which were always working to overthrow it, by the higher impulses stirring even in selfish citizens and leading them to seek its good at the cost of their own. If the rule of a single tyrant was felt to be better than the anarchy leading to it, that is because the tyrant was less selfish than the crowd, did more work for the whole, was more its servant. So the law that the greatest of all is the servant of all had really been the law of all society, implied in its very existence; all wrong came from breaking it. The eagerness to break it, to treat it as the principle of human fellowship, was precisely the lie of the evil nature and the evil spirit, the thing that all tyranny and falsehood lived upon, and the thing the Son of God must come to cast out. So when he took a child and set him among his disciples, he did not say he was founding a kingdom to be called the kingdom of Jesus, or the Christian kingdom, which could set itself up and boast that it was unlike all kingdoms and came to overthrow them. He said, in keeping with all he had said before, that he came to reveal the kingdom lying beneath all other kingdoms and implied in the existence of all; that the true King, who is the true servant of all, had appeared to show what he was and what his government meant, and to make some of those who rule under him aware of their own true position—that true rule means subjection, that selfish rivalry is a contradiction—and so ready to feel with him that becoming little children, giving up supremacy, and owning their weakness is the one way to make the government he exercises through them feared, loved, and obeyed.

#### DIVORCE.

*The passage:* Anyone who divorces his wife (except for unfaithfulness) and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries a woman so divorced commits adultery.

This saying is joined in Matthew and Mark to a discussion of marriage; in Luke it comes, strikingly, between the parable of the unjust steward and that of Dives and Lazarus. I may look later, when I treat the differences among the Evangelists, at how it relates to those discourses. Here I only note that in all three the Pharisees prompted the remark, and that in all three it bears on the nature and purpose of the Law. In two of them the Pharisees say Moses allowed a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away; and Jesus answers that Moses gave this rule because of the hardness of their hearts, but that from the beginning it was not so. Luke reports it differently: the Law and the Prophets were until John, and since then the kingdom of God is preached and everyone presses into it; it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one small stroke of the law to fail — and then the words about divorce follow.

So this is plainly set out as a striking case that shows the relation between the Law of Moses and the Kingdom of Heaven. The Pharisees, who often charged Jesus with relaxing the Law, here suspected that in this one matter He made it stricter. He does not deny it. He condemns the use of a privilege they had allowed themselves and that Moses had permitted. And He does this in exact agreement with the principle He had laid down about the sabbath, where He was so often accused of laxity. There was no laxity in either case. He asserted the true idea and principle of the sabbath, as expressed in the commandment itself, and insisted that keeping this meaning was essential to keeping the commandment: forget the meaning and the day was not kept, even if no ear of corn was plucked. In the same way He asserted the principle and meaning of marriage, which was assumed in the very law that sanctioned divorce. The permission was granted for their hard hearts — a measure for an evil emergency, which the Pharisees, mistaking mere decrees and statutes for laws, had confused with one of the primary and inviolable institutions of human life. People were pressing into the Kingdom of Heaven, hoping to find an easier yoke than the letter-worshippers had laid on them. They would find it easier, because it was the yoke the human heart and spirit were made to wear — a yoke that is the pledge of freedom, not of servitude. They would not find it easier if they were looking for mere licenses and exemptions. It would not cause one small stroke of the Law to fail. It brought to light, re-established, and set on its deepest foundation all that belonged to the true order of humanity. The right actions that laws, in their weakness, could not compel would come forth from the life of the Lawgiver; and the irregularities the Law was forced to tolerate He would undermine.

#### BLESSING THE LITTLE CHILDREN.

*The passage:* People brought little children to Jesus so that He might lay His hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said to let the children come to Him and not to hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. He laid His hands on them and went away.

There is a sentimental interest that has gathered around this record, and I would be sorry to see it stripped away, though I wish it rested on something more solid. People think all the Evangelists felt bound to include it because it was such a proof of the human sympathy and tenderness of Jesus. And so it was; the higher our idea of Him, the more precious every such token of His real humanity becomes. But we have no right to read into these writers a purpose other than their own words state. They tell us He said, "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." It is because He said this that the incident deserves a place in the record of the life of the Son of God on earth. Blessing little children was part of the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven. That Kingdom would consist of such — not of men putting on the airs of children, pretending to become children by giving up the intellectual powers of men, pretending to be simple and so being, at the deepest level, artificial: without a child's frankness, openness, or trust, full of craft and subtlety because they will not and dare not be manly. Not such, but real little children, ready to receive, opening every avenue of the spirit to receive, full of wonder, aware of their own ignorance, craving knowledge and light, believing that all treasures are meant for them — the treasures of earth and heaven, even the infinite wisdom and love of God Himself. As has often been said, the man of the deepest science is, and must be, a little child: he must stop seeing himself reflected in the things around him and be content to see everything as it reveals itself by its own light, not as measured and colored by his. Of such, then, must the Kingdom of Heaven be — only those who can take everything as a gift, who think of the object rather than their own seeing or believing, of Him who works in them rather than their own acts, can be true brethren and fellow-citizens of Him who did not glorify Himself, but His Father who sent Him.

#### THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH MAN.

*The passage:* A man came to Jesus asking what good thing he must do to have eternal life. Jesus asked why he called Him good, since only God is good, and told him that to enter life he must keep the commandments. Asked which, Jesus named the commands against murder, adultery, theft, and false witness, and to honor parents and love one's neighbor. The young man said he had kept all these from his youth and asked what he still lacked. Jesus told him that to be perfect he should sell what he had, give to the poor, and follow Him, and he would have treasure in heaven. Hearing this, the man went away sorrowful, for he was rich. Jesus then told His disciples that a rich man can hardly enter the kingdom of heaven — easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye. The amazed disciples asked who then could be saved, and Jesus said that what is impossible for man is possible for God.

The three Evangelists agree closely in reporting this meeting and what followed. Readers have always felt it holds an important place in the Gospel history. Much has been said about it, but its meaning is not exhausted; it still repays examination in its context and its details.

Most people must have noticed the link between the way the young man framed his question and the weakness Jesus exposed in him. "What good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life?" was exactly the thought of a man used to measuring everything by market standards, who naturally used market language even about life and the kingdom of heaven. Jesus' reply, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but One," was aimed at this state of mind. He seized on a phrase the man used only conventionally to set before him what he really needed, something no market standard could measure: God alone is good; to know Him is the life you seek. But how is that life obtained? Here came another humbling lesson: you already have the commandments, given for this very end. They point out the things that keep you from knowing God, the acts and tendencies that put you at a distance from Him. Keep them, hold them fast, shape yourself by them, and you will be on the way to knowing their Giver, the true Good, the true Life. But the man had kept them all from his youth. Was that a false boast? We are not told so; everything points the other way. He had kept them, but not with a view to the end Jesus set before him. He had kept them habitually, by instinct; and as he grew more purposeful, he kept them hoping for a reward. He thought obeying them would buy him blessings in a future life, or rescue him from its punishments — yet he felt more was needed for security. He never put it plainly to himself that he was bargaining with God; his gentle, gracious mind would have recoiled from such words. That was his misfortune: he did not see his own case clearly. He lived in a dim twilight, unaware of his own feelings, ignorant how entirely his idea of heaven was shaped by his earthly circumstances. So he was willing to give something over and above keeping the commandments, to make his claim to that dreamed-of happiness — and his escape from the terrors his conscience spoke of — absolutely certain. Jesus took him at his word: you will give up much to gain heaven; then sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow me. You feel something hinders you from being all you ought and wish to be — you are right; there is such a hindrance, something that twists all your thoughts about right and good and gives them a false object. Give up the thing you love better than God, and you will know what He is; you will have treasure in heaven. Here was the test. He had never known what his heaven was; now he found out. The life he sought was earthly life, though he called it eternal — by "eternal" he meant the endless prolonging of the good he had here. The Evangelists do not tell us the outcome. But they give one cheering hint on which we may build likely guesses: he went away sad. He had come to know himself as never before, and to feel a discontent with himself he had never felt. Good may have come of that sadness. His past keeping of the commandments, and the gracious qualities that St. Mark says Jesus "beheld and loved," may not have been wasted. If he could not smash his own idol, God may have smashed it for him; or he may later have become one of those who called nothing their own and laid all their goods at the Apostles' feet. Of him we know nothing more. This fragment is recorded because Jesus grounded on it the saying, "How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of God." Why was it so hard? The Apostles were astonished, for who then could be saved? The rich man had time to give to God's service and money to help the poor. If he could not fulfil the duties and earn the prizes of the Divine Kingdom, who could? Their thoughts were perfectly natural — if the Kingdom of Heaven were not something wholly different from what the young ruler, and the Apostles at that time, supposed. But if it was the kingdom John had proclaimed, and that Jesus had shown in all His parables and miracles — a kingdom at hand, throned in the heart and spirit of every person, the reign of the Son of God over creatures made in His image — then it was certain that everything driving them to seek treasures in the outer world, rather than in Him, was a hindrance to acknowledging His rule, a hindrance man cannot overcome, though God can. And if the Kingdom is a universal one, open to people of every rank, then plainly the outward possessions that made one man think himself above another, and unwilling to stand among his brethren, were nearly insurmountable barriers. Unless the rich man could become poor in the most inward and essential sense, he could no more shrink to the size that fits through the narrow gate than a camel could pass through a needle's eye.

#### THE TEMPTATION OF THE POOR MAN.

*The passage:* Peter tells Jesus that they have left everything to follow Him, and asks what they will get for it. Jesus replies that those who have followed Him will, in the regeneration when the Son of Man sits on His throne of glory, sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Everyone who has left home, family, or lands for His Name's sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit everlasting life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

The words about the regeneration and the Son of Man on His throne of glory are found only in St. Matthew, and I will look at them later.

The exact wording of Peter's question, "What shall we have therefor?" also belongs only to St. Matthew, and this, I think, accounts for the differences in the rest of the passage. Much of the emphasis of Matthew's story clearly falls on the last verse, which becomes the text of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. St. Mark does not give Peter's demand the same selfish shape; he only says, "Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee." But since Mark had used that phrase in his 8th chapter, where Peter objected to the prophecy of Christ's humiliation and was sternly rebuked, I take it he meant nearly what the other Evangelists imply. So although Mark leaves out the parable, he still gives the words, "Many that are last shall be first, and the first last," in the same pointed way. St. Luke gives only "Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee," and omits "Many that are first shall be last." Those words appear instead in Luke's 13th chapter, in answer to the question whether few will be saved.

I could not fit these remarks in when speaking of the direct differences among the Evangelists. They help show how seemingly accidental omissions or additions, in accounts that are basically the same, bring out the meaning they share. From all four Evangelists there can be no doubt that our Lord meant to tell Peter that the blessing of those who truly left all for the Gospel could not be overstated: for them there were houses, lands, persecutions, friends, family, and everlasting life in store. But it is just as clear that while Peter was still asking "what shall we *have* therefor?" he himself had not left all. He was bargaining for wages, wanting to gain more than others by his sacrifices. At the end of the day, if that state of mind held, he would be angry when the great Householder gave those who he thought had worked less the same blessing as himself. So the lesson to the poor fishermen is essentially the same as the lesson to the rich ruler, and the two discourses cannot be separated. The disciples were still self-seekers as he was — in a measure, for no one can think they had followed Christ on a calculation. They were drawn after Him by a power, a love they could not resist; they clung to Him and lost themselves in Him, and so far they were already in seed what they later became. But the habit of mind belonging to their country, to the evil nature in every man, and fostered and almost embodied by pharisaic religion, still clung to them. Like the ruler, they still imagined that certain measurable sacrifices would secure a certain measurable happiness; the thinking of the marketplace had not left their view of eternal life. One great lesson comes from the way He answers them: the Divine teacher does not treat men's mistakes by the rule the great human teacher follows — that a stick bent one way must be bent the other. Instead, with both the ruler and His own disciples, He goes all the way with them. He grants that eternal life is gained by sacrifice, and only shows them that the selfishness of their minds is what makes real sacrifice impossible.

#### THE GOING UP TO JERUSALEM.

*The passage:* Going up to Jerusalem, Jesus took the twelve aside on the road and told them: we are going up to Jerusalem, where the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes; they will condemn Him to death, deliver Him to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged, and crucified, and on the third day He will rise again.

I have already discussed two announcements of the Passion, especially the one after the Transfiguration. But the passage that comes right after the conversation with the ruler and with Peter is introduced in all three Evangelists so pointedly—small phrases in each show how deeply it marked the disciples—that we cannot treat it as mere repetition of what came before. Here is the passage, in which Jesus tells the twelve on the road that they are going up to Jerusalem, where the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and scribes, condemned to death, handed to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged, and crucified, and will rise on the third day.

I want you to notice that each Evangelist puts the emphasis on the words, "Behold, we go up to Jerusalem."

Our Lord had already spoken of His passion and resurrection in connection with His own character as the Son of God. But there is another way they must be seen: in connection with the holy city and the people who would reject Him. St. Luke, perhaps, shows us more clearly than the others how constantly this thought was in our Lord's own mind. Yet the more carefully we study the other two as well, the more we find that they too regard the entry into Jerusalem as the crisis in the history of their nation, and therefore of all nations. They never lose sight, in their view of the great Deliverer, of an approaching judgment; they never forget that a baptism of the Holy Ghost is also to be a baptism of fire. We shall see how necessary this thought is when we come to the next step in the narrative.

#### THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES.

*The passage:* As Jesus and his disciples neared Jerusalem at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, he sent two disciples to fetch an ass and her colt from a nearby village, telling them to say "the Lord hath need of them." This fulfilled the prophet's words: tell the daughter of Zion, your King comes to you, meek, riding on an ass and a colt. The disciples brought the animals, laid their clothes on them, and set Jesus there. A great crowd spread garments and branches in the road, crying "Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." When he entered the city, all Jerusalem was stirred and asked who this was, and the crowd answered that it was Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.

This story appears in John's Gospel as well as in the first three; I set aside John's reasons for including it. Everyone feels how important a place it holds in the synoptic Gospels, and everyone sees that it describes a royal entrance into David's city — an entrance long prepared for, which even at the time the disciples, taking their cue from Jesus himself, regarded as the start of a series of great and solemn events. What this would bring him, why the man who had been only a prophet among Galilean fishermen should invite in his enemies' capital the vengeance he seemed to expect, why, if he had to enter the city, he did not more carefully than ever avoid anything that might rouse the Roman Governor's suspicion or hand the Pharisees a new pretext — all this the disciples might puzzle over in vain. But that this entry stood in close relation to that Kingdom of which all his parables had spoken and all his miracles had illustrated, they could not doubt. If he wanted them to think he was not a king, or a king only in some imaginary, figurative sense, why choose just this moment and this manner to leave an impression on their minds that later events could only deepen?

This is the sort of question we would naturally press on those who read the Gospels with full faith in their genuineness and inspiration, but treat them as the history of a Divine Teacher rather than of a Divine King. Those who take the Evangelists to be common men bound by their nation's superstition into believing that Jesus meant to depose the Caesars and restore David's line in Judea will of course seize on this passage as evidence. And they are entitled to whatever the most exact meaning of the words gives them; they may fairly demand that no vague, uncritical sense be put upon an event the writers clearly thought so important — the one they date their last and greatest period from. If, on close reading of these words from Matthew — the "Ebionite" Evangelist, the one said to retain, beneath all later editing and spiritualizing, the strongest marks of old Jewish materialism — anything is found inconsistent with the idea of a real, present kingdom, a kingdom that was the true fulfilment of David's, yet, precisely because real, present, immediate, Davidic, and Jewish, therefore in the deepest sense spiritual, lying at the root of things, existing in One who from the first had upheld all things by the word of his power; if there is one phrase in Matthew that under the hardest examination clashes with the impression his whole preceding history has left on us — then I grant not only that this story of the descent from the Mount of Olives is itself perplexing, but that it throws all that comes before and after it into confusion.

But there is no such word. Everything here is royal, yet none of the trappings of royalty are present. He calls for the ass, and its owner feels it must be surrendered because the Lord needs it. The ass is the ordinary mount of the old judges, yet it is also the symbol of lowliness. He is greeted with palm branches and hosannas, but by a band of insignificant followers. Turn the story any way you like, take its general impression or its smallest details, and everything bears out the sense of a quiet, unseen power that makes itself felt but does not come with display, that claims the homage of human hearts as the highest tribute it can receive, before it shows those who refuse that homage what master they are surrendering to. This is exactly the teaching we have found in every passage we have studied in these Gospels. If there were a history made of such passages, set in Judea, every step tied to an approaching crisis in the land and its chief city, would we not expect this climax, and feel a gap in the story if it were missing? All Christendom has felt this — expressed in art and in books of devotion, by those meditating the Scriptures for their own good and by those reading them as records of the world's history — that the meekest and lowliest of men entered Jerusalem to say, "I am your Ruler and Lord. Will you own me as such? If not, the stones of your city will cry out; the real, invisible bond that holds them together will be destroyed, and soon not one will be left upon another." I point to this deeply rooted, many-voiced conviction as proof of my first claim: that I am not proposing a novel theory about these Gospels, but only drawing out the truth the conscience of modern Europe has implicitly recognized, and showing that it rests not on symbolic or mystical interpretation but is the only reading compatible with the plain sense of these books, the only one that explains how their parts connect. What has kept this belief from its full power, I think, is the want of a fuller, franker acknowledgment that Christ is the King of Men, and not merely the King of the particular portion of men allowed to bear his Name. Our selfishness has robbed him of more than half his glory, and threatens at last to deprive us of the blessing we have refused to share. But I am anticipating what is still to come.

#### JESUS GOING INTO THE TEMPLE.

The last passage was one of the few places where the part of St. John's Gospel before the passion agrees with the other three Evangelists; the passage that follows contains almost the only striking apparent disagreement. St. John seems to place the story of Jesus entering the Temple and driving out those who bought and sold there at the passover following His first miracle, while the other three all connect it with His final entry into Jerusalem. St. Matthew's account matches theirs: Jesus went into the temple, drove out the buyers and sellers, overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling doves, and said that His house should be called a house of prayer, but they had made it a den of thieves. All three Evangelists show that this act made a strong impression on the chief priests, and all seem to link it with the question, "By what authority doest thou these things?" and the parable that arose from it. Matthew and Mark include the barren fig-tree — a miracle everyone has felt to be closely tied to the withering of the Jewish nation — while Luke, who had just described Jesus weeping over the city, puts the same meaning into words instead. But why should entering the temple and claiming a right to cleanse it strike the priests as such a bold assertion of authority? Why should the Evangelists connect it with deeds and words that pointed to a coming catastrophe? I believe the rest of the narrative explains these feelings. If riding into Jerusalem on an ass was a claim to the kingly honor He had seemed to refuse before, entering the temple was an equally significant claim to be the divine Son — a title His disciples had acknowledged but were as yet forbidden to proclaim. The first act gave evidence for the charge before Pilate; the second proved to the chief priest that the Sanhedrim must condemn Him as a blasphemer. To call the Temple His Father's house, and claim the right to drive out its invaders because it was His Father's house — was this not the clearest proof that He had committed the offence the law punished with stoning? So the parable I have already considered, earlier only as an example of parables in general, bears most directly on this very act: the Son had come to claim the fruits of the vineyard from the husbandmen, and the stone that was the foundation and corner-stone of the Temple had been brought in, so that it might be seen how the builders would treat it.

#### THE BAPTISM OF JOHN.

*The passage:* When Jesus came into the temple and was teaching, the chief priests and elders asked him by what authority he did these things, and who gave it to him. He said he would ask them one question, and if they answered it he would tell them: the baptism of John — was it from heaven or from men? They reasoned that if they said "from heaven," he would ask why they had not believed John; but if they said "from men," they feared the people, who all held John to be a prophet. So they said they could not tell, and Jesus said he would not tell them by what authority he acted either.

I must not pass over these words, common to all three Evangelists, that introduce the parable. Part of their value, as everyone has seen, lies in the general law they witness to: those who have not benefited from an earlier, preparatory stage make themselves unfit for a higher one. But we must not forget that it is the chief priests who are singled out here, set apart from — even in contrast with — the people at large; in Matthew's Gospel, set in contrast even with the coarser part of the people, the publicans and harlots. So this passage should be compared with John's words to the Scribes and Pharisees when they came out to his baptism: "Oh generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father; for God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." That sentence exposes the whole sin of the Pharisees, both the height and the meanness of their ambition. They were proud of being Abraham's children and thought that privilege could never be taken from them; they did not care to be God's children. They preferred the lower honor kept to themselves over the higher honor shared with people they regarded as mere stones. So they were wrapped up in a religious atheism, content without any sense that they stood in a relation to God. John called them to repent of this sin, which proved they had forgotten the blessings of their own covenant. They were to turn from Abraham to the God of Abraham; not to glory in their strength or wisdom, but in knowing Him who executes righteousness and judgment on the earth. If they did that, He would reveal Himself to them: there was One among them who would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire. The chief priests had not heeded that call, and so they could not know by what authority Christ did these things. They wanted to be rulers themselves in the temple, at the moment when its true Lord had suddenly come to refine and purify it. They did not know who He was, but they sensed that He was one they ought to obey; and so they said, "Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours."

#### PAYING TRIBUTE TO CÆSAR.

*The passage:* The Pharisees plotted to trap Jesus in his words, sending their disciples with the Herodians. They flattered him as a truthful teacher who plays no favorites, then asked whether it is lawful to pay tribute to Cæsar. Jesus, seeing their wickedness, called them hypocrites and asked to see the coin. When they showed him a penny, he asked whose image and inscription it bore. They said Cæsar's. He told them to give Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and to God what is God's.

The parallel accounts are in Mark 12 and Luke 20. The three Evangelists differ very little here. The largest difference is that Matthew puts the parable of the king's marriage feast for his son between the parable of the husbandmen and the sending of the spies, while Mark and Luke trace the plot directly to the stung conscience and bitterness of the chief priests, who saw these words were aimed at them. If we look closely at that second parable, the difference is not weighty: it is close in spirit, purpose, and even form to the first, and could well have sharpened the rage the first had stirred. I need not dwell on the question about the tribute-money. Every reader sees that it touches Christ's claim to be a king, and was meant to ruin His reputation with the people or to prepare a charge before the Roman Governor. Nor has anyone, so far as I know, suggested that Christ in His answer gave up or softened in the least the dignity He had claimed when He entered the city. My real complaint against the interpreters is this: they have taught readers to admire a kind of cleverness in Christ's answer, as though it were an evasion — as though it did not carry the whole meaning of His earlier teaching into a fresh and striking application, and were not full of solemn rebuke to the Pharisees and Herodians and a deep lesson to the whole nation about the secret of its slavery. What deliverance did the Pharisees dream of? Freedom from paying tribute to Cæsar. And why did they mourn that so much? Because their hearts were enslaved to covetousness; they knew no more shameful bondage than what the publican's presence signified, and no greater freedom than his being sent away. But whose image and inscription is on the coin? Cæsar's — so why should it not go to him? And whose image are you made in? What inscription is written on your hearts? Give those to the invisible God, claim Him as your King, and your chains fall off; you are slaves no longer. So Christ did not merely say, "I am not come to disturb the rule of the Cæsars." He showed why He was not come to disturb it, and why He could not truly free the nation by exempting them from tribute. He came to reveal the Kingdom of God to them, to tell them they were God's servants, not Cæsar's. In that way He came to accomplish everything the people expected of Him, had they only known what they expected; He came to undermine the tyranny of the Cæsars, the tyranny of the Pharisees, and every other tyranny in the world. Pharisees, Herodians, and Romans had reason to fear Him. He was far more truly dangerous to them, and they were beginning to see it, than all the agitators who had ever urged Israel to throw off its yoke.

#### THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION.

*The passage:* That same day the Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection, came to Jesus with a case: Moses ruled that a man's brother must marry his childless widow to raise offspring for him; seven brothers in turn married one woman and each died childless, and then she died too — so whose wife will she be at the resurrection? Jesus answered that they were wrong because they knew neither the Scriptures nor God's power. In the resurrection people do not marry but are like the angels. And as for the resurrection, had they not read God's own words, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob"? He is not the God of the dead but of the living. The crowd who heard this were astonished at his teaching.

When our Lord spoke about the leaven, He plainly hinted that the opposing Jewish sects shared one habit of mind. It is not enough to say their common dislike of Him proved this deep likeness; it was certain that as their opposition unfolded, its inner nature would show itself. Here the Sadducees took up an argument that would normally have set them directly against the Pharisees — a case that must have furnished many a debate and many a jest when they refuted the other school. Yet our Lord found in it the very temper He had just exposed in the men who asked whether tribute should be paid to Cæsar. The idea of God as Lord of the heart, a spiritual Being related to His spiritual creature, was missing in the Pharisee and missing in the Sadducee alike. So neither could enter into the history of their forefathers. To the Pharisee, the old commonwealth of Israel, David's kingdom, and the city rebuilt after the captivity were not really governed by an invisible Lord reigning over it age after age; they were only a nation set apart by certain religious privileges, entitled to look down on others. The Roman yoke galled them bitterly, but it never made them cry out for a real, divine government — only for one in which they would be supreme. The Sadducees had no more sense of a living God than this. They were not called atheists — even the fiercest Pharisee would probably not have named them so — but their belief was in a dead god, one who had laid down a law or moral maxims that men were now to keep by themselves, to regulate their own conduct. That this Being still stood, or ever had stood, in any actual relation to His creatures, that He could speak to them or they truly call on Him, they did not and could not believe. So they logically, honestly rejected the resurrection. It was a loss, no doubt, to be without even the shell of such a conviction — to have told themselves plainly, "Our life is bounded by this world; when appearances vanish, we vanish with them; the laws that govern us are only our circumstances; man has nothing in him but what time and space measure." But the Pharisee really believed the same thing. His doctrine of a resurrection was merely the extension beyond the grave of all the low, selfish, worldly maxims that had ruled him this side of it. To this we may perhaps trace the mildness of the rebuke here — "You are wrong, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God" — compared with the sharper "Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?" of the earlier case. Yet the practical correction went deeper, and was simpler, than the one that distinguished what is owed to Cæsar from what is owed to God. "Have you not read that God says, I am the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Whatever you think of the prophets, you grant some worth to the plain records of Genesis, and the principle of the resurrection is there. Once believe in God as the same yesterday and today, the God of men from generation to generation, truly connected with them, ever alive — and you believe in their life. Then you are freed from the notions that misled you when you asked whose wife the woman would be, for you begin to see men in their higher relation to God, and so in higher relations to one another. Here is the ground of all the later teaching about the resurrection: laid in the deepest theology, yet in the earliest revelation of God. So both Sadducees and Pharisees were taught that to understand and believe in a resurrection they must find Someone in whom they could realize an actual relation to an actual, living Being. And so the question was set before them: whether their dislike of the idea of a Son of God was not the real inward ground of their dislike of the resurrection — and whether, without belief in a Son of God, a resurrection is anything but a dark and fearful vision of the world's misery spread and prolonged.

#### WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST?

*The passage:* While the Pharisees were together, Jesus asked them what they thought of the Christ — whose son is he? They said, the Son of David. He asked how David, speaking in the Spirit, could then call him Lord, saying, "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool." If David calls him Lord, how is he his son? No one could answer him, and from that day no one dared ask him any more questions.

This question is given, with slight differences, in Mark 12 and in Luke 20. It is one of the few questions our Lord addressed directly to the people or the scribes without their having provoked it. It stands close to the passages we have lately considered, and all three Gospels place it shortly before the last Passover. Clearly the Evangelists thought that although it led to no obvious result, was short, went unanswered, and raised a difficulty our Lord did not himself solve, it still deserved a lasting and emphatic record. Did not every event they were recording contain this very question? Did not those events, seen alongside the whole past history of the nation and the whole future history of the human race, supply the answer? How can Christ be both the Son of David and the Lord of David — yet how can he fail to be either, if the Scriptures are true? This was the terrible paradox that tormented the Pharisee, a paradox in his own being as well as in the sacred Books, and he could find only one way to escape it. Eighteen centuries later it is still the question set before every Jew and every Christian, and Christians as well as Jews are inclined to be rid of it much as the Pharisee was. If there is to be a King, a Son of Man over men, must he not be the Son of God? If there is a Son of God, must he not be King over men? Could the Christ fulfil one character without fulfilling the other? The Crucifixion was man's attempt to remove the difficulty; the Resurrection was God's.

#### THE PROPHECY OF THE LAST DAYS.

*The passage:* When the disciples pointed out the magnificent stones of the temple, Jesus foretold its total destruction and spoke of wars, false Christs, tribulation, the desolation of the holy place, the coming of the Son of Man, and the end of the age — urging His followers to watch, since no one knows the day or hour.

We now come to those famous chapters reporting our Lord's conversation with His disciples when they showed Him the goodly stones of the temple. I will follow St. Matthew, as before, noting any important differences in the other Evangelists as I go.

I. There is no dispute about the occasion. The disciples were struck by the temple's fine stones, and whatever else His words meant, they plainly declared that not one stone of that building would be left standing. This remark is obvious, but its very obviousness may have kept it from getting the attention it deserves. Think what that building meant to a Jew. The tabernacle was the sign of God's presence in the nation; its loss at Shiloh was seen as the nation's temporary downfall; its move to the hill above Jerusalem was bound up with the covenant with David, with the nation's whole history, and with the deepest and most rapturous Psalms. Think what Solomon's building and dedication of the temple and his bringing in of the Ark implied; how much of Isaiah turns on his vision, in the year King Uzziah died, of the glory of the Lord filling the temple; how the whole of Jeremiah and his Lamentations concern that temple's desecration; how Ezekiel's visions begin, turn, and end with its desertion and restoration; how its downfall and a future abomination of desolation connect with Daniel and the captivity; how the temple is plainly the subject of Haggai and Zechariah; and how the expectation of One who would come to purify it and its priests is central to Malachi. Consider all this, and we see how this subject relates to every book of the Old Testament, and so to God's whole training of mankind. Here was the place that told the Jew, and declared to the universe, that a God whom no eye can see and who can be pictured in no likeness nevertheless truly exists, is really connected with His creatures, dwells near them, and may be approached by them. Of this building our Lord said not one stone would be left on another. What could the disciples make of it? St. Matthew states, and the others imply, their feeling: privately, on the Mount of Olives, they asked, "Tell us when these things will be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age." Either the temple's destruction meant God had left the world — the start of outright atheism — or it meant the start of something higher: the kingdom of One greater than the temple, who would draw God and man nearer and prove the God of Abraham to be Lord of the whole earth. The Apostles, I think, must have taken one of these. Amid utter confusion they had the faith and courage to believe their Master spoke truly when He said the Kingdom of God was at hand. We seem to have decided they were mistaken. Our Lord did not tell them so.

II. I will not inquire into the exact force of the words "Your coming, and the end of the age," nor even into what the Apostles meant by them then. Their real meaning is precisely what we must learn from the later history and revelation — this very discourse being one of our great guides. The Apostles were of course confused here, as about everything: about the Christ, His kingdom, His relation to themselves, their nation, and the world. The Evangelists assume this confusion throughout, so those who trust their record must admit it more readily than any modern philosopher. But it is quite another thing to say the words they used were wrong, or that they expected too complete a fulfilment, or were wrong to place it in their own time. Religious people today may attach very vague and false notions — borrowed from heathenism and self-contradictory — to the words Heaven, Hell, and Judgment; yet those who try to correct these errors may feel that the words themselves carry a tremendous reality, weakened rather than exaggerated by common misunderstanding. So too the Apostles may not have used words too large when they questioned our Lord — words we must dilute before we can adopt them; they may simply not yet have learned to give them their full, literal strictness.

III. "Take heed that no man deceive you: for many shall come in my Name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many." Few doubt that this was a warning to the very men then looking at the temple. It fits all His earlier teaching exactly. The great danger to the Apostles, as to all men, was being led astray by a false Christ — being led to look for a King coming with the signs the Pharisees or the people demanded, signs wholly unlike those with which Jesus came. Many such would arise, He warns them — men claiming David's throne and the marks of a divine mission. How, they might ask, could they ever, after believing Jesus was the Christ, think another was? But the warning was given, and in time they would learn why they needed it.

IV. "You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that you are not troubled; these things must be, but the end is not yet. Nation shall rise against nation, and there shall be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places; all these are the beginning of sorrows." Every word here is addressed directly to the Apostles: "*you* shall hear; see that *you* are not troubled." To suppose this does not refer to actual reports reaching their ears — of insurrections in Judæa, quarrels among nearby rulers, threats from the imperial power — shows strange carelessness about language. If anyone objects that "nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom" is too grand for a city in one province, read the history of the Roman Empire and see how local events stirred the legions there into rivalries and military revolts that spread like magnetism through the empire, until every part joined the strife. Or read Tacitus, not Josephus, on the years from Nero's end to Jerusalem's fall, and see how the greatest convulsions were tied to Syria, of which every Jew had bitter experience. So whether or not we admit a divine purpose behind Jerusalem's calamities, we must admit as fact that the whole world must have seemed to a Jew to share the convulsions shaking his own land. I do not use "convulsions" to explain away "earthquakes, pestilences, and famines" as metaphor; I take those words to mean exactly what they say, and no reader of Tacitus can doubt they happened just so, *in various places*. There was to be no single, general earthquake matching the great political one, but enough to serve as signs that the physical world sympathizes with the moral and obeys the same Ruler. Our Lord's aim seems to have been to warn His disciples that, while they noticed these signs, they must not be distracted by them or mistake *them* for the great tokens that God had come to judge the earth. "All these are the *beginning* of sorrows."

V. "Then they will deliver you up to be afflicted and killed, and you will be hated of all nations for my Name's sake. Many will be offended and betray and hate one another; many false prophets will arise and deceive many; and because iniquity abounds, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." I take the whole paragraph because its closing words stand in direct contrast to the last one's. There: "the *beginning* of sorrows." Here: "then shall the *end* come." Wars, earthquakes, and famines are not signs of the end but preludes to it; the preaching of the Gospel is the sign the end is near. I also join these verses because the difficulty supposed to lie in verse 14 is removed by verse 9: "you shall be hated of all nations," and "the Gospel shall be preached... unto all nations." The phrase "the whole world" would hinder no one, since anyone recalls that Augustus taxed "all the world" — the same expression. The stumbling-block is "all nations." But those words were just used in a sentence that *must* apply to the Apostles. Preaching the Gospel as a witness to all the Gentiles is exactly what a Jew would have understood: if all the Gentile races the Jews knew, in whose lands they lived, were told that Jesus was their King and that they too belonged to God's Kingdom, then the witness spoken of would have been borne. If it came to special pleading, I could plead too — since the great European and American peoples were then still in Asia, it does not follow that all the earth's tribes were not reached, even without adopting vague traditions of apostolic missions. But I need no such arguments; I simply keep to the text. The Apostles were told they would be hated by all nations; in whatever sense they took that, they must have understood they were to be the instruments of preaching to all nations, and so, after something they had done, within their age, the end would come. Many shrink from the idea that iniquity abounded and Christian love grew cold in the apostolic age; whether the facts justify that doubt we shall judge better when we come to the apostolic writings and certain testimonies of Christian antiquity, which bear also on the rise of false prophets then.

VI. "When you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those in Judæa flee to the mountains; let no one on the housetop come down for his goods, nor the man in the field turn back for his clothes. Woe to those with child and nursing in those days! Pray that your flight be not in winter nor on the sabbath, for then shall be great tribulation, such as was not from the beginning of the world, nor ever shall be; and except those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved, but for the elect's sake they shall be shortened." Without settling exactly what desecration is meant, notice that our Lord keeps fixing His disciples' thoughts on the very object their eyes were on — the temple — which is truly the subject of His whole discourse, as its opening led us to expect; and all these calamities, greater than any the world has seen or will see, and the flight He commands, are bound to it. If the family of Mattathias had no trouble knowing when the abomination of desolation was set up in their day, the disciples might hope, even in their half-belief, to be shown wherein this fuller desertion of the Divine presence would consist.

VII. "Then if any say, 'Here is Christ,' or 'there,' do not believe it; for false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect. I have told you beforehand. So if they say, 'He is in the desert,' do not go out; 'He is in the secret chambers,' do not believe it. For as the lightning comes out of the east and shines to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. Wherever the carcass is, there the eagles gather. Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken." We would naturally take "then" to refer to the event just spoken of, and "you" to mean some of the questioners, unless we had strong evidence otherwise; and until such evidence is proved, we must not read these words less strictly merely because they concern events of great solemnity. Taken in their obvious sense, would they have led the Apostles to expect the Son of Man's appearing in their own age? I think there is no doubt of it. False Christs and prophets would appear; the true Christ would appear to confound them, and confidence in *His* appearing would be their only escape from *their* deceptions. Second, would this appearing be visible? Most visible in its effects and in its accompanying signs, but not visible as the false Christs would be visible. For their falsehood would consist precisely in this: they came to reform the world on the opposite principle to God's Son — to change the surface of things — while He came to lay the axe to the root. In whatever judgment He appeared, He came for that. So if the disciples truly took these words in, not twisting them to their old notions but using them to correct those notions, would they not have understood Him to say: "All these visible appearances of men leading you into the desert or the chamber will tempt you sorely, because the greatest temptation is to seek Me in the outward world, to turn Me into a Cæsar rather than a real divine King, to picture Me on a lofty throne like earth's lords rather than as the Judge who searches every motive and lays every heart bare, before whom all falsehood flies." As the lightning fills the whole sky, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be — mighty words to shatter every sensual dream that puts an apparent Christ for the real one. "Do not think of the desert or the chamber, but of a light felt at once through all heaven and falling as a terrific, illuminating power on earth. And do not suppose this judgment will be felt only where the temple stands. You Jews are scattered over all the earth, everywhere bearing the sign of a divine covenant, meant to be life-givers to the world. But the life has left the body; it has become a carcass, and wherever any part of it lies, the birds of prey — God's commissioned destroyers — will gather. In all these places there will be a manifestation of the Son of Man, clear tokens that He has come to judge the chosen people, and through them the whole earth."

VIII. "Immediately after that tribulation... then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory. And He shall send His angels with a great trumpet, and they shall gather His elect from the four winds. Now learn a parable from the fig-tree: when its branch is tender and puts forth leaves, you know summer is near; so, when you see all these things, know that it is near, at the doors. Truly I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things are fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." The Evangelists agree here, except that St. Luke is more vivid: "signs in the sun, moon, and stars; distress of nations in perplexity; the sea and waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear of what is coming; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken." Comparing the two shows that actual signs in the visible heavens must be meant, as before. Whoever reads these as mere political changes, to escape any physical reference, does violence to the text. Luke especially shows that physical convulsions would startle men most, as such things always do, and be felt as most ominous. But ominous of something — they are not themselves what they foretell. So there is warrant for those who make "the powers of heaven" mean more, not less, than signs in moon and stars. When they say it means *dynasties*, I cannot condemn them as weakening the words, for the fall of a dynasty is far greater than a volcano's eruption. But I do not think they have reached the words' full force, or read them literally enough.

All the old world's dynasties confessed something higher than themselves — kings who bowed to gods above and powers beneath. Astrology was bound up with worship, and demons ruling in sun and stars were thought to uphold earthly thrones. So the simplest reading of our Lord's words is that these powers of heaven were to be shaken, the thrones of these demons and demi-gods to totter. This interpretation demands no strain, agrees with the ordinary language of His hearers and with the facts of heathen life, and involves only the very confusion between the visible and invisible that really existed in false worshippers' minds — a confusion the words, if true, ought to express. Whether they were fulfilled in this sense we must ask later; I deal now only with the prophecy. The same applies to "then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn, and see Him coming in the clouds with power and great glory." I will not now say what the sign was, or how the tribes mourned, or how they saw Him; I only say that, taken with what precedes, the words must mean a victory of the Son of Man over those powers men had worshipped — a victory felt by the tribes of the earth in some striking, terrible way, with visible accompaniments. It must be the victory of Christ as a living Person, not of a religion or doctrine — a victory understood at once by those who saw in God's light, understood in part by some on earth, and leaving the deepest marks in the world's history, marks that would at last make plain that the greatest of all crises had occurred. Whatever the sign and the appearing were, they must answer these conditions to fit the words, and cannot contradict the words just before about the lightning filling the whole sky.

The next words — "He shall send His angels with a great trumpet, and they shall gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other" — exactly match the description in the seventh chapter of the Apocalypse. I will consider their meaning carefully when I treat that book. For now I only note that, so far as the context shows, they seem closely linked to the temple's desecration and overthrow. No language could be more exact than "immediately after the tribulation of those days," which governs the whole passage. Judged by this Gospel and the others, these words suit exactly the tenor of John the Baptist's first prophecy and all our Lord's earlier prophecies. The people who boasted "We have Abraham as our father" would be left without capital or temple, the great witnesses of their election's meaning. But the purpose of the election would stand; God would raise up children to Abraham, show why He had called them, and reveal a deeper society and kingdom hidden beneath theirs.

For how does He continue? "Learn a parable from the fig-tree: when its branch is tender and puts forth leaves, you know summer is near; so, when you see all these things, know it is near, at the doors." All these events, in which at first one sees only winter's icy hand withering and destroying, are really foretastes of a coming summer; death prepares for life. Instead of being cast down, you are to lift up your heads when they appear, for they speak of redemption, not ruin. The world's regeneration — the manifestation of the kingdom your fathers died expecting, which I said is at hand and have come to reveal — will be the fruit of that judgment which leaves not one stone of this building on another.

He says this, then adds: "Truly I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things are fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." He had said "*immediately* after the tribulation," and "when *you* see all these things," and now "this generation shall not pass." No language could be more awful. I do not ask those who think the speaker was only Matthew the publican, or the fallible report of a good man, to weigh it heavily. But I do ask those who believe these are the words of the Son of God, who spoke as never man spoke, and who insist on the record's inspiration and authority, to take care how they trifle with "Truly I say to you" and "Heaven and earth shall pass away." Let them notice that the language grows more exact and emphatic in the parts they suppose *cannot* have been fulfilled at the temple's fall than in the parts they eagerly claim, with quotations from Josephus, were fulfilled then. Let them weigh the whole sequence, and then ask whether they can be satisfied with the explanation of "generation" that Mede made popular and that others have adopted in slavish deference, or in eager relief at any escape from such severe language. Did our Lord, saying the temple should be destroyed, mean only that it would fall before the Jewish race died out? Did He not mean γενεά (generation) in its ordinary sense at all? Were they not to expect the city besieged by Roman armies within that age? Consider that it is one thing to say a prophecy has a double or treble sense — meaning that what is true of one time is even more clearly true of another, as historians note that the same principles ruled Charlemagne and Napoleon, that facts repeat, and that their governing laws come out more fully in later events — and quite another thing to use words in a double sense, meaning that within the very same discourse their meaning changes, so the interpreter may make them mean one thing here and another there. To say a prophet must go beyond a single event when he lays down a great law of the Divine Mind is to grant him the very insight his name implies; but to say he juggles with words in a double sense is to call him a false prophet, a heathen oracle. Had Mede's followers only said, "Christ's words cannot pass away; they were not exhausted at the temple's fall; the law of the Divine Mind fulfilled then must be eternal, for He is eternal; we live under His government as they did, so what came to pass in that generation is a guide for later ones" — how one would have honored and thanked them for helping us read the future by the past! But when they say, "Our Lord did not mean that *all* these things would come in that generation, though He used these very words, but only *some*, leaving us to decide which belong to that time and which to ages hence," then all security in reading the Divine Word is lost; no neologian undermines the authority of the Evangelists, or of our Lord Himself, more effectively than these honest, earnest believers.

IX. "But of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. As the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. For as before the flood they ate, drank, married, and gave in marriage until Noah entered the ark, and knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so shall it be. Then two shall be in the field; one taken, one left. Two women grinding at the mill; one taken, one left." Right after His emphatic "all these things shall come in this generation," He adds, "of that day and hour no one knows... but the Father only." The Apostles had asked *when*; He answers plainly, in varied yet harmonious ways: "It will be within this age, within a human lifetime, within the years some of you will live to see. Some of you may be brought before rulers and killed before the moment comes, but all of you will witness the events I have described as its forerunners. More I cannot tell you. The day and hour are not revealed — men know them not, angels know them not, only the Father. Men so deeply concerned will have all the preparation they need; the inhabitants of the invisible world, no less concerned, will understand more clearly when it has happened and what it means. But the first must understand by watching and waiting, keeping an attitude of spiritual expectation, not by guessing at times and seasons; the others will not need to guess, resting in the assurance that past, present, and future are in the hands of Him who is perfect goodness and truth and will establish His Son's Kingdom on earth." How deeply this went into the disciples' hearts — how sure they were the coming was in their generation, yet how careful to warn their followers against asking the day or hour — we shall consider later. Here I only ask you to see how our Lord strengthens their conviction that a great era was ending by having them compare their generation with the one that ended an earlier era: "As the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be." The words that follow surely mean there would be the same security and indifference about the coming crisis as about that ancient one. Yet it too would be a crisis of destruction and of restoration, showing what the earth and men are without God and showing Him as its Ruler and Renewer. All that follows accurately describes a great judgment, where one is taken and another left, the onlooker knowing not why, only feeling an invisible power at work — which he either curses as arbitrary and hostile or blesses as righteous, believing its purpose is to set righteousness in the earth. It is the description of a judgment — not a sudden sweeping destruction but a searching, penetrating fire sent to try men's hearts. All this fits the belief in an unseen Lord of the earth making His government felt in men's hearts and through the visible world, fits the appearing of the Son of Man in His Father's glory with the holy angels — but it does not in the least fit the advent of a visible prince in the tinsel of ordinary royalty. Such an advent would be announced precisely as to day and hour; its visible tokens would be the decisive ones; the secret witnesses would matter little; the command would be, "expect me, prepare in this place, for there I will appear." But not, "Watch, for you know not, any more than those around you, at what hour your Lord comes."

"Watch, therefore, for you know not what hour your Lord comes. Know this: if the householder had known when the thief would come, he would have watched and not let his house be broken into. So be ready, for the Son of Man comes at an hour you think not. Who then is the faithful and wise servant, made ruler over the household to feed them in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his lord finds so doing; truly, he shall make him ruler over all his goods. But if that evil servant says in his heart, 'My lord delays,' and begins to beat his fellow servants and eat and drink with the drunken, his lord will come in a day and hour he does not expect, and will cut him in pieces and give him his portion with the hypocrites, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth." I want to press the point I made in the last section before I finish this chapter, because I know the moral obstacle to the literal view I have taken is far stronger than any other. If our Lord really meant all these things would come in that generation, what has the chapter to do with us? What promises or warnings does it hold that we may not set aside as mere adaptations, not spoken to us by His own lips? My answer: its promises, warnings, and commands will be far weightier and more awful for us if we believe every one of them was strictly fulfilled in that day. For then we believe the Kingdom of God has actually come with power, has come to us, and that we live under its shadow. Then the question, "how have we used this gift, how have we behaved as subjects of this kingdom?" brings before us not a vague fancy of some future judgment but the clear knowledge that we must be judged — a steady watching for signs that the Judge is at the door, and a direct use of our Lord's comparison of the world's first period with its second, as a ground for judging the third by the second. If there had been no real manifestation of the Son of Man as judge and deliverer, we would give ourselves up, as we do, to mere fancies of a great assize — fancies that never touch the heart, that make children afraid of their Father and keep them from Him, that men cast aside with the rattles of infancy, that eloquent, terrifying preachers press on weak nerves and sin-sick consciences with as much harm as good, and that pass away leaving the hollowest unbelief behind. But if He has come to judgment in the most real way — if the death of a whole nation and the birth of a whole Christendom were and remain the proofs of that judgment; if it was a judgment mysterious, invisible, yet real, going to the roots of society, touching every outward relation, meeting each conscience and either raising it or leaving it in a deep abyss; if the Christian Church was a witness to the dying world of what it was meant to be, and *might* become a feeble, false witness — then the voice of Christ as a present King, a present Son of God, speaks to individuals, nations, and churches now. It bids them watch lest their house be broken into and the invisible world be shut from them, through indulgence, party-spirit, the worship of idols outward or inward — self worst of all — through following false prophets, through swapping a partial Christ for a universal one, an imaginary king for a real one; lest, when He comes to His higher temple, He find it full of buyers and sellers, moneychangers for priests, mammon on Jehovah's throne, and decree that of this defiled temple too not one stone shall be left on another. I have anticipated some of what I shall say later; but the subject seemed to demand even more solemn treatment than those before it, especially as it introduces the history of the Last Supper and the Passion.

#### THE PASSOVER.

*The passage:* When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he told his disciples that in two days the Passover would come, and the Son of Man would be handed over to be crucified. At the same time the chief priests, scribes, and elders gathered at the palace of the high priest Caiaphas, and plotted to seize Jesus by trickery and kill him — but agreed not to do it during the feast, for fear the people would riot.

The first two verses come from Matthew; the report of the priests' plotting is found in all three of the first Evangelists. What both our Lord's words and the priests' words put before us is the Passover. In the first three Evangelists — and we will see later how different the fourth is — the Jewish festivals are not prominent in the rest of the narrative, which is mostly set in Galilee. When harmonists have tried to arrange the history by the recurring passovers and pentecosts, we can be sure they drew that help from somewhere other than the three accounts they were comparing. These three Evangelists seem to want to fix our attention on *this* Passover, showing everything leading up to it and bearing on it. Jesus enters Jerusalem shortly before it; the Jewish rulers are certain that His aim is to present Himself at that time, before the crowds gathered from all over the empire, as the Son of David, their rightful king. Some decisive blow must be struck before then, or it may be too late. Yet no time is more dangerous, since it is a sacred one: the man who entered Jerusalem to strewn palm-branches is loved by the people and has devoted followers, so He must be taken by trickery or there will be a riot. These are the plain, natural thoughts recorded of the rulers of the Sanhedrin, and the Evangelists mean us to notice how all this plotting pointed to the connection between the Passover — the beginning of Israel's deliverance and of its commonwealth — and the kingdom that had been declared to be at hand.

#### THE BETRAYAL.

*The passage:* One of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and asked what they would give him to hand Jesus over. They agreed on thirty pieces of silver, and from then on he watched for a chance to betray him.

I leave out the story of the alabaster box of ointment, because I will not assume that this event is the same as the one recorded in the seventh chapter of St. Luke. Despite the two hosts sharing a name, the difficulties in identifying them are very great, and I will not force my way past them merely to draw out another parallel in the history, or to supply a link in the life of Judas Iscariot. That could only be done by borrowing ahead from the fourth Gospel, a liberty I have resolved never to take. So I move straight to verse 14: Judas went to the chief priests and offered to deliver Jesus for a price, they agreed on thirty pieces of silver, and he began looking for his chance. St. Mark's account is even shorter and omits the amount; St. Luke's is a little longer and adds that Satan entered into Judas. I need not dwell on how this record contains no cries or exclamations; by now we know that trait of the Gospels well enough that pointing it out is almost an impertinence. I mention it only to show how completely the thought of their personal friend was swallowed up in their acknowledgment of the King and Son of God, even here, where the most striking instance of one man's affection and familiarity was about to be told. How could men merely speaking of Jesus of Nazareth, their beloved friend betrayed by one of their own, hold back all indignation and horror? If they had only credited that friend afterward with certain heavenly attributes, that would not have prevented such outbursts — it would have made them more natural. What can explain the bareness, the seeming coldness, of the narrative at an event that pierced so deeply into Christ's own heart and formed so mysterious a part of His suffering, except the feeling that they were speaking of One who needed no such bursts of earthly vehemence, about whom they would be profane to indulge them, whose history they were simply to set out so that men might know their King and deliverer — a revelation to which even the chief priests and Judas were mysteriously contributing?

#### THE FEAST.

*The passage:* On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples asked Jesus where he wanted them to prepare the Passover. He told them to go into the city to a certain man and say the Master would keep the Passover at his house with his disciples. They did so and prepared it. That evening he sat down with the twelve, and as they ate he said one of them would betray him. Grieved, each asked, "Lord, is it I?" He said the one who dipped his hand with him in the dish would betray him; the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to the man who betrays him — better for that man never to have been born. Then Judas, the betrayer, asked, "Master, is it I?" and Jesus answered, "Thou hast said."

When we think of the Passover as a great national festival binding all Israelites together, we easily forget how much it was also a family occasion. Anyone reading the words of its first institution carefully sees that the command for each man to take a lamb from his father's house belongs to the very heart of it, and that this blending of the domestic with the national runs through the whole life and history of the chosen people. Every great painter who has attempted the Last Supper leaves the spectator with the impression of a family gathered, with one at its head who holds all its members together, and one dark figure among them who has broken free of him and is destroying its unity. This impression comes from the Evangelists. Nothing could be more simply human and personal than the bitter words "One of you shall betray me," and the question they drew out, "Is it I?" Once we lose the sense that this was a real family meeting, we fail to see how fully the feast in that upper room fulfilled the idea of the old Passover, and we are unprepared for the next step in the story — the carrying of the Passover's idea into its highest meaning and power.

#### THE LORD'S SUPPER.

*The passage:* While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, telling them to take and eat, for this was his body. He took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, telling all of them to drink of it, for this was his blood of the new covenant, shed for many for the forgiveness of sins. He told them he would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until the day he drank it new with them in his Father's kingdom. After singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

These words, along with the matching accounts in Mark and Luke, are usually said to record the institution of the Lord's Supper. The narrative is closely bound up with the history of the Passover meal: the bread and wine were those of that feast. Why then have Christians felt these sentences to hold the most solemn announcement of a new festival — one that was to be, and has actually become, the bond of a new society with no national or geographical limits? Has this belief of the whole Christian world been merely a dream? How is it that for eighteen centuries, across all the most civilized parts of the world, so strange a reality has answered to it?

I can explain this fact only in one way, and those who object may offer another. Suppose that beneath the Jewish kingdom there really lay another, deeper kingdom; that its national sacraments held the idea of some more real sacrament grounded on an actual relationship between the Son of God and human beings; and that this relationship is of the most intimate kind language can express, implying the closest communion of inward life and love. Then such language as our Lord uses, however profound, would be exactly what we should expect. The link between the new institution and the old would follow from the nature of both, the one succeeding the other as soon as the shell could no longer hold the bird within it. Suppose our Lord's kingdom to be truly a family kingdom, resting on real union to a divine father and a divine brother: then the domestic element would matter even more to the new sacrament than to the old. And suppose, finally, that the Evangelists were thoroughly filled with this idea: then one would expect just these few quiet, unimpassioned sentences recording the giving of the bread and the cup in remembrance of him. But this is exactly what all the earlier records of these three Evangelists have been saying — they have set forth a divine kingdom established in a Son of God. So the institution of the Lord's Supper agrees perfectly with every step we have already taken, and prepares for all that is to come.

#### THE WARNING TO PETER.

*The passage:* Jesus tells the disciples that they will all fall away from him that night, since Scripture says the shepherd will be struck and the sheep scattered; but after he rises he will go ahead of them into Galilee. Peter insists that even if all the others fall away, he never will. Jesus answers that this very night, before the cock crows, Peter will deny him three times. Peter protests that he would die with Jesus rather than deny him — and all the disciples say the same.

The three Evangelists all place this warning — that the cock will not crow before Peter has denied him three times — at the same point. Matthew and Mark tie it to the general saying that all of them will fall away that night. Luke expands the words to Peter, beginning, "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have thee that he may sift thee as wheat." No one, I think, has been surprised to find these words coming right after the institution of the Lord's Supper and before the Agony; they have seemed to belong there. And although it is often useless to try to justify such a feeling, there is at least much plausibility in the common observation that Peter, the most affectionate and self-confident of the disciples, was warned how little he could rely on himself, and how little his strong personal love would help him when trial came. To put the same point more fully: Peter, along with the others, was being taught that the family feeling of union expressed and celebrated at their Passover meeting was not nearly enough to hold them together or to keep any one of them loyal — that unless God bound them closely to Himself and held them there, they could not stay united. Peter in particular was reminded that unless he held fast his confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," and leaned on the One who had revealed that truth to him, he would certainly deny Jesus of Nazareth as his Master, however lively and eager his devotion to him as such might be. Taken together with the rest of Peter's story, it is hard to draw any other lesson from his actions or our Lord's words. And this is simply the consistent working-out of the principle we have traced throughout: that Christ's divine Sonship and kingship are assumed in everything he does and says, and are borne witness to by the sins and unbelief of his disciples as much as by their faith and obedience.

#### THE AGONY.

*The passage:* Jesus came with his disciples to Gethsemane, telling most of them to sit while he went to pray. Taking Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he grew sorrowful and heavy, and said his soul was sorrowful to the point of death; he asked them to watch with him. Going a little farther, he fell on his face and prayed that, if possible, this cup might pass from him — yet not his will but the Father's. He found the disciples asleep and asked Peter whether they could not watch one hour, telling them to watch and pray against temptation, for the spirit is willing but the flesh weak. A second time he prayed that, if the cup could not pass unless he drank it, the Father's will be done; again he found them asleep. A third time he prayed the same words. Then he told them to sleep and rest, for the hour was at hand and the Son of Man was betrayed into sinners' hands; and he called them to rise, for his betrayer was near.

Every difference in the accounts of the Agony deserves careful attention. One detail in St. Luke's version is fixed in our minds with the story and has almost named it. Still, St. Matthew is the fuller and more detailed. He brings out perfectly the anguish, the solitude, the craving for sympathy that goes unmet, and it is to him especially that we owe the repeated prayer with its memorable change. I have nothing to add to what thousands have already said of it; what has really drawn out its meaning is what has not been said — the unspoken, unspeakable experience of suffering human beings over eighteen hundred years. I would trust that experience to say whether the word "Father" has not been felt to hold the very heart of both the sorrow and the comfort — whether, without it, the whole account would not become incoherent, filled with a vague horror the heart could neither escape nor name. The intensity of the sorrow lies in this: that it is a son's sorrow, the Son's own will coming forth as though separate and alone, yet in the agony of prayer striving to submit itself and to claim its perfect, essential unity with the Father's will. Who can find words but those the Evangelists give, even to hint at this conflict and this sacrifice — a sacrifice made complete by the very intensity of the conflict? Our words for such a struggle of life and death must sound paradoxical and self-contradictory. Yet everyone feels that the truth they point to lies at the root of all human feeling and sorrow, and of every individual, and that the secret of the Gospel's power and life is there. No one has ever doubted that, if the New Testament holds more than a few fine moral sayings and truly reaches the deepest root of our being, the story of the Agony is its most living, inward part — the part by which we understand the rest. Why? Because Christ's sonship is revealed here even more fully than in the Temptation. And because his kingly relation to all human beings, which we have followed through his acts of power and mercy, is here brought out just as wonderfully. He enters the deepest experience of human suffering; he enters the innermost depth of that struggle of the human spirit to be independent, which is the ground of all its suffering and sin. He treads that winepress alone, with none beside him — yet comes out wearing the stained garments of the Conqueror. Again one feels how poor these attempts at commentary are. The simple narrative holds the whole. The writer's mind was so filled and possessed by the idea of the divine Son and divine King that he could only speak the words, or a few of the words, by which the Son of God himself had expressed it. No single Evangelist can take in the whole mystery; each gives one side or glimpse of it, and their differences have surely proved themselves true to men in different stages and moods of suffering — the full result of all belonging to the history and life of the universal Church.

#### THE BETRAYAL AND APPREHENSION. THE SANHEDRIM. PETER'S DENIAL.

*The passage:* While Jesus was speaking, Judas came with a crowd sent by the chief priests, armed with swords and clubs. Judas had given them a sign — the man he kissed was the one to seize — and he kissed Jesus, who called him "Friend" and asked why he had come. When they seized Jesus, one of His companions drew a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest's servant, but Jesus told him to put the sword away, for those who take the sword die by it; He could call on His Father for more than twelve legions of angels, but then how would the Scriptures be fulfilled that this must happen? He asked the crowd why they came against Him armed, as against a robber, when He had taught daily in the temple and they had not touched Him — but all this happened to fulfil the prophets. Then all the disciples fled. He was led to Caiaphas, where the scribes and elders were gathered, and Peter followed at a distance and sat with the servants to see the outcome. The council sought false witnesses to condemn Him but found none, though many came; at last two said He had claimed He could destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days. The high priest asked why He gave no answer, but Jesus was silent. Then the high priest charged Him under oath by the living God to say whether He was the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus said, "Thou hast said," and added that they would see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power, coming on the clouds of heaven. The high priest tore his clothes, called it blasphemy, and the council said He deserved death. They spat on Him, struck Him, and mockingly told Him to prophesy who had hit Him. Meanwhile Peter, sitting outside, was three times accused of being with Jesus, and three times denied it — the last time with curses — and then the cock crew. Peter remembered Jesus' word that he would deny Him three times before cockcrow, and went out and wept bitterly.

The main differences among the accounts concern the wounding of the high priest's servant, the young man mentioned only by St. Mark, and Mark's account of the cock crowing twice during Peter's denial. St. Luke puts the denial before the examination by the high priest. Otherwise the narratives agree. I pass over the parts about the betrayal and the denial, since I already touched on both in speaking of our Lord's prophecy at the Paschal Feast. I do not want the reader distracted by side events from the real object and result of the arrest: the accusation before the Sanhedrim, which every Evangelist records carefully. Matthew gives the high priest's charge, "I adjure thee by the living God that thou tell us if thou art Christ the Son of God"; Mark has "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the blessed One?"; Luke adds other questions, but they all come down to the one, "Art thou the Son of God?" The answer in Matthew is "Thou hast said — nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven"; in Mark, "I am: and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Luke gives these words earlier with one important variation, "Hereafter shall the Son of Man sit on the right hand of the power of God," and has them ask, "Art thou then the Son of God?" and Jesus answer, "Ye say that I am." All three give nearly the same verdict; Luke leaves out the tearing of the clothes, but the high priest's and the council's cry, "what need we any further witness?" is common to all.

I have dwelt on these points because you can see how important they are for the object of this lecture. No one has ever disputed that our Lord's condemnation by the Jewish nation turned on the blasphemy of His claiming to be the Son of God. The history began with that proclamation, and it is about to end with the effects and proof of it. But the high priest's all-important question is met by an equally important answer, which belongs to the very heart of the gospel: He who is the Son of God is also the Son of Man. The Son of God is about to be condemned to death, so that the Son of Man may sit at the right hand of the power on high. So one part of the claim the gospels have been making throughout is now being sealed. But there is another. Another title was claimed, and another charge is to be brought. They all rose and led Him to Pilate.

#### CHRIST THE KING. THE ARRAIGNMENT BEFORE PILATE.

*The passage:* When morning came the chief priests and elders decided to put Jesus to death, bound Him, and handed Him to Pilate the governor. Pilate asked whether He was the King of the Jews, and Jesus answered, "Thou sayest." When the priests and elders accused Him, He said nothing at all, so that Pilate marvelled. At the feast the governor used to release one prisoner the people chose. There was a notable prisoner, Barabbas. Pilate, knowing the priests had handed Jesus over out of envy, asked which of the two they wanted freed; but the priests persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. When asked, they said Barabbas, and when asked what to do with Jesus, they cried, "Let Him be crucified." Pilate asked what evil He had done, but they only cried out the more. Seeing he could do nothing and a riot was starting, Pilate washed his hands, declaring himself innocent of this just man's blood, and the people said, "His blood be on us, and on our children." He released Barabbas, scourged Jesus, and handed Him over to be crucified. The soldiers gathered the whole band, stripped Him, put a scarlet robe on Him, plaited a crown of thorns for His head and gave Him a reed, then bowed and mocked Him, "Hail, King of the Jews!"—spitting on Him and striking Him with the reed. Afterward they dressed Him again in His own clothes and led Him off to be crucified.

The parts I have left out in Matthew concern the death of Judas and the message from Pilate's wife. What belongs only to St. Luke is the whole account of Jesus being sent to Herod. What all three accounts bring out is that Jesus is accused, mocked, and condemned as a King. Pilate is never allowed to treat the matter any other way; he does everything he can to show his contempt for the charge. His insults, like those Luke records from Herod, are Roman jokes at the Jewish nation—partly political, meant to show how little he feared a Jewish rising; partly the ordinary pride of a conqueror; partly merciful, to save the man from punishment by making him contemptible. I am convinced Barabbas, though a brigand, was more than an ordinary robber: he was one of those who had gone into the wilderness as a kind of chieftain and Christ, claiming a divine commission to free the people. The priests probably disliked Barabbas heartily, as one of those insurgent leaders who interfered with their own hold on the people even more than they shook Rome's power. The people would be surprised to hear the priests urging the release of a man whose death had seemed certain; they would welcome it as a generous concession, and be easily led to leave the other victim to his fate. In effect the priests were saying and feeling, "This is the more dangerous of the two pretenders; though He comes with less violence, He is the real underminer of Cæsar's throne." Their thoughts were surely very mixed. Partly they really thought Him a blasphemer, partly they hated Him for denouncing them. They were insincere in pretending any love for Roman rule, yet they believed it safer for the nation and themselves than whatever might come if it broke up. They half thought Him a mere impostor, and half suspected some mysterious royalty in Him. So they could easily justify their acts to themselves; in their own minds nothing in their accusations was directly false. It is inward, spiritual falsehood that the Evangelists charge them with; their acts the Evangelists see as expressing and bringing out the most precious and living of all truths. Pilate they see as adding his own Gentile testimony to that truth, for this was the inscription he set on the cross in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew: "This is Jesus the King of the Jews."

#### THE CRUCIFIXION.

*The passage:* As they went out they forced a man of Cyrene, Simon, to carry Jesus' cross. At Golgotha, "the place of a skull," they offered him vinegar mixed with gall, which he tasted but would not drink. They crucified him, divided his clothes by lot, and sat to watch. Over his head they placed the charge, "This is Jesus the King of the Jews." Two thieves were crucified beside him. Passers-by mocked him, telling him to save himself and come down if he were the Son of God; the chief priests, scribes, and elders jeered that he saved others but could not save himself, and that they would believe if the King of Israel came down; even the thieves reviled him. From the sixth hour darkness covered the land until the ninth, when Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Some thought he called for Elias; one gave him vinegar on a sponge. Jesus cried again and died. The temple veil was torn in two, the earth quaked, rocks split, graves opened, and many dead saints rose and later appeared in the holy city. The centurion and those watching feared and said, "Truly this was the Son of God." Women who had followed him from Galilee looked on from a distance. The parallel accounts are in Mark 15:21–41 and Luke 23:26–49.

I said most of what I have to say in my last words, so I will add little here. You can see that these reports differ; the story of the thief is perhaps the most memorable difference in the Gospels. But what stays the same? Surely everyone would point to the inscription, "This is the King of the Jews," and to the cry of "Father"—whether "forgive them," "why hast Thou forsaken me?" or "into my hands I commend my spirit." The heart of the story, and the mystery of the cross, lies in these. We will never preach the cross or glory in it as the Apostles did, and never understand the coherent meaning of the Evangelists and all the Scriptures, until we see in it the revelation of Jesus the Son of God and the King of Men.

#### THE BURIAL.

*The passage:* When evening came, a rich man from Arimathæa named Joseph, himself a disciple of Jesus, went to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. Pilate ordered it given to him. Joseph wrapped it in clean linen and laid it in his own new tomb, cut in the rock, rolled a great stone across the entrance, and left. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sat facing the tomb.

Whatever we make of the words "It is finished," the Evangelists plainly do not take them to mean that the deepest humiliation has now been reached or that the story of Christ's acts is over. To them the laying of the body in the tomb by the man who waited for the Kingdom of God is a necessary part of the story—told quickly, like the rest, without any grand words, yet a fact important in itself and a needed step toward what comes next. The quiet burial is noted as carefully as the violent death, and the honor paid to the body as much as the suffering it endured. If it were only the body of a dead and beloved friend, we would hear how grief overturned every law and duty; but since it is the body of a Son of God and King of Men, it may rest through the Sabbath-day, and the tomb in the rock is a sign that the light of the world, though it seems put out, is only hidden.

#### THE RESURRECTION.

*The passage:* The 28th chapter of Matthew, the 16th of Mark, and the 24th of Luke tell how Christ rose from the dead.

What impression does this history leave on anyone who reads it? Surely this: that the Evangelists treated the Resurrection as the natural and inevitable end of their story. They take no pains to show how so strange and unparalleled an event could happen, and no pains to gather weighty testimony for it. When the disciples doubt, that is recorded with blame; when they wonder and rejoice, it is recorded without comment. Matthew is very brief, and part of his account explains the deal struck between the priests and the soldiers. Mark tells how our Lord rebuked the disciples for their hardness of heart. In Luke He asks, "ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?" The assumption throughout is that, given the premises of the story, any other outcome would be incredible; that the Resurrection was the exact fulfilment of God's order, the victory over irregularity and disorder. It was not *possible* that death should hold Him—not possible if He was the Son of God and the King of Men, not possible if His baptism, His temptation, His miracles, His parables, His whole life were what the three Evangelists declare them to have been.

The narrative of the Resurrection belongs to all three Evangelists; the narrative of the Ascension belongs only to two of them. This is the point where I begin to examine what is peculiar to these documents, having so far tried to work out the common ground and meaning they share.

### PART II. DIFFERENCES OF THE EVANGELISTS.

It is commonly believed that the Spirit of God brought the facts of our Lord's life back to the Evangelists' memory. They may have seen these things themselves or heard of them from others, but merely seeing or hearing did not make them understand. They needed a light from above to tell them what the facts meant and to bring them into harmony. Without that light they were not fit to record them.

That is our common belief. With it we have joined the opinion, drawn from outside sources or from Scripture, that each Evangelist was closely linked with one of the leading Apostles. No one doubts that St. Luke was St. Paul's companion. Tradition, backed by weighty texts, connects St. Mark with St. Peter. We have not usually tied St. Matthew to any Epistle-writer, but critics ancient and modern agree that he wrote especially for the Hebrew part of the Church—so in our minds he is associated with St. James, the presiding Apostle of the Jerusalem Church, the Christian Jew above all others.

I do not think people have asked themselves clearly how they connect these two sets of facts. They say vaguely that the Evangelists were inspired to report certain events. Because they find the events recorded differently, they suppose the inspiration produced those differences; because some events are left out by one and recorded by another, they suppose the same cause is at work. But they are so little used to seeing these events as one whole, with one purpose, that they fail to explain—to others or to themselves—what they mean either by the human helps of eyesight and testimony the writers used, or by the divine guidance over them.

But is it hopeless to reconcile these two views? Is any book worth anything unless some idea or principle in it binds its facts together? Can anyone write a lasting book, one that leaves a living impression on many minds, without such an idea within it? And if the idea is there, will it not penetrate every part of the record, so that the writer sees every fact in its light—and passes his impression to us by making us see every fact in the same light?

If we grant this, we might better understand what it means for the Spirit to bring to remembrance events already seen or known by testimony. Would not that operation be exactly this: that what was scattered, disjointed, and incoherent in the mind became a living, harmonious whole, each part brought out in its proper proportion by a light spread over all? In this way we might understand why, among the many gospels known to have existed in the early Church—and which St. Luke says were composed in his time—some sank into obscurity at once and some lasted a little and then perished, because they had no living coherence. The events they recorded, even if true, lacked the sure divine stamp, and were felt to be not a divine history but only its loose fragments.

In this way too we might understand how the idea of a Son of God is stamped on all the true gospels, while the false ones tried, by strange narratives and startling wonders, to suggest they had some very great One to tell of, yet never managed to present Him to the heart and conscience of their readers. But if this fundamental idea is the common test of every true Evangelist, were there not also special aspects of it that struck each of them? Could a single narrative convey the whole of such a truth? Here is the place to consider those links between the Evangelists and different Apostles which we have all taken for granted.

St. Matthew, as we have seen, sets before us a Son of God as much as any of the three. But under what aspect? I will say nothing yet about St. James's special work, since I must later examine his Epistle for his meaning and purpose. I assume only that St. Matthew's is what all have called it—the Hebrew Gospel. If so, I would expect his prevailing idea to be that the revelation of the Son of God fulfils the revelation of the Old Testament, that the new covenant is needed to complete and confirm the old, that the God of Abraham must be a Father, and Abraham's kingdom a fatherly kingdom.

I will speak of St. Peter later, so I will not now go into what his Epistle shows of his ruling idea. I will only recall his confession recorded by St. Matthew: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Turning to St. Mark, I find his opening words, "The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God." I would expect St. Mark's aim to be, above all, to bring out Christ in His own person and His own acts, as the head and founder of a kingdom and an object of faith.

I must later examine St. Paul's Epistles and his place in the Church. For now I assume only that he was the teacher of the Gentiles, and that he saw the new dispensation not merely as completing the old but as having a deeper foundation than the old—so that the Jewish law and whole Jewish economy rested on the revelation of Christ, rather than Christ resting on them. So I would expect St. Luke's Gospel to embody this idea, to present the Son of God as the giver of the Spirit and the founder of a spiritual kingdom with an older and deeper root than Judaism itself.

Whether these expectations match what we actually find in these three Evangelists is now, as briefly as we can, our task to consider.

#### ST. MATTHEW.

##### CHAPTER I.

St. Matthew's Gospel opens: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham." A genealogy runs from Abraham to Joseph, husband of Mary, divided into three periods of fourteen generations each. Joseph was espoused to Mary, and before they came together she was found with child by the Holy Ghost, fulfilling the words, "A virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel." The child, when born, was called Jesus.

There are obvious difficulties here which cannot be evaded. Jesus is called Son of David and Son of Abraham — what we'd expect from a Jew who believed the Messiah must be of that line. But how is it proved? Joseph is shown to be of that race, yet declared *not* to be His father. Second, what has the arrangement of Jewish history into periods to do with the genealogy or the Conception? Third, even granting the miraculous Conception, how does it fulfil Isaiah's words, which plainly speak of a child soon to be born, one too young to say "my father or my mother" before the two conspiring kings should be put down?

Supposing the first two chapters spurious does not remove these difficulties — we'd still have to explain how so inconsistent a story got assembled. Supposing St. Matthew an Ebionite doesn't help either, since belief in the miraculous Conception was not characteristically Ebionite; the inconsistency remains. Nor does supposing two narratives spliced by a later compiler help — why would he keep the genealogy unaltered instead of dropping it or fitting it to the Conception story?

But suppose St. Matthew started from the belief, common to all the Evangelists, that Jesus was the eternal Son of God. Would His incarnation in a miraculous way seem strange to him — or might it seem the most *natural* way for such a Person to enter the world, explaining the law of other births rather than merely excepting Him from it? If so, would not all Jewish history seem to confirm it? Take the first name in the genealogy: did not Isaac's birth teach Abraham, and through him the nation, that a child is God's gift, that even with a human father the child is still to be attributed to God as its true author? Given that first example, must not the whole line of Jewish children have been seen as witnesses to a mysterious divine paternity over the nation and its members? Did not every page of the prophets suggest that human relations had a divine counterpart, grounded in a relation not yet manifested? If this were Matthew's thought, is it strange that he traces the genealogy to Joseph rather than Mary? Would not the sudden break in the history at just that point be the clearest sign that its meaning was now disclosed, its ground brought to light? Then "Son of David, Son of Abraham" connects intelligibly with what follows: the Son of God is the heir of David's throne that all previous kings had testified to, and in Him the covenant with Abraham — blessing to all families of the earth — is accomplished.

On this view we can easily see why Matthew pauses over the successive periods of Jewish history. He who came to gather up the people's history, who was to be the centre of its ages, is about to be presented. No sharper way to signal that this is his subject, that the past is to be *fulfilled* in Him.

I use the word "fulfilled" anticipating what follows. A virgin at the time Isaiah spoke to Ahaz did conceive and bear a son — we're told plainly that the prophetess did so, in the eighth chapter. Far from overlooking this, I think St. Matthew wants us to remember it, and its connection to what befell Ahaz and Israel. Ahaz showed utter faithlessness toward God's covenant, and because of that the Lord promised a sign showing that the fulfilment of the promises to David's house did not depend on his faithfulness or his house's. The sign given to Ahaz — that his land would be preserved while Samaria and Syria were destroyed — was fulfilled without delay or double meaning. But the sign's *meaning* could not be fulfilled unless a perfect King were actually given to David's house, one who was the Son of God. The sign itself was accomplished exactly as it would naturally be understood — not by any departure from ordinary conception and birth, though the Prophet felt that he and his children were themselves signs and wonders from the Lord of Hosts. But when the sign's full intention had to be fulfilled, it required that the sign itself be accomplished by an extraordinary, yet — as I have dared to say — the most natural, means by which so divine and so human a fact could occur.

##### CHAPTER II.

So far, assuming only what we've already established — that St. Matthew was a Hebrew writing to Hebrews and held this faith — I've reached what seems a consistent reading of chapter one. If we've grasped this, especially his sense of "fulfilment," the difficulties of chapter two are not, I think, very serious. On the ordinary view that this is primarily a human person's history, or on the Ebionite hypothesis, or on the theory of spliced inconsistent narratives, these difficulties seem to me insurmountable.

The chapter opens with the Magi's visit and adoration. This might be taken as one of the strange supernatural events attesting Jesus as a great prophet. But it breaks the narrative's order so completely, forms such an isolated episode in His childhood, connects so little with His teaching or acts as prophet or founder, that I don't wonder people eager to see Him chiefly in those roles want to discard it. If discarded, where did it come from? Not from an Ebionite — the child's kingly character, so prominent here, was just what Ebionites were least inclined to stress, and far from delighting in His manifestation to Gentiles, their whole effort was to keep the New Covenant as limited as the Old. Unless the compilation process can actually be traced and the patchwork detected, cutting the knot this way is as gratuitous and uncritical as resorting to miracle — indeed it is a *Deus ex Machina*, modern indolence and superstition.

But what did St. Matthew need to believe for this to be consistent? That God promised Abraham's seed would bless all nations. That God promised to raise up a Son of David to rule the Gentiles. That Gentile wisdom was itself God-given. That He was teacher and ruler of the Gentiles. Grant these — incredible postulates to a modern critic, but natural and inevitable to any instructed Hebrew — and the Magians' story becomes perfectly reasonable. Instead of a fortuitous miraculous announcement like that given to Habakkuk about Daniel in the apocryphal Bel and the Dragon, we're told these men learned of a King of the Jews' birth through the ordinary occupation of every Eastern sage — study of the stars. Laborious diligence is honored. An unseen guide leads them, but the visible guide is a star they had been watching — one which, like all Persian astronomers, they'd take as a king or dynast, connected to an actual ruler. This points to the nature of the Gospel's preparation not in one class of Gentile thinkers but in all: each led to the true King through the very subject he had most earnestly pursued. But the story assumes this Child *was* the true King, that divine glory was in Him and could manifest itself. We cannot avoid that assumption — only note that making it shows Matthew's consistency, not his inconsistency.

The part concerning Herod and the priests fits everything we know of both. That an Edomite ruling by Antony's choice and Augustus's tolerance should tremble at a native prince is expected. That Herod would consult the Jewish authorities he was anxious to conciliate, assuming an anointed king was due to be born, matches the temper of the time. That the priests would name Bethlehem, David's city, quoting Micah, was equally expected. Notably, the Evangelists dwell far less on the Bethlehem birth than the priests did, resting Christ's claims on evidence quite distinct from mere connection to the royal village. The wise men's gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh presuppose the idea of a divine King, and are otherwise consistent and Oriental.

Then: an angel warns Joseph in a dream to flee to Egypt with the child and his mother, to escape Herod, and they remain there until Herod's death — fulfilling the words, "Out of Egypt have I called my son." This quotation has puzzled everyone. Isn't it a forced application of Hosea? Doesn't Hosea plainly mean the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, referring to the past, not the future? I have no doubt he does — the whole context requires that reading. But does this mean St. Matthew is merely toying with words from a writer he believed to be God's prophet, catching some chance phrase that came to mind? I think the case is quite otherwise. He looked for fulfilment not just of the particular words but of the idea toward which the words, their context, and the history all pointed. Why does God call Israel His son? That was the mystery needing clarification. Until clarified, the history of the people — God's deliverances, His paternal care and chastisement — remained unfulfilled. If Matthew saw Jesus as Son of God, he believed this history *was* fulfilled in Him. His actual relation, as one who took Abraham's seed, to God brought to light the relation of Abraham's children to God that their history implied but had not yet manifested. But how was this to be shown to Israel — that this was their King, the one in whom God had regarded the people through all their murmurings as His own family? The Evangelists held that every act of Christ's life was significant, that going to and returning from Egypt was no accident but part of divine order. So the people's life was linked to their King's life, and Hosea's words about the one were interpreted through what befell the other. Such reasoning would be natural if Matthew had the purpose I've supposed; I don't see how it's natural on any other view.

Then comes the massacre of the infants at Bethlehem, needing no explanation in itself — entirely consistent with Herod's character, given fear of a rival heir. The strangeness lies again in the supposed fulfilment: "In Ramah was a voice heard." Apart from the principle I've adopted, Jeremiah's words are as distorted here as Hosea's were there. The mother of the Jewish race weeps over children about to be carried captive to Babylon; she is told to stop weeping, for they will return, the nation will live though many perish. Where do we find the fulfilment of the prophet's sorrow and hope? Here, says the Evangelist, is the king and deliverer, the Joseph of the family, who is to become its head and preserve its life. The deaths and deliverance of His childhood connect Him to His land's history — not only its past captivity but its future one. A few Jewish mothers wept over these deaths; many more would weep before that generation ended; Rachel would weep over the seeming extinction of her whole family — yet since the Head of it was saved, blessing and higher deliverance would come from the ruin. This reading assumes belief in the nation's organic life, a vital connection running through all its history. But can anyone read the Old Testament without sensing this pervaded every legislator and prophet's mind? And if the New Testament fulfills its promise to explain the Old, must it not take us to the heart of this mystery, showing the centre toward which all these lines converge?

Once more: Joseph, finding Archelaus reigning on his return from Egypt, feared to enter Judæa and settled instead in Nazareth of Galilee — fulfilling the prophets' words, "He shall be called a Nazarene." In the earlier cases we could locate the passage referred to, however puzzled by its application. Here we can't even find the quotation. Matthew says "spoken by the prophets" — plural — so he doesn't mean one specific text but a general meaning running through them all, which this phrase aptly captures. Given Nazareth's actual low reputation as shown throughout the Gospels, given how decisively His dwelling in Galilee counted against His claim to kingship among the Jews, given all that "Nazarene" implied when later applied to His disciples, I think the simplest reading is the most accurate: Matthew has in mind all those prophetic passages suggesting the coming king and prophet would be, like the nation itself, despised and rejected, his true nature unrecognized. This fits with everything before and after, and explains, better than almost anything else, what Matthew meant by the fulfilment of prophecy.

##### CHAPTER III. IV.

We come to a part of Matthew already considered. His account of the baptism is distinctive for including: "But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." I don't know that this helps establish the Evangelist's purpose, but it's curious that the "Ebionite gospel" is the one asserting our Lord's superiority to John. The phrase "fulfilling righteousness" has a specially Jewish ring, interpreting the other uses of "fulfilled" we've just noted.

The righteous man of the Old Testament was one whom the righteous God chose and set apart, who believed in God and to whom God's righteousness was imputed. He fulfilled his righteousness by submitting to God's calling through whatever voice it came, submitting to every ordinance as a signification of God's mind and will. This is plainly implied here; and consistent with earlier passages, something more is implied too — that the law's righteousness was now fulfilled in a person, and His baptism proved it. The Son submits to the servant so that He may be declared Son. This idea pervades the Gospel, surfacing unbidden at every turn.

The order of the temptations in Matthew differs, as everyone notes, from Luke's: the offer of world-kingdoms follows the pinnacle-invitation in Matthew, precedes it in Luke. Others have made more of this than I want to, though I think there's meaning in it — not imposed but springing naturally from the writer's habit of mind. The characteristic Jewish temptation was to cast himself off the ground God had placed him on, out of His covenant into surrounding idolatries; the characteristic temptation of the Gentile, and of those belonging to the new dispensation, has been to seek universal dominion by paying homage to the Evil Spirit.

After the temptation, Christ's preaching begins. Matthew says He went to "the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim," fulfilling Isaiah's words about that land. The connection to Isaiah's larger prophecy is this: just as darkness in Judæa was deepest through Ahaz's idolatries, just as the ten tribes were being destroyed, a great light appeared — a king raised up ruling in righteousness. Hezekiah did not see himself as merely Jerusalem's king; the whole land was God's, and he invited even those separated from Judah since Jeroboam's time to the great passover. Even to the furthest borders, near the Gentiles, his gracious rule extended, and remote peoples felt themselves again under divine government. Isaiah's language is not exaggerated — the difference between a sensual tyrant's rule or anarchy and a king who feels raised up to show God's rule is immense. Matthew has this whole passage in mind. The king is its central object; the words about Zabulon and Nephthalim express how his power reached the land's furthest limits — these are the words fulfilled in Christ's visit to Galilee of the Gentiles, as a sign that the whole prophecy was fulfilled in the true and perfect King. The fulfilment is literal. The poor inhabitants of that region, wretched under Herod and Rome as under the first captivity, actually felt the presence of a divine teacher, deliverer, King. But their experience is the sign and witness of the fulfilment to the whole nation, and through the nation to mankind. The universal is seen in the individual — the method of Scripture, of nature, of reason, the divine method throughout.

##### CHAPTERS V. VI. VII.

I won't take up whether Luke's sermon in chapter six is the same as the Sermon on the Mount. But I'll point to the great pervading difference anyone who studies both attentively will see. The words "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil" have nothing corresponding in Luke six. Yet Matthew's whole comparison of what was said in old time with what Christ now says begins with, and turns on, these words. I think the whole discourse must be read through them. Doing so, we're struck by the contrast our Lord draws between the age before Him and the one He came to establish. He has said plainly He came to destroy nothing — even the least commandment remains precious. Why then does the contrast seem so great? The last verse of chapter five gives the ground: "Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." This is the fulfilment traced through the whole chapter. "Father" recurs at every turn, grounding every sentence. Compare any chapter of Leviticus, with its repeated "I am the Lord" — that was the ground of what was said of old, great and abiding words, the everlasting foundation of a Decree. There can be no other foundation for a decree. But our Lord uttered no decrees. He revealed God's actual mind, and showed how it could become men's mind, since it was His Father's mind, and He came to them as a brother. Remove this idea from the Sermon on the Mount and you destroy not just its unity but the sanction and intelligibility of every separate saying. You cannot explain why one shouldn't pray or give alms to be seen, why not take thought for the morrow, why one should ask expecting to receive — apart from "your Father seeth in secret," "your Father knoweth ye have need," "shall not your Father give good things to them that ask?" This is the only explanation our Lord gives.

I won't go step by step through this discourse. This hint should suffice for anyone wishing to investigate further; I'm sure the reward will be rich, and such a reader will find many things I haven't noticed that illustrate the Evangelist's meaning even better than what I've set down.

##### CHAPTER VIII.

I note that Matthew, in the story of the centurion's servant, adds: "And I say unto you, that many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness." That Matthew would go out of his way to record this is inexplicable if he were, like every Ebionite, jealous of Gentile intrusion into the covenant — so such passages must be treated by that hypothesis as later interpolations. Why a later compiler should choose Matthew especially for this experiment isn't clear. But if Matthew wrote as a Hebrew to Hebrews, nothing is more natural than dwelling on the evidence that other nations were to be blessed in them and their seed, or warning them, as prophets did, how near they stood to desolation and apostasy. This must have been the continual tone of St. James's preaching in Jerusalem. The difference between his preaching and Paul's — as we'll see later — was decided, but it wasn't that one was more tolerant of Jewish sin or believed less firmly in the prophecies about Gentiles. Nor is this the nature of the difference between Matthew and Luke. Their warnings about coming calamity on the Jewish nation differ curiously, but in kind, not degree. If anything, Matthew is more earnest and frequent in warning, since, treating of prophecy's fulfilment, this was obviously his province.

An instance of prophetic fulfilment follows: at evening they brought many possessed and sick to Him, and He healed them, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." Since commentators habitually restrict these words to Christ's death, readers are startled to find an Apostle applying them here. Surely Matthew understood the prophet at least as well as we do. Healing sickness and casting out devils seemed to him to involve bearing sicknesses and infirmities. Only one who suffered them could remove them. His power to relieve humanity's woes could not be separated from His sharing in them. Christ's brotherhood with man answered every prophetic expectation of their king. Without it there could be no fulfilment of God's promises or man's longing.

##### CHAPTER IX.

I've already discussed the feast at Matthew's house and the question of fasting. Distinctive here is: "Go ye, and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice." This brief allusion opens a wide view of the old economy and the new. The Jewish worshipper tended to imagine his sacrifices bought God's mercy. But the Law and Prophets continually teach that mercy was itself the ground of the sacrifices. So in showing mercy to the unrighteous, Christ wasn't contradicting the Old Law but fulfilling it — carrying out God's mind toward men, showing Him as the source of forgiveness, deliverance, righteousness. Notice how naturally this pervading conviction shows itself in all Matthew's quotations — at every turn, our Lord brings out the mind of the God of Abraham as the mind of a Father.

##### CHAPTER X.

I've noted that the instructions to the Apostles are given in far more detail by Matthew than by the others, and especially that Luke transfers much of what Matthew assigns to the twelve to the seventy instead. Given that Matthew shows the Old fulfilled in the New, while Luke teaches the Gentiles, we'd expect exactly this difference.

The apostolic office, for all its breadth, is the unfolding of the tribal institution. It represents the Jewish nation while making it what it was always meant to be — teacher and evangelizer of the world. The directions here belong first to the Apostles as teachers of Israel's lost sheep, to whom their first mission was confined, though every warning looked ahead to when their office would be unlimited. The Evangelist's characteristic trait appears again: "It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." Here is the ground of the Apostles' faith and comfort — and I believe, the foundation of their office itself, which their acts as well as their words were continually to declare.

##### CHAPTER XI.

Both Matthew and Luke record John's disciples coming to Christ and the conversation after. One passage is peculiar to Matthew: "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come." At the Transfiguration, Matthew alone tells us Christ said Elias had already come and suffered as men wished, and that the disciples understood He meant John the Baptist — Matthew alone directly identifies them. John's Gospel, as I'll consider later, seems to show the Baptist disclaiming the name Elias himself. It's entirely in keeping with Matthew's purpose to stress this: all the old economy's announcements and ideas were to be fulfilled in the new. Christ's advent had to substantiate Jewish history and prophecy's indications. Elijah, who proclaimed the Lord God of Abraham against Jezebel and her idols, must have his counterpart before the Jewish age closed — a protester against the heart-idolatry of Pharisees and Sadducees, a witness that God was manifesting Himself, that the great Day of the Lord had come. The Evangelist, I think, never ceases to see our Lord as revealer of the mind of that God for whom Elijah testified, fully declaring His righteousness and judgments.

There's one memorable passage near this chapter's end belonging solely to Matthew — the one that taught Augustine the difference between Christ's teaching and that of the best philosophers: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." The words would be beautiful alone, but Augustine never separated them from the sentence just before, which occurs in Luke ten without them. His heavy burden was the sense of ignorance of God and separation from Him. Philosophers could awaken this sense but not satisfy it. Only one who could say He knew the Father and was willing to reveal Him could say, "Come unto me, I will give you rest" — and then call them to take His yoke, to work with Him in His Father's Kingdom, to become sons as lowly and obedient as the Son was, casting off the heavy burden of pride and self-will. A soul crying for the living God could understand this. Those who entered into the psalmists' and prophets' cries could understand — and still can — how Christ answered and fulfilled them.

##### CHAPTER XII.

This chapter gives another familiar instance. Jesus withdrew, healed the multitudes, and charged them not to make Him known — "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet": "Behold my servant... He shall not strive, nor cry... A bruised reed shall he not break... And in his name shall the Gentiles trust."

I ask anyone to meditate seriously on this application of Scripture, and ask what idea of fulfilment its maker must have held.

No one, I think, will call it inappropriate. Heart and conscience recognize its wonderful fitness at once. One who refused to let His deeds of mercy be known, who had power to heal and power to reject the fame of healing, is exactly what Isaiah describes. This trait implies others — He must have been inwardly meek and lowly throughout, and that meekness was a main element of His power, not an obstacle to it. But analyze the Isaiah passage the way a modern prophetical interpreter would: what becomes of it? What has "showing judgment to the Gentiles" to do with healing the sick in Galilee? What has "sending forth judgment unto victory" to do with commanding silence? How do "Gentiles trust in his name" because Jews were told not to proclaim it? If this incident merely needed fitting to some specific prediction, a hundred texts would have matched better. Only if this Person fulfilled the whole prophetic portrait of gentle royalty, only if the Evangelist felt in that one act how the whole divine-human portrait was embodied in a living man, only if we say with him, "such a one as this, so human, so divine, can rule the nations, can be trusted by all nations" — only then do we grasp the intention of the words rather than dismiss them as frivolous.[^fn002]

[^fn002]: There's a passage in this chapter I haven't discussed, because I don't understand it: "As Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Since there weren't three days and nights between the crucifixion and resurrection, these words can't bear the common interpretation. But I see no other they're susceptible to. So I leave them, as I will other puzzling passages. I hope readers will reject any strained interpretations of mine, and I hope I won't cling to any merely because they're mine and seemed plausible. The more I read and believe the Bible, the deeper my sense of the sin of sacrificing truth even slightly to make out a case for it. God has confounded such tricks before; may He confound mine, if I've committed what must be a worse offence than open doubt.

##### CHAPTER XIII.

Chapter 13 contains two parables already discussed, plus two or three peculiar to Matthew. Notably, though Mark and Luke also record "that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand," only Matthew adds the quotation from Isaiah with "in them is fulfilled the prophecy." Again at verse 34: "All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables... that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." Both quotations require the same principle we've applied throughout. To suppose Isaiah wasn't speaking of his own generation's grossness would make his awful vision of the Lord of Hosts and his mission a mockery. And if the writer of Psalm 78 wasn't himself about to utter and explain parables and hard sayings, what is the Psalm about? But Isaiah's prophecy wasn't *fulfilled* in his own time — hardness of heart hadn't reached its climax, eyes hadn't yet closed against the fullest light. The Psalmist dwelt on the parables of his nation's history, the dark sayings his fathers told him, seeing those dealings in connection and thereby lifting part of the veil that covered them while they could only be seen separately, in progress. Only the perfect Image of God could fully set forth the parable of His relations with man, exhibiting His acts in perfect order and sequence.

These two quotations illustrate the particular aspect of the parable Matthew presents. Its general object is to show the inward order of God's kingdom and government over the heart and will, with outward results illustrated from nature and human affairs. Matthew's special calling seems to be showing divine power working alongside the powers that counteract it, and the approaching crisis that would separate them.

So the parable of the tares is Matthew's. The leaven hidden in three measures of meal — which recent commentators, justified by Scripture's uniform use of "leaven," take as an evil principle mixed with the pure seed in Christian life and doctrine — is his too. So is the net cast into the sea gathering every kind. His comparisons especially concern the full working-out of the mystery of good and evil, indicated by the phrase "end of the age."

I can hardly help seeing this same character, less obviously, in the two beautiful parables of the treasure hidden in the field and the merchant seeking pearls. The first surely describes the wonder of those who had spent their lives seeking outward signs, finding instead that the treasure they needed lay in the field of their own hearts — a field never cultivated, even needing to be bought as a strange possession. Does not the other describe just as vividly those old philosophers genuinely searching for goodly pearls, fragments of divine wisdom, who found all these fragments gathered into one living Person? — parables with infinite personal application, yet belonging remarkably to that age's history, that confluence of Jewish and Gentile faith and unbelief marking its close.

##### CHAPTERS XIV. XV. XVI.

I know of nothing in these chapters not already discussed, or peculiar to Matthew, except Peter being called onto the water, and the memorable words: "Upon this rock will I build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Only the latter needs attention here — its importance is obvious.

Romanists rightly draw attention to the blessing given to Peter, since the rest depends on it. Consider what it is: "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." Knowing Jesus as Son of the living God was knowing a truth only God could reveal, belonging not to the mind's surface but its very ground. This matches our earlier findings. Discovering the Son of the living God is discovering Him on whom all things and persons rest. All His miracles and parables have been proving this — He fulfilled the meaning of the old Jewish kingdom, coming as the Prince and Head who had secretly directed all its movements and been implied in all its offices.

How well the next words accord with this: God has revealed to you the ground flesh and blood could not — the ground on which your life and all men's lives stand. "And upon *this* rock will I build my Church." Without the preceding blessing, we might doubt this rock's meaning — Romanists say it means Peter himself, many Protestants say a dry formal confession. But these are just what flesh and blood *could* reveal. A man, head of a school of Apostles, or a logical formula declaring Jesus Son of God, belongs to the mind's surface. But teaching a man that he can rest only on the pillars of the universe, on the Son of God Himself — this is God's work. One who grasps this knows he stands not on shifting sand but eternal rock.

"Upon it will I build my *Church*." The word *Ecclesia* hasn't occurred before in the New Testament, and occurs only twice in the Gospels — both times in Matthew, which may seem strange given how especially Pauline the word is. But remember: though closely tied to the so-called Gentile dispensation, its force and application must be learned entirely from Jewish Scripture. Paul found the term in Greek cities, applied to an assembly called by a herald, but took it in its etymological sense — a body called out. This meaning is expounded through the whole Jewish national history, through the calling of the first father, the nation, every officer and man in it. How fitting, given all Matthew's previous teaching, to say that a body called out beyond these old limits would be built up in the world, founded on a rock lying deep down. Against such a building the gates of Hell could not prevail — it could not sink into darkness and death, standing on One who would show death and hell had no power to hold Him.

That Peter should hold this Kingdom's keys, opening its gates to Gentiles as well as Jews, might seem wonderful, but history confirms it — at Pentecost, and with Cornelius, this honor was given him. Strictly, what he bound on earth was bound in heaven, what he loosed was loosed. I won't fully take up these last words now, as they recur later. But I'll say: first, I don't shrink from attributing to Peter greater privilege and glory than claimed by those whose view of his position would mean the Kingdom's gates were *never* truly opened by him or anyone; second, I'm ready to test Peter's own view of his position, and his Master's, against his own epistle.

##### CHAPTER XVI.

This chapter has one passage peculiar to Matthew — the tribute-money demanded of Peter and how he was told to procure it. One might naturally think Matthew's background as a publican prompted this story, but that conclusion would be rash: it's often rightly noted that the didrachma wasn't Roman tribute but Temple dues, and the force of the question to Peter — "Of whom do the kings of the earth take tribute?" — turns on this. They were children of Him who dwelt in the Temple, not strangers or bondsmen. On this reading, Matthew would naturally be the Evangelist most likely to record such a conversation — fitting his whole purpose, another illustration of how Christ fulfilled the old dispensation by substantiating the meaning of its forms and holy places. I'm not sure I see the special meaning some find in the miracle of the fish. I see in it Christ's general claim over nature, asserted in many ways — understandable alongside the draught of fishes and similar acts — but it may carry meanings I can't perceive. Those who value it merely as more startling than other miracles must ask themselves whether they'll explain all miracles by this one, or this one by the others.

##### CHAPTER XVIII.

I noted earlier that the conversation prompted by "Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?" is fuller and more varied in Matthew than the others. The little child is common to all; peculiar to Matthew are the warning about scandals, "In heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven," and "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish." The first topic clearly follows from the Apostles' dispute — their desire for high places, treating offices as prizes rather than service, was in one form or other the root of all scandals in Christ's kingdom. But where was the test of scandal's existence, and its correction? The little child, humblest of creatures, was dear to the Father in heaven — not merely a fallen, corrupted thing. Its Angel, its pure original type, ever looked into His face. Bringing it to this state was His will; it was against His will that any such little one lose its high original glory. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, to fulfil His Father's will by bringing back the wandering sheep. How fearful, then, the scandals that injure such little ones! How needful to cut off the offending hand or eye!

From here the transition is easy to the great law: "If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone... thou hast gained thy brother." This is the great law of the family, the means of checking its scandals. Christ, the elder Brother of the human race, came to establish this family principle as universal. Here Matthew uses *Ecclesia* a second time. Before, we learned the Church's foundation; now, the principles of its cohesion and the powers threatening it. It holds together by a law of forgiveness and mutual sacrifice. Only when someone utterly resists and renounces this law, despite every warning, is his brother warranted in casting him off as the proud Jew treated heathens and publicans.

Then: "Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven... if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing... it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven." In our disputes over what powers this conveys to priests, we've overlooked the passage's radical principle: that the Son of Man brought heaven and earth under one law, that earth was to have a real kingdom of heaven within it. Here is the true exposition of the Church's power and reality — for which certain "keys" placed in mortal hands would be a poor substitute. Both clauses, taken together with the whole passage, illustrate the deep mystery of human creatures adopted as sons of God by being acknowledged as Christ's brothers, thereby enabled to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect — the very mystery of the Sermon on the Mount, which seems to be Matthew's special task to expound.

Nowhere is this more strikingly expounded than in this chapter's closing parable, the king settling accounts with his servants: that God's forgiveness is the ground of man's forgiveness, and that God's forgiveness, free and absolute as it is, only reaches a man's heart when it subdues his unbrotherly nature and makes him forgiving — a truth we grasp very imperfectly, and set at naught constantly, in theory as much as in practice.

##### CHAPTERS XIX. XX.

Nothing new in chapter nineteen. But its close is inseparably tied to chapter twenty's parable, peculiar to Matthew, whose importance for declaring the divine kingdom's nature and rewards can't be overstated. Peter, like the rich young ruler, faced the same temptation in another form. "What shall we have therefore" was his thought as much as the ruler's. "Everything," is the answer — gifts beyond imagining — but the greatest is this: to understand that your calling and work are themselves inconceivable blessings, and that the reward following them, the hire at day's end, is something to be shared, not possessed. Regard it as something to "have," excluding others for your own sake, and you'll never grasp it — my Kingdom's nature and meaning will stay hidden from you. Why? Because that kingdom rests on the will of a Father whose eye is good, who sends rain on the just and unjust alike. To be like Him, to enter His mind, is *the* good — this is what the chosen seek; those who imagine themselves chosen at their brothers' expense are merely called. What a lesson for the elect nation! What a deeper, more awful lesson for the elect Church!

##### CHAPTERS XXI. XXII.

In chapter 21, Matthew's account of the conversation about John's authority includes the parable of the two sons: one refuses to work in the vineyard but repents and goes; the other agrees but doesn't go. Asked which did the father's will, they answer, "The first." Jesus tells them the publicans and harlots enter God's kingdom before them, for John came in righteousness and the publicans and harlots believed him, while the leaders, seeing this, still didn't repent and believe.

These words are characteristic of the Evangelist: a Father's will; submission or resistance to it; repentance acknowledging *it* good and the child's will evil — this is the subject of Christ's revelations as Matthew presents them. Other aspects of the gospel aren't lost, but are seen in reference to this one. Thus it fulfils the Law and Prophets, even while casting out those who boasted most of them. This point is especially apt here since chapter 21 records largely the same discourses and parables found in the other Evangelists.

The parable opening chapter 22, the King's marriage feast for His Son, closes with the same moral as chapter 20: "For many are called, but few chosen." It remarkably develops the earlier parable's idea, though occasion, audience, and setting differ. The Father's great reward to men is that they come and rejoice with Him in His Son's marriage. His bridal with humanity expresses and fulfils the Creator's mind and will — this reconciles Him to His creature. To give thanks for this is to become like Him, entering the Lord's joy. Those first invited refuse because their hearts are set on their own possessions and pleasures; the most wretched and helpless, who have nothing of their own, are called instead; and some of these still insist on appearing in their own rags rather than accept the wedding garment. This explains the nature and root of man's evil — Jewish pride, distrust, and exclusiveness were its great examples then, but it belongs equally to Gentiles, and would show itself in them once given the same privileges. I don't doubt this parable belongs among the discourses spoken after the entry to Jerusalem, bearing directly on the sins of its rulers. But this specific character doesn't prevent it from having a universal character rooted in the subject itself, and an individual character from the Evangelist's own distinct purpose.

##### CHAPTER XXIII.

The specific, universal, and individual all appear in the tremendous chapter that follows. Those who read Christ's words as announcing a gentler, more tolerant dispensation are scandalized by the denunciations here. How, they ask, can these be reconciled with the Sermon on the Mount's tone and spirit? They are in the most literal, most inward harmony with it. "Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven" was that discourse's maxim. Now, with the same authority, we're told what the Scribes' and Pharisees' righteousness actually is. If Jesus didn't speak as king and lawgiver, this discourse's tone is strange and new. But those who heard Him say "Blessed are the poor in spirit" felt He spoke as King and Lawgiver, one who knew and could reveal God's very mind. If so, He implicitly declared there what He explicitly declares here: that any religion not grounded in God's eternal Mind, in truth and righteousness — however seemly it looks, however godly its phrases — is atheistical and must be swept away, unable to enter the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom rests on a revelation of God's eternal Will and Order; all who confess that Will and Order are invited to share its blessedness; all who set up themselves on any pretext must be aliens from it. Pharisaic religion was the enthronement and deification of self — the world's evil, scattered through many forms, concentrated in them; it stood face to face with Christ, who came to offer Himself as Sacrifice; it denied not the Son of Man but the Holy Spirit dwelling in Him. Our Lord here, in awful language, describes its signs and announces its downfall. The age these Pharisees represented would gather into itself the crimes of all past ages; against it the long-delayed final sentence would go forth.

We see how these woes belong to their assigned time, matching the parables before and the prophecy after. We also see how everlasting is the truth brought out in condemning a particular nation's rulers: a selfish religion wearing the names and forms of self-sacrifice must be the sure sign of any people's misery and ruin — all its other evils rooted and consummated there. But nowhere more than here, tracing history and showing its perpetual application, does Matthew perform his distinct function. Christ's denunciations fulfil all former prophets' denunciations; their execution would fulfil all past judgments. The establishment of His kingdom would fulfil all those reformations and restorations that had once cheered ancient seers under the crushing weight of the people's sins, amid the prospect of captivity and desolation.

##### CHAPTERS XXIV. XXV.

I have commented very largely upon the next chapter. I ask only that you read it again alongside the one just considered, and with the 25th.

That chapter begins, "*Then* shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom." I take the "then" literally, fixed by the prophecy about the Temple: then, when the tribulation of the last days comes, when Jerusalem is surrounded by armies, when the abomination of desolation stands in the holy place—then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins. This gives new light on words in the prophecy that have caused much perplexity. The bridegroom's coming here is identical with the Son of Man's coming there. The King has made a marriage for His Son and comes to claim His bride. If the passing of the Old Dispensation meant this—if the shaking not only of earth but of heaven, not of merely human polities but of one that rightly claimed divine origin, proved that the Son of Man had come to assert His fellowship with humanity—then we can see why the day and hour should be unknown, why He should come as a thief in the night, even though the outward signs of judgment were startling and their effects visible through all later ages.

This is what the parable of the virgins suggests. The kingdom of heaven would resemble ten virgins, five wise and five foolish. Most commentators take the virgins as churches, and the oil, as elsewhere, as the Spirit or spiritual life. There is much agreement that certain churches would have the outward preparations for Christ's coming—scriptures and ordinances as lamps for their feet—and that some sudden convulsion, startling them into believing His coming was near, would set them all trimming their lamps, discovering the need to actually use them; but the foolish would then find themselves unable to use them, would seek second-hand help, and would finally be forced to see that unless they went and bought for themselves—unless they had direct personal apprehension of Him—they could not meet Him. I depart nothing from ordinary commentary in this. I only want it tied more clearly to the idea of the bridegroom. So understood, certain churches would be truly waiting for the divine King who declared Himself the root of humanity, the ground of their personal and social life, the only bond of their unity—and would find Him, in the fullest sense, not merely as King but as Lord of Man. The others, expecting some mere outward display of Him, like the adulterous Jewish generation, would find they had grasped only a shadow, would lose what they once had, and would become apostate: "Verily I say unto you, I know you not." The five wise would become part of the new, living Jerusalem; the others would sink back into corrupt Judaism or heathenism. This is the parable's specific force, matching the chronology our Lord gives it. But within that specific application lies a force that renews itself for every age of the Church, and especially for its last age. St. Matthew, the Evangelist who shows the fulfilment of the Old Dispensation in man's filial relation to God and conjugal relation to the divine King, was especially fitted to record this parable.

The disciples hearing it might well ask: did all the virgins have equal advantages? Could the foolish have been as prepared as the wise? If it was spiritual treasure they lacked, are these not emphatically divine gifts—withheld from those who lacked oil and had to borrow? The answer lies in the parable of the Talents, which is not really separated from that of the virgins, though our translators mark a break with the words "For the kingdom of heaven is like unto"—words that seem awkward and out of place here. The absent bridegroom did not leave those he would later claim without the inner gifts needed to receive him on his return. The treasures might look unequal because the tasks and temptations of those entrusted with them were unequal, but all were adequate, all could be improved—they were gifts meant to be traded with, not fixed and final. The difference between servants arises first from neglecting to trade with them, and ultimately from distrust of the owner—believing him a hard master reaping where he did not sow, rather than a gracious one who wants his servants to share his work and his joy. The principle here, as in the last parable, is deep and universal. The Apostles needed this parable for their own time just as they needed the last—to know what was coming and how to act; and it was a lesson for the world only because it was first a lesson for them. There are two aspects to this teaching, one drawn out by Luke, one by Matthew. What concerns us here is the evenness and righteousness of God's dealings: the same joy is meant for all who do not distrust their divine employer, but work for Him and with Him in His spirit.

Then follows the memorable passage beginning, "When the Son of man shall come in His glory." I have few remarks to make on it, for I do not wish to propose new interpretations here or elsewhere. I only want us to consider more earnestly what we mean by our ordinary interpretations, so that they become less shadowy and more real, bearing on our lives, rather than a loose collection of notions inconsistent with Scripture and with themselves. Everyone has a kind of dream of a great judgment where the Son of Man sits on His throne of glory. Let him keep that dream, undisturbed by any speculation, even by Scripture's own words—but let him work to make it more than a dream. Let him not let so awful a truth dissolve into phrases about "a great assize," into vague impressions borrowed from English courtrooms or from paintings. Such images, if they help bring to mind an actual Judge of the living and dead, to whom hearts are open, should not be discarded—they bear some real relation to the truth, something symbolic of it. But it matters gravely, as a question of honesty of mind, that we work out what that relation is—how the symbol connects to the thing symbolized. Let us admit plainly that we have let the symbol stand for the reality; that we have talked of judgment and tried to frighten ourselves and others with it, without truly believing in it; that it hangs about us as a terrible phantom we wish to be rid of, inspiring nothing like the comfort and joy it gave to psalmists, prophets, and apostles. Having made that confession, let us turn to this passage as our best guide to a right, practical understanding. If the Son of Man Himself best knows what it means to sit on His throne of glory and gather all nations before Him, let us hear His own teaching: when He says, "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these, ye did it to me," He proclaims the very truth of human existence—the truth with which it is eternal life to be aligned, and eternal death to be at odds. He is actually one with every man; His incarnation and death proclaim this. He judged the old world by that law. However little we understand His method now, if we take Scripture as history's interpreter, this law and no other decided the fate of every nation and race. And to the degree we're assured this held in every preparatory judgment and in the final judgment of the old world, we shall see it as the law affirmed in the great visitation upon Jerusalem, the law that has governed every nation and every person since, the law judging us now, and the law that will judge us on the last day. If we hold this truth and try to live by it, that final judgment will be no idle fiction, no pageant to trifle with, but a living, eternal reality—one we could not abandon without losing all our hope for ourselves and our race, and all our faith in God.

##### CHAPTERS XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII.

I have dwelt at great length on the first two of these chapters. In the last, it is significant that St. Matthew speaks only of the Resurrection, not the Ascension. The one fulfills all the meaning of the Old Dispensation; the other grounds and begins the New. But the Resurrection would not fulfill the past unless it brought forth the Son of David and Son of Abraham saying, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth"; unless the promise, "in thee and in thy seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed," were translated into "teach all the nations"; unless the name of the I Am, the ground of the national polity, were expanded into the Name of "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," the foundation of the universal Family.

#### ST. MARK.

It is commonly thought that the writer of the second Gospel set out deliberately to make an abridgement of the first. A reader notices that the same events appear in both, apparently told the same way, that Mark's is shorter, that various parables and discourses which add greatly to Matthew's beauty and fullness are left out by Mark, that his story moves quickly, and that he dwells on incidents more than on words. What could be more natural than to suppose he was picking out the main points in the life of Jesus and discarding the rest?

But the difficulties in this supposition grow at every step for anyone who gives the Gospel the same close attention he would give any ordinary document. Careful readers are struck by the vividness of Mark's style; he never merely records an incident but surrounds it with the circumstances that made it striking to those present. His wish for brevity does not stop him giving two stories of the same kind, as with the two miracles of the loaves. He often includes details that an abridger aiming only at condensation would surely have dropped had he found them in his source. These points are so obvious that I do not wonder that some who once searched for a single Gospel out of which the others might have been made were often inclined to the opposite view — to fix on Mark's history as nearly answering to their idea of the primitive one.

The modern school rightly turns us away from all such speculation and directs us to the actual books we possess, urging us to face their contents honestly and observe their great and startling differences.

Following that precept, I must notice in Mark not merely an occasional departure from Matthew, but the omission of what we found most characteristic of Matthew. It is not that Mark leaves out a parable or a memorable discourse; it is that the feeling which filled Matthew's mind and colored all his language seems not to be present in Mark in the same way at all. If Matthew's repeated, seemingly unintentional phrases, allusions, and quotations indicate anything, his ruling purpose was to present the Gospel as the fulfillment of what went before; and if the absence of such things in Mark — in the very places where Matthew put them — indicates anything, this was not Mark's ruling purpose. If we suppose he had Matthew's narrative in front of him, the fact is all the more remarkable: no plan of shortening the earlier history could have prompted omissions like these.

Do not forget that the whole Sermon on the Mount is missing from Mark. What a monstrous omission for someone selecting the important parts of the divine history! Yet what a natural and necessary omission for one who did not aim to bring out the Fatherly kingdom as the thing Christ came to reveal, but had another object that his readers could not have grasped if he had lingered on the theme Matthew illustrated so fully. I have already said what I take his object to be. I made the first verse of his Gospel the text of this whole lecture, because it announces, more distinctly than any verse I could find in Matthew or Luke, what was common to all the Evangelists. But a thing may be both common and special. It may be absolutely necessary that there be an Evangelist who sets forth Christ Himself simply in His own person, as King of the nation and Lord of man, and who, to do that work properly, does not give the same prominence to the mystery of His relation to the Father which those acts implied. When we come to the history of the Apostolic Church we may find a class of people standing midway between the Jewish and Gentile worlds — people with whom a respectable tradition connects Mark — for whom this treatment was peculiarly necessary; whose deepest needs would not otherwise have been met, who would not have felt Judaism fulfilled or its connection with the outer world established, and who would not have been freed from some of their most dangerous tendencies, unless the Gospel of the Son of God had been given to them in this simple, direct form. We may also find, in later Church history, that this view of the Gospel has shaped a whole age almost to the exclusion of any other — the cause of all its strength, and its exclusiveness and corruption the source of all its weakness. This is not the moment to take up either subject; I mention them only to gain a hearing and to lead you to read Mark's Gospel with this thought in mind. You will not expect me to go over ground minutely that I have already covered. I will add only a few more hints to those already given, to help you feel that Mark carries out — by his omissions as much as his statements, by his differences from Matthew as much as his resemblances — the intention he announces so simply at the opening of his Gospel.

In the first chapter we are told nothing of a son of David or a son of Abraham. There is no genealogy, no account of a divine conception, no journey into Egypt, no kings from the East coming to worship, no children murdered for His sake. The Gospel begins with John preaching in the wilderness, announcing one coming after him who is mightier because He will baptize with the Holy Ghost, and baptizing that mightier one, who as He rises from the water is declared the beloved Son. The Temptation is treated very briefly. It could not be left out, but since Matthew's details of it mainly illustrate the Son's relation to the Father, His trust and dependence, they suited Matthew's object wonderfully — while in Mark they would have broken the coherence and made his aim less clear. I want to avoid over-refinement, but I cannot think Mark's phrase "and He was with the wild beasts" is meaningless. I believe he especially wishes to show the Son of God as ruler of nature, the Person in whom the original grant of dominion to man is fulfilled. And since the Temptation opens the ministry, it was fitting that this side of His character and office, as well as His perfect obedience, be set forth.

This hint, once given, will help you — not to find in Mark something you had not seen, but to account for your own impressions of him. You will find him recording every exercise of our Lord's power distinctly and minutely; making us feel, more than the other Evangelists, the wonder of onlookers at a teaching bound up with power over unclean spirits; insisting on the Son of Man's lordship over the sabbath; treating the call of the disciples and the ordaining of the Apostles as instances of His authority; recording parables — the sower, the man casting seed into the ground, the mustard seed, the vinedressers — that describe His personal influence and mysterious government; omitting nothing that can illustrate the nature of His kingdom and His relation to human beings, the doubts that such power could belong to one called the carpenter's son, the proof that it did belong to Him, that He could confer it on men, and that they would afterward exercise dominion in His name under Him; and passing by everything that does not bring this truth to light. So while the outward resemblance between him and Matthew is very strong, there is a lively and continual contrast in the design and effect of their narratives. Their closing chapters show the difference perhaps more fully than any others. "All power is given to Christ in heaven and earth," and the disciples are to go and baptize the nations — thus Matthew ends. Mark adds that signs shall follow those who believe: in His name they shall cast out devils, speak with new tongues, take up serpents, drink deadly things unharmed, and lay hands on the sick, who shall recover. Matthew's words speak of humanity remade, brought back into submission and communion with God. Mark's speak of new powers and energies given to the witnesses of this redeemed order, so that they may testify of Christ, the healer and caster-out of devils, as the true Lord of the race. So Mark cannot stop where Matthew stops, at the Resurrection as the fulfillment of past hopes; he alludes to the Ascension — though only alludes to it. Another Evangelist was needed to set forth the mystery of that fact and its bearing on the after condition of the universe.

#### ST. LUKE.

##### CHAPTER I.

This Evangelist is St. Luke. No one doubts that the two New Testament books attributed to him are closely connected. He addresses both to the same person, and calls the first "the treatise of that which Jesus *began* to do and to teach until the day he was taken up."

The introduction to his Gospel has prompted much discussion; I doubt we have grasped its full importance. "The things in which Theophilus had been catechised," "the things most surely believed among us," must all have related to the person of Christ. The theology of the Apostolic Church had a living centre—Christ himself. Only through knowing what he did and what he was could that theology's meaning be drawn out. So an Evangelist, in any sense of the word, must be one who sets forth Christ's life. This introduction also assumes that someone who had not seen our Lord could be just as competent an Evangelist as an eyewitness. There might be many unrecorded facts about him, but the Evangelist's task was not chiefly to hunt for these, but to follow up the facts already accepted as common ground of the Church's faith, so that their full meaning could be brought to light. St. Luke promises not something new, but an *orderly* narrative—one that presents the facts so coherently that the character disclosed by them, and their relation to past, present, and future, would be more clearly grasped. He mentions that many others had attempted the same task; he does not disparage them, only asserts his own contribution. All such works would be tested; whatever served to expound the Divine Mind would endure as a lasting possession.

If you have followed what was said of St. Matthew, the contrast between his Gospel and St. Luke's shows plainly in their accounts of Christ's conception and birth. In Matthew, the birth of a Son of God through a woman married to an heir of David's house, yet without his part, *fulfilled* the line of births from Isaac onward, each attesting God as author and preserver of the race. In Luke, the *difference* between the Old Dispensation and the new is shown by the parallel stories of Zachariah and Mary. John is born to a father well advanced in age and a barren mother, as Isaac was—showing, as with Samuel before him, that birth is of divine power, not human will. But John remains the child of a man; whereas the holy child born of Mary is to be called the Son of God.

Whatever one thinks of the genuineness of these chapters, this contrast was clearly in the writer's mind. Modern critics find the very obviousness of the intention suspicious: "This is not history but artificial theology," they say. Whether it is an artificial theory, or the revelation of a Divine principle without which the facts of Jesus's life would mean and account for nothing, is exactly the question at issue—one I cannot argue point by point without repeating myself or anticipating the whole inquiry. My present concern is the connection of these chapters with the rest of Luke's Gospel, and what they show of his intent.

Notice the surrounding details in both stories. Both Gospels mention Angels. We might expect this to be most definite in Matthew, the essentially Hebrew Gospel. Instead, Matthew simply says "the Angel of the Lord" appeared to Joseph in a dream, while Luke gives a name: "I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God." All the Old Testament assumes communication between the visible and invisible worlds, but not until Daniel are these visitants named or given specific offices. The change in Jewish feeling after the Captivity is often attributed to Chaldean influence—an explanation I find vague, though I do not dismiss the fact it tries to account for.

If the Captivity was, as Jewish Scripture treats it, as pivotal an epoch as Abraham's call or David's reign (so Matthew implies), it must be a step in divine revelation like those. Daniel suggests, and later history confirms, that this was when prophecy was sealed and the old records gathered into a complete volume. Daniel also teaches that the age of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus began a great period for all nations, each with its appointed place under divine government—and it is in this connection that Angels are introduced, each nation under one. This belief is clearly close to the heathen notion of tutelary divinities. Yet a Jew could hardly hold the Lord's absolute rule over every nation alongside his special rule over Israel without some such faith: "We are under the everlasting I AM; other nations he has committed to angels." This may have developed as Jewish and Gentile history began to flow together—not a graft of Gentile notions onto a Jewish stem, but an application of an old Jewish truth to interpret new facts of Gentile history and mythology.

Whether Christ's coming should be announced by a messenger from the invisible world is reasonable or incredible depending entirely on what we believe of his office and character. If he were King of Men, Lord of both worlds, the bond between them, the *absence* of such an announcement would be the more puzzling fact. If he were not this, I admit the story, however simply told, must be abandoned. But granting an annunciation at all, that it should come as Luke reports it, and that Luke should be its reporter, seems natural—for Luke is, on the common view I adopt, *the* Gentile Evangelist, meant to prepare us to see Christ as the Desire of Nations, and to explain the merging of Jewish and Gentile history and feeling that had been underway since the Captivity.

But the angelic visitations are secondary to the messages they bring: "Thy wife Elizabeth shall conceive and bear a son," "The Holy Ghost shall come on thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee." Here Luke shows the central opposition between old age and new. The Holy Ghost working distinctly and personally as Life-giver in human spirits and bodies is, most of us hold, the very mark of the Gospel kingdom. We often lose ourselves in vague metaphors about it, yet we should not think we speak merely in metaphor when we speak of the Holy Ghost's operations—nor would orthodox believers accept that a power true of the members could not be true, in transcendent measure, of the Head first. I only ask that readers follow this thread of thought carefully and literally, and be ready to set aside habitual notions if the book they call divine requires it. Those who do not accept the document, I ask only to determine carefully what it actually says, rather than charging it with inconsistencies we ourselves have put there.

One more opposition deserves attention; its importance is great. Zacharias is a priest performing an office in the Jewish commonwealth, representing Israel; the message to him concerns that office. Mary is simply a woman, a maiden of Galilee, her link to David's house mentioned only through her husband Joseph. She represents humanity in its lowliest form, and shows what constitutes its excellence: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." Here is the *sancta sanctissima*—the only sanctity she claims, the only one it would not have been blasphemy for her to claim. All goodness lies in trust and obedience, all evil in distrust and disobedience: this is the lesson Luke opens his Gospel with, and it runs through his mind as it did through his Master's.

Luke has often been called the Hymn-writer of the New Testament. The Songs of Mary and Zacharias set forth the character of the New Dispensation, with the old as its witness and herald. Both celebrate that a spring of life and joy has opened for humanity, that a kingdom of the Spirit is beginning—a kingdom now revealed but always existing, the subject of prophecy because prophecy speaks of the *eternal* mystery made known in its appointed *time*.

##### CHAPTER II.

Luke's second chapter says nothing of the wise men from the East, the flight into Egypt, or the massacre at Bethlehem. Instead it tells of Caesar Augustus's decree taxing all the world; of the message to the shepherds that "to them was born in the city of David a Saviour, who was Christ the Lord"; of the song "Glory be to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill toward men"; of Simeon's blessing on him who would be "a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of the people Israel"; of the widow who spoke of the child to all who awaited redemption in Jerusalem. The scenery is all Jewish—the royal city, the purification offerings, the holy doctor, the woman serving God in the Temple with fasting and prayer. Yet this only makes the essentially human character of the rejoicing and prophecy more striking. We hear not of kings or priests but of shepherds and devout ordinary people, finding consolation in the belief of a blessing for the Gentiles and redemption for mankind.

The other event in this chapter is the Child staying behind in the Temple among the doctors, to hear them and ask questions. There is no hint yet of his later ministry—the Boy is a questioner, not a teacher, perfectly fulfilling the obedience of a child even while about his Father's business. Yet there is a clear sign of spiritual power able to bring men's hidden thoughts to light and make the learned scribe know himself and God as never before. Matthew showed us a kingship over nature and over men's minds and bodies; Luke, more than either of the other Evangelists, compels us to recognize a life-giving sympathy, an intercourse with the inner man, a human fellowship grounded in, not contradicting, divine condescension.

##### CHAPTER III.

John the Baptist's preaching in chapter three differs from earlier accounts in the answers he gives to the various groups who ask, "What shall we do then?" The simplicity of these answers—ordinary duties suited to each questioner's station, and warnings against their particular temptations—might seem at odds with the spiritual character claimed for Luke. Would a disciple of St. Paul be expected to preserve such plain moral instruction as preparation for faith? Or, if it belongs naturally to John's lower dispensation, would John himself have remembered and kept it? I think John is exactly the one to have done so. People of every kind came to be baptized. If their confession of sin was sincere, they had received power from above to act rightly, and were to prove their faith by doing so. Higher blessings would follow. They would come to know the one who unites publicans, soldiers, all people in one; they would receive his baptism of Spirit and fire, fitting them for higher ministries and preserving them through the coming trial.

##### CHAPTER IV.

I have nothing new to add on the genealogy. That it traces back to Adam shows Luke is not chiefly concerned with a Son of David and Son of Abraham, though none could fully be those without also being Son of Man and Son of God. Luke must bring this fact out directly, not as a side point: the second Adam must be seen, more completely than the first yet just as actually and formally, as representative of the race.

All the Evangelists say Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Luke says Jesus, "*being full of the Holy Ghost*, returned from Jordan, and was led into the wilderness"; that he "*returned in the power of the Spirit* into Galilee"; and describes him opening the book in the Nazareth synagogue to read, "*The Spirit of the Lord* is upon me." These are not trivial details—any book would be recognized by such phrases as revealing the writer's habitual cast of mind, and the more we consider them in their context, the more force they carry.

The Temptation, in all the Gospels, is the pivotal event on which the following ministry depends. I have already noted a difference in the order of the temptations in Luke compared to Matthew, and agreed this reflects Luke's Gentile, human emphasis against Matthew's. I did not press the point hard, because the Temptation is so much a meeting point of both Gospels—the Son's obedience to the Father being the ground of the dominion over the world's kingdoms which the devil cannot give—that I am wary of distinctions that might obscure the common truth beneath them. There are minor contrasts, such as between "he fasted forty days, and then the Tempter came to him" and "being forty days tempted of the devil," which are instructive once we grasp the ground of the Evangelists' differences and resemblances—but more valuable traced out for oneself than received secondhand. I offer hints, not my own interpretations imposed on the reader.

##### CHAPTER V.

Everyone notices the difference in order of events between Luke and Matthew, and most preachers have tried at some point to trace the course of each narrative. I believe such efforts mostly disappoint—the theories we trust most turn out to leak once we are at sea in them. Still, the effort has its reward even without a firm conclusion. I claim no new light, but reading Luke's story in light of what I take to be his leading thought, I find an inward coherence in his record—one that has justified itself to me, though I might blunder trying to explain why particular narratives sit where they do rather than elsewhere. If these Gospels are works of divine art, they should show the kind of arrangement of parts we recognize in human art and still more in nature—an arrangement we could not lose without losing the sense of the whole, one that critics may help us consider but which mostly comes to us slowly, and which we may never fully explain to others, though it shapes our own minds and makes what we say clearer. With this I leave the chapter, in which nothing is, strictly, new—though its context gives every passage in it a force different from what it had with other surroundings.

##### CHAPTER VI.

This applies still more to chapter six. There has been endless debate over whether the discourse here is an abridgement of the Sermon on the Mount. The facts: many sentiments from Matthew 5–7 appear here in nearly the same words; a number are wholly omitted, though some reappear elsewhere in modified form. Matthew has Jesus going up a *mountain* and sitting to teach after seeing the multitudes; Luke has him coming *down* to stand "in the plain." In Matthew the sermon follows the calling of James and John; in Luke it follows the naming of the twelve apostles.

Some have explained these differences by supposing the Evangelists merely gathered scattered sayings of Christ into one general sermon. But surely the scenery of the discourse is part of its substance—strip it away and you turn a living utterance into a set of school maxims, destroying its very nature. That the same words were repeated in different places and circumstances, gaining new meaning each time, is only to be expected: no true human teacher fails to repeat himself, since he applies the same principles to many cases and so keeps them ever fresh. But when specific persons and places are named, it is because they belong essentially to the words spoken, and cannot be torn away without dislocating their sense. Comparing Matthew 4:23–25 with Luke 6:17–19 shows the same kind of persons, places, and scenery in both. The difference—that Matthew says he went up a mountain and opened his mouth, while Luke says he went up to pray and then came down to the plain to speak—is too slight to matter; no one imagines he preached from some high, remote peak. Matthew's language is general but accurate enough for his purpose; Luke's is more specific because he has another fact to record—Christ's prior solitary prayer and private choosing of the Apostles. As for timing, each Evangelist plainly sacrifices strict chronology to the order that best reveals his purpose. Within the fixed landmarks all four observe—Temptation, Transfiguration, Entry into Jerusalem—each follows his own guided thread, grouping events by another than a time order, and it appears a simple, natural one. Matthew links the calling and naming of the Apostles to their commissioning; Luke links their naming to a discourse delivered, he implies, right after their appointment, setting forth the nature of the kingdom they were to proclaim.

So what matters is the nature and intent of the discourse as each Evangelist reports it. I have touched on this already. Luke has not merely trimmed a few minor passages from Matthew's sermon—he has omitted some of its most important and characteristic parts, the very ones that shape how we read all of Matthew's version. This cannot be accidental. Luke has no more abridged this discourse than Mark abridged Matthew's whole Gospel. He has left out precisely what conveys Matthew's purpose, because it would obscure his own. What Luke keeps thus gains a force it would otherwise lack: it sets forth not the fulfillment of the old dispensation but the distinct character of the new. The precious Hebrew element was fully brought out elsewhere; Luke's task was to let it recede, so the purely human element of the teaching could stand out.

##### CHAPTERS VII. VIII.

Two narratives in chapter seven belong only to Luke: the raising of the Widow of Nain's son, and the encounter with the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee's house. It must strike most readers that the first three Gospels place less emphasis on raising the dead than we might expect. The few such acts mentioned are not singled out from Christ's other acts, nor is the impression they made much dwelt upon—only words like "There came a fear on all; and they glorified God, saying, A great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited his people." These Evangelists are so deeply convinced that Christ came to confront death in every form that they make no special note of any one instance over another. I find nothing remarkable, then, in Luke recording one more such event than Matthew or Mark.

But ordinary readers' instincts—often better guides to inner meaning than critics' arguments—have always fixed on "son of a widow" as the vital heart of this story. I believe this reflects Luke's mind. If the New Dispensation is marked, as against the Old, by giving more direct honor to women—or rather bringing out honor already latent in them—Luke, true to his character as we've traced it, would naturally show this mark of the new age in connection with the Son of God's life. We saw this already in chapters one and two, not through sentimentality or loss of the manliness proper to Jewish and every great nation's history, but by linking the glory of woman to the glory of humanity, showing her passive, receptive faith as the channel of real divine power. I would fear being thought fanciful in linking this to the Nain miracle, if honest popular feeling did not support it, and if similar instances did not recur throughout this Gospel.

One appears immediately after. Our Lord is eating in the Pharisee's house; a sinful woman enters with an alabaster box of ointment, stands weeping at his feet, washes them with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses and anoints them. It would badly distort this story to read it as concerning one sex only. The common understanding—that it shows Christ's treatment of the sinner as such, and the difference between one conscious of owing five hundred pence and one who barely admits to fifty—is surely right, and I would never weaken it, for it displays one of this Gospel's greatest traits as the Gentile Gospel: its eagerness to show that the outcast and lost are constant objects of divine care. But the person embodying this principle must not be forgotten. Every one of her acts, as all have noticed, is the act of a woman—the whole female character shows through them. This is a side of humanity that must never be absent from a man, or he hardens into a Pharisee or Sadducee. In one sense it is humanity itself, ashamed yet dependent, trusting, hiding its evil in a love above it until lost and buried there. But it is specifically the female side of humanity—not the commanding, kingly side, but the side of submission, self-surrender, hope, prone to weakness and ruin, yet capable of being raised from the depths by a voice of love acknowledged also as a voice of authority: "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace." The belief in a Magdalen has always gone hand in hand in Christendom with belief in a Virgin. Both have been badly degraded, dragging down with them the ideas of penitence and faith—degrading the female character itself, which then makes its own religion, idolizes its fancies, cuts itself off from manly thought, and provokes a defiant, atheistic reaction. But both ideas can and must be redeemed, and no one could help that work more than the Evangelist appointed to bring them vividly before us.

Chapter eight opens with another such indication: "And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him. And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance." This important passage belongs only to Luke. On its strength, the Magdalen has reasonably been identified with the woman of the alabaster box. Whether she is also the sister of Lazarus is harder to say, and this passage, or the rest of Luke's Gospel, sheds no light on it.

##### CHAPTER IX.

This chapter contains the Transfiguration, and so, as noted earlier, should be critical for chronology—as all commentators agree. Verse 51, "when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem," can only mean he set out on the final journey ending in his royal entry and crucifixion. Everything between that verse and Luke 19:28 belongs to that journey, however short its actual duration. This section contains the most distinctive material in Luke's Gospel—proof, if any were needed, of how little value harmonist chronology has for grasping the real meaning or relation of passages to one another.

Between verses 49 and 57 are two narratives found only in Luke. The first turns on John's remark when Jesus set a child beside him: "Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us"—a passage revealing how Christ's words could stir a response in conscience seemingly unrelated to them, and warning powerfully against our interfering with God's own assignment of offices to men. This connects closely to Luke's purpose: Paul's disciple would naturally recall words showing that calling the twelve did not exclude another, more secret calling—that the Apostles' order, holy as it was, drew its holiness entirely from the one who might choose others differently to cast out devils in his name.

Still more characteristic is the next passage. On the road to Jerusalem, Christ and his disciples enter a Samaritan village that refuses to receive them; James and John ask, "Shall we call down fire upon them, as Elias did?" This must have been shortly after Peter's confession and the Transfiguration, when the Apostles felt more strongly than ever that their Master was the divine King, Son of the living God. What could be more natural than to vindicate his authority by a method Old Testament history had sanctioned? It has rightly been said that the answer, "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of," was not a condemnation of Elias but an assertion of the new economy's principle. Yet I cannot accept that these words carried no censure at all, or merely rebuked an understandable ignorance—they are too strong for that. They must mean, "You do not know whether you act under a righteous or an unrighteous spirit." What Elias did in a righteous spirit to assert the Lord God of Israel's dominion, they would have done merely to assert *their own Master's* authority over them personally. The Apostles' persecuting temper showed they still did not grasp that they served a Son of Man, head of a universal dispensation gathering Samaritans and Jews into one fold—which is why Luke would carefully record the story and its warning. But since this Son of Man was also Son of God, fulfilling what Moses and Elijah had spoken, James and John's words showed they were only beginning to understand the acts of lawgivers and prophets, not yet entering into their true mind and spirit.

##### CHAPTER X.

The mission of the Seventy is recorded only by Luke. Old commentators have guessed he was among them—an unnecessary assumption, since we know he was an Evangelist, and we've just seen his care to report words checking an apostle's wish to make his own order a basis for exclusion. It was natural for him to dwell on an event that justified a distinct class of teachers, showing that the New Dispensation, though rooted in the Old and honoring the twelve Apostles, would need and have an organization suited to work among the Gentiles. Notably, neither here nor in the charge to the twelve in chapter twelve does Luke limit the mission to the tribes of Israel, as Matthew does—suggesting Luke had in view the ultimate, universal scope of both offices rather than any temporary restriction. Strictly, Matthew's instructions apply to the Apostles' immediate mission to towns Christ himself had visited or would visit. But the words "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Judah till the Son of Man come" surely mean more than merely the span of Christ's earthly life. What force they carried for their original hearers, and how they were understood, may come up in my second lecture. Here I only wish to note Luke's consistency in pursuing the theme that distinguishes his Gospel from the Hebrew one.

The exquisite passage comparing the Seventy's joy that devils are subject to them, with Jesus's own rejoicing—"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent"—deserves deep study, and sheds light on our theme. Spiritual life and joy, in its pure form and its temptations, should especially concern the Evangelist of the coming age. What an incalculable loss it would be without this glimpse of gladness at the very heart of the Man of Sorrows.

The private words to the disciples, "Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: for I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them," immediately suggest the comparison this whole Gospel draws between what had been and what was to come. They flow naturally from what precedes: Christ's own gladness could not stay confined to himself but overflowed onto those around him—his blessedness lay in their blessedness, and theirs in knowing the Father and the Son.

I believe the Church (see the Gospel for the 13th Sunday after Trinity) teaches much by linking these words to what follows—the lawyer's question and the parable of the Good Samaritan. The representative of the old world, the Law, asks, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" The Pharisaic schools, understanding "eternal" life merely as *future* life and its rewards, endlessly debated whose rules were best. As with the young ruler's similar question elsewhere, keeping the commandments was not thought sufficient even by those who valued the commandments most—something more must be done. What did this new prophet propose? Christ's reply is an *argumentum ad hominem*: he sends the lawyer back to the Law itself. He does not endorse the idea that more is required than what is written—but what *is* written? The lawyer recalls words some enlightened teacher had likely set forth as God's highest demand: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." He could not have answered better; the secret was there in Deuteronomy. But never before, under Truth's own gaze, commended for knowing the right way, had he felt so keenly that these grand words did not settle his case. Loving God with all one's heart was conceivable; so was loving one's neighbor as oneself. But who *is* one's neighbor? The text never says. What a discovery for a lawyer—that the sublimest command, however precise, could not even define its own object! A whole field was left open to interpreters' subtlety, practically to ordinary fancy, in fixing the limits of "neighbor." Where was the definition to come from? The parable answered it: it reveals a Law of Love acting directly on the heart, itself determining who counts as neighbor where outward geography, tradition, and religious maxims denied the connection—and it reveals the powerlessness of a mere rule to compel that recognition where all such lines proclaimed it should exist. The priest and Levite saw the man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and passed by.

There is a depth to this parable, taken even in its simplest sense, that familiarity has blinded us to. I do not doubt it describes a real incident. The Samaritans are consistently shown as open to feelings of affection and gratitude that the formality-bound Jew did not entertain. Where did these feelings come from? From evil nature? Did the Samaritan have less of that nature because he rejected part of Scripture and did not worship at the Jerusalem Temple? Or was there some secret spring of good from which all love, in Jew or Samaritan, actually flowed—some real Person in whom the Law of Love dwelt perfectly, the source of men's power to fulfill it? Should not Jews, aware they could not fulfill that law despite possessing its letters carved in stone, cry out for such a one to appear and declare himself Lord of their lives, author of their obedience? And if he did, might not Samaritans, might not Gentiles, recognize him as the common brother of all, the one claiming every wounded, half-dead creature as an object of his love, whose Spirit helps us all to go and do likewise? Blessed are your eyes, fishermen of Galilee, to see that universal brother whom kings and prophets longed to see!

If I am right, this parable is the pattern for those found only in Luke: each has its own distinct purpose and truth about the divine Kingdom, yet each carries a sense of the contrast between Law and Gospel, the human and the merely national, the mind of God shown in a Person versus that same mind shown in decrees—and yet also of the underlying oneness of old and new principles. It can be hard to separate this idea from Matthew's idea of fulfillment, since each so implies the other. Yet presenting either alone would leave something narrow that should be universal and perfect; presenting both together left room for partisans to seize one and call it a contradiction rather than a completion of the other. But I am getting ahead of this inquiry.

I have described Luke's Gospel as displaying *contrasts*. This is long recognized in the story ending this chapter. The active and contemplative types of character are brought together, with a clear preference expressed for Mary's type. This opposition surely exists in every age. But I question whether we grasp our Lord's full meaning by reducing two actual women to mere representatives of qualities that should unite in every character formed in the image of him whose delight was doing his Father's will, and who went about doing good. Martha is rebuked for complaining, not for her diligence. The deeper lesson seems to be that restlessness and bustle are not real activity, and that a still, inward current of life is essential to steady, patient work. I suspect our eagerness to stress "one thing is needful" comes less from reverence for the speaker than from its convenience as a short sermon motto, and from the mistaken idea that religion is one selfish pursuit to be separated from everything else rather than a great many things. Adopt that notion, and we will certainly not sit at Jesus's feet—we may be less active than Martha, but just as troubled and restless. This might suggest I want to weaken the passage's popular force; in fact I want to strengthen it by stripping away accompaniments that have nothing to do with it. The genuine common feeling about Mary and Martha agrees with what I've said of Luke's general aim, illustrating his special tendency to show the female character in relation to Christ and his Gospel—seizing one point that has remarkably distinguished the history of the modern world from the ancient.

##### CHAPTER XI.

In Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, Christ tells his disciples not to pray showily like the Pharisees but to their Father who sees in secret, then says, "After this manner therefore pray ye." Here in Luke, the disciples ask, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples," and he repeats, with slight variation, the same form of words. This form, it's often noted, was already known to the Jews in its separate petitions. It became the Lord's Prayer not because Jesus told his disciples to discard what existed before, but because he enabled them to grasp its true sense—to feel that God was, and would be, answering it, that their Father himself meant to accomplish what he taught them to ask. The Pharisee might say "Our Father" while praying showily in the streets, but he did not believe in a Father—only in a Being whose name he dreaded, whose kingdom he feared, whose will he merely wished matched on earth as in heaven. So Matthew rightly shows Christ fulfilling the very letter and spirit of the Old Dispensation by teaching the confession of a Father and desire for his triumph that the Pharisees, in their self-righteousness, continually betrayed. But the disciples would naturally think a prayer spoken before a great crowd was not meant specially for them, his chosen band. They had seen him praying alone on a mountain; they recalled John giving his disciples what seemed special wisdom; would Christ not share some esoteric secret of prayer, of moving the divine mind? Instead he taught them the same "Our Father"—the prayer for the New Dispensation, belonging as much to the poorest beggar in the crowd as to them, the future ministers and judges of the new kingdom.

Then follows, found nowhere else, a parable urging importunity—that a friend may obtain by persistent asking what mere friendship alone would not secure. Compare this to Matthew: "Do not think ye shall be heard for your much speaking; for your Father in heaven knows what things ye have need of before you ask him." The two lessons seem opposed. Curiously, the sentiment modern liberal readers favor comes from the narrow Hebrew Matthew, while the one they call fanatical comes from Paul's disciple. It is worth noting that the importunity Luke urges, here and in a later parable, is importunity that God's will be done and his kingdom come. What that kingdom and will are, and how each is to be accomplished, God must know before we ask him. But the eagerness of our asking depends first on believing his is a good will and kingdom; second, on experiencing a real evil will and kingdom resisting it; third, on trusting that we are meant to be fellow-workers with our Father, contributing our own energies to the victory of true over false—in short, on the degree to which the Spirit of our Father works in us. So it is fitting that the Gospel most concerned with the Spirit's communication to man as the source of his energies should dwell on this side of the truth. This is illustrated by the parallel passages, Matthew 7:11 and Luke 11:13: Luke gives up the antithesis "how much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts" in favor of "Give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him." No doubt Christ used both expressions at different times, but how much light the latter casts on the former!

From here Luke moves, quite naturally, to Christ's argument with the Pharisees over the power by which he cast out devils. It *was* by a Spirit that he cast them out. If an evil spirit, then Satan is divided against himself; if a good spirit, then the strong man guarding his goods in peace has been overpowered by one stronger.

Then, by another characteristic transition, Luke sets the spiritual kingdom against the seeking of signs—the spiritual power that cleanses the inward man first, thereby purifying the outward, against the Pharisees' materialism, cleaning the outside of cup and platter while inwardly full of greed and wickedness. I have discussed these passages before, but note how their placement here gives them new force.

##### CHAPTER XII.

Some English Bibles head this chapter "Christ's charge to the Apostles." Yet nothing in the discourse addresses the Apostles as such until Peter asks (verse 41), "Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even to all?"—and receives the answer, "*Who* then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household?" Many of this chapter's sentences belong, in Matthew, to the charge to the Apostles, part of an earlier stage of the ministry. Their new force in Luke comes from being addressed to disciples or individuals in the crowd generally, not the twelve specifically; and from being tied to the final journey to Jerusalem, after the Transfiguration—hence the stronger denunciations of the habits corrupting the Jewish heart and blinding it to its King. Many minor differences will strike the careful reader, making this discourse feel as fresh as if its words appeared nowhere else.

##### CHAPTER XIII.

Every passage in this chapter plainly bears on Jerusalem and the approach to it. Several incidents appear only here. The force of Christ's answer about the Galilaeans and those killed by the falling tower of Siloam—correcting the persistent tendency to judge people's worth by what happens to them—has always been recognized, though perhaps not enough weight has been given to "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." He does not dismiss such events, which the Jews rightly saw as divine signs; but they were signs not about the victims, but to the whole nation and each hearer—warnings of like punishment that Roman governors or the forces of nature might bring on covetous, self-righteous, hypocritical stewards of God's mercies. When we draw a lesson from this passage, we usually turn it into a warning about punishment in the next world, missing how directly Christ denounced judgment in *this* world on a people proud of its privileges and using them only to judge and despise others.

In this light, the parable of the fig-tree follows naturally: every warning of coming judgment was a voice saying of the barren tree, "Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?"—and at the same time a plea, "Let it alone this year also."

I have already noted that the Pharisaic doctrine about the Sabbath is shown in the Gospels not as excessive good but as radically evil, hateful to God—not to be tolerated for fear of weakening the commandment, but to be met with anger as subversive of it. Nowhere should we expect one of Christ's solemn protests against this temper more than here, for nothing proved the fig-tree rotten at the core more than this incapacity to bear wholesome fruit.

I have already commented on the two parables that follow. The Mustard-seed, common to the Evangelists, explains the expansion of the universal kingdom out of the national one, as a process of development. If I am right to follow the common judgment about the word "leaven," it was almost necessary that the working of the true principle be shown alongside an allusion to the false principle that works with and beside it in every age.

The terrible warnings just given were likely to provoke the anxious question, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" This much-repeated question is usually criticized as seeking definite knowledge God withholds. But is its real error not rather its *vagueness*—the willingness of those who ask it to remain unclear about what, exactly, they or anyone need saving from? Christ seems to answer this way: "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able." The strait gate of sacrifice, of deliverance from self, is what the self-seeking would never find. Since self-seeking was exactly the Jewish tendency he had been denouncing throughout, how fittingly this personal warning matched everything he had said about the nation's excision! How necessary that each disciple should always be seeking to know him, since a time was coming when the Master of the House would expose every heart's secrets, and it would count for nothing to have eaten, drunk, or been taught in his presence. We need not weaken this warning's force for every age by recognizing that it also applied directly to that time, when the Son of Man was about to test every man. The words that follow—already given in Matthew regarding the centurion's servant, about weeping and gnashing of teeth, and people coming from east and west—would make no sense here unless the disciples connected their own personal fate with their nation's history and destiny.

That same day, with the same thoughts filling his heart, messengers came saying, "Get thee out; for Herod will kill thee." His answer: "Go and tell that fox, I *must* walk to-day and to-morrow, and the day following." The men of Galilee cannot kill him. "A prophet cannot perish out of Jerusalem." The deep, solemn words that follow have moved countless hearts, rightly received as testimony to Christ's love even for the most unworthy, and as declaring that those not gathered under his wings choose their own separation. But we do the history and its spirit wrong if we forget these words concern an actual city, and that *its* curse was to be left to its own self-will, party spirit, and hypocrisy.

##### CHAPTER XIV.

Another Sabbath healing shows us still occupied with Pharisaical corruptions; Christ is laying his axe to their root. What follows is called a parable, yet seems only a plain comment on men's eagerness at a feast to seize the chief places. This use of the word "parable" is instructive: a parable never excludes a plain direct meaning, and is not worthless for the particular case it addresses; but it takes that case as the manifestation of a law reaching to far higher cases, inward as well as outward. The self-seeking shown in the struggle for the best seats was the very thing undermining the Jewish nation, because it is the canker at the root of humanity itself, the great anti-christian principle. So it was no mere accident of the feast that led our Lord from this parable to his admonition about whom to invite to a supper. I do not undervalue the fact that our Lord always used passing occurrences as texts for his teaching — this is a key to much in the Gospels and shows their value to the teacher. But the outward occurrence is only an index to the deeper meaning. If he came to destroy the competitive spirit that makes each man crave to stand above his neighbor, he came also to destroy another fruit of that same spirit: the calculating kindness that expects to be repaid. We should not imagine that our Lord is simply redirecting that same selfishness to a higher object when he says, "Thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." Throughout his teaching he had been showing that this recompense is nothing but being like God, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. He does not do away with the idea of recompense — the word is woven into our very language, because the reality belongs to the very constitution of man and the universe; to imagine rewards done away with is absurd. But rewards may rest on a principle exactly opposite to selfishness, on the divine order which selfishness overturns. I will say boldly that in every one of our Lord's discourses, the recompense he offers consists mainly in deliverance from the selfishness that torments and oppresses us — though Christ's own followers and ministers have too often built their whole notion of his kingdom, here and hereafter, on selfishness instead.

The subject of the feast is not finished. A man in the crowd sensed that a society which invited the poor, the blind, and the lame must be the kingdom of heaven our Lord had proclaimed at hand, and cried, "Blessed are those who shall eat bread in it." From this the transition to the spiritual feast of the kingdom was natural. Common opinion, then as now, would suppose that spiritual blessings, being deeper and less bound to the senses, must be reserved for a rarer, more select company — ordinary food for ordinary people, but celestial fare for a special band set apart from the vulgar. Such notions are natural, and hold some latent truth, but also an intense falsehood — the very falsehood that undermined the Jewish nation and has at all times undermined the Christian Church. The spiritual feast is no less universal than the material one; the inward principle of the kingdom is revealed precisely in the summons of the poor, halt, and blind to the material supper. This is the great doctrine of the parable, though it appears here in a different light than in Matthew, partly from its surroundings, partly from differences of structure. Matthew's central image of a king making a marriage for his son is absent here — it would have drawn attention away from the point Luke wants to make. Matthew's excuses are general; here they are distinct and dramatic, showing the different reasons men refuse blessings meant for all in order to grasp private, excludable goods. Matthew's account of the murder of the messengers and destruction of the city is also omitted, since that belongs to the marriage-of-the-son idea and would add nothing to the point about the feast's universality. Nor is the detail of the man without a wedding garment — illustrating "many are called, but few are chosen" — needed here; the point is simply that men lose the feast because they prefer their own private enjoyments to those shared with people from the streets and highways. Comparing the two forms of this parable is one of the best exercises for grasping both the distinct aims of the Evangelists and the nature of parables generally.

I have already discussed the passage that follows. Everyone notices it is stronger in Luke than elsewhere: not "whoever loves father or mother more than me," but "whoever does not hate father and mother, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple." This variation matters. The milder wording would justify those in Rome and elsewhere who claim that "religious" duties are often at odds with human ones and must override them — leaving it to a scrupulous conscience or a priest to decide, in each conflict, how the sacrifice should be made. But no confessor has the nerve to actually say, "You must hate father and mother to save your soul" — only, "avoid the excess of love that would betray you." Christ, however, does say it. If his words must not be explained away, then do not explain them away; find a meaning for them that also fits "yea, and his own soul also." I take it we are commanded to hate ourselves, our souls and bodies, everything we prize as merely our own, so that we may have the love that is in Christ — a love that embraces father, mother, wife, children, and our own souls too, but as bound up with him. This fits exactly with what has gone before. The Jew grounded his religion, politics, morality, and domestic affections on self, and they were therefore doomed to ruin, as they were. Christ came as the true root of humanity, the real foundation of all these things and their only reconciler and security. Whoever would be his disciple must set that other principle aside entirely and banish it from his life — or else find himself waging war with too mighty an enemy, or building a tower he cannot finish; he would in effect be sending to make peace with the great spiritual enemy of Christ and men, unwilling to strip himself of all he has, his own righteousness, everything that exalts him above another. Men are the salt of the earth, keeping it from decay only while they hold the divine, life-giving principle. Selfishness has not been allowed to destroy this, because there has been a seed proclaiming God, not self, as the ground and purpose of its institutions. But if that divine seed becomes itself infected with the world's selfishness — if the religion of God's elect becomes the most concentrated selfishness of all — how are they the salt of the earth, and how can they ever become so? "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

##### CHAPTER XV.

I could rest my whole case about St. Luke's distinctive character on this chapter alone, probably the most influential in his Gospel on the mind of Christendom. But I would not want to gain that advantage by cutting this passage off from what precedes, or suggesting any break in the writer's train of thought. The exclusiveness of the Pharisee, and of the Jewish nation embodied in him, has run through all we have lately read, shown as the anti-christian principle that must keep the Jew from believing in the King and Shepherd who had come. St. Luke, I think, presents this sin in that character, where Matthew makes us feel it as an outrage on the law and the prophets, the culmination of every evil they denounced.

Most have seen in the parable of the Prodigal Son a hint of the Gentile order, along with an implicit rebuke of the Jew unwilling to see his brother welcomed back with music and dancing. But this has been the reading of commentators more than of ordinary readers, who rightly resist any interpretation that would strip the parable of its direct, personal claim on each one who recognizes himself as the prodigal. The heart's certainty that this parable expresses God's inmost mind cannot be set aside for any interpretation, however reasonable or consistent with the Evangelist's purpose. But if we look to this discourse for a revelation of God's purpose, we will find that its various readings — which taken alone become either dry and scholastic, or narrow and partial — are held together by a higher light.

First, we should take the story's details as they stand. This is not a tale of distant figures. Actual publicans and sinners were with our Lord, actual Pharisees were murmuring, "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." It is surely of these that he speaks when the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep, and the woman sweeps her house for the lost coin. We badly misread Luke, and worse misread Paul, if we suppose their chief concern is with Gentiles as such. They were born Jews, Jewish in every sympathy — but they had discovered that to be truly Jews they must first be men. It is a gospel to men, a covenant with men, that they proclaim, and therefore one with the Gentiles, with all nations. This may seem obvious enough to state with such emphasis, but I do not think we — commentators, the Christian world, myself, my reader — have kept hold of it, or realize the confusion and loss that forgetting it has caused. Once we are rid of that forgetfulness, Luke's Gospel and Paul's Epistles come to us as new books — new, though the same old ones, read even more literally and simply than we read them as children.

Holding this thought, we can come to the story of the two sons without fear of losing its personal force even as it opens to the widest view of God's purposes for the world. If the prodigal is called a son from the first, and the hard elder brother in the field is told "all that I have is thine," we must ask ourselves plainly whether these are not the basic facts and laws of the New Dispensation — whether the Gospel is not the claim that men as men are sons of God, that they must be prodigals joining themselves to a foreign country and feeding swine until they discover this, and that once they discover it, the condition of truly enjoying and benefiting from it is that they acknowledge this same right in all, even the most outcast, and rejoice at their childlike return to claim it. This view of God's purposes is a comfort to the reader of Gentile as well as Jewish history, and it speaks even more pointedly to the modern world: to Christendom's right to claim sonship to God for all its children, and the impossibility of giving Baptism a merely narrow, formal meaning if it does not proclaim that very truth to each of us. At the same time it carries the strongest encouragement to spread the good news of that sonship far and wide, and a warning against the great guilt of turning Baptism into a plea for exclusiveness, denying the very human privilege it asserts. Alongside this general meaning, the parable also holds the history of each man who "comes to himself" — showing that his return to sanity is nothing but discovering an actual Father, which itself implies acknowledging an influence drawing him, a confession that the Father has sought the lost sheep and swept for the lost coin. Here the lines of Matthew and Luke, starting from different points, meet: one shows Christ revealing a Father, the other Christ bestowing a Spirit — but the Spirit guides the lost child to the Father, and the moment his heart is touched, he knows the source.

##### CHAPTER XVI.

The Jew's covetousness has already appeared to us in various forms — it is the sin the New Testament generally, and this Gospel particularly, lays to his charge. We must not, in search of a more spiritual meaning, shy away from the word's plain, vulgar sense: the mere craving and grasping of money. But neither should we limit the disease to that one form. Its worst expression, striking at the nation's vitals, was religious; yet those who showed it in religion would often show it in money too, or pass it on to others of different tastes and education. These points are essential to understanding this chapter.

Its two parables should be taken together. The Jew was a steward whose handling of God's gifts — material or spiritual — was meant to show what God is and what he demands of those given advantages others lack. This steward is accused of wasting his goods — and in the strictest sense he has, for such goods decay unless scattered abroad. Called to account, he feels he has betrayed his trust and knows he is about to be cast out. What can he do? He cannot undo his fault or start fresh. But he can use his position to make friends — by persuading people who felt real obligation to some divine teacher that their debt is smaller than they thought. He can strip nations of the very conscience and moral instinct God gave them. Who doubts this was the effect of the Jew's presence and false witness among heathen peoples — that his disbelief in their gods helped destroy their flickering faith while his own godlessness gave nothing in its place? This was exactly putting fifty measures where conscience had written a hundred. Yet was the steward wrong to think he was meant to win these people's love, using the wealth God gave him to do it? No — he was right, though he learned it the roundabout way; had he learned it earlier, he would have been a faithful steward instead of an unfaithful one. Had he used his master's wealth as intended, rather than supposing it given for his own benefit and possession as the highest good, he would have found the "mammon of unrighteousness" — which instead became a millstone round his neck — a great blessing. So, disciples: use the money God gives you for him, not for yourselves, and it will win friends who will not merely give you temporary refuge, as the cast-off servant sought, but will receive you into their inmost hearts, and carry you with them before their Father.

This important digression links the parable's meaning to the coming age, explains some puzzling facts of Christian history — not least the place and influence of Jews in the modern world — and applies with special force to any nation drawn into trade or government with others, holding great stores of mammon and a strong urge to worship it. But we must not let our Lord's passing praise of the steward blind us to what follows at once: "He that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much... who shall commit to you the true riches?" — and then a sentence seemingly disconnected: "The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. It is easier for heaven and earth to pass than one tittle of the law to fail. Whoso putteth away his wife and marrieth another committeth adultery."

Puzzling as this connection of thought may seem to a critic, I think a hearer's conscience will not be slow to see it. Mammon-worship was becoming the Jew's only worship, and his later history was already foreshadowed in the tendencies of that time. Before he could receive the true, inward riches of the heavenly kingdom, he had to feel the responsibility attached to his outward wealth — to know it was not his own. Since John's time, the message of the kingdom had stirred hearts, and men pressed in to know what it was; those who truly wanted it would take it by force. But many supposed the kingdom of heaven meant a relaxing of the law, licenses beyond what Moses allowed. Far from it — not one tittle of the law could fail. Indeed some permissions granted under the law would have no place in the kingdom of heaven; the law, for instance, would be fulfilled by a stricter enforcement of the marriage bond — a bond both Jews and Gentiles were constantly breaking — than Moses had found it wise or possible to make. So Luke carries out his special task: even while denouncing the sins and judgment of the Old Dispensation, he asserts the principles of the New — a dispensation of inward, universal principle and practice, not of rigid rule with occasional exceptions.

I said the second parable cannot be separated from the first. That the Gentile world is figured in Lazarus, and the Jewish nation in the man in purple and fine linen, is an old reading which any careful student of Luke's ordered narrative can hardly avoid — but, as with the Prodigal Son, it meets the counter-witness of Christian consciences insisting the story must be about themselves. If I thought it applied less directly to us because it dramatizes the Evangelist's constant theme — the contrast pressed on the Jews standing round our Lord — I would suspect my own reading and better ones too, whatever evidence supported it. But I think the common way of reading this parable as simply a story about two men — really no parable at all — destroys its bearing on our own lives, giving us an excuse to escape its warning: "after all, it's only a story." Having insisted on its literal meaning, we then fear taking it literally, lest it commit us to unsafe opinions about the state of the departed. I do not say those opinions would be unsafe, nor do I endorse shrinking from Scripture's plain sense for fear of Romish or other conclusions. But since the English public plainly does not take these words as a literal record of fact, they cannot object if others, guided by the context, read it as a parable of races and dispensations — which, I believe, only sharpens its personal truth and moral. "Purple and fine linen" would naturally suggest to a Jew the garments of king and priest; being carried by angels into Abraham's bosom, adoption into God's covenant with Abraham. This is the ordinary strict way to read a parable — tracing its symbols carefully according to their source. Doing so, we see the full height and depth of Dives's covetousness: covetousness of religious privilege valued because others lacked it, covetousness making money the measure of worth and the rule for weighing every blessing. To say this was a nation's habit is not to deny it could be one man's habit too — no more than calling the dog that licked the beggar's sores a symbol of nature's sympathy for those neglected by God's witnesses denies that an actual dog may have done it; either way it testifies to God's care reaching hearts that could learn nothing of him from those sent to reveal his name except that he seemed exclusive, capricious, hard-hearted. Nor does reading the parable as the transfer of privilege to other nations, neglected by the Jews, blunt its edge for those nations either — since five brothers are named who might come to the same torment unless warned by their brother's fate for his covetousness and cruelty. And if the man's worst punishment was exclusion from the office he abused, stripped of his priestly and royal robes, left to feel the gulf his covetousness had dug between himself and all that was pure and loving — I cannot see how this lesson bears less on each of us, whatever form our self-idolatry takes, even as it also speaks to the state and destiny of Christendom and every Church within it.

##### CHAPTER XVII.

This parable teaches that the sin of the New Dispensation would be the same as that of the Old: the Jew's covetousness had caused countless offences, and the same cause would always produce the same effects — "It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come!" So I connect this chapter's opening, and its teaching on avoiding offences (already treated at length in Matthew), to the larger subject of our Lord's discourses on the way to Jerusalem.

Then comes the passage: the Apostles ask for increased faith; the Lord answers that faith like a mustard seed could uproot a tree and plant it in the sea; then speaks of a servant who, having done all that was commanded, deserves no special thanks, and of disciples who, having done all commanded them, should say, "We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do." This passage is unique to Luke except for the mustard-seed saying, found elsewhere too. I have often noted that the very habit of mind our Lord denounced in the Jews generally also showed itself in the Apostles, and he was rooting it out of them so they could rightly testify against it in their countrymen. Their plausible-sounding prayer for more faith, he seems to tell us, was itself tainted with the covetous desire that is faith's great enemy: they wanted a great store of faith not to serve God with, but for themselves — something to be proud of, to set them above others. They had to learn that God gives faith for doing his work, not for a feast of self-satisfaction.

We are reminded that the healing of the ten lepers happened on the road to Jerusalem. This fact speaks, better than any discourse, the same lesson already given in the parable of the Good Samaritan: that those outside the nation, excluded from its privileges, showed more openness to God's kindness than those who possessed them all. Its importance for Luke's purpose here needs no further comment.

If what follows were not so clearly part of this design, I would be tempted to linger on it for another reason — it strongly confirms the view I drew, from the other three Evangelists' accounts of the last days, of the coming of the Son of Man and his kingdom. Luke places here several sayings the others attach to the discourse about the temple. He gives them in answer to the Pharisees' question, "When will the kingdom of God come?" The answer: "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." This saying is often quoted, but always with the qualifier that there is also an outward kingdom, and that all Gospel talk of the Son of Man's coming refers to that outward kingdom, not this inward one. But how does that fit the context? Luke immediately moves to the very language used elsewhere to describe the Son of Man's coming, as part of the same answer to the Pharisees, expanding his rebuke of their materialism. What else can this mean but that the great outward events would reveal the very kingdom that does not come with observation — bringing to light the kingdom within, at the root of each man's being and of society itself, the order God established from the beginning, which would emerge in new power once the outer fabric of Jewish polity broke apart? That the gospel of the Spirit should declare this, that the Evangelist of the new, human dispensation should record its permanent, eternal foundation, and that this announcement of the true and new Jerusalem should come amid warnings preparing the disciples for Christ's rejection by the old — all this gives the words a fitting consistency and solemnity for him who is said to have spoken them.

##### CHAPTER XVIII.

It is pointless to ask on what principle the chapter divisions were made; presumably parables were meant to be grouped and separated from other discourses where possible — otherwise why detach the parable urging constant prayer without fainting from the preceding warnings about the Son of Man's coming, though it ends with "when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" The dividers had reason to think this parable has worth of its own apart from its occasion: it captures the very impulse to pray, the sense of being tormented by an adversary, showing that men will pray so long as they believe in any Judge of the earth at all, even an unfeeling one — and that the deepest encouragement to prayer lies in believing that Judge actually cares to free them from their oppressor. But this timeless meaning is realized far more powerfully if we picture a moment when everything looked dark and terrible, when the Son of Man seemed to have abandoned the earth he had visited, when the disciples searched in vain for any sign of his day, when the adversary seemed unbeatable and judges cared for neither God nor man — and then, exactly then, amid thunder and lightning, came an actual revelation of Christ's power, presence, and permanent kingship. That would be a lasting consolation, an encouragement to God's elect to cry day and night in their worst circumstances, certain he was hearing them and about to answer just when he seemed to delay longest.

Luke uses the words "his own elect." Could words be more genial or encouraging? Without believing himself called by God, what strength has a man to pray? How can he ask deliverance without believing God wills to deliver him, and that his adversary is God's adversary too? But did this confidence carry no danger — might it not breed contempt for others, self-glorification? And what would that do to his prayer? Our Lord answers in a parable that must be read as the necessary companion to the first. A man who thinks himself unlike other men cannot really pray — he feels no adversary, flies to no judge. Unless he says, "God be merciful to me a sinner," taking the lowest place among men and seeking deliverance simply as a man, not as better than others, he doesn't know what he needs deliverance from, or who could give it; he has no faith, no ground for his conscience to stand on. Here is a paradox: the elect man must see himself as one with all other men, or he cannot feel that God hears or justifies him. A man who stands on his own separateness cannot feel God has called him, for his very effort to separate himself from the world proves he belongs to it — for what is "the world," in its bad sense, but individuals trying to rank themselves above each other, to sever themselves from one another? This is the paradox of Christianity itself, one we will find Paul continually pressing, and one that has confused readers of his epistles who try to resolve it by discarding one or the other of the two facts he actually held together — which I think we will find he reconciled.

I have given full weight to the wish that this parable be read universally, without even mentioning — though almost every reader notices it — that its two figures are a Pharisee and a Publican. This ties it directly to the larger theme of these discourses: the exposure of the falsehood by which the Jew inverted God's purpose in calling him, bringing on himself the very exclusion he supposed God intended for others. The verses to the 30th have already been treated at length; what I said there applies especially here.

I have also already discussed the passage from verse 31 onward, but note it here as one of several allusions to the journey up to Jerusalem that give these chapters their pathos, and that keep before us the goal to which every warning, encouragement, and event is subordinate. This last incident connects movingly with the disciples' failure to understand, noted in verse 34. How their Master, the great King, could become the great sufferer — scourged, spat upon, killed — no words, not even Christ's own, could teach them; only suffering could teach that. The blind man who cried, "Thou Son of David, have mercy upon me," whom the disciples tried to keep away, discovered for himself, and teaches us, that only one who shares man's sorrows as a brother can be his Lord and deliverer.

##### CHAPTER XIX.

I connect the opening story of this chapter with the closing one of the last. The old view of Zacchæus as an extortioner reformed by Christ's Spirit, though set aside by some modern interpreters, still seems to me most consistent with the facts. The Pharisees were too used to our Lord's dealings with publicans to be struck by an ordinary case; their remark, "he is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner," suggests, absent other evidence, that Zacchæus was worse than his class — that his wealth came by means common in that trade but not universal. His own words support this probability; they sound like a new resolution, not a denial of ever having wronged anyone. So our Lord's words, "This day has salvation come to this house, forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham," both recognize an outcast as included in the covenant and affirm that its great blessing is deliverance from the very sin that kept Abraham's children from God. That this particular sin was the one our Lord had been exposing throughout, and had foretold as the cause of the nation's coming ruin, gives this moral miracle special weight, explaining why it should be paired with the physical healing of the blind man as testimony to the kingship Jesus was about to claim on entering the city. Without this purpose, the story would seem too minor to record at such a crucial point in the history.

Again, we are told he spoke a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they supposed the kingdom of God would appear at once. This parable of the pounds is often compared to Matthew's parable of the talents. Their obvious differences: there, varying sums are given; here, one pound each. There, the faithful servants' reward is entering the Lord's joy; here, it is ruling over ten or five cities. There, no citizens revolt or are punished; here, as with Matthew's marriage-feast parable, that is a central, deliberate feature. In fact I think the rest of the parable must be read in light of it. The journey to Jerusalem had led the disciples to expect some grand display, even the actual establishment of Christ's kingdom. The answer: No. First, a message from the citizens: "we will not have this man to reign over us." Then an interval in which the king's servants are given power to use or neglect. Then a reckoning of what each has done. Then judgment on the citizens. All this before the kingdom is established. I believe this maps precisely onto the period up to the Ascension, the apostolic age after the Spirit was given, and the events leading to and culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. Whether the parable loses force for the later Church depends on our estimate of that Church's endowments. If every believer, beyond whatever special talent suits his own calling, also receives the higher gift of an indwelling Spirit, his responsibility for that gift is no less than that of Christians in the intermediate age between the passing of the Old Dispensation and the full arrival of the New, who were called to account for their stewardship — rewarded with greater usefulness and authority in proportion to their gain, or stripped of what they had treated as unreal. Only if the Church has for eighteen centuries been barren of what Scripture says is its very essence does this parable, however perfectly suited to apostolic times, stop being a guide for ours.

Here we reach the meeting point of the Evangelists: the descent from the Mount of Olives. Luke gives a more direct and obvious preparation for it than the others, and enlarges it in one important way: "I tell you," Christ says to the Pharisees complaining of the disciples' hosannas, "if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." Those words are explained by the tears he sheds moments later, approaching the city: within a few years, the very stones held together by children's praise would indeed cry out — "For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee... and lay thee even with the ground... because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

##### CHAPTERS XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII.

I have already spoken at length on the first two of these chapters. The account of the Last Supper in chapter 22 has three notable peculiarities. First, the new feast is set apart from the old far more sharply than in the other Gospels: the words "I will not eat any more of this passover, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God" and "I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come" are spoken with clear distinctness after he had eaten the unleavened bread and passed the paschal lamb, and before he takes bread and says, "This is my body," and the cup, "This is the new testament in my blood." I know no clearer proof that Luke was, and knew himself to be, the Evangelist of the New Dispensation in a special sense. Second, and nearly as significant: Luke records a dispute at this very feast over who among them should be counted greatest, and Christ's answer — that the Gentiles' kings lord it over their subjects and call themselves benefactors, but "ye shall not be so"; the greatest must be as the youngest, the chief as the servant; for is not the one who serves greater than the one who sits at meat, though Christ himself serves them? Yet he appoints them a kingdom as his Father appointed one to him, that they may eat and drink at his table and sit on thrones judging Israel. That such a dispute should arise at such a moment is among the most humbling, and therefore most instructive, facts in the New Testament: first they ask who will betray him, then who among them ranks highest. That this feast — the institution of a sacrificial meal by one who was himself to be the sacrifice — should be the very occasion for breaking down notions of rivalry and precedence, of "benefactor" meaning only "greater servant," fits its purpose exactly. And even as their ideas of worldly power are crushed by his words and acts, how confidently he promises them real power, repeating all he had told them of a kingdom and their place in it — a kingdom founded on sacrifice, actually to be proclaimed in the world, in which, if they could give up themselves, they would be kings and judges. Third is the passage about the purse, the bag, and the sword — much debated by interpreters. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it looks to me like a re-consecration of ordinary things, which the disciples had proven they did not strictly need but which Christ would now hallow into his service. They had learned their Master could sustain them without these things; now they must depend on him even while possessing them — for the earth itself was to be redeemed, and the ploughshare, the sword, and the money-bag could all serve God in the new order as in the old. If this reading is right — and it is close to what many have held, and perhaps underlies the medieval fancies about the "two swords" — it fits Luke's larger design that he should record this conversation, just as he shortly after records the disciples' mistaken use of the sword and Christ's correction of it.

In the account of the Arraignment and Passion in chapter 23, Luke has several notable variations: he alone records Christ being sent to Herod; he alone gives the words to the daughters of Jerusalem on the way to Calvary; he alone gives the words from the cross, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"; he alone tells the story of the penitent thief; and he alone gives the last words, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." I merely note these differences for your own reflection. A thoughtful, devout reader needs few words from me on such a subject; he will already have learned, better than I could teach, the power of these passages. I only suggest that far from being breaks or accidental additions in Luke's narrative, they fit its whole structure and purpose so closely that substituting either other Evangelist's account here would jar, though we might not say why. I cannot easily prove this without going into refinements I would rather avoid, which might do the reader's inward perception more harm than his understanding good. But it is worth noting, as most readers probably have noted for themselves, that the Evangelist who recorded the woman weeping at Jesus' feet and the parable of the Prodigal Son is exactly the one from whom we would expect to hear, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" — words which, I believe, Matthew was, for good reason, not given to know or record.

##### CHAPTER XXIV.

The whole story of the journey to Emmaus is unique to Luke. Many have found that this story, more than any other, gives them a grasp of the risen Lord and the kind of fellowship that might exist between him and his disciples — different from before the Passion, yet more real, more intimate, mixed with greater awe yet producing greater warmth of heart, sparer in words yet deeper in instruction, making clear what had before been only dimly heard, spreading peace, opening the heart to mysteries it had only vaguely sensed. The sense of a body freed from death's chains, essentially the same as before, now using naturally powers once hidden or only occasional, is one part — though perhaps not the chief part — of the revelation. Its power to vanish and reappear suggests the possibility of a spiritual presence that might remain continually near, in which men are meant always to dwell.

If this is the impression Luke's words leave on us, they carry us beyond the forty days after the Resurrection, leaving us certain we stand at the beginning, not the end, of a history. If there was a Resurrection, there must be an Ascension. Men have believed it — why? Because of a great mass of external proof? Where is it? Who has ever found it, or believed such a stupendous fact on its strength? For eighteen hundred years men have accepted the Ascension on the testimony of this one Evangelist, confirmed by a few words in Mark, not because the evidence compelled them but because, believing already in a Son of God and King of men, it was not incredible that it should be so — rather incredible that it should not be so: that he should be bound by chains of space and time, not lead captivity captive, not be as actual and personal as ever, though freed from the fetters that keep us from realizing our own personality; that he should not actually sit at God's right hand, actually be the bond of union among men. The Evangelist of the New Dispensation casts this belief before the world without demanding special deference to his own authority or piling up crushing evidence, offering it simply as good news which the needs of men and the wisdom of God in ages to come would establish — even if every earthly witness to it failed, even if all the power and wisdom of the world declared that God had not set his Son on the holy hill of Zion, and that the rulers of the earth owed him no homage.

## LECTURE II. ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, EPISTLES OF ST. JAMES, ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL.

### ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

ROMANS I. 1—4.

*The passage:* The gospel of God, promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, is about His Son Jesus Christ our Lord — descended from David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead.

Most readers notice how large a place the life and travels of St. Paul occupy in the Acts of the Apostles. They think this natural in a writer known as Paul's companion, for whom the twelve so prominent in the Gospels might well shrink to nothing beside the teacher of the Gentiles with whom he lived and suffered. But some ask: does this weight given to a man whom our Lord did not mark out on earth as a herald of His kingdom contradict the book's title and clash with the rest of the New Testament? Does it show that there was a separate Pauline element in the Church, at odds with the authority, if not the doctrine, of the older Apostles — so that later editors, or Luke's own leaning toward compromise, brought in the earlier part of the book to soften the later? Such questions have occurred to readers in every age, and in our own day they have taken formal shape and deserve serious attention.

I think I have already partly dealt with these questions. I have plainly admitted the difference between St. Luke and St. Matthew as Evangelists and examined what it consists in, so far as comparing the two documents allows. The difference is not that Matthew affirms less clearly than Luke that Jesus is the Son of God and King of men. It is that one shows His Sonship chiefly in acknowledging a divine Father, the other in the gift of a divine Spirit to men; that one sees Christ's kingdom as fulfilling a particular dispensation, the other as the form of a universal one. In Matthew a Hebrew character appears, with a human character shining through it; in Luke the aim is to present the Gospel-kingdom as the one originally designed for mankind. Yet we have also found Luke — not once, but continuously through his whole Gospel, and especially in the long series of discourses after the Transfiguration — tying every word about the future to Jerusalem, to Jesus' claim to be King over that city, and to that claim's rejection by its rulers.

If these points hold, and this was the steady tenor of Luke's first treatise, then I find nothing out of place, no sign of patchwork, in what follows. The new treatise opens with the Ascension, which Luke seems to regard as the necessary sequel to the Resurrection and the proof of Christ's claim to universal rule; its witnesses are the Apostles He chose; they complete the number He had fixed, answering to the twelve tribes; they are met at a great Jewish festival gathering men from across the Roman and Parthian empires; the Spirit's descent is declared the witness of Jesus' Sonship and kingdom, shown by enabling Galilæans to speak of God's wonderful works so that each hearer understood in his native dialect. The society that held this early pledge of universality is yet confined for a time to the city of its birth, and proves its human character there by no one counting his goods his own; then it spreads. Circumstances apparently accidental lead to acts of discipline and fuller organization; a deacon discovers, even before an apostle, that the temple and the customs of Moses would not last forever, becomes the first martyr, and his death spreads the kingdom into Samaria and soon into Syria. A Hebrew of the Hebrews rages against the church for breaking the barrier between Jews and the outside world, then learns by revelation that he is a sinner as much as the Gentiles and that Gentiles share in Christ as he does; yet another apostle, not Luke's friend and teacher, is the first to preach to the Gentiles, taught not to call common what God had cleansed. Saul spends a long time at Antioch — among Jews sprinkled with some Greeks, where believers first came to be called Christians — learning what his work was, until he is directly appointed to it. From then on the book's main subject is how he declared a universal kingdom to Roman governors in Cyprus, to Lycaonian savages, to Asiatic Greeks, to Macedonians, to Athenian philosophers, to the worshippers of Aphrodite at Corinth and of Diana at Ephesus. It is filled out by his journey to Jerusalem to defend the Gentiles' right to the new covenant without submitting to the old form, by another journey in which he declared Christ had sent him to the Gentiles and so drew on himself the zealots' plot and the high priest's condemnation, and by his examinations before Gentile governors until he came a prisoner to the capital of the world.

I cannot imagine a more orderly and coherent history, one whose every part is explained more naturally by the governing idea we have traced in the writer's mind. I have not denied but eagerly asserted that his being Paul's companion fitted him to write it. Only I cannot find that his personal friendship drew him one step from his purpose. If he meant to describe how a human kingdom, lying hidden at the root of the Jewish kingdom, unfolded by God's will through human agents and against human opposition — how men were prepared to help establish it by divine arrangements they could not control and barely understood — this is just the narrative we should expect: one that gives no honor to individual men, that shows their errors and weaknesses, and that shows how mighty they became when they confessed a calling and were content to fulfil it.

I readily admit that the name "Acts of the Apostles" describes the book poorly. If we look for biographies of the eleven whom Luke, as much as any Evangelist, says our Lord called to sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes, we are wholly disappointed. For the countries they traveled to, how they preached, and how they died, we must rely on vague church tradition; the Scriptural historian is silent. He says little even of those our Lord most favored. Andrew appears only in the list in the first chapter. The martyrdom of James the brother of John gets a single sentence. The beloved disciple is mentioned only with Peter healing the impotent man, once before the Sanhedrim, and once in Samaria.

These omissions are, I think, the clearest possible proof of a purpose that never for a moment aims to satisfy a reader's curiosity. Whatever concerns the growth of the universal society out of the Jewish one is noted carefully and minutely. Human agents' works are mentioned only so far as they illustrate this subject. The highest honor an apostle could receive was to be shown as living and dying only for the kingdom of God, caring nothing whether his name was written in brass or wholly forgotten, provided he did his given work.

This second treatise of Luke is invaluable as an introduction to the Epistles — not because it supplies life-details we could not gather from the writers themselves (their letters are their best biographies), but because it removes an impression about them that we fall into naturally and that badly darkens their meaning. We assume they are meant to set out the Christian religion, and by that we usually mean a doctrine about the state after death and how a man may secure a blessed one for himself. Assuming this is the great subject of the Epistles, we ask earnestly why documents meant to guide our thought and conduct present views so different — how one apostle can say faith saves and another ask, "Can faith save?" These words seem to baffle us on the very point we most want clarity about. A man possessed by the one truth, feeling it the staff of his life and the Church's ground, indignantly rejects the other, and no canonical authority reconciles him to it. Milder men feel there is truth in both and cannot cast either away, though only at certain seasons do the ingenious explanations of divines really take hold of them. Bolder thinkers in a critical age readily accept the simpler solution: that men who said such different things were heads of opposing schools or factions, each holding its own theory of how the rewards of a future life were to be secured.

Now, without weighing these suggestions yet, we must say that if we take Luke's plain words for our guide — still more the whole context of his history — we shall not accept the popular account as fairly stating what any of these apostles thought of his divine office. The book we call the Acts, as far as we have considered it, is the history of a kingdom actually set up in this world — not confined to it, of course, but by its very nature joining the visible to the invisible, the temporary to the eternal, the earthly to the heavenly, the human to the divine — yet no more about the future than about the present. Every apostle's preaching, as Luke reports it, points the same way. When Peter speaks on the day of Pentecost, he declares that Jesus, whom the rulers had crucified, was both Lord and Christ, risen from the dead because death could not hold Him; and those pricked to the heart were not told of some distant punishment or bliss, but to repent and be baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost, and to save themselves from *that* untoward generation. So too, addressing those amazed at the healing of the lame man, Peter says all the prophets foretold *these* days, that God is fulfilling the covenant with Abraham that in him all families of the earth should be blessed, and that God raised up His Son Jesus to bless them by turning each of them from his sins — a present blessing, an immediate deliverance, with future ones spoken of only as flowing from this. The joy and singleness of heart of the first community at Jerusalem sprang, on Luke's account, from feeling they were now brothers of one another and of a common Lord, not from dreams about another world. Their thanksgiving when the house was shaken sprang from their conviction that Jesus was the King David spoke of, against whom the Gentiles raged in vain, and whose kingdom they were to attest by acts and words of healing — the language of joy in a deliverance already accomplished, not of some good hoped for or evil to be escaped after death. Stephen, his face shining like an angel's, might be expected to dwell on what awaited him, but his defence is a history of God's kingdom gradually shown on earth and his countrymen's resistance to it; and the sight that cheers him before he sleeps is of Christ standing at God's right hand, a Conqueror and King. The great joy Philip brings the Samaritans is not by telling what shall be, but by preaching Christ who now gives the Spirit whose power the enchanter tried to imitate and would gladly have bought. The revelation to Paul — who had cried, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" and who in Gamaliel's school may have wrestled with questions of a world to come — was not of a way to better his state hereafter, but of Jesus the deliverer from present sin and an evil conscience, who had brought reconciliation to Gentile as well as Jew. So when he speaks most solemnly in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia, warning that despisers may wonder and perish, his message is that a work has been done in *these* days which they would not believe, that God has fulfilled to their children the promise made to the fathers — Jesus raised from the dead not, as we might expect, to prove that they will rise, but to prove He is the only-begotten Son to whom the sure mercies of David are given. To the Lycaonians Paul speaks not of future rewards or punishments but of the God who made the world, has done them good, and now bids them turn from their vanities to serve Him. To the Athenians he speaks of a God in whom they are *now* living, moving, and being, whose offspring men are, who has overlooked their ignorance but now calls all men to repent. He does add that God has appointed a day to judge the world by the Man He has ordained, assured by raising Him from the dead — a clear claim that a judgment is coming on the earth to which all men, wise and unwise, worshippers of known and unknown gods, are subject. But this is not the kind of information about the future that those bred on Tartarus and Elysium, eager for any new doctrine of either, would have expected. A present God, a present King, a present Judge, was his message here and everywhere.

If you keep this in mind, you will be ready to read the apostles' letters and find that in them, as in their preaching, the doctrine concerns an actual kingdom that men are invited to join or already belong to. If so, we ought to understand each writer's position within this kingdom; that may clear away perplexities and contradictions we have tried in vain to remove by other means. Besides the Evangelists, there are, so far as we know, only five contributors to the New Testament canon: St. James the less, his brother St. Jude, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. I take them in that order. I put James first because it is plain, from the 15th and 21st chapters of the Acts, that he held the place all antiquity assigns him: whether because the other Apostles had left Jerusalem or for some cause unknown to us, he became overseer of the Mother-Church of the world. I turn at once to ask what aspect of the Gospel his Epistle shows us.

### ST. JAMES.

I think it has been shown clearly that this Epistle was not written to soften or counter any hard sayings in Paul's letters: the two were aimed at quite different people, those who read one in the first century were unlikely to read the other, and James's was probably written earlier. But this does not prove there is no great difference between the mind and aims of the two Apostles. The difference shows on the surface of their letters, and we grasp it better the deeper we go. The question is whether this difference affects the unity of the New Testament books in their witness to Christ and His Church. Is James in his Epistle *not* speaking of a Son of God? Is that *not* the leading idea he is bringing out?

James calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ. The name occurs only two or three times in the letter—one of its most remarkable features. He writes to the twelve tribes; whatever we say today about lost ten tribes and restored two, he recognizes no such distinction. He treats the Jewish nation as a whole, as it was first constituted in Jacob's descendants. But why, you may ask, does this Christian address a nation most of which had rejected Jesus as king? I can only take his words as I find them: he writes to the twelve tribes, and confesses himself the servant of Jesus Christ. That is the fact, whether I understand it or not. Yet I could not understand him taking any other course. He felt his belief in Jesus Christ was the sign of his being a true Israelite; that belief let him appreciate his own position. He wanted his brethren to understand and appreciate theirs—to feel themselves truly twelve tribes, a united nation, and to know how and why they were so. So far from making them careless of their privileges, he wanted them more alive to them.

Do I suppose he was addressing only those *not* baptized into the holy Name, who did not confess Jesus as the Christ? No. He could not exclude Jewish believers from the twelve tribes even had he wished; they gloried in their national position, and he had taught them to prize it. He could make the best use of their claim to the privileges of the Old Covenant, using it to instruct them in the nature of the new.

He evidently assumes those he addresses were passing, or likely to pass, through great afflictions—which does not limit the letter to converts. Converts often suffered from their countrymen, but no worse than the whole body of Israelites underwent throughout the empire in the quarter century before the city's destruction. James addresses these sufferers in paradoxical language: "Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations." Our translators chose the right word, though often censured for not preferring another; James's meaning is lost if we suppose the *trials* were not *temptations*. Those in them would be tempted to distrust God, to think He had deserted them. Precisely because they would be so tempted, their state was good for them: if an enemy was turning their circumstances to ruin their faith, a friend was using them to awaken it. God, ordering all things for them, was not tempting them to *evil*—let no one imagine that. He was cultivating their trust and patience. Their own lusts drew them aside; but every good and perfect gift came down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning.

Here begins James's message to the twelve tribes: the God of Abraham, their fathers' God, is the source of perfect unmixed good. No evil comes from Him. Every circumstance is to be welcomed as His instrument of good. They are yielding to something opposite to Him if anything leads them wrong. No lesson was more needed by a Jew of that time. If he believed in Jesus, he needed this truth as the only foundation his belief could rest on. If he did not believe, the truth stood, and to acknowledge it was the first step toward confessing Jesus as the Christ.

James continues: "Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures." Everything is traced to God's will as the ground of their calling: they had not chosen themselves; He had chosen them. Any Jew who knew his Scriptures would recognize this as the source of their covenant and history, and a believing Jew was bound to refer every privilege to it still more thankfully. But what of the next word—He *begat* us? The idea of paternity enters here. A believer who understood his baptism would say at once: we have not merely a servant's calling but the adoption of children. Yet a reader of Isaiah or Malachi would not stumble at such language—"I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me"; "Have we not all one Father?" How can we claim the I AM, in whose sight the angels are not pure, as our Father? That is the question James would have wished to stir in readers of the prophets; and equally he would have wished Church members to feel they had not gained some special privilege for the first time by a new magical operation, but that their highest privilege was to know fully the relation God had gradually revealed to their fathers.

James adds that they were "begotten by the word of truth." I do not insist this be read as an Alexandrian Jew would, by the great passage in Proverbs chapter 8; I do not insist that the word of truth must mean a person. James may not have meant his own language to raise that question directly—the Old Testament had already raised it. The Jews were full of conscious questioning whether the Word or Wisdom who was with the Lord, whose delights had been with the sons of men, must not be a living bond between men and God, the channel of all spiritual communication. Even in its lowest sense the phrase meant to every Jew that the unseen God, whom he might picture in no image, had held converse with his mind and heart. Whatever *more* it means, it means nothing *less* than that God, by communicating with His creature, had brought him out of natural darkness and the worship of visible things into spiritual guidance. The Israelite's circumcision, his separation from surrounding nations, signified this, and lawgivers and prophets kept explaining it as its intent. It was most needful that the believer in Jesus should not imagine *his* privilege was different, an outward economy rather than an inward government. James also reminds the Jew that, rightly understood, his privilege made him only a kind of first-fruits of God's creatures. The covenant to Abraham could not be fulfilled unless in him and his seed all the families of the earth were blessed. What hint could be more valuable to a converted Jew than that his little sect of Nazarenes was only the first-fruits of a vast coming harvest?

Here, as I see it, is the great principle of James's Epistle, from which all his exhortations and warnings follow. It is a Jewish principle, as I have tried to show—but is it any less an evangelical one? Would James have been a more spiritual teacher had he kept repeating the name *Jesus Christ* instead of leading his countrymen to study the very nature of His government? Had he taken that course, which his modern critics think most apostolical, I think he would have proved his grasp of the Gospel was more nominal than real. I do not mean the name Jesus Christ lacks precious significance and reality, or that there were not teachers—some carelessly grouped with James—whose special office was to bring out that Name in its fulness, presenting the acts of the Man Christ Jesus as objects of faith, uniting His work on earth to His work in heaven. But their task would have been inadequately done without a James to display first and foremost Him whose mind the divine word uttered, so that Jews might ask how all their old covenant's prophecies—that God would one day prove Himself their Father—could actually be fulfilled.

Does the apparent confusion of two classes of Jews, so utterly different in feeling and habit, seem strange to today's reader? I dare say it does, and I do not wonder. But I ask him first to consider whether I am putting this into the letter, or whether its superscription and much of its character do not compel this reading. Next, whether each class did not learn something it much needed through this apparent confusion. Lastly, whether the passages that clearly point to the believer in Jesus are not warnings against evils the Church was inheriting from the Jew—evils it was in danger of preserving and passing on, most criminal in the Church because they were especially treasons against the Man of Sorrows.

Consider these questions. James says that, since God had begotten them by the Word of truth, they should be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, and receive with meekness the engrafted Word able to save their souls; but they must be doers, not hearers only. A mere hearer is like a man who sees the form of his creation in a mirror, then goes away and forgets what manner of man he is. All this flows from the truth that a divine Lord and Teacher was near, whose voice they were drowning with their own words and passions, who was ready to implant the seed of a new life, after whose image they were formed, and by obeying whose commands they proved their kinship with Him and His authority. Every Jew instructed in the law, who entered into the Psalms and Prophets, acknowledged such an invisible government. This prepared them to acknowledge the divine Teacher who spoke with human lips yet directly to the inner mind. And a believer in Jesus could little understand his position if he merely confessed a teacher born at Bethlehem and dead on Calvary, and did not own Him as the secret ruler of his heart.

Being convinced the believer in Jesus was the true Jew, James practised all the religious observances his position in Jerusalem allowed. The Acts and the passages in Josephus leave no doubt he was, in the Jewish sense, the most religious man of the city. Yet here he says that if a man seems religious but does not bridle his tongue, his religion is vain, and that pure and undefiled religion before God is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Believing or unbelieving Jews could scarcely receive a more remarkable testimony from such a source. The unbelieving, tempted always to make devotion consist of observances, were told those observances themselves meant there was an invisible Ruler conversing with and governing the heart. The others, inclined to use their descent from Abraham as a reason for separating from Gentile brethren, were led straight to the inward principle and practical result that alone gave their privileges value.

Then comes a passage that directly mentions the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. What prompts this apparent departure? This faith, he says, is not to be held with respect of persons. If a man came into their assembly with a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby dress, and they honoured the well-dressed man—"Sit here in a good place"—and told the poor man, "Stand there, or sit under my footstool," would they not be partial and judges of evil thoughts? Such things had happened in Christian assemblies, and had drawn the notice and contempt of unbelieving onlookers—themselves great worshippers of Mammon—who saw the contradiction at once among the Nazarenes. James admits and proclaims the contradiction for both classes. He grants it is far grosser in those who confess Him who was called the Carpenter's Son, who took the form of a servant, than in anyone else. So he shows by a new argument how Jesus fulfilled the law. Why should believers not treat any poor man as beneath them? Because Christ came to embody, and to let them embody, the royal law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." A royal law indeed—the law in the king's own heart—which, if they would not obey, left them under another law, one that must be kept at every point, a law of slavery; whereas they might obey the law of liberty, by which they would be judged, if they did not prefer the other. What a fine way of teaching a Jew the meaning of his own Deuteronomy—and how the Christian's sin becomes a lesson on how the Jew needed Christ, that the law might not be destroyed but fulfilled.

The famous argument about faith and works follows naturally. "What doth it profit though a man say he hath faith and have not works? can faith save him?" We think this a Christian temptation; it was emphatically a Jewish one too. James's example makes it clear: "Thou believest there is one God"—thou thinkest thyself unlike other men, worshipping no idols. Excellent. But the devils also believe and tremble. Faith in a God who tempts us for our good, from whom comes every good gift, who begat us of His own will—that James had put forward as the pillar of life: trust in a living Being who would work in them to do right. But faith merely *that* there is one God, or *that* there is a Christ, or *that* Jesus is the Christ—faith not *in* a living Being but *about* one—could that save anyone, raise him from sin, make him better? No; like the devils he would believe and tremble, utterly separated from the Being he confessed, receiving no energy from Him. Abraham believed God—not merely that there is one God—and so offered Isaac, because God worked with him, and by works his faith was made perfect. As the body without breath is dead, needing a quickening influence to move, so faith that does not attach to a living person and receive a vital breath from Him is dead. Faith, in James's view, is not itself the quickening principle; that must be what responds to faith—God's power working in the man who trusts Him.

The next passage, on governing the tongue, agrees with all this. "What an unevangelical subject for an Apostle," some Pauline partisan says with lips or heart. Yes—if the dominion over the inner man, the government of heart and will that James connects with governing the tongue, belongs to mere legal doctrine, then James is essentially legal. But to some, light on this subject seems most spiritual, taking them out of the circle of laws that merely restrain conduct and carrying them to the springs of all divine life. Here especially James sets forth the law of social life, whether in nation or Church, under new economy or old. The same unbelief in God's actual government of the inner man, the same bitter envying and strife of heart, was destroying Jerusalem and threatening the Christian community then and in all days. All good things come from above; but the craft that set them plotting against each other was not from above but earthly, sensual, devilish. Yet the other wisdom was given them, though they might pervert it—the wisdom first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.

This part ends with the law of peace, kept by obeying the divine Spirit of peace. The next opens: "From whence then come wars and fightings among you?" Surely from the lusts in your members warring against that Spirit of peace. Submission to Him is the secret of all quietness; resistance, of all discord within and without. All pride, self-glorying, and planning for the future spring from the same unwillingness to submit to the inner Ruler, the same unbelief that He is working in us to do right and withstand wrong.

The last passage, our fifth chapter, refers directly to a judgment the Apostle believed was approaching. The hour was coming when the proud rich man would answer for the labourer's wages he had fraudulently kept back, when his gold and silver would be found cankered, and their rust would witness against the hoarders and eat their flesh like fire. To Mammon-worshipping Jews, whether professing faith in Jesus or rejecting Him, the words applied equally. James was no respecter of persons; he exempted neither them nor their heathen persecutors, but wished each to take the lesson home—and each could also strengthen himself with "Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord." If they acknowledged Christ come in the flesh, they could not rest until it was shown to all that He was the King. If they had not, but still looked for a great king and judge, let them wait—only asking whether any but such a judge as this, One who had cared and suffered for men, could be the deliverer they wanted, or one they could bear to look upon. The patience of Job, of the prophets, of all before them, was recorded for their encouragement. They might be patient as these were, checking restlessness and waiting for deliverance, and they would not be disappointed—deliverance was coming. But if they were weary, discontented, hopeless—Jews, Christians, why was that?

Such, I think, is the tenor of this Epistle, which some would have us believe was written to discourage faith and teach conformity to an outward law. It is, I take it, one of the most wonderful exhortations to trust in an inward spiritual teacher, law-giver, and life-giver. It is the Sermon on the Mount re-delivered after the Spirit had descended who could make men perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. Had its writer not acknowledged a Son of God and Son of Man who had set up His kingdom among men, his Epistle would be a string of incoherent sentences, useless for any moral purpose. That faith turns it into a living whole, one of the most practical discourses any age could meditate on.

### ST. JUDE.

We know almost nothing about St. Jude. He called himself the brother of James. Placed at the start of a short letter, that description shows he wanted to claim a bond with James that was more than mere kinship. In any case, he must have been writing to people who knew his name and held it in a reverence they felt for no other Apostle, perhaps for no other man. Although his opening address is general in form, and although his warnings belong to every age, we may fairly assume he meant them especially for the church at Jerusalem, and we must assume they applied to things he actually saw happening in his own time. Anyone who imagines that words so direct, personal, and terrible were merely composed in a study for the benefit of later generations, and were not meant to warn his own contemporaries of a coming judgment and a coming apostasy, has given up belief in the writer's sincerity—and, I fear, in his own. But if that is so, and we do not intend to strike this letter from the canon (and it is hard to see why anyone would later forge a document so clearly tied to that time), then we must abandon any idea of the primitive Church's purity that clashes with this: that the Church was shaken to its center by the upheavals before the fall of Jerusalem; that there was not merely decline but real apostasy in individuals and churches; and that the judgment on Jerusalem was an even sharper test for those who had received the Gospel than for those who had denied it. All our Lord's words led us to expect this. If the plain language of the Epistle to the Hebrews means anything, it must have been so. St. Jude's letter, coming from a source utterly unlike the one from which the Epistle to the Hebrews is thought to come, gives the clearest confirmation of all its warnings.

### ST. PETER. FIRST EPISTLE.

Anyone who studies the passages in Acts about St. Peter will conclude, I think, that he stayed in Jerusalem only for a short while, though he may have returned often, especially on great occasions like the debate over circumcision. We hear of him staying at Joppa, going to Cæsarea, being found at Antioch. In his Epistle he addresses the strangers scattered through Pontus, Cappadocia, Galatia, Asia, and Bithynia as someone who has visited and lived among them. If we connect these hints with the tradition that he was at one time Bishop of Antioch and at another of Rome, and with the great church theory that makes him the universal Bishop, we may reach a clearer idea of him than these contradictory reports give on their own. Need we suppose that Peter ever held anywhere a position like that of St. James at Jerusalem? May it not have been God's intention — carried out by what would be called natural accidents — that one apostle of the circumcision should oversee the first Christian community, live in the city, model righteousness there, write from it to the twelve tribes, and be martyred there; while another apostle, also chiefly of the circumcision though the one who opened the Kingdom to the Gentiles, should exercise a general oversight, never bound to one place, and claiming no fixed jurisdiction even where he lived a while? Those who know the records of the first century will recall several difficulties about Antioch and Rome that this idea would reconcile, and will see how the opposite idea gained ground by forcing a fixed later pattern onto an earlier time. But the main reason for some such view of Peter's office, I think, comes from the Epistle itself.

At the end of the Epistle our translators put the words "The Church which is in Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you." Nearly all modern commentators protest that this is a monstrous paraphrase of the original. But it is open, I think, to an objection as grave as the linguistic one. How could a Church at Babylon be "elected together with" those to whom Peter wrote — the strangers dispersed through several countries in Asia? One might, by a bold and unusual figure, say the Church at Philippi was elected together with the Church of Ephesus or Rome. Here the phrase has no force at all. The fact is that the word *ecclesia*, in St. Paul's sense, is not and could not be found in Peter's Epistle. For him the Jewish nation was still the body called out of all lands. Gentiles might be joined to it, but it remained the heart of any divine society that would form in the world. That is why Peter's Epistle has always been called a Catholic Epistle: not limited to any one city, it belongs to a body which, though far from universal, carried the seed of universality, and by its dispersion through many lands bore witness to a society that would belong equally to all.

In these remarks on what may seem merely the Epistle's outward form, I believe I have pointed to its most essential characteristics. Everyone sees it is in some ways very unlike the Epistle of St. James. De Wette and other German commentators exclaim that its tone is almost Pauline. There I cannot agree. In its method and immediate aim I think it is as distinct from Paul's letters as from James's. But in its spirit and ultimate object it is in harmony with both.

The obvious difference from James's Epistle is the constant naming of Christ. It was by the resurrection of Jesus Christ that the God and Father of our Lord had begotten them. Their faith was to be tried by fire so it might be found unto praise and glory at the appearing of Christ. The spirit of Christ in the prophets had testified beforehand of Christ's sufferings and the glory to follow. They were to hope for the grace to be brought them at the revelation of Jesus Christ. They were redeemed from their empty way of life by the precious blood of Christ.

Clearly Christ is here set before them as an object of faith, a centre they were to turn to and to which God was continually drawing them. Such a centre was exactly what scattered men enduring great affliction needed. Jerusalem still existed — but could they feel about it as they once had, as their capital and home? The temple still stood — but was it a real bond of sympathy to wanderers and outcasts? Peter leads them away from city and temple to Him who had given the city its worth in the eyes of all who came to it, who had dwelt in the temple and met true worshippers there. Coming to Him as a living stone, rejected by men but chosen and precious to God, they too as living stones were built into a spiritual house to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. This idea — a divine temple made of living men, held together only by a corner-stone who is Christ — runs through the whole Epistle. From first to last he tells them of a unity that existed for them and could be enjoyed despite their dispersion, if only they recognized its living ground and moved round the true centre instead of trying to exist as separate atoms apart from it.

With this aim always before him, Peter could not write to Jews simply as Jews, the way James was right and bound to write. What Peter chiefly wanted to press was not their election — though he wanted them to remember and understand it — but the bond of their fellowship with one another. And that fellowship they could realize only when they confessed a living Christ implied in law, priesthood, and temple. However the dispersed Jews might wish for brotherhood and use the name of brother, they would stay divided in heart and mind, not only in place, until they confessed as their common brother One above all place, who had ascended on high, and loved and rejoiced in Him with joy unspeakable. But they could not do this unless they believed He had actually suffered for them and with them — unless they acknowledged Jesus the sufferer to be the Christ.

So Peter's Epistle is in one sense more exclusive than James's. It seems more sharply to cut off the unbelieving Jew from the blessings of the new covenant. But it does so by no formal edict of excommunication. The Jew had a right to see himself as belonging to a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. He was only to understand what his royalty and priesthood and election rested on — not on anything external, but on Him by whom they were redeemed, by whose blood they were sprinkled. Their union was thus shown to be holy, spiritual, and inward, grounded on their relation to One known only by faith, who had come to deliver them from outward vanities and bring them to an inheritance eternal, incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading.

And in another sense this Epistle is more comprehensive than James's. Though the Jew is always in Peter's mind, though all his language and thought come from the Old Testament, though it is the Shepherd, the Corner-stone, the Priest of Israel he sets before them, there is nothing here that any baptized Gentile could not feel as his own and gladly claim. If this living stone is the bond of a spiritual temple, it must be because all men are spiritual beings related to Him, and apart from Him do not know their own spiritual condition. So while Peter uses the scattering of the circumcised across heathen nations as witness of a real divine federation that circumstances and persecutions cannot destroy, he also shows how a body could exist in all lands with no mark of circumcision at all, resting only on the Name of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. At times we are almost tempted to think the Gentiles were specially in his mind, as when he says they "were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy." Yet such words would not seem strange to Jews long cut off from spiritual privileges, treated as strangers among Gentiles, with no real sense of communion with each other. And if, as I think we may rightly hold, Peter had met many descendants of Israelites who never returned to Jerusalem under the decree of Cyrus — who had known nothing of the restored city or second temple — then their recognition as members of Israel, joint-heirs of a divine inheritance, called by the divine Shepherd into His fold, must have been good news indeed.

I need not point out how carefully Peter builds every relationship — husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants — on the common relation to Christ; how the duties of elders to their flocks, their not lording it over God's heritage, the duty to civil governors, and all mutual services and courtesies rest on the same ground; how the whole framework of human society is shown to rest on Him who gave up Himself — on self-sacrifice, and so on that one accepted sacrifice of which all others are images and in whose power all others are offered. But I would ask whether the idea of filial obedience and sacrifice, of a Son come to make men sons of God, is not as much the subject of this Epistle as of the last — whether their great differences do not make this central resemblance stand out the more. And I would raise a question I may press another time: whether, of all the Epistles in the Bible, Peter's is not the one which — by its statements and its omissions alike — proves that Jesus Christ the Son of God, and no man whatever, certainly not Peter himself, is the rock on which the Catholic body must stand, and against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail.

### ST. PETER. SECOND EPISTLE.

People have imagined allusions to St. Paul in the Epistle of St. James; in the Second Epistle of St. Peter his name is openly named. Clearly such a reference is unlikely in the one case but not in the other. St. James wrote to the twelve tribes—people who, believers or not, regarded the Apostle of the Gentiles with suspicion and dread and were in no danger of misusing his authority to their own ruin. St. James was thoroughly practical; no reader of his letter can suspect him of fighting tendencies his disciples were not prone to, for he aimed straight at the diseases he had seen in them. St. Peter, on the other hand, wrote to those who "have obtained like precious faith with us." As his first letter's address shows, he had travelled over the very ground where St. Paul's flourishing Churches stood; and though he saw Christians not as belonging to particular cities but as members of the commonwealth of Israel, he had been first to admit Gentiles into that commonwealth. So he would inevitably meet St. Paul's converts, or people influenced by him directly or at second hand, and might—as St. Paul himself did—need to point out grave and dangerous errors they had fallen into.

No one has doubted that this Epistle throughout denounces Antinomianism. The word can be used loosely for any doctrine leading to neglect of good works; in that sense St. James certainly fights it. But Antinomianism in its strict sense—opposition to outward law—is not what St. James combats; he rather warns against forgetting the inner government God exercises over heart and tongue, and against a faith that is not in a living God and so bears no living fruit. St. Peter deals with a different mood: the tendency to make the liberty of the Gospel an excuse for disobedience and rebellion. That this could result from St. Paul's doctrine misunderstood has never been denied, though it could arise from very different causes too; and among the provincial Jews their circumstances might give it a political turn. St. Peter does not name his beloved brother to hint that Paul stirred this up, but to claim him as a fellow-witness to the truth Peter himself asserts—that God's long-suffering is not an excuse for recklessness but a power leading to salvation and holiness—while noting that the unstable and ignorant had drawn the opposite inference from Paul's writings.

The use here of words nearly identical with St. Jude's, certain peculiarities in its composition,[^fn004] and perhaps the reference to St. Paul, have made many German critics of our day suspect the Epistle is not genuine. I make no pretence of explaining the resemblance to Jude, and there are many passages I do not understand. But I cannot think that, if some book outside the Bible had been ascribed for many generations to a given author, sober critics would count these sufficient grounds for denying it to him. I do not feel much hangs on the decision. Were the evidence strong I would accept it, and I admit the difficulties deserve careful study. But there are strong internal marks that it belongs to the first age, if not to St. Peter himself—marks certain modern prejudices tempt critics to overlook.

[^fn004]: Among these is the allusion to the Transfiguration. It is true that spurious epistles tend to bring in broad, frequent references to events familiar to the reader, making a violent demand on his faith that a simple, truthful writer need not make; and the canonical epistles are remarkably free of allusions to our Lord's life in the flesh, though belief in those events must, on any view, have been common among the converts. But that one such allusion appears in the writing of the only Apostle who could have introduced it (I set aside St. John for later) seems a very strange reason for discrediting the book. Such an allusion would have been quite out of place in James or in Paul; I cannot feel it out of place in a letter whose whole aim is to set the glorified humanity of Christ before the disciples' minds.

As I said with St. Jude, it does not suit our notions that members of the primitive Church should be charged with crimes as great as those that destroyed the world before the flood or the cities of the plain. We attach to "the apostolic age" and "the first age" impressions of purity that no testimony will make us drop—until we adopt the Apostles' own consistent language and see that they write not about the beginning of an age but about the end of one. I cannot say how important I think this scriptural usage is, or what harm has come from replacing it with the opposite. For instance, it has been thought necessary to read this Epistle as applying to a time far beyond Peter's own, though every exhortation must strike plain men as unsuitable and deceptive unless it refers to the actual circumstances of his readers and to the fears their teacher held for them.

If the reader is once convinced Peter is writing about a distant future, no wonder he finds the Epistle fragmentary and disjointed, and readily supposes the opening paragraphs on Christian virtues are Peter's while the rest was accidentally tacked on from elsewhere. But if he can overcome his reluctance to believe that the Apostles feared their converts might sink into the very worst moral state, losing all hold on truth and righteousness, and that a judgment was coming on their world more terrible in principle and outcome than Noah's flood, he will find the opening peculiarly fitted to such a situation. I do not hold, with our excellent Hammond, that we must trace Gnosticism at every turn in the apostolic writings, or suppose the elaborate Gnostic systems of the next age already existed. But the Antinomian tendency of that time, as of every time, arose from separating knowledge from obedience, setting the grasp of truths against submission to commands—of that I am sure. And I can imagine no more apostolic way to meet it than Peter's. "You boast of your illumination, your knowledge of the divine and unseen. But that knowledge is first of all the acknowledgment, the ἐπίγνωσις, the inward discernment of a righteous person, one who delivers from sin." The γνῶσις was taken as something in itself, unrelated to faith and still less to moral energy or self-restraint. But faith, Peter says, will not stand unless virtue sustains it; virtue demands knowledge; knowledge requires self-government; self-government, patience; patience, brotherly affection; brotherly affection, love in its highest sense. Each grace is not to be "added on" to the last, as our translators wrongly teach, but brought as fresh fuel to keep a fire already kindled from going out. The etymology of ἐπιχορηγήσατε, and its use elsewhere—even apart from its being joined with σπουδὴν πᾶσαν παρεισενέγκαντες—surely settles this as his meaning.

And this sense runs through the Epistle. They were called to glory and virtue. Let them make their calling and election sure—actually inherit and possess what has been made theirs—so that the supply of grace always ready for them would achieve its purpose, and their entrance into the eternal kingdom of the Lord and Saviour would be real, not merely nominal: an entrance into a kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, and Joy.

To this effort the Apostle would rouse them as long as he lived in this tent or tabernacle. It was not to be a fixed tabernacle, like the one he had once proposed to build on the Mount for Moses, Elias, and Jesus, not knowing what he said. The voice that scattered that dream, "This is my beloved Son," was still in his ears, assuring him of a more fixed and eternal home and warning him that his own tent's stakes would soon be pulled up. That voice was as real now as then, and the glory that shone about them was permanent. They had not, as many supposed, been telling elaborate myths or well-made legends when they spoke of His power and presence; they had been allowed to witness a momentary showing of it, so they could call on their disciples to believe in it and enter into it. That vision let them grasp more firmly the prophetic word that spoke of this power and presence. Peter's readers were applying themselves to that word, perhaps with some fear and restlessness, each seeking his own private solution to its riddles. Their study was not overzealous; they did well to work that mine. But let them remember that the day of the Lord the prophets spoke of was to rise and shine fully in their hearts, and that holy men spoke under the power of the Holy Spirit, so uttering not their own narrow speculations but truths about the nature of God and the good of the universe.

And if they were busy with true prophets, let them not forget what those prophets so often spoke of—the existence of false prophets alongside them. Such had been in every age, and such would arise among themselves.

What follows is a very clear description of these false teachers. Their chief mark would be confusing fleshly independence with spiritual freedom, the freedom to sin with freedom from sin. They would deny the Lord that bought them—that is, deny they had been redeemed, deny He was their Redeemer. Redemption would mean something wholly different to them from its true sense; so they would crave indulgence. In such men spiritual powers would drag their fellows and themselves into deeper sensuality; the sin of Balaam would be repeated in them, for in him the scriptural idea of the false prophet was realized. He was essentially the false man, trafficking with his conscience, using divine wisdom and power to serve his gain or lust. The memory of Simon was probably in Peter's mind; if the later traditions about him can be trusted, he would exactly embody this Christian Balaam. If we take him, as all antiquity encourages, as the head and type of a class, the false prophets of the apostolic age may have been as numerous as ever they were in the days of Elijah or Jeremiah. Peter sees these men as both produced by and producing the Antinomian temper prevailing in the Church—themselves signs of a nearer apostasy and hastening the judgment at hand.

Of that judgment the Apostle speaks in the third chapter. His words, taken alone and without knowing what other apostles and evangelists said, would certainly make us suppose the last days were near, and that the scoffers who asked where the promise of His coming was belonged to that very day, like the false prophets he had just described. The Apostles had told them His coming was drawing near; the mockers would say, "Where are its signs? Where is the promise? Is not the whole course of things just what it always was? Since the first fathers of the old world fell asleep, has the world's monotony been disturbed at all?" The answer is just what the earlier passages lead us to expect: a reference to Noah's time as a parallel to the one approaching—there was to be as great a shock and upheaval in the world's order then as at the Deluge.

So much of his meaning seems clear; on other parts I still wait for light. I doubt anyone is satisfied with our translation of the passage on the dissolution of the elements: that τεθησαυρισμένοι πυρὶ can mean "reserved *unto* fire," or that τούτων οὖν πάντων λυομένων ("all these then being dissolved") equals "seeing that all these things *shall be* dissolved," or that δι' ἣν means "in which" rather than "for the sake of which" or "in consequence of which."[^fn005] The argument surely suffers from these deviations. What effect it would have on men surrounded by temptations to sensuality and lawlessness to hear that at some very distant time the present framework would dissolve, I cannot see. But if it were then dissolving—if the eternal day were emerging from night's mists and shadows—there was good reason to fix their minds on what abides forever and withdraw them from what is transitory by its very nature. This meaning must, I think, be in the words, whatever the correct version, on which I wish scholars would give careful judgment. This much at least I claim: that "one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" be pondered in silence and awe, not turned into an excuse for making Scripture as vague and flexible as interpreters find convenient. I can conceive no more beautiful and helpful passage, if we use it to bring before our minds that day of the Lord which cannot be measured by time's rules, which lies beyond them and yet is at certain crises shown in full brightness to eyes waiting and ready to welcome it—none that better harmonizes with what the old prophets and the other Apostles say of the day of the Lord, or that better prepares us to understand the same word used by the brother whom Peter says wrote some things hard to understand. But I am sure that if we merely use the thousand years to postpone indefinitely the judgment the first-century Christians were taught to expect in their own time, we shall make the Apostle of the Gentiles even more unintelligible than the Apostle of the circumcision.

[^fn005]: Lachmann has adopted τακήσεται ("shall be melted, consumed, wasted away") in place of the usual τήκεται ("is consumed"), and so far supports our translation of the 12th verse. If his reading καὶ τὰ ἐπαγγέλματα ("and the promises") is accepted, it must give the 13th verse a different character, though I confess I do not see its precise force in that case.

On the whole, then, we may say the two Epistles of St. Peter are emphatically about the Son of God and Son of Man—Epistles that remarkably set Christ personally before these Churches as the living bond of a society, the object of Faith, the deliverer from present evil, the refuge in a fast-approaching judgment that would test men of every class for what they were. The very features we found in St. Mark's Gospel appear here too. Christ is not showing men a Father; rather the Father is leading them to Christ. He is the actual centre they need in their dispersion to make them a people; the righteous Lord each of them needs to keep him from falling back into the abyss of corruption from which he was rescued.

### ST. PAUL.

I mean to take St. Paul's Epistles in the order the Canon gives them. But there is one passage so important in itself, so important for linking St. Luke's narrative to the inner life of the Apostle, and so important because it comes in the very Epistle that brings out the clash between St. Peter and St. Paul at Antioch—the Epistle modern Paulinists therefore love above all others—that I must use it to introduce everything I say afterward.

It is this (Gal. i. 15, 16): "But when it pleased God, who had chosen me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood." This is, strictly, St. Paul's own account of his conversion. No one supposes he made light of the vision on the road to Damascus; he tells it again and again with its details, and assumes the Galatians know it—no lesser fact could bridge the gap between the man who persecuted the Church and the man who preached the faith he once destroyed. But we want more than the outward fact; we want to know what it meant, what inner process matched it, what was disclosed to the Apostle's mind that a light in the sky could not disclose. Here he tells us: "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." God showed me that there was One whose warnings and invitations I had been resisting, One who was my Lord, and yet whom I had been persecuting. This revelation first blinded and bewildered me, then lit up all the dark places of my earlier life. From this Son of God had come every right desire and true thought I had ever had; from myself, resisting Him, had come all that was false and evil. But was this Son of God only in *me*? Was He revealed to me only so that I might know my own good and my own evil—because I was different from my Jewish brethren, or merely because I was one of them? No; He was revealed in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles. I was made to understand what was true of me as a man, and so was fitted to be a missionary to men. In this way too I fulfilled the calling of a Jew, chosen from my mother's womb to help carry out the covenant to Abraham: "In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed." So I could not confer with flesh and blood or lean for now on outward teaching; I went into Arabia to learn in silence what this communication meant for me and for the world, and to wait for the answer to my question: "Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?"

So I hold we have the highest warrant for believing St. Paul's special work was to carry this message to the nations: to tell men that the Son of God was in them, that He was the true head and root of their humanity, and that apart from Him they had no life, righteousness, or unity at all. He was to show this in relation to what men found in their own minds, to history, to the calling of the chosen people, to their law, to the order of society, and to the world's condition past, present, and future. He was to show how our Lord's Incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension bore on His relation to human beings, explained the riddle of their existence, and answered the countless facts, outward and inward, that seemed to argue against His real fellowship with them and rule over them.

This, I say, is the rough idea one would form of the aim of St. Paul's life from this memorable passage. By taking it as the basis of our inquiry we may be able to trace the distinct aims of his several epistles more clearly, without departing from the accepted maxims about them—provided those maxims are not flatly at odds with what the Apostle himself says.

#### I. THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

We need not deny that the Epistle to the Romans treats the doctrine of justification by faith, as every Protestant writer insists. Nor need we deny that it deals carefully with Law and the relation of Law to the Gospel. We will not skip the passages asserting the rights of the Gentiles, or those about Israel after the flesh and Israel according to promise. We will not make the letter explain St. Paul's own life and struggles any less than the 7th chapter suggests, nor explain the state of the human race under its two heads any less than the 5th chapter suggests. Whatever aspect the Epistle has shown to any earnest reader, even the most superficial, should receive full recognition from anyone who understands that Christ was revealed in the Apostle so that he might preach Him. But when the various doctrinal and practical statements addressed to this Church are seen in that light, they are no longer fragments—not a random string of opinions and arguments, nor a dry formal treatise in which affection would be out of place. The whole becomes a *Letter*, with a clear and orderly sequence of thought, in which no part could be dropped without damaging the rest, flowing freely from a rich, inspired mind, perfectly fitted to the needs of the particular people addressed.

Those who make justification by faith the one subject of Romans can find some support in every chapter, but chapters 3 to 9 are their main ground. They tend to treat the first two chapters as prologue and everything after the 9th (or the 11th) as epilogue. On this arrangement they trace the argument clearly: chapter 3 shows all are guilty before God; chapter 4, that Abraham and David were forgiven and had righteousness imputed to them by faith under the old covenant; chapter 5, how this becomes available to us through Christ's obedience; chapter 6, that faith without works has no evil moral consequences; chapter 7, how it frees the conscience from a terrible bondage; chapter 8, how it connects with hopes of future glory; chapter 9, how it rests on a divine election, not of the flesh but of the spirit.

This view seems plausible, but examined from various angles it raises many controversies. Does St. Paul really mean that all men without exception are sinners in the same sense—that the words "there is none righteous, no, not one," their throats an open grave, asps' poison on their lips, no fear of God before their eyes, apply to Samuel, Hezekiah, Isaiah? If not, where do you stop? The language sets no limits and gives no hint that it describes only the unfaithful; indeed the whole argument would collapse if it did.

Again, what faith is this that brought such blessings to David and Abraham? What kind and degree of it? Did it look to some event not yet done—was it future or present? If future, how does it resemble the faith that justifies after Christ's coming? If present, what was present to them that is also present to their successors?

It is further asked whether the idea of imputed righteousness clashes with the Apostle's solemn assertion that God's judgments are according to truth, and with his condemnation of the Jews for treating righteousness as a mere form. Another question: doesn't chapter 5 suggest that justification by Christ matched the fall in Adam, and was even more complete—yet how can that be if justification is only for the few who believe it? Then a moral difficulty: Paul says we must not stay in sin so that grace may abound, but if a man is not tempted to sin by having grace, is he not forced into sin by lacking it, and is that consequence not just as terrible? Again, if a man's faith does not attract grace—which would be a Roman doctrine—in what sense is faith the justifying power? And once more, the endlessly repeated question: whom does chapter 7 describe—Paul converted or unconverted, a man aware of an evil nature without a deliverer, or aware of both and believing the deliverer stronger? Whom do the assurances of chapter 8 apply to—those God is willing to save in chapter 9? And are there not others, vessels of wrath, whom by the same chapter He is willing to destroy?

I think all these difficulties come from one source. It is assumed that Paul's theology starts from human depravity, that he regards Christ and all Christ's acts—I fear this sounds irreverent, but I cannot avoid it—as mere provisions against sin. This notion comes largely from taking Paul's conversion as the key to his life and doctrine. I have no quarrel with that; I hold it firmly. But I must interpret his conversion as *he* interprets it. Then I have no reason to disturb the natural order of his Epistle, or to treat its opening—where he seems to announce his innermost purpose—as a mere porch.

##### CHAPTER I.

St. Paul begins by saying he is entrusted with a gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, born of David's line according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection of His dead members. He is not ashamed of this Gospel, because it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes. And why? Because in it the Righteousness of God is revealed to faith, as Habakkuk wrote: the righteous man shall live by faith. As this Gospel reveals God's righteousness to everyone who believes, so also it reveals the wrath of God against those who hold down the truth in wrong. He explains this: God has shown Himself to all men, not just here and there; His power and Godhead are seen through His works; what can be known of Him He has declared to them.

Paul leaves no doubt what kind of showing this is. It is a showing of *righteousness*—of God as a *righteous* Being. He traces men's unrighteousness in all its forms back to their unwillingness to keep God in their knowledge. In many ways they confess His righteousness and confess that He judges evil, yet they worship the creature more than the Creator and make Him into the likeness of birds and beasts and creeping things. And this idolatry, this revolt from the invisible God, drags after it an ever-growing train of moral corruptions.

##### CHAPTER II.

So far his countrymen might agree, condemning the idolatrous world and boasting of their own privileges. But how dare they? Did mere possession of a law and covenant exempt them from other nations' sins? Had not Jews committed every crime charged against the heathen? Was it not said that God's Name was blasphemed among the heathen because of them? So how does the case stand? God had revealed Himself to the Gentile, and more fully to the Jew. Jews or Gentiles who, by patient well-doing, sought glory and honor and eternal life—that is, who truly made use of God's self-revelation and chose to keep Him in their knowledge—would obtain what they sought; while Jews or Gentiles who were contentious and obeyed unrighteousness would find tribulation and wrath. How could such evil fall on a member of the chosen nation? Because the whole covenant is with the Jew inwardly; circumcision is not the outward thing in the flesh but the setting apart of the inner man to God, cutting him off from what is fleshly and outward.

##### CHAPTER III.

So he asks in chapter 3 what advantage the Jew has, or what profit in circumcision. He answers: "Much every way. Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God." God had revealed to them His own righteousness and His relation to them. And if some did not believe, should their unbelief cancel God's faithfulness? No—let God be true though every man a liar. But this did not prove the Jew as Jew better than the Gentile as Gentile. In themselves, apart from God, all alike were under sin.

I submit that if we follow the Apostle in these statements, they determine the character of the rest of the Epistle.

The passage quoted from the Psalm need not be forced beyond the meaning it had for its original writer, as condemning a particularly godless age. Taken so, it serves Paul's purpose. What the Law says, it says to those under the Law. How could such an indictment be brought against men who had the privilege of being Jews, if that very privilege made them righteous? That, he shows, can never be the effect of Law. By Law comes the knowledge of sin: it makes a man aware of something in him at war with a standard he admits he ought to keep. Such a statement presumes something prior to Law. The Law discovers evil in a man only by discovering God to him, and God as related to himself. It proclaims the dreadful fact that he inclines to be separated from One intimately bound to him, whom he cannot cast off. And Paul insists, with strict consistency, that the One of whom the Law testifies is a righteous Being—that the sense of sin would mean nothing otherwise. The notion that the Law reveals a Being of infinite power who has decreed the utmost penalty against a man never enters Paul's mind, is not hinted at once. What he says is that a Being who is all right and true makes the man know there is something in him hostile to Right and Truth—awakening the sense not of punishment but of sin. Hence the conclusion: however that sense is awakened, by positive law or otherwise, the result is the same. Jew and Gentile stand alike guilty before God; condemnation belongs not to what makes them differ but to what makes them alike. The *world* is guilty before God.

Now comes justification. The sin was not wanting to keep the invisible, righteous God in one's knowledge; God has made the man conscious of it; deliverance from it, the restoring of man to a right state, must be justification. How is it done? Paul declares that God has shown the Righteousness the law testified of but could not produce, in the Person of Jesus Christ. His Righteousness is shown *in* the forgiveness of sins, and this revelation is made to Faith. It is not the eye that recognizes God's righteousness in Christ, nor the outward man that asks forgiveness. It is the inner self, conscious of estrangement, longing for reconciliation. To that God speaks, revealing His reconciliation and His righteousness in it. The man believes, is reconciled, becomes righteous—but has no ground to boast, for he did not make himself righteous or gain a righteousness of his own. He believed in God's righteousness as seeking to make him righteous. God is just and the justifier. All the man's righteousness comes from acknowledging God. And since God is not different for Jew and Gentile, the Gentile has as much right and duty to believe in Him. The revelation in Christ must justify both or neither.

##### CHAPTER IV.

But one naturally asks: did Abraham's circumcision do him no good, or was Abraham not in himself different from other men? Hear the Scripture. God reveals Himself to the uncircumcised Abraham; he believes; his faith is counted to him for righteousness. He becomes an actual heir and enjoyer of something not his own, of what is in another. His circumcision is a seal of that righteousness he had while still uncircumcised. His descendants had as much right to believe in the righteous God as he did, and here was a perpetual sign of their right. But the nature of the sign showed it was a right to *believe*, a *spiritual* privilege—not a right to think they had something of their own by descent, a *fleshly* privilege.

Abraham gained a *righteousness* not in himself by believing in a righteous God, and a *power* not in himself by believing in God's power and promise. So he became the father of many nations, the father of the faithful, circumcised or not, all having a right to believe in One who revealed Himself as their Justifier. And how did God reveal Himself as Justifier of Jew and Gentile? By raising Jesus Christ from the dead—by delivering One out of what was the universal sign and curse of universal sin—by announcing Himself as the deliverer of *man* from death and sin.

##### CHAPTER V.

You ask how Christ's deliverance from death was man's deliverance from death, and the assurance that sin was conquered for him? *I* can only answer: "Christ was revealed in St. Paul that he might preach Him among the Gentiles." Paul found Christ to be the righteous ground of his own being, so that he might proclaim Him the righteous ground of Humanity. But for a fuller answer, Paul himself gives one.

The famous 5th chapter begins by declaring that, having been justified—not by anything we have done or that is in us or that sets us apart from our brethren—we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, access to a grace in which we stand, joy in the hope of God's glory, and can welcome tribulations as breeding patience, experience, hope; and hope is upheld, and not put to shame, by the love of God poured into the heart. For that love was shown in Christ dying, not for the good or just, but for the ungodly. Its strength in the past pledges its strength in the future: if His death justified us, His life shall save us. Such words have often been used by a believer, or one who thinks he believes, to exalt himself above others: "I have this peace, this hope, this love, which you lack." Paul cuts away that boasting while showing the real ground of confidence for those who will believe in God and not in their own belief. "As by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification." The translation is careless and padded, but it keeps the great fact: justification is as wide as condemnation; if all shared one, all share the other. The translators trembled at their own admission, and in the next sentence evaded it by tampering with the original—a tampering Luther too is not clear of: "by one man's disobedience *the* many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one *the* many shall be made righteous." If only some of the race shared Adam's sin, then only some shared Christ's justification. But Paul says *all* were involved in one, *all* included in the other. All in Adam's race were shown by his sin to incline away from God and to have no righteousness in themselves; all in Christ's race are shown to have a righteousness in Him, not their own, held only by faith. If we keep to the letter of the Epistle there is no retreating from this; explain it away as we like, there it stands in plain words. I would feel the same difficulty as anyone, and the same need to explain it away by fair means or foul, if I saw Christ's death and resurrection as mere events at a late date, meant to remedy earlier evils. But since I see them as revelations of the Son of God in whom all things had stood from the first, in whom God looked on His creature Man from the first, I do not want to be rid of them; I thank God for them as the most blessed exposition of God's order in the universe, of man's disorder, and of how the one cures the other.

##### CHAPTER VI.

Part of Paul's statement might seem to make Christ's grace *only* as wide as Adam's fall. He guards against this: "Not as the offence, so also the free gift." It was not one act of obedience against one act of disobedience, but against all the piled-up disobediences of mankind since creation. Where sin abounded, grace much more abounded. Such a forgiveness, deep and infinite, surmounting all offences, seems at first a warrant for presumptuous sin—and if justification meant merely removing punishment, the escape from fear of consequences, that would be a reasonable conclusion. Paul's answer brings us to the most practical and most deeply metaphysical part of the letter: "Live in sin because we are delivered from sin? Live in that to which our great privilege is to be dead? Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into His death, buried with Him through baptism unto death, that as Christ was raised by the Father's glory, so we should walk in newness of life?" What is more practical, more matching every human being's experience in every land and religion, than that two powers struggle for him—one dragging him down into and below himself, one raising him out of and above himself? This conviction is the key to all mythologies and philosophies, binding them to each man's conscience. What made Paul's words to his Roman converts differ from what Pythagoras or Socrates might say to a disciple? Just this: "We know the good power raising us has claimed us as His own. Our baptism witnesses, not that we chose good and shunned evil, but that He who is good and true has chosen us and taken us into His service." That is the main idea of the chapter: those who were servants of sin have been taken as servants of God, their right to that name established, their highest privilege to yield their members as instruments of righteousness. But the contrast of death and life expands this. "You are dead to sin: count yourselves so. You are alive to God: count yourselves so." Both facts of humanity from the last chapter are now applied to the individual. Not only is there an Adam and a Christ as heads of the race; there is a Christ and an Adam head of *thee*. And the Christ has triumphed over the Adam: the Son of God in your nature has conquered your nature, slain it in Himself and raised it to new life in Himself. Now God claims each of you as His, a sharer of Christ's death and life. Act as a child of Adam, with the Adam in you as master, and you are a sinner, whose wages is death. Act as though the Adam is dead and you are a new man married to Christ, and you gain His righteousness, bear fruit unto holiness, and reach the end, that eternal life which is knowing God and Jesus Christ.

##### CHAPTER VII.

Christ and sin have been spoken of as two powers a man may obey. Claiming Christ, married to Him, the man dies to sin, and dying to sin he dies to the law that condemns sin; it no longer condemns him but condemns a state he disowns. He is married to Another, to Him risen from the dead, that he may bear fruit to God.

Then comes that wonderful history over which commentators have fought so much, in which suffering people find themselves explained—which they feel must be in one sense the story of a past experience Paul emerged from when the full light came, and in another sense the disclosure of what was always true of him and of all men in all times. The key is these words: "I was alive without the Law once; but the commandment having come, sin came into life, and I died." This is the death sin causes, the instant death: "*I* died; I was shut up in self, unable to get beyond myself; so as a spirit I was dead. I strove to escape this prison, yearned after a higher state, felt I belonged to it, delighted in the law of God—yet could not obey it. Wretched man! How can I be delivered from this death? If I am still the same, what new circumstances can help me? If I am evil, what forgiveness can help me? But you are not evil; you are righteous; Christ is in you; you are one with Him. I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord." This is surely the record of a discovery made to the Apostle at a certain time—a truth good for all his later years, which he need not repeat, since God claimed him as a new creature in Christ, then and always. But that revelation brought another: "With my flesh I serve the law of sin." Conversion and baptism do not change that; they declare it. In you, your separate self, they both say, dwells no good thing. Only while you claim the privilege of a spiritual creature—not shut up in self but married to a living Lord—are you righteous, are you alive.

##### CHAPTER VIII.

The 8th chapter carries this out. "There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath freed me from the law of sin and death." These words, and the magnificent passage that follows, unfold more fully the truth working out through the whole Epistle: that man in the flesh, in himself, is hopelessly condemned, alienated from God, under a death that goes on by an unchangeable law; while man in the spirit, in Christ, is justified, redeemed, renewed, under a law of resurrection with ever-expanding glory. What is added here is that the spirit united to Christ raises up the body to share its risen freedom, just as the body had dragged the spirit down into subjection to visible things. Nor does this stop there. The Apostle sees the whole involuntary creation subjected to man's bondage, and so assured of a share in his freedom. So little will he allow that any creature's fallen state can ever become its true state, so deeply does it penetrate his theology that humanity can only be seen in Christ, that the law of the spirit of life in Him is the law of the universe. The passages at the chapter's end about those God foreknew, predestinated, justified, called, glorified—which I would not evade but earnestly press on every reader to seek the fullest meaning of—must be read by Paul's earlier language. If we forget what he said of spirit and flesh, and that both are in every man, and fail to confess that the spiritual man is *the* man, walking according to God's constitution for human beings, all these words lose their force; we may seem to take them literally, but we shall find ourselves twisting the letter as much as we pervert the spirit. So when he ends with that song, "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?" I think those hear it most faintly who are trying to secure for themselves the right to be God's elect to the exclusion of others; while those hearts echo it most clearly which thank God that of His mercy He called them out of their natural pride and exclusiveness into the common blessings He has given their kind in Him who died and rose again for it, and gave them a glimpse of that infinite love which is above, over, through, and beneath all.

##### CHAPTER IX.

The 9th chapter opens with the deep sorrow Paul felt at thinking of his nation as cast off by God. He felt an Israelite's anguish, but more. The permanence of the nation is bound up with belief in God's promises. If it ceases, God's Word has failed; He who is, and was, and is to come, has changed His purpose. But that, Paul says, is impossible; Israel cannot cease. And is it new to distinguish Israelites from Israel? Is not the history full of men who seemed the natural heirs being rejected while the promise and the race continued? What do such cases mean? They are explained by the law of spirit and flesh. Israelites imagine they are such by descent from Abraham or Isaac. But were not Ishmael and Esau firstborn of Abraham and Isaac? What did their rejection show? Not any special wrongdoing—their exclusion was decided before they had done good or bad. Why? To show the race stood on higher ground than fleshly relationship, that it witnessed a spiritual relationship: God's calling, not man's begetting; sonship to Him, not to Abraham.

This idea runs through the whole chapter. Popular writers and learned commentators alike have inverted it. Instead of making the permanence lie in Israel's preservation, they read Paul as saying: Israel may perish, but a few select Israelites, myself among them, will be saved—a comfort that would have overwhelmed rather than eased his grief, for then God's Word had failed and the prophets' promises gone unfulfilled. Secondly, and in line with this, they suppose the exclusion of Ishmael and Esau before they had done good or evil asserts God's arbitrariness or self-will, which they call sovereignty. If so, all the Jewish conceit of privilege that Paul was fighting would be confirmed by the very instances he uses against it. But if Paul says to the Jew, "You cannot claim Jacob was chosen for being better than Esau, or Isaac than Ishmael; it was done to fulfil God's purpose—the very purpose of this whole letter, to shame mere fleshly descent, which is partial and limited, and to assert the spiritual bond between God and man in Christ, Lord of man's spirit, Son of God and Son of Man"—then he upholds his life's great object and derives his right to be apostle to the Gentiles from the history of the Jews.

From false premises it has been natural to read the rest of the chapter as a bare assertion of sovereignty choosing some and rejecting others. And no doubt, if this passage has no connection with the rest of the letter—if the letter has not set forth God emphatically as the righteous Being making men righteous, said nothing of the justification of all by One's obedience answering the condemnation of all by one's disobedience, made no attempt to reconcile these by the Apostle's own experience of a flesh in him with no good and a spirit hungering for righteousness, given no witness that God in Christ receives that spirit and will raise the body too—if we are to begin with "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy," with no knowledge of who speaks or of whom, free to fill in our idea of God from some heathen Ammon or Jove—then certainly these words must give the impression readers have taken from them. But if the fundamental idea of God is the righteous Being, then to believe we get what we seek not by willing or running but by God's mercy simply repeats what has been said: that man merely receives the good that comes from the Source of good. It tells us we do not work our way to heaven, but heaven comes down to receive and adopt us. And Paul's answer to the recurring objection, "Who has resisted His will? Why does He still find fault?" does not dissolve everything into sovereignty and cancel the whole letter's teaching; it asserts the consoling truth that a man submitting to the Ruler of the universe submits to a wholly gracious, loving, merciful will seeking to make him gracious and loving; while the man resisting and disputing it hardens himself, shuts himself in self-will, becomes proud and unloving—especially when, like those Paul argues with, he makes his religious privileges and election a ground for exalting himself above his brethren. Hence the special hardness the Jews were showing, which made them, as he says, "enemies to God and contrary to all men." Pharaoh's very pride was reappearing in the descendants of those delivered from Pharaoh. As God's will had been shown through Pharaoh's hardened heart, His power and grace displayed through disobedience, so it would be again, through the hardening of these Israelites.

This goes very deep. There is a divine will discovered at the root of all things. Our minds reel unless they fall prostrate before it. But if they do, they find what Paul teaches: it is a will of absolute righteousness and mercy, long-suffering to those who have resisted, gracious to those not asking for it. For the prophets taught Paul that God would show this mercy to a people who had not sought Him but whom He never forgot. He says in Hosea, "I will call that which is not my people, my people," which does not annul but confirms Isaiah's word that God would keep a remnant of Israel, that the nation in its truest, divinest sense should never perish. So far the result is: the Gentiles have obtained the righteousness that comes of faith, of believing in and yielding to God's righteousness. A righteousness has been revealed which those who claim it in the only way a spiritual thing can be claimed become truly endued with. But Israelites, always aiming at a law of righteousness as their own property, boasting of it, have not obtained it, have become unrighteous and hard-hearted. Why? Because they did not believe in God's righteousness as the ground of their own, but tried to make one by selfish acts. God laid a foundation for them to rest on, revealing His Son as the corner-stone of humanity: those who stumbled at that stone lose their place in the spiritual temple; those who confess it will not be confounded.

##### CHAPTER X.

These words of Isaiah are deeply fixed in the Apostle's mind; he returns to them in the next chapter, and their spirit runs through it. But he does not rely on them alone to support his great proposition: that the Jewish Scriptures throughout assert a righteousness lying at the foundation of things—which the law did not create but rests on, which men's works do not create but rest on, and which belongs to Gentile as much as Jew. Moses, he says, clearly distinguished the righteousness that consists in keeping precepts: "he that doeth these things shall live in it." On the other hand he describes the righteousness that is faith's object: "Say not, Who shall go up into heaven? or, Who shall go down into the deep? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." A wonderful passage, throwing clear light on all Paul has said. The righteousness a man believes in is not far off in some heaven or down in some abyss; it is close to him, with him. He stands on it; his faith confesses it as the ground of his existence. So Moses spoke, and in speaking, Paul says, he spoke of Christ, of Him who is the ground of the righteousness that the law outwardly expresses. Yet the longing to climb to heaven and go into the deep was a natural human desire felt by all nations—all asking what that firmament above means for man, how he can claim his rights there; all asking what the deep below is, the grave into which the body descends, the dark infinite proclaiming itself the beginning and end of all things. Here the facts of the Gospel meet its principle. Christ has descended into the grave and hell, Christ has ascended into heaven. The Lord your righteousness, the Divine Word, Son of God and Son of Man, has entered the regions you longed to enter, knows them all, claimed them all as His Father's. Believing in Him, you may be freed from the restlessness Moses knew his people and all people would feel.

I know that in the next sentence the "word" is *rhēma*, not *logos*. The word of faith Paul preached was: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved." There was to be an open proclamation to the whole world that this Man is the Lord of men. If that word were choked and suppressed, a man would not believe Jesus is his Lord. But with it must go belief in the heart that God raised Him from the dead—that this Lord conquered death—otherwise there is no salvation from the fear of death, from man's great enemy. "For with the heart there is belief unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession unto salvation." Within, man believes in his righteous King and Deliverer and so becomes righteous; with his mouth he joins in confessing Him and so is fully set free. Here is revealed the mysterious law that we are members of one body: though becoming partaker of righteousness is wholly inward and spiritual, it cannot be a merely individual process; we can only be saved from our evil—so much of which is selfishness and isolation—by confessing a common Saviour and centre. Paul connects this with the equal privileges of Jew and Greek. Quoting Isaiah again, he lays the emphasis on "every one": "*every one* that believeth in Him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between Jew and Greek; the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call on Him. For whosoever shall call on the Name of the Lord shall be saved."

That there is a righteousness for all men, which they know of and revolt against, has been Paul's theme from the start. Now he is driven back to the question raised at the outset: "How could the Gentiles call on One they had not heard of? How believe without a preacher? How preach unless one is sent?" He answers with Isaiah: "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things." These words declared the Jews appointed as heralds of blessing to the earth. Yet most did not heed the message, for Isaiah says, "Lord, who hath believed our report?"—showing there is a hearing that precedes faith, as there is a report of Christ that is the ground of hearing. But had there not been a hearing and a report that might have grounded faith? What of the 19th Psalm: "Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world"? Whether Jews preached or not, sun, moon, and stars had been preaching to all men everywhere. "What—preaching of *Christ*?" some learned theologian will exclaim. Yes, sir, preaching of Christ. Paul taught us so in chapter 1: God's works were not declaring a designer or arguing to the understanding, but preaching to the common heart and conscience of mankind of a God to be obeyed, a God near them, against whom they rebelled when proud, sensual, covetous. They preached of a Lord of man, of his spirit—that Lord who in the fullness of time took flesh and dwelt among them. And were not Israelites told this in their Scriptures? Was it new that other nations might learn the truths the Jews were stewards of? How did they read Moses: "I will stir you to jealousy by that which is not a nation; by a foolish nation will I provoke you"? Did that not mean people outside the covenant were admitted to truths the Jews closed their hearts to? Or Isaiah's bold saying: "I was found by those who did not seek me; I was made manifest to those who did not ask after me," while to Israel he says, "All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and contradictory people."

##### CHAPTER XI.

So the question returns that so distressed the Apostle: "Has God cast away His people?" "That cannot be," is the answer, "for I am an Israelite, of Abraham's seed, of the tribe of Benjamin." How is that an answer? A poor one indeed if Paul thought, as many interpreters do, that his salvation was exceptional—a blessing on the individual Saul because it pleased God's sovereignty to spare him from the doom the race, by the same sovereignty, was consigned to. Taking "people" in the ordinary sense, Paul could not represent the people, and his preservation would prove nothing about God's faithfulness to them. But if Israel was called out to represent the true state of man, to declare man's relation to God as spiritual and not carnal, then anyone who stood on that spiritual relation, repudiated the carnal ground of confidence, and preached to Gentiles as well as Jews that they are spiritually related to God—such a person is not a fragment rescued from a rejected race; he embodies the very principle and purpose of the race. Though he were alone, the nation would survive in him. But Paul has no proud thought of being alone. He recalls Elijah, who thought himself the last worshipper of God while all bowed to the Baal of Phoenicia, and was told there were 7,000 in Ahab's land, where there was no temple-worship, still trusting the Lord God of their fathers.

"Even so," he says, "there is a remnant according to the election of grace"—a remnant in Isaiah's and the prophets' sense, not the modern predestinarian's; a remnant witnessing that the root of the nation has not perished, that the substance of the oak remains though branches are gone, not one proving that most branches were lopped off and a few kept by arbitrary decree. Paul presses his old doctrine: how was this remnant kept? By the grace of God, from whom all good in His creatures comes, not by any works of theirs. He need not restate this against the unbelieving Jew, already confuted: it had been shown he could claim election or superiority only by God's calling, and that when he boasted himself better than the Gentile, he chose a test that must condemn him. But it was very necessary for the Church—the Gentile part as well as the Jewish—that this be driven home. Surely the same lying thought would arise in the Church, "In ourselves, by our acts or covenant, we are better than others," and bear worse fruit than before. So Paul lays the axe to the root: he shows the Gentiles the meaning, cause, and conditions of the Jewish rejection, that they may see the same could befall them. How stands the case? Israel after the flesh, standing on fleshly privileges, sought something and did not find it; but the election, standing on spiritual ground, obtained what they sought. The rest were hardened—those to whom Isaiah's words apply: God gave them a spirit of slumber, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear. A fearful sentence, the most fearful that can befall a man or nation, but one that shows there *is* something to see and hear. They are in the light, or their blindness would mean nothing; a voice speaks to them, or you could not call them deaf. Every charge against the Jews assumes ignorance of a state that was really theirs—ignorance brought on by wilful struggle against a divine Teacher seeking to make them know themselves and Him. Every dreadful curse, like the one Paul quotes from the 109th Psalm, falls on a race of proud, self-righteous, self-seeking men who have grown brutal and cruel because they broke loose from a merciful Ruler, and must learn what it is to be left prowling in the darkness they chose.

"They have stumbled," Paul continues. "But is it so that they should fall?" He boldly answers, "By no means." Then he argues from the truth he has asserted so often: neither Jews nor Gentiles were holy in themselves, but only because the root is holy; the Jew cannot boast against the Gentile, still less the Gentile against the Jew; each lives only while it abides by faith in the root, and each, not abiding, may be cut off. On the other hand, the root has a life and sap that can restore what is decayed. Israel, not abiding in the root, claiming independent virtue, was cut off; the same cause will produce the same effect in any nation. But let the Gentiles receive this mystery, however hard: blindness has come to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has entered in, and so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, "There shall come a Deliverer out of Zion, and shall turn away iniquities from Jacob." Mercy to the Gentiles thus becomes the final cause of the Jewish fall, so that the same mercy may reach the Gentiles too; for "God has shut them all up in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all." I can give no interpretation of these words; I leave them to interpret themselves to the reader. Paul did not claim to understand them himself, but he knew they were true, and could realize their truth when he cried, "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God." He did not try to sound a love he found unfathomable; he was content to be lost in it.

##### CHAPTER XII.

But that revelation of Mercy and Love, however deep, was no less the foundation of practical life. "I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice to God, that reasonable service of yours; and not to be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of the reason, that you may test what is that good, acceptable, perfect Will of God." Rebellion against a perfect Will that has shown itself in acts of love to all creatures, its redeeming power over and through and in them, has been the misery of Jew and Gentile alike, the cause of the blindness that keeps both from discerning that Will. Simple submission, an entire surrender of self to God, is the reasonable sacrifice by which a man comes into his right state, claims his true relation, and gains the power to see what was hidden or inverted. Making that sacrifice, there would be no more self-exaltation and boasting of one above another, which destroys Christian fellowship. "For as we have many members in one body, but the members do not all have the same function, so we, the many, are one body in Christ, and each one members of one another." This parable—the parable of parables, which explains the very nature of parable—of the intimate link between the individual's constitution and society's, each suggesting the other, is drawn out at greater length in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Here it bears especially on that renewing of the mind and deliverance from the form of this world he has just spoken of. Jews and Gentiles had each striven for superiority; Jewish pride trampled Gentile, Gentile pride rose against Jew. The discovery that they had nothing of their own, that they lived simply on God's free, equal grace, given in measures to each for the good of all, showed the absurdity of pride; and offering themselves as sacrifices was the renunciation of it. The new order is founded on the manifestation of the God of righteousness and grace, carried out in the reconciliation God made for the race by giving His Son for all, and consummated when the Spirit of grace enables each man to live as a member of a body and give up himself. With that sacrifice begins the faithful doing of every assigned task, each man knowing what he is meant to be and cheerfully doing his own work as God's work without intruding on his brother's. Humility here is not an ornamental virtue but a necessary condition of one's place in the commonwealth, and from it flow all other graces: zeal, hope, patience, prayer, hospitality, forgiveness of persecutors, sympathy, leaving vengeance to God, overcoming an enemy's evil with good.

##### CHAPTER XIII.

The 13th chapter opens with words familiar as texts for sermons on the duties of subjects to rulers, but which we do not usually connect with what surrounds them. That submission to the divine, gracious Will, that acknowledgment of the offices given to each member of the commonwealth, that breaking of the ambitious, self-exalting spirit, makes the precept, "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God," an assertion of a beautiful order running from highest to lowest through every rank—man being the one able to disobey and having the privilege of cheerful, voluntary obedience. On this ground some have argued that the powers meant are ecclesiastical, not civil rulers: "Only in a Church organized on the apostolical idea could there be the spiritual authority and subjection here enjoined. To call Nero's power spiritual or divine is monstrous; it might be submitted to from conscience as an appointed scourge, but never confessed an ordinance of God."

This is plausible but, I think, mistaken. The common view, though dry and often defended on false grounds, is nearer Paul's mind. Drawing his idea of authority from the Church, not the Empire—seeing the Empire as the distortion of the principle the Church displayed—he had to affirm that all power whatsoever is ordained of God, precisely in order to protest against all arbitrary use of power, all claim of a man to be absolute, as hateful and ungodly. He could not limit the principle to the Church without destroying the Church's claim to declare the true principle of all human society.

So here, as elsewhere, there is a special fitness in his words to the Church he addresses, and this application shows how all his earlier teaching on Righteousness and Law bore on the state of the Roman world as well as the Roman Church. The rest of the chapter, where he presents Love as the fulfilling of Law, shows how his teaching on gospel and law bears on society as well as on individuals. The gospel of God's love and reconciliation becomes the power of God that saves a man or a society from self-will and enables both to bear fruit to God, the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus purifying and uniting the spirits in whom He dwells. This Spirit of love is calling men's spirits out of the sleep of death, bidding them wake, because the night is far spent and Christ's day is at hand—a day that must scatter all confused images and night-birds and show how near Christ is and always has been. To see Him is our salvation from the darkness of the world and of our nature; every hour we believe and trust Him brings His full disclosure nearer. So let us act as if the day were already here, doing no deeds of darkness but putting on the armor of light.

##### CHAPTER XIV.

None of these principles apply to individuals alone. They are all social precepts, and because they are, they bear most sharply on the conscience of each member of a society. Waking out of sleep is surely addressed to a man's conscience—but to the conscience of a man who sees he has not followed the law of love, has lived apart from his brethren, lived to himself. This law of love is now applied to obviously social questions—about meats and drinks—over which a Church of Jews and Gentiles, with all their local, philosophical, and religious divisions, was bound to quarrel. Paul refuses to settle them. Had he settled them, there would be no room for the principle by which alone they could really be settled. As long as any man believed he could judge his neighbor in these things, the idea of a common Master and Spirit stayed weak. The truth on which the Church stands had to be imperfectly recognized in order for such rules to be dogmatically laid down—but such rules are worthless except as grounded on the law of love and self-sacrifice. All allowances and self-restraints that interfere with that are equally ungodly, and each man's conscience will avenge itself on him if he trifles with another's. A man must take care not to condemn himself in what he allows himself. These practical ethics still rest on the great sacrifice Paul keeps returning to: "Christ pleased not Himself; for as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell on me."

##### CHAPTERS XV. [and]{.smallcaps} XVI.

This use of a Psalm's words might strike some readers as unnatural. Did they not belong to a Jew, written long ago? What have they to do with Gentiles or the Christian Church? Consistent with all he has said, the Apostle claims these Scriptures, with their history and revelation, as belonging to Gentile no less than Jew. Christ came as minister of the circumcision to confirm the promises to the fathers, and came to declare the Gospel to the Gentiles; as the center of past, present, and future, the foundation stone of both, the common root of blessing to both, all these words meet in Him; and the God of consolation and hope was using them, and would use them more and more, to establish the patience, faith, hope, and unity of the whole body.

The Apostle goes on to speak of his hope of seeing his Roman brethren, whom he had never met, and his resolve to visit them after Jerusalem, before going to Spain. He was sure he would come to them in the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of peace. A plan strangely defeated, an assurance wonderfully fulfilled. Before reaching Rome he would be mobbed and beaten at Jerusalem, held under two successive governors at Caesarea, and brought after shipwreck before Nero. Yet the prisoner did come in the fullness of the Gospel of peace, which spread more widely from his prison, through all churches and times, than when he spoke freely. This simple statement of a purpose to be frustrated as he conceived it, yet realized in a better and diviner way, has the same effect as the greetings in the last chapter. Both keep us aware that we are reading the actual letter of an actual man, full of personal sympathies, hopes, sorrows, and joys—who often saw only a little way into his own future and may often have been deceived in others—while we are forced to confess that he has disclosed to us the mystery of the divine purpose, the ground on which our right and wrong, our thoughts, acts, and hopes rest, as no man could who had not a right to say he was the Apostle of God Himself, entrusted with a Gospel for man.

#### THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS.

No interpreter doubts that this Epistle is primarily about the Unity of the Church, and that its questions all bear on that subject. The effort has been to see how Corinth's particular circumstances connect to the general argument, and what that argument has to do with the frequent talk of Wisdom, and the wisdom of the world, in the earlier chapters.

These allusions lead to Paul's declaration that he determined to know nothing among the Corinthians but Jesus Christ crucified. From this the natural inference is that their passion for wisdom was a chief cause of their disunion; that to unite them was to humble them; that to humble them was to hold up Christ dying on the cross. How this works is disputed. The pious Romanist says that contemplating the act of crucifixion, aided by a sensible image, has special power to lower intellectual pride. The pious Protestant says rather that belief in Christ as a perfect Saviour from wrath and sin, which a man could not achieve by his own efforts, is what empties him of self-sufficiency. Each suspects the other — the Protestant of regarding Christ merely as carnal image, the Romanist of reducing him to a doctrine stated as a proposition. The Protestant complains that Christ's work should raise us above visible idolatries; the Romanist replies that there can be no fellowship with the poor without presenting the Crucifixion more objectively. History seems to sustain both objections, while refuting the uncharitable assumption that either the one who bows before a crucifix, or the one who dwells on the cross as peace for a crushed conscience, cannot be a spiritual worshipper. So one of the great causes of the Church's division meets us at the very threshold of the classical book on its unity — seemingly suggested by the book itself.

If I tried to resolve *this* perplexity by Paul's own account of his conversion and his preaching to the Gentiles, both Romanists and Protestants would likely object equally. They would say: whatever occasions justify speaking of Christ as revealed *in* him, this is not one. The wisdom-teachers drawing the Corinthians from gospel simplicity were mystics, substituting inward apprehensions for outward facts. The preacher of Christ crucified was directly opposing them by affirming a *fact* — calling the Corinthians to acknowledge that first, whatever interior illumination might come after.

This has plausibility. Apollos, we know, was an Alexandrian teacher. We need not suppose he consciously rivaled Paul or openly claimed deeper lore, but the language of the Epistle shows this was the effect on men already eager to rally round a new leader for self-glorification. Given this, the view of sound critics that Apollos had studied under Philo, and so imparted lore especially concerned with the Divine Word speaking inwardly, may be accepted. This hypothesis explains one party the Apostle alludes to, fits Corinth's circumstances, and illuminates otherwise obscure passages.

An Alexandrian Jew as learned as Apollos would constantly use "Wisdom" or "Word," tracing them through Proverbs, the Prophets, even the Law's forms and the Patriarchs' history. Whatever impression this made on synagogue-goers, it would strike with startling force those few cultivated Greeks who had heard the Porch or Academy debated — for here was the very thing Greek inquiry sought, reconciled with the sacred book, linked to the innermost New Testament revelation. Even ordinary Greeks in the crowd — used to judging plays, having picked up scattered ideas from travel, their reflective powers now awakened by the Gospel — would claim their own privilege to follow a teacher who spoke of mysteries they longed, as Corinthians, to know, and claimed, as Christians, to be initiated into.

It seems beyond question that the Apollos party formed this way, and that the language of the first chapters justifies us in thinking this was the party the others protested against. A school exalting spiritual intuition and inner guidance, appealing as the Alexandrians did to the Old Testament, would provoke Jewish Christians raised under the Pharisees, who took Jesus as fulfilling Law and Prophets in their plain historical sense — these would call themselves Cephas's party, especially once a third party arose proclaiming the New Testament as God's message to the Gentiles, against both literal and spiritual Judaism. Paul's name would equally serve those saying: the Old Covenant is abrogated, we are not under Law, Christ came for the Gentiles and to give the Spirit — why do you Apollos-followers drag us back to old allegories? We might easily conclude, even without the Epistle's clear hint, that a fourth class existed, despising all human teaching — Apollos's wisdom, Cephas's dogmatism, even Paul's liberty — and clinging only to Christ's own words.

Granted that the Apollos school posed the primary danger, and the other parties formed in reaction to it, the question is how Paul met that danger, and how far his approach healed the Church's schisms generally.

All agree his method was preaching Christ crucified — his words are too plain to dispute. But since what this means is disputed, we should seek his own fuller statement. I find it in chapter one: Jews require a sign, Greeks seek wisdom; we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews, foolishness to Greeks, but to the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the Wisdom and Power of God. This is a cardinal passage introducing the whole doctrine of the Cross. Here are the Apollos school's favorite words, Wisdom and Power. Paul purposes to declare God's Wisdom (Σοφία) and Power (Δύναμις) — but says God has declared them better than his own discourses could. The Cross manifests both. God's foolishness is wiser than man, God's weakness stronger than man. You speak of a living Word, the expression of God — I confess it, and say that Word has spoken by acting, suffering, and — greatest wonder — dying; and in that death has come forth God's innermost character, his essential love and his essential power.

This was Paul's Gospel, mighty and startling. God had revealed his Son in him, that he might preach him to the Gentiles who had struggled against him — his spirit had bowed to this Lord and asked what to do; the answer was to proclaim this Lord to all as claiming their submission. But was he testifying to an unknown teacher speaking only in secret hearts? Then his message would be for a few elect spirits, as Philo's initiates — not for the Gentile, for men, for the world. Only if this Word revealed himself through human, bodily, mortal acts — acts the delicate Alexandrian mystic disliked dwelling on — could Paul fulfill his commission, and show the true dominion of spiritual power over fleshly, divine over human. The two could not stand aloof; they had to meet in conflict for each to prove its strength.

This preaching of the Cross as God's manifestation of Wisdom and Righteousness is neither Romanist nor Protestant as they oppose each other. It does not appeal primarily to sense or intellect, but goes deeper than both — yet does justice to each method, explaining why each alone is unsatisfying. The sensible image corresponds to spiritual reality; Christ must be as truly an object to the spiritual organ as the crucifix to the eye. Forms of sense, following Scripture, are the best — the only — way to express spiritual truth; translating them into intellectual propositions weakens them. Yet the longing to escape mere sensible, material idols is genuine, and the true preacher awakens it — connected with, though not identical to, the longing to escape moral evil, which arises when a man knows himself his own tormentor, having bowed to outward things by wandering from a higher centre. Announcing that spiritual centre — Christ as the power drawing all creatures to itself, withdrawing them from dividing material idols, raising them above themselves — fulfills both purposes. It is not a charm on the outward man, nor a proposition for the understanding, but a message to what is most human and universal in each person, concerning the one in whom alone the universal overcomes the partial and warring.

We can now follow the Apostle's thought. He finds the Corinthians rich in gifts, yet divided into parties under leaders. Paulites! Were they baptized into Paul's name? He thanks God he baptized few of them, lest they think so. He was sent to preach the Gospel — Christ as Wisdom and Power of God — to the despised and foolish as much as the wise: you are called of God, Christ is made your wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. He proclaimed one common human-and-divine foundation for all — and instead of resting on it, they set up separate teachers, making Christ a minister of division rather than Lord of Man.

##### CHAPTER II.

Paul resolved to preach this Gospel as broadly and simply as possible, so their faith would rest not in his wisdom but God's power. But was he not then preaching a mystery, God's wisdom? Certainly a profound one — one the learned rabbis and Roman rulers could not penetrate, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. It required divine light to reveal: eye had not seen, ear not heard what God prepared for those who love him. But God revealed it by his Spirit — none can know God but God's Spirit, as none knows a man but that man's spirit. The merely natural (psychical) man does not receive this; a spiritual organ is needed for spiritual communication.

Here Paul touches the heart of Alexandrian teaching. Does he refute it? No — he adopts its very principle and terms. A mystery known by the initiated, by a spiritual organ rather than mere ψυχή, the spiritual man above others — all granted. Where they differ is only when the mystery becomes not an eternal, universal reality but the possession of particular men; when the initiated become a peculiar set glorying in a peculiar organ rather than an open eye receiving light meant for all. Then the "spiritual" man becomes exactly the carnal, natural man — for that is what happens when he glorifies his individual soul and separate wisdom above the Wisdom that is for all mankind.

Paul applies "Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he might instruct him?" — what contradiction, for the partial, individual mind to comprehend the Universal! Is knowledge of God then impossible, a mere dream of the Philo school and sympathetic philosophers who sought it as their goal? No, he answers: we have the mind of Christ. We are not bound to the individual soul's measure. The mind that formed and sustains all things is with us; Christ is in us, knowable if we give up ourselves.

##### CHAPTER III.

He now strikes hard at the Alexandrian conceit while using one of its own distinctions. "I fed you with milk, not meat," he says. "Ah," they say, "then you accept our division of novices and adepts, of those needing sensual forms and those receiving pure essence." Not so fast. It is precisely to you, the aspirants who scorned the vulgar herd and thought yourselves discerning of mysteries, that I gave children's food — because that's all you could bear. You are not, as you fancy, spiritual men — you are plainly carnal, for division is the sign of carnality, self-exaltation the sign of carnality. Setting up earthly teachers keeps you carnal. What are those teachers for? To build you, as a Church, on the only foundation humans can stand on: no other foundation can be laid than Jesus Christ. Here is the doctrine of the Epistle — the condemnation and the justification of Paulites, Apollosites, Cephasites alike, and the ground of Church unity. The foundation is laid; Christ is at humanity's root. Preaching by Apollos or Paul can only declare facts, not change them — either may preach best, God will judge that. What is built on the foundation, precious or worthless, will be tried by fire, and we ourselves tried by fire — but the foundation remains, and *you* remain, for you, not our notions, are God's building on this foundation. You are God's temple; defile it and God will destroy the defiler. Rightly seeing your own glory, then, give up glorying in wisdom and party-leaders. All things are yours — life, death, present, future, Apollos, Cephas, Paul, all nature, all men — for you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

##### CHAPTER IV.

What are Apollos and I, whom you've made into party-heads, destroyers of Christ's Church? Servants of Christ, stewards of God's mysteries, appointed to share deep truths with the whole household. We are stewards for you, but you are not our judges — God judges us; his light will reveal what each of us is and has done. Our own consciences may not accuse us, but that is not our justification. Give up this futile attempt to judge us, which is only dividing you further. Here Paul lays bare their deepest wound — gently, even with humor, yet cutting sharply, combining affection with severity. You Corinthians have become wise, great, judges and kings — would that we shared your exaltation! But that's not our calling: we apostles are God's outcasts, the offscouring of the earth, perhaps like criminals thrown to beasts when the show's best part is over. He feels the bitterness of these words, contrasting self-conceited pupils with those they should look to as guides — but he claims a father's right to speak, not a sophist's or leader's dignity, which he disclaims as inconsistent with the Gospel and the Church itself; the paternal claim he asserts because he preached the Gospel and the Church needs such strict government.

##### CHAPTER V.

An immediate instance shows the Apostle, though absent, exercising this power — a passage as important as any in the Epistle. The Church, so proud of its illumination, had a member committing fornication with his father's wife, and had done nothing about it. Paul pronounces sentence in a dreadful formula: in the name of the Lord Jesus, the Church gathered, Paul present in spirit with Christ's power, decrees the man delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

This is the formula of excommunication. Modern Protestants are unsure what to make of it — surely it can't mean what it says, just a phrase for exclusion from fellowship. Romanists ask what separates this from the anathemas they're accused of, the curses Irish priests pronounce at the altar. To the first I answer: yes, it means exclusion, but what does *that* mean? Paul could have simply said, don't share the Eucharist with him, or avoid him — why mention Satan, delivering to Satan, if the words mean nothing? He had condemned rhetoric as unfit for a herald of Truth — would he forget that rule now? I think we cannot avoid the conclusion that he saw the Gospel as deliverance from devil-service, and the Church as united in confessing the one who destroys the devil's works. A distinct renunciation of Christ, a distinct assertion of fleshly self-will, is also a choice of the devil as master, a surrender to him — sometimes broad and obvious enough that the Church must treat the man as what he has chosen to be, for his own sake: treating him as outcast is the way to truly keep him within the Church's unity. Delivered to Satan for the flesh's punishment, that his spirit may be saved in the Lord's day — I cannot explain these words away; they contain the essence of Christian philosophy and benevolence. Had priests studied them, they could never have sported with curses as they have. The truth must be told plainly: the priest's malediction has too often been not this final reluctant declaration that a man who chose an evil master should feel that bondage until he loathes it and turns to his true Lord, but rather a prayer to the devil as his real god, to punish enemies he hated.

The law of excommunication as it concerns the sufferer is thus explained; its ground as it concerns the Church appears next: "a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump," "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us," "ye are unleavened." These are texts of vast subjects — Church history is their expansion. The Corinthians' glorying, as we've seen, did not reflect a high view of their corporate standing but individual boasting of wisdom and insight as exclusive property. Setting before them the Church's own sanctity and dignity is Paul's corrective. You are a holy body, the leaven cast out; the pure Paschal Lamb sacrificed for you, in whom you are perfectly holy. Impurity enters with separation, with self-will breaking from the divine fellowship's principle — that is the leaven Christ casts out, and which we seek cast out when we come together to the feast. Where this self-will reaches a head in some flagrant act, like the man's incest, the body's holiness must be asserted by excising that member — a doctrine inherent in the Church's existence, yet one that can be so emphasized as to destroy the truth it springs from. Excommunication can be imagined apart from communion, as if the Church were a set of people with special qualifications, all others to be excluded — making excommunication the rule and defeating Paul's actual reasoning, which grounds the body's purity in its relation to Christ, not in members' individual graces. This opens the door to pride, censoriousness, hypocrisy, and immorality, which so troubled Paul at Corinth.

Next he addresses another form of the same error. He had told them to avoid fornicators, covetous men, extortioners, idolaters — an instruction easily misused. They couldn't literally avoid all such people without abandoning society and their power to benefit it. But they could judge and despise the heathen while still mixing with them, counting themselves pure by comparison. Did they? Then let them prove it. What business had they judging the heathen? Who gave them that commission? How could they gauge the evil in an idolater's sin? Their calling was to witness to a righteous society that loved its neighbors and so could not harm them — let them keep the body to that office. God will judge the world outside.

##### CHAPTER VI.

Every Greek trait reappeared in the Church, including litigiousness. Nothing could more starkly contradict the Church's profession before the heathen than brother suing brother. It came from the same cause as the parties — glorification of individual gifts, no real sense of brotherhood, no understanding of a spiritual body's function; they acted like atoms accidentally associated. As always, Paul crushes their individual conceit by making them conscious of their corporate greatness: you go to heathens to judge small property matters? Don't you know the saints shall judge the world? How could Paul assume they knew this, unless such a function belongs to the very nature of a spiritual society? He had said the spiritual man judges all things but is judged by none — raised to higher ground, we can survey what lies below; truly seeing by God's light and partaking his mind, once fleshly bias is overcome, we exercise fully that discernment the humble already partly possess.

Their failure to judge came not from intellectual defect but from intellectual pride — and see how that pride punished itself in practical incapacity: they, with their great illumination, couldn't find members competent to settle small property disputes! The sarcasm must have stung. But it reveals Paul's view of the Church: high gifts and low alike come from the eternal Spirit; prudence dwells with wisdom; handling life's pettiest details is as much a divine endowment, as necessary to the Church, as grasping spiritual truths.

These lawsuits revealed not just ignorance but a moral defect. Why couldn't they bear wrongs from one another, or avoid committing them? Didn't they know the Gospel meant deliverance from moral evil, that such wrongs were fatal hindrances to living in God's kingdom? No — this simple truth was exactly what they hadn't grasped. Too fine and spiritual to think about gross outward evils, absorbed in high mysteries, they forgot that the old grovelling sensualism's temptations were as strong as ever, even though washed and sanctified. Covetousness, envy, strife invaded them. Some Paulite would object: are you, preacher of Christian liberty above law, becoming a mere moralist? No, he says — I still say all things are lawful to me; God gave the earth and the appetites to enjoy it, but not as masters. Belly and food are both good, but I won't be enslaved to either — God will destroy them, and means me to live on. This is commonplace, perhaps scorned by both parties, yet vital and ever fresh, needing constant new application through bitter experience — the text for the larger subject of Christian liberty Paul will address further, perhaps with fresh light on both an earlier subject and matters the Corinthians had consulted him about.

Many are troubled by why the Apostles at Jerusalem mixed a moral prohibition — fornication — with temporary rules for Gentile converts. Three weighty answers exist: first, fornication was tied to idolatry, part of certain festival worship, so forbidding idol-offerings guarded against the moral sin and named its root; second, those freed from the old law needed reminding that authority deserved obedience even without understood reasons; third, Jewish-Gentile relations made otherwise innocent acts scandalous to those raised under the old Covenant. These deserve consideration and teach later times much — but we profit more if we assume the early churches faced the same difficulty we do, and expect from Paul himself an examination resolving it more fully than our partial answers.

Paul had said all things are lawful, God provides meats for the belly — we must simply judge case by case when his gifts threaten spiritual liberty. But he saw how this could be twisted: fornication classed with mere excess, governed by the same personal-expediency rule as food. No, he says — our membership in Christ, who redeemed our bodies, makes this offence entirely different. The Gospel does what Law cannot: Law could and did forbid adultery, violation of a formal bond, but evils that gravely wound the conscience without breaking any recognized bond, Law can frown at but not reach — attempting to legislate them brings disaster, as Puritan New England shows. Only acknowledging our spiritual relation to Christ and each other, only believing our bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, effectively guards against this evil.

##### CHAPTER VII.

The transition is natural to questions the Corinthians asked about marriage versus single life. Paul's unusual caution here is striking — compare Gregory the Great's far more decisive, minute answers to Augustine's similar questions about Anglo-Saxon converts in Bede. His phrases "I speak by permission, not commandment," "I speak, not the Lord" have oddly affected readers: some, out of mere reverence for Scripture, disbelieve the very distinction Paul makes, fearing they won't know what's divine if some words are the Master's and some the servant's — such reverence borders on real irreverence, even disbelief, and needs replacing with something better. Others actually value the hesitant passages *above* the rest, imagining the Lord's words are general rules for ordinary people while Paul's hints suit the refined and saintly aiming higher. There's a latent truth here, grievously distorted — nearly inverted. The better distinction is: what is of universal obligation versus what concerns local circumstances and individual temperament. Principles the Spirit-endued teacher knows are grounded in God's own being and his relation to humanity, he states absolutely, without hesitation — "they are the Lord's." All teaching on marriage's nature and permanence, forbidding separation at mere pleasure or for supposed religious advantage, belongs here — riding over private judgment and even over Apostles, Bishops, Councils, who must declare but cannot alter them. But when consulted about what's right for one person and wrong for another, the teacher should tremble — not doubting he has God's Spirit, but fearing to misapply a truth meant for a part as if for the whole, imposing one age's or place's rule on another. Beyond the case of conscience itself, there's the more terrible difficulty of the patient's morbid feeling that universal principles mean nothing beside his own idiosyncrasy — anyone who addresses that first, providing a tailored rule, seems a sympathetic guide and risks becoming an absolute authority, opening the door to spiritual quackery and, once such prescriptions are organized and imposed generally, spiritual despotism.

The more I consider this chapter, the more important it seems — not for its pronouncements but for this very distinction between what should and shouldn't be pronounced; for the sacredness it grants the universal and the uncertainty it leaves the particular, offering just enough hint to help conscience without overwhelming it, and enough notice of special circumstances to remind each time and place of its own responsibility in applying universal law — profiting from others' experience without being bound by it. These lessons, I suspect, will prove far more valuable in studying Church History and in our own lives' emergencies than the direct Yes or No the Corinthian questioners wanted, and modern readers still wish for.

Remember that a — perhaps the — great disease of the Corinthian Church was each group's desire for its own standard: Apollos's party trusting their intuitions above the vulgar, Paulites claiming liberty they despised timid Judaists for lacking, Judaists feeling safer for keeping old ceremonies. Paul, combating this throughout the Epistle, was unlikely to encourage it now by laying down separate codes for ordinary devotion and higher aspiration. Such a design has been imagined here with little justification from Paul's actual words — there's no question of high devotion, only of avoiding the low vices the Corinthians were tempted to. Marriage's Old Testament meaning, its role in spreading God's kingdom, its highest Christian sanctity as in Ephesians — none of this is addressed here. Paul, likely questioned by an Apollos-school mystic, answers as plainly and briefly as possible, without either indecent detail or false delicacy: it's honorable for a man not to touch a woman at all, but the married conduct they supposed holy was neither especially honorable nor safe. Read the whole passage together, not piecemeal, remembering the introduction "concerning the things ye wrote unto me" explains why the topic arises at all. Next, asked about the "virgins" and "widows" who held certain Church offices — should they marry or stay single? Some wanted to marry, some thought it a fault. He believes they'll serve with less distraction single, but should marry if otherwise troubled — the goal is moral freedom to serve God, achieved differently by each; he himself prefers singleness, expecting trouble in the flesh if he marries — basing his own abstinence not on holiness but on freedom for missionary work. His fear for them stems from their low view of marriage, balanced against caution about dissuading them from it. The phrase "they shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you" seems to concern a peculiar case — reading all clauses together (which drove even careful interpreters like Locke to strained readings), it seems young women were placed under guardians, perhaps deacons, for church training, and on reaching marriageable age awkward, risky relations arose, raising questions whether guardians might marry their wards, marry them elsewhere, or maintain the current arrangement. Where the last is possible, with full self-command and no wounded feelings, Paul recommends it as best, though he regards either alternative as harmless where conditions allow. I may guess wrongly about the specific difficulty, but no careful reader can doubt some urgent, complicated case — one that might recur with variations — demanded his judgment. My conclusion: the whole chapter is a manual worth constant study by the spiritual guide, precisely because it teaches him, following the most inspired of guides, not to affect certainty where none exists, not to fear showing doubt, and not to relieve those consulting him of their own responsibility to judge.

##### CHAPTERS VIII. IX. and X.

These chapters shouldn't be separated, nor should attention to their details obscure the swift movement of Paul's thought. The question, probably raised by a Paulite, runs: doesn't forbidding food offered to idols restrain the liberty you granted us? Isn't the meat still good, still God's creature? Does others' absurd worship make it evil? What is an idol — a mere fiction? Can fiction destroy fact? Good reasoning, says Paul — a sign of great knowledge, but too much knowledge, not yet enough to discover: we know nothing. An idol *is* nothing; whatever many gods or lords exist, for us, members of Christ, there is one God the Father and one Lord by whom all things are. Yet on this knowledge you build a *right* to acts that pain your brethren — acts that would be sinful if they imitated you. Because you have one God who freed you from these dividing idols, you set your knowledge against theirs, grieving — mortally grieving — a brother for whom Christ died!

And you do this because I preached liberty. I have preached it — now see how I assert it myself. I might claim to live by the Gospel I proclaim; law, reason, God's own ordinance permit it; I might marry, be supported by the Church. Have I? No — I claim the privilege of *not* doing so. I assert my right to preach the Gospel unpaid; that is my reward. I must preach regardless, as a steward dispensing what's entrusted to me — but I may have the luxury of doing it free. In all things I act on this principle: the liberty I claim is the liberty to defer to Jews' and Gentiles' feelings. I don't cast off the law from burden or craving independence, but to win Gentiles, to assert their share in the divine fellowship — the one object being the Gospel's spread, the universal fellowship's establishment. With that object before us, like wrestlers training and enduring hardship for the prize, I must bring my body into subjection — not wanting freedom to eat this or that, but the freedom of a body fully my servant. If it masters me, I'll be found useless after telling others how to become God's children and citizens of his kingdom.

Here are two paradoxes, one growing from the other: I submit to others because I am free; I subject my body to keep my freedom. He develops the second in the next chapter, applying it directly to a Corinthian fallacy, especially among his own named party: supposing that their calling and sainthood exempted them from self-restraint required of lesser folk. He reminds them that belonging to a called body isn't new — the Old Testament tells of such a body, truly baptized and sacramented, Christ himself present with them as their manna and rock-water testify. Yet that history shows them murmuring, lustful, cowardly, severely punished. The lesson: election and consecration didn't prevent faithlessness but threw it into relief. Temptations from the world and from their own flesh were no less for the called. A protector was always at hand, with signs and pledges of protection — but they wouldn't trust God's faithfulness unless they distrusted their own. Paul strikes not just at Corinthian self-conceit but at their forgetting that privilege belongs to them as members of a society — glorifying individual knowledge and sainthood instead. Every Jew who tempted Christ did so by forgetting his calling as a Jew, presuming on his own power or God's favor; every Corinthian would tempt Christ from the same forgetfulness, the same eagerness to claim private liberties. The Jew's great temptation, idolatry, summed up all his temptations. Were the Corinthians free from this danger — weren't they exposed to it, most dangerously when they felt safest, believing their old habits infinitely distant?

So the specific question about idol-offered food connects again to Paul's broader discourse — he hasn't forgotten his starting topic, though we might. Now, tied closely to everything he's said about partial, dividing, self-exalting tendencies, comes the communion of Christ's body and blood.

*The cup of blessing we bless — is it not communion in the blood of Christ? The bread we break — communion in the body of Christ? Since there is one bread, we many are one body, sharing that one bread. Look at Israel: those who eat the sacrifices share in the altar. What then do I say — that an idol-offering, or the idol itself, is something? No — but that what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, not God, and I don't want you sharing with demons. You cannot drink the Lord's cup and demons' cup, cannot share the Lord's table and demons' table.*

Until now Paul hadn't fully answered the objection that idol-offerings and idols are nothing. He identified the state of mind behind it, distinguishing false liberty from true. Now he goes deeper: all worship is communion. You're brought into communion with the eternal Father; in Christ's body and blood you're united to him and each other. Sharing that body and blood means you've been taken from subjection to lower beings into direct fellowship with the Lord of all — bread and wine being to you what manna and rock-water were to the Jews, but signifying a higher fellowship through your ascended Lord. Idol-offerings, by contrast, express communion with lower beings, subjection to mere natural powers — a denial of your privilege, an abdication of your high state.

I don't assume, as our translators do, that "demons" here means devils. Much Greek and Roman — why not Jewish? — worship was indeed becoming devil-worship, worship of malevolent beings opposed to the Divine nature. But this passage is weakened, not strengthened, by that reading. Paul's contrast is between the lower, divided powers men worshipped — rulers of nature's various domains — and the one eternal God, Father of Spirits. Christ's incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension delivered them from these powers, raising them to the highest glory possible — what a notion of liberty, to throw this all away merely to prove they weren't narrow Judaizers!

Paul propounds this doctrine of communion as if it were already familiar to the Corinthians, so implied is it in the Church's very existence — yet we can't conclude they weren't ignorant of it, nor that it isn't among the deepest truths. This whole Epistle teaches commonplaces the Corinthians disliked, preferring novelties and disputes over teachers' peculiarities — this frivolity kept them from seeing the facts of their own existence, the principles connecting man to God. Paul's surprised tone at their not knowing what was so near them would evoke an answering surprise in his readers — as if discovering something always known yet suddenly striking, like a familiar landscape at sunset. "Is not the bread we eat communion in Christ's body?" Yes, certainly — we've always called it that, and it meant something real! It applies to our dispute, giving it new importance while making our pettiness plain: the reason for avoiding idol-offerings is that we're actually joined in fellowship with the Lord of heaven and earth, redeemed from idol-service by our very membership in the Church, signified in the feast — reason to flee anything drawing us back to that slavery. Yet this equally justifies the liberty Paul asserted for us in using all God's creatures: whatever I find in the market I may eat without question, for it is the Lord's good creature and the earth is his fullness — but whatever is pointed out to me as offered to idols, I must not eat, for the same reason, since nothing lawfully belongs to another besides the Lord. And this holds even if my own conscience tells me I'm offering it to God, not an idol — for I am not alone; I belong to a Church, and must consider every Jew or Gentile within or without it. If I corrupt their conscience, I bear false witness to them, misunderstanding and betraying the very state God has brought me into.

##### CHAPTER XI.

This chapter opens with Paul commending the Corinthians for keeping his traditions. It seems some members, especially some women, had protested against a rule the Church generally enforced. Though not numerous, they showed a tendency working throughout the society in various forms. "Why may we not eat things offered to idols?" was one form of this cry for spiritual independence dressed up as freedom. Others were as obvious: why shouldn't a woman prophesy as well as a man, why not claim equality with him? Who could control the Spirit's workings? Who could tell a woman to be silent when she felt an inner power urging her to speak?

Very plausible, pious, spiritual arguments—and the Corinthian women acted on them quickly. What was natural, customary, and decorous for ordinary people, these "inspired sisters," carried away by a divine afflatus, avoided. Yet for all their inspiration they fell to imitating models they knew well—the priestesses of Aphrodite with uncovered heads and disheveled hair, the familiar symptoms of Pythian frenzy—adapting these to Christian assemblies. Would Paul, a mere man, dare check this? Yes: whatever names the sisters of the free spirit call him, he tells them plainly they are violating the first principles of Christian society. The head of the woman is the man, as the head of the man is Christ, as the head of Christ is God. The Church is first of all a divine, eternal order grounded on Christ's headship over man; whatever interferes with that is antichristian and is simply to be put down. But he has a further lesson for these highflown prophetesses: they are to obey Nature. There is a customary order in women's behavior which their own consciences ordinarily approve; that, and no other, is to govern them in the Church too. However people elsewhere dress their hair is how they are to dress it there. For the Church does not supersede any natural law or custom—even a merely local one belonging to a particular race—but grounds it more deeply.

This is, I think, the general sense of the passage. Asked for the particular meaning of the clause about the woman covering her head because of the angels, I cannot say for certain. I sense a meaning, but putting it into words I might blunder and get in the way of a better interpretation someone else may offer. What I care about is that the mysteriousness of that clause should not obscure the thoroughly human, almost anti-mystical, character of the rest of the passage—though I do not deny it is mystical in another sense of that word. When Paul appeals to nature's teaching he does not contradict what he has said about the Church's spiritual economy; that economy vindicates and sanctifies what might otherwise seem mere convention. The principle that man is head of woman has always been recognized, has suffered great perversions, provoked protests, and yet given rise to customs bound up with society's very existence. The truth that Christ is head of every man justifies that imperfect human belief, removes the tyrannies it produced, and makes any rude breach of even its secondary consequences a moral offense. I suppose the women-and-angels relation is somehow bound up in that same principle—implying an intercourse between the visible and invisible worlds that we do not commonly recognize, and could not safely recognize unless our belief in Christ's relation to us were more serious than it usually is. But I hope no one gets lost in speculation on this point before taking to heart the Apostle's correction of spiritual ambition and self-conceit.

Paul had been pleased that the Corinthians generally kept his traditions; he is now displeased that they had entirely abandoned what he taught them about the Lord's Supper. This error was characteristic of their state of mind as we have already seen it. They could not grasp a common feast: each brought his own supper, reducing it to a meal for bodily satisfaction. The Church's heresies and schisms were both the parent and the offspring of this habit. Nothing is more instructive than Paul's way of dealing with the offense. Gross as the eating and drunkenness were, he does not treat it as mere excess. A great principle involving the Church's very nature had been outraged. He first states the rule they had carelessly or willfully altered. But then he shows that no ordinance in a Church—least of all this one—can be merely an ordinance; there must be profound significance in it, or observing it is empty formalism. The same self-willed habit that made them alter the sign made them unable to grasp the thing signified. They did not discern the Lord's body; they drew lines between rich and poor, shaming the Church that was home to both. Not discerning the Lord's body is the root of all these errors—failing to perceive that they were members of his body, sharers in one life and one communion. This was the dreadful loss and judgment they incurred, and none could be greater: the loss of the very blessings won when they abandoned their divided idolatrous worship to confess one Lord and one Father. The lesser judgments following from their own wrongdoing—weakness, bodily torpor—they should take as merciful punishments, warnings that God was waking them to judge themselves, to exercise the spiritual powers that would let them discern Christ as the root of their own life and their brothers'.

##### CHAPTERS XII. XIII. XIV.

The way is now prepared for the great passages that follow—the very essence of the epistle—which make the Corinthians' ignorance and strife the means of revealing the principle on which the whole Church, and human society itself, is founded. Paul does not want them ignorant "concerning the things of the Spirit," an expression we are hardly justified in narrowing to "gifts," especially if by that we mean merely the powers bestowed on the Church then or since. He does go on to explain the nature and purpose of these powers and connect them to the nature and purpose of the Church. But he begins earlier: while Gentiles, unacquainted with the Gospel, they were still under spiritual influence, not mere creatures of sense; they had the instinct and need of worship, but it was turned toward dumb, dead idols. "Wherefore" no one speaking by God's Spirit calls Jesus Anathema, and no one can call him Lord but by the Holy Ghost. Why "wherefore"—what connects these two statements? This, I think: the Corinthians' impulse was to believe in a Spirit and glory in possessing it; the new gift of tongues was as much an excuse for intellectual pride as any pre-conversion gift had been. Paul wants them to understand first what Spirit had taken hold of them and where it was leading. Their secret thought was that it had come to make them independent, above law and order—the same habit that showed itself in the women. He tells them the Spirit of God leads them to confess a Lord, to bow their spirits to a government, and to confess the crucified Jesus as the one exercising it. If they set him aside for some mere spiritual power, claiming the liberty to say and do as they please, they are not speaking by the Spirit of God; if they confess Jesus Lord of their inmost thoughts and speech, that is the token of true submission to the Spirit. Some may actually have said "Jesus is anathema" in a moment of supposed ecstasy, declaring that mere acknowledgment of Jesus was a low form of Christianity from which the spiritually intuitive were emancipated—as one might suspect from the Everlasting Gospel of the thirteenth century and similar movements since. Even if only a few spoke the words, the principle pervaded many hearts, and nothing may have startled the Corinthians more than being told that the highest work of the Spirit was to teach them Jesus's dominion over them. Had they not believed that since their baptism? Might they not hope for something higher now? No—this was the very truth they had so imperfectly grasped, needed to cure their strife, needed to become a Church, a spiritual body. Their sense of being exalted, high-souled men worked against their sense of belonging to a body, and therefore—as throughout this epistle—against their spirituality. The psychical man boasts of what belongs to him alone, distinguishing him from others; the spiritual man seeks only what is common, the joint inheritance of himself and his brother.

Here, then, is the principle of the chapter and the epistle: you must be a body to know what the Spirit is and receive benefit from his workings; you must have a Spirit to be a body, not a mere set of scattered limbs. The various gifts had been mistaken for the one Gift, the living Spirit from which they came. So Paul lays down that these distinctions all imply the same Spirit. There were also different offices, each an excuse for some class distinction; these he calls ministries, referred not to the Inspirer but to the Lord they serve. And there are differences of energies: it is not enough to speak of gifts or even services; one must refer all to a divine Energizer, believing that God himself makes gifts, persons, and ministries alive, reviving the Spirit he has bestowed. So the great theological mystery becomes the source of the great human one: God the ground of all, Christ the Lord of man, the Spirit of the Father and the Son the perpetual fellow-worker with men.

Given this, Paul goes on: the manifestation of this power in each man is not accidental but lawful, given for the common benefit. Through the Spirit come the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miracles, tongues, interpretation of tongues. Whether a gift grows by patient cultivation or appears suddenly, its author is the Spirit and its end the good of the society. None of the powers he describes is merely marvelous in the vulgar sense; none could not be stripped of marvel and exercised, as we would say, professionally. His aim is not to explain the phenomena of his own age but to show how they illustrate the constitution of the Church and of humanity.

To appreciate what follows and recover the force familiarity has dulled, compare it with Hobbes's *Leviathan*. That clear-sighted man saw the truth of Paul's image at once—that the body and its members are the true type of the distinctness and unity a polity implies; the "body politic" was no idle phrase to him. But he takes the body as natural and society as wholly artificial, manufactured, with many awkward deviations, after nature's pattern. The whole difference between the world's order, which Hobbes represents fully and truly, and the Christian order Paul develops, lies just there, and it is worth pressing on ourselves. We are apt to think Paul is picturing a peculiarly beautiful, seraphic social state: how glorious that the foot should never say to the hand "I have no need of thee," that if one member suffers all suffer together—glorious when people understand their condition and stop struggling against it. That is indeed a seraphic vision. But Paul says the foot *cannot*, now or ever, dispense with the hand; if one member suffers, all *must* suffer, always. We cannot make our own body other than God made it—that is a law daily experience teaches us. Nor can we make the whole human body other than God made it; and if Christ's revelation is no imposture, this is that body's constitution. The particular Church at Corinth, with its rivalries, heresies, idol-food disputes, abused Communion, exalted gifts, is being taught its own law through all these contradictions—and we are to learn ours from it. It would be perverse to imagine we are reading of some celestial, paradisaical people when Paul is pointing out their ignorance and willfulness at every turn. We must say plainly that their condition was theirs because it is also ours, or admit that Paul was no true teacher of either them or us.

The first purpose of chapter 12 is to explain the law governing the whole society; the second, to show how members' particular gifts and offices are determined by, and illustrate, that law. Everything depends on keeping this order. If individuals' gifts and graces are considered first, as though the body were made of limbs each previously endowed with separate life, then Christian society becomes as artificial as Hobbes's—his idea, not Paul's, becomes the true account of a Church. Christ then becomes merely the king or leader the Corinthians chose over another, not the corner-stone binding living, spiritual beings together. I slip here into Peter's illustration from the Old Testament—so closely connected with Paul's, and so aptly fitted to a different side of human life, that one naturally suggests the other. But the human body remains the great illustration to which all others must be referred and tested. The stones of the temple must be made "living" by a kind of violence before they can represent members of a society; the members of a body must necessarily be alive, and their life necessarily implies unity. Only in the scattered, distracted condition Ezekiel saw in his vision can we conceive them as utterly dead; nothing has truly perished until it has lost what unites it to the rest. I hardly know how to state these simple truths simply enough—any effort to abstract them weakens them, and we always stumble back to Paul's own words as the fullest explanation of our explanations. Yet we forget this truth constantly, not only in daily practice but in our most elaborate theological theories. Each one evades the plain question: "because the hand, the eye, or the foot says, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body?" Each tries to claim either the right to say it is not, or that it has no right to say it is—that it should be modest and diffident about claiming such an honor. Each eye strains to find salvation for itself alone; each hand reaches to grasp it or its shadow; each foot tries to walk toward it alone. And the eye goes blind, the hand withers, the foot is paralyzed, because each is driven to a vain, impossible experiment instead of being told of its relation to Him in whom the whole body is fitly joined and who nourishes every part. So each gift is absurdly overvalued, made an excuse for idolatry, and yet serves no one properly, lacking the strength it would draw from fellowship with the rest, and awakening no due thankfulness to the Giver.

The Apostle's list of gifts at the chapter's end has puzzled many, since human persons are so oddly mixed up with their endowments: "God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, then prophets, then teachers, then powers, healings, helps, governments, tongues." But the order makes sense given the preceding sentence and the chapter's whole purpose. Apostles, prophets, teachers, as far as office goes, are as ministerial to the body as gifts of speech or healing. The human being is placed highest: a man is a greater gift to the Church than anything he does—Paul is more than any word he speaks or wonder he performs. Yet the man is given to the Church exactly as the energies working through him are. Man and gift alike stand in a fixed relation; nothing in this society is arbitrary. The teacher is subordinate to the prophet, the prophet to the apostle. Even influences that seem overpowering, uncontrollable inspirations, are subject to order, because spiritual gifts belong to an order. What is unspiritual, fleshly, idolatrous always tries to be strange and startling. The Corinthians' errors demanded this principle be asserted, and so does our own age, which seems to think everything spiritual must be irregular and anomalous. Once we live habitually in the opposite conviction, the wonder-monger's trade will be obsolete, his wares known for what they are worth and treated with due scorn. That day will not come until we earnestly desire the best gifts, count every art of healing and every capacity for government as a divine trust—most divine when most regularly and scientifically exercised—and enter the more excellent way the Apostle points to after praising the worth of gifts.

##### CHAPTER XIII.

This chapter cannot be separated from the last; its subject is still the subordination of gifts to the divine principle binding the whole Church—the gift of God. This answers Socinus's argument against the personality of the Holy Spirit: if Paul can personify charity at length, why must he or our Lord mean more by attributing acts and sympathies to the Comforter, the Spirit of truth? I admit that if there is personification in one case there might be in the other—but really there is in neither. Paul speaks of charity suffering and being kind because he cannot separate charity from Him who is Charity; he treats Love as God's essence, not his attribute. If you ask whether he means divine or human charity here, I answer: he must mean one if he means the other. Only God's own charity fully answers this description. Cut man off from God, and it remains wholly, incommunicably, in Him alone—but it is a contradiction to call charity incommunicable, since its very nature implies a longing for fellowship. The words describe charity in exercise, even toward those resisting and unworthy of it. If you must believe—and you must—in a charity absolute and original, not dependent on any creature, yet longing for and establishing relationship with one, then believe in a Father. If you must believe in love manifesting itself to meet the disobedient, embracing and adopting them, believe in an only-begotten Son. If you must speak of that love not merely offered to the creature but working within it, believe in the Holy Spirit of Love. So you have the charity of this chapter in its fullness, with full allowance for the imperfect results it produces when meeting a will, or many wills, not submitted to it. This Charity remains the ground of the Church's unity; acknowledging it at work in the Church and in ourselves is the more excellent way by which we rise to belief in God and communion with him. It belongs to the eternal and universal, while gifts and powers belong to the temporal, and even prophecies to a partial region—they may pass, may mark a period of partial illumination or childlike understanding. But Faith is abiding, for it attaches to the eternal God; Hope is abiding, for it looks to his full revelation; and Love is abiding in the highest sense, since God himself, the object of Faith and Hope, is Charity.

##### CHAPTER XIV.

We have heard of what stands above all gifts, and what gives all gifts their value and lets us judge their relative worth. To the Corinthians, speaking with tongues seemed most precious because its outward show was most astonishing; prophesying seemed least, being most commonplace. Paul reverses this. If Love is the end, what benefits the whole body must rank above what serves only the individual. To establish this he must explain the nature and purpose of tongues, and his explanation contradicts much current opinion. We are often told the gift suited preachers carrying the Gospel to foreign lands—but the New Testament gives no such hint. Our translators, puzzled how to reconcile Paul's words here with their own preconception, unjustifiably inserted the word "unknown" to make him clearer. He tells us tongues were not primarily an intellectual gift but the sign of communication between God's Spirit and man's spirit—witness to the deepest Christian mystery, the union of man with God effected by Christ's acts, and the union of man with man realized in the Church's existence. The Corinthians' chief error, as we have seen, was confounding this "spirit of man" with the individual soul, glorifying separate powers over what is universal—and here was its climax: this very gift of tongues became a pretext for their individualizing tendency. They exulted in a divine communication precisely because no one else could understand it; they liked to think something was given to one person here or there with which the rest had nothing to do. Paul combats this tendency without disparaging what had been a great and significant witness that the Church had begun on earth, that real fellowship existed between earth and heaven. But with his usual courage he sets that sign at nought once he sees its meaning wholly subverted. He tells them to desire prophecy because it is useful, and "not to forbid speaking with tongues"—a strange, audacious phrase: how could they forbid the effect of divine inspiration? This is what he considers in the chapter's latter part. The high-flown Corinthians cared nothing for so vulgar a thing as usefulness, and just as little for order. Paul, the inspired Apostle, insists on both, certain that the Spirit is a Spirit of order and that every manifestation of the Spirit is given for profit. Inspirations that do not benefit the body must be undervalued; those that disturb its quietness and order must be, and can be, suppressed. If anyone disputes his ruling here, he does not argue but simply overrules them: "Came the word of God from you, or to you only? If any man thinks himself a prophet, let him acknowledge that what I write is the Lord's commandment. If any man is ignorant, let him be ignorant."

One passage here has caused perplexity. Paul seems first to say tongues are not for believers but unbelievers, and prophesying the reverse; then to say prophesying will especially benefit an unbeliever entering their assembly, whereas hearing them speak in tongues will only make him think them mad. I think the difficulty comes from misreading the first statement. Tongues benefited the Corinthians themselves while they were still unbelieving—as a token of a spiritual communication they had not thought possible. Once they believed in the Spirit's presence, implicit in all their fellowship and worship, the sign lost its worth; craving it afterward proved they had not truly believed what it signified. Taken this way, the statement is not at all inconsistent with the other, so evidently reasonable and confirmed by the whole Church's experience since.

##### CHAPTER XV.

The connection of this chapter with what precedes is not obvious at first, but becomes clear if we consider the question that provokes the discussion: "How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?" Some denied the resurrection for the same reason others claimed to belong to Paul or Apollos, exalted their own wisdom, asserted a right to eat idol-food and do as they liked, wanted women to speak in church, treated Communion as an ordinary meal, or valued self-glorifying gifts above useful ones. All these "some" expressed one common failing: valuing the individual over the body, tongues and prophecy over charity. To deny bodily resurrection, holding that the only resurrection is rising to a higher spiritual state, followed naturally from such notions. The old Greek reverence for the soul and contempt for the body was reviving under Christian forms, shaping Christian doctrine to itself: whatever was common and human was therefore despicable, whatever peculiar and distinguishing was therefore glorious. The body, to the older philosophers, was death's case from which the winged soul emerged at dissolution; the Corinthian Christians could claim to have already reached that deliverance—their spirit already winged, already regenerate. They had been buried with Christ in baptism into death, and already risen by faith in the power that raised him. What their ancestors looked forward to, they looked back on, and made this the ground of the new doctrine's superiority. But in doing so they were really clinging to the psychical principle of the old heathenism, while abandoning even the faint hope for the future that heathenism itself had allowed.

Paul, following his usual method, begins again from the beginning. Those puffed up with their own maturity must be treated as babes and fed milk. He declares to them again the simple Gospel he first preached: Christ died for their sins and rose the third day. He dwells on these as events, apart from whatever meaning he later draws from them, insisting they accord with the Scriptures—the written word demanded them; they were no part of a philosophical theory. This, he says, was his good news: nothing better than that the Son of God and Son of Man went into death and rose out of it. Here was their salvation from sin and death, if they believed he had done this for them. If no such acts, no such victory, had occurred, they were still enslaved—not redeemed at all.

Plain and historical enough, one might think—Paul speaking of events external to the believer. But I cannot acquit him of mysticism here, if belief in Christ as the root and ground of humanity counts as mysticism, for the whole argument that follows depends on this ground and is worthless without it. If we do not rise, Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain, we are still in our sins. A daring claim—that Christ cannot have risen unless we are to rise! Yet for all that he is the Son of God, Paul affirms exactly this. Either he did not rise, or in rising he displayed the law of the race united to him. If he was not the firstborn among many brethren, it was a lie that he ever left the grave; not one part of his message but the whole was delusion. The bodily resurrection would be gone, and the vaunted resurrection of the soul just as imaginary.

And then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have simply perished. The whole past would be nothing but a dark vision of human souls born to sorrow, enduring their span, and dying out of it. If our hope in Christ is for this life only, he adds boldly, we are more wretched than anyone—for all peoples have dreamed of another life, of heroes escaping the prison-house into a higher state, or of some champion who might lead them there. The exalted Christian's privilege would then be precisely *not* to have such hope—Christ died and rose only so they could be content with their brief span and content that mankind perish, so long as they gain a temporary happiness. That this, and not some claim to be more miserable than Festus, Berenice, or Agrippa (whom he wished to be as he was, except for his chains), is what Paul meant, I think beyond doubt. He continues: "Now Christ is raised from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep. For as through man came death, through man also comes the resurrection of the dead; as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." This is as sweeping as the claim in Romans 5, that as through one man's transgression came condemnation for all, so through one man's just act came justification of life for all. Neither statement admits limitation without destroying the very contrast being drawn. The law of death for the race is shown in Adam; the law of life for the race, in Christ. The Resurrection proved the law of life stronger than the law of death—not merely to comfort a few believers or assure later Christians their lot is better than their fathers'. Christ is the firstfruits of all who have slept; every person of the past world shares in his victory over their common tyrant, their broken chains. Theologians have labored to fit this free gospel to their narrow notions of humanity's present state and future destiny, but the words are too strong for them; in trying to build a salvation just for themselves, they exclude themselves, leaving no ground to stand on when they must fight not a merely theoretical death but an actual one.

Every man, Paul says, rises in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ's at his *presence* (ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ). I stress "those who are Christ's" because I think our translators erred twice in rendering these words, in ways that, though seemingly minor, have seriously hindered students. "They that are Christ's" has been taken to mean the faithful who belong to him, as against the unfaithful who are none of his; that sense may be latent in the words, but no one would draw it straight from the Greek. Christ comes first, then his companions, the members of his body; who these are must be settled by other considerations—this verse by itself excludes no one. The other, more far-reaching error concerns the word παρουσία. Should it ever be rendered "coming"? Doesn't "appearing" or "presence" convey the sense far better? Is there any instance where those renderings would not fit, that is not distorted by importing the idea of travel?

I want readers to examine this for themselves; I have little doubt of the outcome. Consider the passage before us. On our version's rendering, Christ is the firstfruits of a harvest, yet he rose ages before a single other grain is gathered—everyone who has died or will die for generations would rise, at some indefinitely distant day, from graves that had seen the grossest corruption, following the precedent and law set by him who saw none. On the other rendering, Christ's appearing or manifestation *is* the resurrection and deliverance of each man from his deathly Adam-condition: the true Lord of his life, the source of all that has lived in him body and spirit, awakens and renews him, bringing him into the true state he has been dimly conscious of throughout his earthly life, though choked and hidden by so many perversities. This view of Christ's presence to each man does not conflict with the gathering together of all men in him that Paul mentions elsewhere—one truth sustains the other. I do not want less emphasis on a general appearing of Christ; I want its universality felt more fully. If he is the one living Head and Root of humanity, no unity or gathering of humanity's elements is conceivable except in him. Life means union, as death means only dispersion. If his Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and later judgments on Jerusalem declared him the Man, the Center of Humanity, it follows that he should go on appearing or declaring himself in that character ever after—that each individual's death, like each nation's judgment, is such an appearing—and that there should be a final, more perfect appearing gathering up the threads of the universe's whole history and fulfilling the Creator's purposes.

"Then the end," τὸ τέλος—the point toward which all Christ's acts have tended, the fulfillment of the design implicit in them. This need not mean only the final gathering just mentioned. In the history of each age, and of each man, a purpose may be carried out, expressed in these words: the Son, having fought the long battle of that age or with that man, and put his enemies beneath his feet, presents the fruit of his victory to the Father, subjecting himself to the One who put all things under him, so that God is all in all. Certain passages of Paul give a clear glimpse of an eternal kingdom of God, for which Christ's kingdom prepares—a kingdom where principles still war, where world, flesh, and devil still contend for man and earth, often seeming to win—but for its fullness we must turn to the beloved disciple's writings. If anyone imagines that kingdom to be one where the Son disappears, swallowed in the brightness of Eternal Glory, John is the best safeguard against so gloomy a thought. The Son revealing the Father, the Father revealing the Son, the perpetual strife of opposing truths reconciled in the Spirit's perfect unity—this is the great τέλος, the satisfying vision that those who have suffered with Christ may hope to wake to, not one where he who was their only strength in the battle is no longer distinctly, personally present.

Death, Paul says, is the last enemy destroyed. *Is* destroyed, or *to be* destroyed? The next sentence, which has troubled interpreters, answers this: "Why then are they baptized for the dead?" Whatever the exact force of ὑπέρ, our translators were not far wrong. Every explanation drawn from supposed Church customs—probably antedated for the commentators' convenience—itself needs explaining by some principle; the words of Romans 6 must account for such a practice if it existed, or for Paul's language here if it did not. Christians were baptized for the dead: baptism witnessed that they were planted in the likeness of Christ's death and would share his resurrection. It declared them dead with Christ, carrying that death through their whole pilgrimage—but a death no longer solitary or antihuman, a human, common death uniting them to each other rather than cutting them off. And it was a death already overcome: baptism contained not just the promise but the fact of resurrection, spoke of death already trampled as well as death yet to be trampled, for each person who puts on Christ. By Paul's own argument, if it implies one it must imply the other. What a mockery baptism becomes for anyone who adopts the Corinthians' notion of a merely spiritual, already-past resurrection!

If that notion were true, he goes on, why are we in peril every hour? He touches here a grave ethical question later ages have taken up fully, and seems to side with Bossuet against Fénelon. Bossuet's school could draw from these words the moral: we need the promise of reward to bear the world's opposition; love of God alone is not enough, or the temptation to "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" would be irresistible. That conclusion, I think, is one-sided and hasty, though it usefully warns the mystical dreamer who turns his faith in God's love into an excuse to accept whatever on earth contradicts that Love. How could one trust such a love if it achieved nothing, conquered no enemies, found miseries and left them? Eating and drinking would be the only refuge from so dreary a faith. But it was not the thought of a selfish reward that restrained Paul's appetites—he was too honest and practical to trade present pleasure for a mere hoped-for future one. It was the conviction that God would not disappoint believers, that he would prove mightier than sin, death, and hell, that made Paul ready to fight beasts or men at Ephesus and to die daily—as he swore, by the very gladness and triumph he had in their common Lord and wanted them to share. He calls them to wake to this same hope, instead of substituting theories about resurrection—refinements that cannot survive real trial—for trust in and knowledge of God, theories fostered by their sects and cliques. Let them seek instead the higher blessing it should shame Church members to lack.

"But someone will say, How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come? Fool—what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. What you sow is not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, wheat perhaps, or some other grain; but God gives it a body as he wills, and to each seed its own body."

The doubter's question is twofold: how does resurrection happen, and what kind of body can belong to those who have shed what we here call body? Both questions would occur naturally to Greeks taught that the body was a mere carcase, a prison for a nobler principle, expecting individual life to be absorbed into some general essence. Yet Paul treats them with real contempt, wanting the Corinthians to see how little serious thought about facts lay behind their fine speculations. A moment's quiet attention to the most familiar things would teach them more than the wisest philosopher could. They expect the buried seed to rise; they expect wheat to yield wheat, rye to yield rye. It lies in the ground and dies. When it comes up, is it at all like what was buried? Yet it is the same seed—no one doubts it. God gives the seed a new body, yet still its own, though so changed. Does not this pattern run through all nature? Are only seeds different from one another, or also the bodies they produce? Isn't human flesh different from that of beasts, beasts' from birds', birds' from fish? Are the heavenly bodies like earthly ones—can they even be compared? Isn't there a difference in degree, if not in kind, even among the heavenly bodies' own glory—isn't one star more conspicuous than another? This preserving of type alongside variety of form runs through all God's works. What wonder, then, if from a perishable seed rises the imperishable, from an insignificant seed the glorious, from a feeble seed the mighty—if from man's psychical body rises a spiritual one? "For there is a psychical body, and there is a spiritual body." He cites Genesis: "The first Adam became a living soul," adding his own comment: "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit."

Here is Paul's own explanation of his argument, tying back to "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive"—and here too is the refutation of the crude notion that the seed sown in the ground stands for burying a man's mortal remains. How could anyone read these sentences, ranging from earth to heaven and back, and suppose their basis is a trivial verbal pun one would blush to find in the poorest rhetorician? No—the seed is not sown when a man leaves this world. What he inherits from his parents, what belongs to him as Adam's child, what has already gone through a death-process in his mother's womb and that he carries through his whole pilgrimage—that is what is sown in corruption, dishonor, weakness; that is what the second Adam's quickening life comes to penetrate and purify, raising it in incorruption, glory, power. The earlier part of the chapter makes no sense on any other reading, and neither does what follows. The spiritual body does not come first, but the psychical; the first man is of the earth, earthy, the second out of heaven. As is the earthy, so are the earthy; as is the heavenly, so are the heavenly; and as we have borne the image of the earthy, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly.

Man's twofold condition is set forth here, as everywhere in Paul, but newly applied. Christ, the divine root, is the true ground of life, redemption, and resurrection for the whole man, body and soul. The old Adam is the root of the curse and of death; to bear the earthly image is to bear the image of death, and to bear Christ's heavenly image is to have life and resurrection. "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither can corruption inherit incorruption." If there were no other text in the Bible, this alone might settle whether the corruptible thing we commit to earth—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—is the body destined to be made like Christ's glorious body, inheriting his incorruption. If flesh and blood were truly the body that filled the Psalmist with rapture—if, once blood stops flowing and flesh goes cold, all its marvelous powers simply dry up—then we might indeed search the charnel-house for the only proof that the voice once heard may speak again, that the light once shining in a face may not be quenched forever. But if every word that ever cheered us came from the Divine Word, if every smile witnessed the presence of Him in whom is fullness of joy, why should not the body, as well as the spirit, dwell now in the kingdom that flesh and blood can never enter?

"Behold, I declare to you a mystery." What follows admits two opposite readings. Our translators give: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." Lachmann's punctuation gives: "We shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed." I do not think any careful reader of the next verse can reasonably doubt that the traditional reading is right, and that Lachmann sacrificed both Paul's characteristic style and his own consistency for the sake of a more regular grammar. For what would "the twinkling of an eye, the last trumpet" refer to, if the preceding words were "we shall not be changed"? And what becomes of the clause that follows—"the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed"?

One can only suspect Lachmann of a kind of philological stubbornness in departing from the usual punctuation. But some might find it theologically convenient to have Paul speak that other way. A flat assertion "we shall all sleep" would greatly strengthen the theory that holds, as an article of faith, that the remains of the dead lie for thousands of years in their graves while disembodied souls slumber in a kind of oblivion, until the archangel's trumpet reattaches every scrap of dust to the very creature it once burdened on earth. But however great and frightful a marvel that is, it is utterly unlike what Paul means by a "mystery." The renewal and resurrection he has been describing has parallels throughout nature; this notion, by its own advocates' admission, is wholly without parallel, violating every law we recognize. But what law is violated—what law is not fulfilled—by an unseen transformation, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, that ends the body's long struggle with its case of death and announces the second Adam's triumph? What Paul is telling the Corinthians, I think, is that those who died before Christ's coming in the flesh would share his glorious resurrection just as fully as those still living then. Neither group's flesh and blood, neither group's corruption, could inherit the kingdom; but the bodies of both alike would hear the voice of the Son of Man. The very voice that on Sinai proclaimed the law of death would proclaim through God's whole universe that death is swallowed up in victory, the last enemy conquered—a voice the unseen world would hear and echo, and that could even here, in this visible world, be repeated by the inspired Apostle: "O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the Law. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

##### CHAPTER XVI.

This doctrine of the resurrection is so living and practical that it touches earthly, common things as closely as it does heaven. "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, unmoved, always abounding in the Lord's work, since you know your labor is not in vain in the Lord." From there Paul turns to the weekly collections, his own travel plans, his wish to winter with them, Timothy, Apollos, the household of Stephanas, friends sending greetings from afar, and their greetings to one another. Those who exalted the soul and tore the Church apart for fine notions could never touch common earth; they could only dwell in the clouds. But Paul, believing that the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, had dwelt on earth and hallowed and redeemed it, that he was Head of the whole body and quickening Spirit of each member, felt nothing too glorious for humanity and nothing too mean for its minister and its Lord's. He could say, in the sterner parts of this letter, "If anyone does not love the Lord"—setting up his own pride against him—"let him be Anathema; he must be." But he could say, in that very same spirit: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen."

#### SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS.

I have examined carefully two of Paul's Epistles that even the school of Bauer admits are genuine. Different as they are in aim and occasion, I think we have found in both the marks of one common design. Neither is written to establish a formal doctrine of justification by faith. Both set forth Christ as the common foundation on which Jew and Gentile can stand, the bond of human society, the root of human righteousness. In examining the other ten Epistles for the same tokens I will be much less detailed, so that the purpose of these lectures is not lost in details, and so that I do not seem to offer a commentary rather than help you read the New Testament yourself.

The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is clearly connected to the First, yet the two are so different in character and subject that many regard the external links as the only proof they were sent to the same people. Still, few can miss that at least one thread from the first letter runs through the second: the question of the honor due to ministers of the Gospel, which arose there from the false honor the Corinthians paid them. In the second letter the subject becomes more personal, more bound up with the conflicts, griefs, ecstasies, and humiliations in the Apostle's own mind; but it concerns the Corinthian Church, and the order of all Christian society, no less.

At the end of the last letter Paul had spoken of visiting Corinth. He had not done so. Some in the Church suspected he made such promises carelessly. He denies it: he had postponed the visit deliberately, not thoughtlessly, believing it better for them that he not come at once. He wanted them to use their own judgment about the man he had declared excommunicate, and did not wish to oppress that man or them by his presence. So he sent Titus instead. He was delighted by Titus's news of how they received his letter, the impression it made, their zeal to clear themselves of the guilt he had said they shared. He thinks they have done all that was required in punishing the offender; now he is content, even eager, that they forgive him. Their forgiveness would be his, as their punishment had been his.

Paul dwells on this part of Titus's report with his usual warmth, his satisfaction matching the severity of his earlier rebukes. Clearly Titus made other reports that pleased him less. With delicacy and courtesy, but some irony, Paul hints that the Corinthians had promised a collection for suffering members of other churches which they had not yet made; that the Macedonians, with less means and less pretension, had done more; and that it would be well for their honor, and his, if his boasting of them were not proved false.

It is also clear that the jealousies and suspicions against Paul, stirred up by rival parties, were not removed by his letter but took a new form because of it. "He can write powerfully at a distance," his opponents said, "but how feeble he is among us." The plainness of his Gospel, his refusal to dress it up for refined intellectual tastes, still gave offense. Many called him only half an apostle, without the outward marks a commission gives, without the credentials the men of the circumcision had, or the eloquence of Apollos. The old leaven was at work. False apostles, mere traders in a Gospel, who would have been second-rate sophists among the heathen, were building their own reputation by undermining Paul. Vanity, party-spirit, and self-exaltation were still painfully marked in the Church. Where these exist, however much genuine sorrow there may be over one offense, even real amendment, there cannot be the deep repentance that comes from knowing the evil each man carries in himself. The old sensual corruptions and intellectual conceits would show themselves again.

Given these outward circumstances, Paul, even without other motive, might naturally have discoursed on his own position and powers, or on the position and powers of an apostle in general. But something in himself compelled him more strongly to speak of this, and kept him from treating it in a dry, teaching manner. He says at the start of the letter—which more than usual guides all its contents—that he wants them to know the conflict that came upon him in Asia, how he was distressed beyond measure and despaired even of life. He rejoices in that conflict because it showed him the death that is in himself and the life that is in Christ; because it taught him to trust not himself but Him who raises the dead. He rejoices in it too because he believes the comfort he received will help others as well: as he shared their sorrows, they will share his thanksgiving.

This certainty—that what he suffered was for others, that he was entering into human grief and joy as Christ did—gives him a sense of his ministry that all his earlier experience had not. In the depths of his own being he had been learning what a Gospel of life he had to preach, and how close to every man lies the death from which it offers deliverance. It is awful to consider the power of his words, what mysteries he proclaims, and how the knowledge of them may harden the hearts it does not purify. The mere trader in the divine word has no sense of the fearfulness of this calling; but one determined to speak it sincerely as God's message must feel his own insufficiency.

Even announcing this determination sounds almost like a boast, as if he wished to commend himself to the Corinthians. But that is not his meaning. He needs no letters of recommendation to them or from them. He wants his letters graved in their hearts, so that they themselves are his epistle. For this is the character of the New Testament ministry, and its contrast with the Old: it is written not on stone but in the heart. It does not stand outside a man as a ministry of law and terror, but comes to his very self as an effective ministry of righteousness. It is not God shown under a veil, but His unveiled face in Christ made manifest to the creature made in His image.

For this reason Paul tells the Corinthians who complained of his plainness that he is *bound* to speak with great simplicity. Those who upheld the Old Testament ministry against the New might clothe their speech in symbols, as Moses veiled his face. They could not see to the end of what was being abolished, for the veil was on their hearts—the Old Testament veil which is done away in Christ. When they turn to the Lord, the Ruler of their spirits, the veil is removed and they gain true spiritual liberty. Meanwhile we who have confessed Him, beholding the Lord's glory with unveiled face, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Lord's Spirit.

This fully explains what he said before. There must be no craft or trickery in handling God's word. The New Testament minister must, by showing the truth plainly, commend himself to every man's conscience in God's sight. And if, for all our boldness, there is still a veil over the Gospel, the veil is not in it but in the hearts of those who do not believe, whose minds the god of this world has blinded, so that the light of the Gospel of Christ's glory, who is the image of God, does not reach them. For we do not preach ourselves, but Him, who lights our hearts, in whose face the glory of God is made known to us.

Since he preaches not himself but Christ, they can see why he had to go through such conflicts. It was so that the mere man might be crushed and Christ revealed in full power to hearers and preacher alike. Through this came his own faith in the power of the risen Christ, and his ability to speak of it. The outer man was consumed in these fires while the inner man was renewed day by day. An invisible, eternal glory was working itself out through these afflictions. He knew this whenever his mind was fixed not on the things seen but on the things unseen; for the seen last a moment, the unseen are eternal.

This contrast between the invisible, eternal glory of Christ revealing itself in them and the outward affliction leads to the great passage in the fifth chapter about the earthly tent of this body and the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Plainly no Apostle could have written that chapter who had not just passed through the agony he records; not a sentence of it makes sense if we forget that personal experience or its results described earlier. Read as a mere weighing of the future life against the present, of the world before death against the world after, its whole meaning shrivels. But read as the new Adam in the man struggling with the old, as the man claiming his share in a divine and immortal Lord, confident of new life for body and spirit in Him, confident that this life is for his brethren too, and therefore willing that his present tent should fall to pieces whenever God pleases—though content to groan in it while that is his lot—then we understand why he speaks of walking by faith not sight, of being absent from the body and present with the Lord, of desiring, absent or present, to be acceptable to Him. Then we understand his expectation that all men will be manifested before Christ the Lord of their spirits, each receiving for what was done through the body, good or ill. And we see how he ties this to what he said of his ministry—his zeal, knowing the fear of God, to persuade men; his hope that his word is manifest not only to God but in their consciences. We see why, with this confidence, he cared little whether outside critics thought him mad or sober. The love of Christ pressed him to speak, for he had concluded that if One died for all, then all were dead, and that He died for all, so that the living should live not to themselves but to Him who died for them and rose again. And so we can grasp the great words that follow: if there is this Lord over our spirits, and to speak of Him is our work and to know Him our reward, then from now on we know no man after the flesh; even though we once knew Christ after the flesh, we know Him so no more. He is revealed as the Lord from heaven, the Author of a new creation, so that if any man is in Christ he is a new creature; the old has passed and all has become new. And all things, he says, are of that God who reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. All things must be seen as grounded in Him and proceeding from Him. We are to testify that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and putting in us the word of reconciliation. Here is the object of that ministry he had been explaining.

So he is an ambassador for Christ. Through him God pleads; for Christ's sake he begs them to be reconciled to God. Able to announce that the reconciliation is done—that He who knew no sin was made sin so that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him—all he need do is beg them not to receive this grace in vain. They have heard of an acceptable time, a day of jubilee: it is now; the day has come. He and his fellow heralds of that day, messengers of the New Testament reconciliation, are bound to give no offense in anything, and in all things to show they are God's ministers, displaying in themselves the very contrast between power and weakness, glory and shame, death and life, that they preach when they preach Christ's Cross and Resurrection and tell men to learn from these God's will and their own condition.

Paul has poured out his heart to the Corinthians, showing them that in his secret battles he fought for them as much as for himself. Now he asks for a return—not a cold, critical appreciation of his eloquence or a comparison with other teachers, but the sympathy of fellow churchmen, if not the affection of children to a father. Many may think his warning not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers is out of place here. But what the first letter tells us of the Corinthians shows both its fitness and its meaning. They were glad to exalt themselves above heathens and judge them, yet they had not shed heathen habits or understood the real glory of Christian fellowship. Nowhere was the old pagan temper plainer than in how they rated their teachers. The most divisive and demoralizing tendencies of old Greece—least compatible with one body of many members—broke out in their comparing of Paul with Apollos, in treating both as sophists rather than divine ambassadors. So the call to come out and be separate from these unbelieving habits naturally follows what he has said and introduces what he is about to say of himself and his work.

It is sometimes thought the latter part of this Epistle is almost painfully personal—so much of the Corinthians' suspicions, of false apostles, of Paul's revelations, of his sufferings and humiliations. If this part were cut off from the rest and not read through it, we could not account for these allusions; we might think the man had got the better of the ambassador. But once we learn how essentially the man and the ambassador are one—how they can never be separated unless the office is badly filled or the man becomes merely selfish—then the confession of personal grievances, the "folly," the boasting, the shame, are not only glimpses of a character we would be glad to meet elsewhere, but, in the strictest sense, revelations of the relation between God and His creatures and of the close bonds between man and man, such as we look for in our Bible and find very imperfectly outside it.

I mentioned Titus's reports. The transition to them is not forced; they have been woven into the fabric of Paul's own life, mingling with the pains and comforts he has already shared. He dwells first on the pleasant news, moves gradually to the less encouraging, and comes last to what is most shameful to his disciples and most bitter to himself. The subject of the Epistle is never lost. The minister's keen delight in any sign of good in his children, and his tender awareness of their weaknesses, illustrate the doctrine already unfolded. Only when he reaches the Corinthians' injustice to him personally do we get the full account of that conflict he had described earlier only in general terms, giving us its results rather than its particulars.

Paul had been charged with claiming a power in his letters that he could not back up in person, since measured against the other teachers he was found inferior. This charge seems to have come from teachers who traded on the honored name of Apollos and drew followers by imitating his style. Paul refuses any comparison with them. Neither he nor they are the standard by which an apostle's work is judged; God's calling is. He went where he was sent. If these men have another Gospel or another Spirit to give, so be it; otherwise there is no excuse for undervaluing him. Whether or not he is skilled in speech, he has told them what they needed to know; he at least preached to them free of charge; others supported him, not they. If he has used his authority before, it was for their benefit, not their harm, and he will use it still. He will not let them be the prey of deceivers, even if they wish to be. He bound them to Christ, and will not hand them over to those who pretend to be ministers of light while doing the work of the evil spirit.

Do they want visible, tangible proofs of apostleship? What would satisfy them? Circumcised men, children of Abraham? He is that. Men who have suffered? He has suffered as much as any. These are all empty things, and he is unwilling to speak of them; it is folly to speak of them. But if they demand such tokens, there they are.

Or perhaps they want men who have had mysterious revelations. He is not afraid to speak of those either, for they do not glorify him as an individual; it was only as a man in Christ that they were granted him. And bitter humiliations followed them, teaching him not to glory in what was not his own. So the infirmities, contempts, and hardships that mark his fellowship with humanity are as precious signs of Christ's mercy as those revelations.

He has laid himself bare before them, become a fool for their sakes, and now he will come to them a third time in the same spirit—not to lord it over them, not to plunder them, not to apologize, but to build up their Church, and for that end, if need be, to censure without sparing those who corrupt and divide it. They ask for proof that Christ speaks in him; they shall have it. He will come in his own weakness but in the might of Christ, and speak to them of their own earthly weakness and their own divine might. "Try yourselves," he cries, "whether you are in the faith. Bring yourselves to the proof. Do you not know your own selves that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you are reprobate?" Our translators used this word well here: "prove yourselves" answers to "reprobate," as δοκιμάζετε answers to ἀδόκιμοι. Thus we reach the true meaning of *reprobate*—that which has been tested and found worthless, not that which is cast aside untested. Yet the Latin word does not carry the whole Greek meaning. The ἀδόκιμος is one who has lost the power to test and prove himself; that is the sign he has been proved worthless. If they do not know themselves, do not know that Christ is in them, they deserve the name, for they have lost the capacity to grasp the truth. Paul hopes to show them that in this sense he is not reprobate—though so far as the word means loss of all standing with them, he is willing to deserve it if he may do them good. He has no power against the truth, only as a witness for it. He is glad to be weak if they may be strong. All he wants is to establish and unite them. He writes from a distance so that he need not use, when present, the power given him for building up and not for tearing down. He tells them to rejoice, be strong, be of one mind, be at peace, and assures them that the God of love and peace will be with them.

#### EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.

I began my remarks on St. Paul with a sentence from this Epistle, because it seemed so remarkably to declare the object of his life as well as his writings. I must of course take that sentence as declaring the object of the letter it stands in. But I will not force this on the reader; I hope it will impress itself on him when he considers how the Apostle stood toward his Galatian converts.

There is little dispute about the teachers who tried to turn this Church from Paul's doctrines, or about their influence. They were Judaizing Christians. They set up the Apostles of the Circumcision against the Apostles of the Gentiles, claiming that Paul was no real Apostle but had merely learned from the original twelve and then perverted what he learned. They held that the circumcised had privileges far beyond the merely baptized—if the baptized could even be counted safe. And the Galatians, who had welcomed Paul with passionate fervor, listened to these insinuations and began to suspect he had deceived them about their own standing. All this is plain to any reader of the letter.

When he opens by declaring himself an Apostle not from men nor by man, he joins battle with those who spoke of the men Christ called on earth as his masters, with a claim to obedience he could never make. Far more was at stake than a personal slander. Underneath lay the heresy that Christ was a great and divine Prophet only during his thirty-three years on earth—so that those years were not the showing forth of One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. On that view Christ had spent his power of naming Apostles and was not truly ruling His Church after His ascension. Paul's own calling was the practical answer to this denial, and the whole Gospel was bound up in it; so he insists on it, not caring, as with the Corinthians, whether he is called arrogant.

The first two chapters mainly explain his relation to the Apostles of the circumcision. But he lets the Galatians know at once that he takes this up because their faith itself was in danger. These new teachers were not merely damaging his reputation or offering a different *manner* of teaching. They were undermining the whole New Testament dispensation; they preached another Gospel—which was not another, which was no Gospel at all. He gives them no quarter; he denounces and anathematizes them as robbers of the Gentiles and of mankind. They were playing the oldest and easiest trick with the old success: persuading their hearers that bondage was safer than freedom. The only way to deal with such men was to tell them that, however religious they seemed, they were denying Christ, who came to set men free.

He reminds the Galatians how fiercely he himself had been devoted to Jewish traditions—he knew them better than any of those now exalting them. Only because it pleased God to reveal His Son in him did he escape from them and find a message he must deliver to all. He did not learn it from Peter or John or anyone. After three years in Arabia he did go up to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter, also seeing James the Lord's brother. But for fourteen years he had no further dealings with the churches of Judæa. Then, engaged in his Gentile mission with Barnabas, they went up to Jerusalem—by revelation—wanting a further witness that they were not laboring in vain. Yet they took no dictation. They would not let Titus, a Greek, be circumcised, however much some, perhaps even the Apostles, wished it to satisfy false brethren who wanted to rob them of their liberty. To such men he would not yield for an hour. In the end those reckoned pillars of the Church laid no new restraints on them, but gave them the right hand of fellowship, treating their work as distinct from their own, only urging them—willingly—to remember their poor countrymen.

So far he had shown that the Apostles of Jerusalem were not his lawgivers or judges. At Antioch he went further. He rebuked Peter to his face, because Peter had at first eaten freely with Gentiles, then, when men came from James, drew back from them, setting an example the other Jews followed, even Barnabas. Paul rebuked this as contrary to the truth of the Gospel. He said to Peter before them all, "If you, a Jew, live like a Gentile, by what right do you force the Gentile to Judaize?" By Lachmann's arrangement of the sentences, that is all Paul said then, and what follows belongs to the Epistle itself.

I still think the old division right. Those words alone could not have been intelligible to Peter and the Jews without what follows. It could easily be said, "No wonder you, an Apostle of the Gentiles, want to assert their equality with Jews; Peter, an Apostle of the Circumcision, is equally bound to assert the difference." Paul, I take it, wanted to show Peter that he too, though an Apostle of the circumcision, was bound to hold this principle, and was as inconsistent in abandoning it as Paul would have been. They had agreed there were points where each should take his own course; Paul wants to make clear this was not one of them—that Peter could not hold the truth they shared in common if, to please any men, he refused full brotherly fellowship with the Gentiles.

Here is his argument: "We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners from among the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Christ, have ourselves believed in Christ, so as to be justified by faith and not by works of the law." As if to say: You are a Jew; you don't have these Gentiles' disadvantage; you are not a sinner because you belong to them. Yet you have believed in Christ, and felt yourself righteous only by that belief, not by anything you did as a Jew that set you apart from Gentiles. "But if," he goes on, "in seeking to be justified in Christ we too are found to be sinners"—if by seeking this righteousness we confess ourselves sinners as much as those outside our covenant and law—"do we thereby make Christ a servant of sin?" For that was the Judaizers' reasoning: in lowering ourselves to the Gentile level we lower our Master, as though He came merely to serve Gentile sinners, not to deliver holy Israel. But is it so? No indeed. I make myself a transgressor if I build again what I threw down. Certainly I, Jew as I am, am a sinner in myself; the law itself tells me so—tells me I am dead. I died to the law that I might live to God. I am crucified with Christ; I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in God and Christ, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I will not make void the grace of God. If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Bauer and his school rejoice that Paul set himself so passionately against the Jerusalem doctors, and showed their chief man how close he was to what was later called Ebionitism. But if I wanted to curb the pride of these neologians, this is the very passage I would dwell on. Does Paul set his theory of the Gospel against the other Apostles', his doctrine of Justification against their doctrine of Works, his faith in Christ against their faith in the Law? Does not his whole argument turn on convicting Peter of a temporary treason against *his own* faith, *his own* convictions, *his own* usual professions? The whole speech would be a silly waste of words unless it showed what a Jew's, a circumcised man's, an Apostle of the Circumcision's, faith must be to justify his trust in Christ—even supposing there were no Gentile in the world. If Peter had one Gospel and Paul another, Peter did nothing wrong or insincere. But if the peculiar duty laid on Peter and James—to display how great the Jew's privileges were—exposed them to a special temptation into which Peter here fell, and fell in the very city where it would do most harm, hurting his own countrymen as much as the Gentiles, how needed was such a testimony to the truth of the Gospel they were both pledged to live and die for.

As usual, the Apostle has done much work in little space. While seeming only to defend his own title, he has entered the heart of the matter, torn the Judaizers' new Gospel to pieces, and stripped away the authority they claimed for it. Now he can turn to their victims. There is no real gap between his speech to Peter at Antioch and his address here to the foolish Galatians. There he said he was dead with Christ and lived by Him; here he asks who bewitched them, before whose eyes Christ had been openly set forth crucified. I do not press whether the words "in you" should stand or fall. I only ask that we read this alongside the sixth and seventh chapters of Romans to see why he speaks of Christ crucified. If he had not preached to the Galatians that they were crucified with Christ and that Christ lived in them, this language would have no ground and no clear connection with what follows. He asks whether they received the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith. He surely means that the gift of the Spirit was the great sign that Christ had come and the New Covenant had displaced the Old. Was this highest of all gifts given because they had earned it, or because they trusted God as a Father to give good gifts to His children? He pauses to ask whether they really think any blessing could be greater than this, whether outward fleshly gifts could make them more complete than this spiritual one. Then he argues with the Judaizers on their own ground. They prize the covenant with Abraham. What is it? Its ground is belief in God, its fruit is righteousness, its fullness is "in you shall all nations be blessed." If you would be blessed with Abraham, you must believe as he did. But you want more—to be under the law; that is, to be not under a blessing but under a curse, for the law is ratified by a curse. Those who had the law did not want to be under it, for the Prophet said the just shall live by faith, and the law is not of faith: its rule is "he that does these things shall live by them." Christ, bearing the accursed cross, redeemed us from the law's curse—the death that lies on all men alike—so that in Him Abraham's blessing might reach Gentiles as well as Jews, and we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

Romans has prepared us for this kind of argument, but here it is sharper and more epigrammatic, suited to the Galatian temper. The contrast between the covenant's blessing and the law's curse would startle them by its plain truth, however little they had thought of it. The remarks that follow are similar. A human agreement, once made, is not cancelled by its maker. The promises to Abraham and his seed were made by God Himself; would God's own law annul them? And note the wording: it is to Abraham and his *seed*, not his *seeds*. It may seem Paul is playing with words, accommodating the Rabbinical teachers or the lively superficial people they misled. I don't deny he knew both and used his knowledge—but to cure the disease, not confirm it. The distinction between seeds and seed is a real one; it catches the ear, and the deeper you look the weightier it grows. As in Romans he turned the Israelite's prejudice against Ishmael and Edom against itself—showing that the calling of Isaac and Jacob proved the covenant was not fleshly, as they made it when excluding the Gentiles—so here he dwells on the one seed, not the many, to witness that one Person was meant in God's plan, He in whom all earth's families were to be blessed. So his argument runs: if the Jew claims a blessing as Abraham's descendant, he must first claim it simply as a blessing; second, through a Person, its Mediator; third, as a blessing of universal extent.

Then what does the Law mean, if it stands thus against the Covenant and the Promise? He answers, "It was added because of transgressions." It assumes wrongdoing, the separation of those to whom it is sent from Him who chose them and revealed Himself to them. It served this purpose until the seed should come to whom the promise was made. It was ordained through angels, but placed in the hand of a Mediator. And "a Mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against God's promises? No. If a law could give life, righteousness would indeed come by law. But Scripture has shut up all things under sin, that the promise by faith in Christ might be given to those who believe." This teaching—that the Law was administered by angels—bears importantly on the New Testament revelation and links this Epistle with Hebrews. There the new dispensation is the dispensation of a Son, set against the old as a dispensation by Angels, yet with a Son implied throughout Jewish history and prophecy. Here the matter is viewed less generally and somewhat differently. God's promises all point to a certain seed; the law is given through angels or messengers, yet always with reference to a Mediator in whom the law is fulfilled and God and man are united. The law expresses their separation—herein its curse. The covenant expresses their union—herein its blessing. But the blessing can be realized, and the curse removed, only when He who is at once the Seed and the Mediator appears. The law implies two parties to be reconciled. Yet since God is one and always the same, His law and His promises cannot be contrary; their source and object are the same. Law proclaims righteousness and would make men righteous if it could—but it cannot; it can never give life. The written letter has shut up all things under sin, that the promise of righteousness and life might be given to those who have faith in Christ. I have treated language like this at length on Romans, and there one must go for the full explanation of the law of sin and righteousness—how the flesh is shown to have no good in itself, and righteousness comes from Christ on all who believe. What matters here is the phrase "shut up," kept as in a garrison under law, awaiting the faith to be revealed. The Judaizers told the Galatians that the old law and covenant put men in a higher state than baptism—good as far as it went, a preliminary, but to stand on high ground they must add the Judaic rite. Paul's great aim is to reverse that order: to show the old was itself the preliminary, that law and covenant both implied something not yet declared. The state the silly Galatians imagined as a special elevation was in its nature elementary. The law was the schoolmaster leading men to Christ, that they might be made righteous by faith in Him. But now faith has come, now its object is revealed, and they are no longer under that schoolmaster. "For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female; you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to promise." This is where he has been leading us from the first. Sonship to God is the highest state of all; everything in the old dispensation hinted at it, looking forward to when men could claim it. That time has come. You Gentiles have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ, have claimed sonship in Him. What more do you want? To be heirs of Abraham's blessing? You are that already. This is the inheritance.

Then comes that remarkable passage, so important for understanding Paul, in which he says men did not *begin* to be sons of God when they were *declared* sons; their earlier discipline and training already implied that this was their character—just as the Roman act of emancipation did not make men children who were not children, but recognized them as children and gave them a child's rights. What is specially to be noted is that Paul draws no distinction here between Jew and Gentile. We might have supposed the Jews, God's chosen, were the children under education, treated as servants until emancipation. But here, as everywhere, Paul is a leveller. We, he says, while we were infants, were in servitude under the elements of the world; and you who did not know God were in servitude to things that by nature are no gods. He does not confuse Jew with Gentile, nor undervalue deliverance from idolatry; but he describes both as children under servitude, both subjected to the world's elements, so as to be trained for the fullness of time, when Christ, born of a woman, born under the law, should redeem those under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons—and, because they were sons, God would send the Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying Abba, Father.

So he treats their clinging to these Judaizing teachers as nothing less than a relapse into idolatry. He had rescued them from it only by preaching that the unseen God had sent His Son to claim them from the service of visible things and adopt them into His family. If they were not in His family, if they became servants of visible things in hopes of a higher state, then whatever they called themselves, they were parting from the God of Abraham and doing homage to the very things law and prophets condemned. This was a startling charge for men who fancied themselves super-Jews and claimed to raise the Gentiles to their level. But it fits all Paul's teaching. Jews, he saw, must become idolaters—the worst kind—unless they preached a Gospel of deliverance to idolaters that was equally a Gospel for themselves.

This conviction comes out strongly in verses 11 to 21 of chapter 4. He fears he may have labored among the Galatians in vain. It is not that they have wronged him; he only wants them to share the blessing that is theirs as much as his. They know he came to them in weakness—something in his condition on his first visit was especially humiliating—yet it did not stop them receiving him as an angel of God, as though Christ Himself had come. Then they would have plucked out their eyes to give him. They were wonderfully zealous—and zeal is excellent in a good cause, if it does not spend itself merely in love of those present. But there is a zeal that is not excellent: men zealous to rob their disciples of what is most precious, so as to make them dependent and admiring. That is not the affection Paul would cultivate or win. Yet he feels for them a mother's love and pangs; he is in travail again until Christ be formed in them. That is what he wants for them—not something foreign and external. While they chase mere externals he must doubt them, and even come to them again with a sterner voice.

After this outpouring of personal feeling—which belongs as much to the Epistle's purpose as similar passages did in Corinthians—he returns to his old line of argument. He still argues from the man's own ground, still takes up the thought familiar to Jews, but strips away its triviality and brings out its latent truth. You wish to be under law—that is, under the Old Testament economy. Then let us hear what its own books say. Consider Hagar and Sarah, Isaac and Ishmael. Your teachers love to draw fanciful meanings from that story. I grant it has a meaning; what is it? The child of the flesh was Hagar's; the child of promise was Sarah's. Sarah was free, Hagar a bondslave. I have called you to be children of promise, of God's covenant; they want you to be children of bondage, servants of the law given on Sinai. They would tie you to Jerusalem—but not God's Jerusalem, the free, heavenly city; rather a fleshly, earthly, slavish city in bondage with all her children. I call you to be citizens of the free city, children of that mother of whom the prophet speaks—the true Sarah, barren yet destined to have more children than the other. I know that if you claim this freedom you will suffer persecution from those content with fleshly bondage. But the divine word has gone out: "Cast out the bondwoman and her son; the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free." A strangely new moral this must have seemed to the Rabbis, one never occurring to them amid all their allegories. Yet it carried its own proof. It was no pretty application, but the detection, in one case, of a divine law running through every fact of the divine history.

Freedom is held out to man as the aim of all God's dealings with him. Christ fulfilled the law in working out man's freedom, and in His freedom they were to stand fast. To stoop to bondage was to renounce Him. To be circumcised was to say He had not redeemed them; it was to bind oneself to keep the whole law, to fall from grace. "For we, in spirit, by faith, wait for the hope of righteousness." That is our reward and expectation—to know God's righteousness and share it. If united to Christ, made sons of God in Him, we have it; for in Him neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts, but faith working through love. Plainly, there would be no faith working through love, no reaching after righteousness, in those who thought circumcision would save or perfect them; they would not grasp what they were saved from, nor dream what perfection is. So the Apostle does not hide his alarm for them. He trusts the leaven has not filled their hearts, but a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Whoever troubled them with this new Gospel of circumcision will bear his judgment. It was an easy doctrine to preach and could spare a man much persecution; but he trusts God will cut off those who trouble them.

The hint he has dropped about the moral effects of liberty and slavery he now follows out to the end. What did his opponents suppose he meant by liberty? The liberty of the flesh, each pleasing himself? No—the liberty of yielding to God's Spirit, of serving one another in love. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" is the great law of liberty; the right to bite and devour one another is a wretched right. Two powers contend for them: the flesh lusting against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh, so that they cannot do all the good or all the evil they intend. But if led by the Spirit, they will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, and they will not be under law—for law exists to condemn the works of the flesh, and against the fruits of the Spirit there is no law. As he said already, those who belong to Christ are crucified with Him; they have renounced the flesh and its lusts and claimed the righteousness and life in Him.

I have noted elsewhere the striking agreement between this passage, in the Epistle thought most Pauline and most anti-Jacobite, and the Epistle of St. James—an agreement precisely in the assertion of liberty. The royal law of James is the law of liberty in Galatians. Both teachers insist alike that the Son of God has come to give us power to be spiritual creatures and carry out God's will in the spirit, and both apply this to confuting Jewish vanity and pharisaism. Only James confutes the Pharisee by showing him what his ceremonial law really means—how it is fulfilled by one who counts true service of God as visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction; while Paul shows what foundation had been laid for a spiritual, universal economy after the Jewish ceremony and polity should crumble. So the last part of the Epistle points out what sympathy and fellowship the members of the church would have; how they would restore the fallen, distrust themselves, bear one another's burdens and their own; what sharing of blessings between teacher and taught; what unwearied zeal in doing good; what hope of a harvest of eternal life if they sowed to the Spirit, and what poor results if they sowed to the flesh—even with all their zeal for circumcision and law. That zeal, when it forced bondage on the Gentiles, was fleshly in the plainest sense, a rebellion against the cross of Christ—the only thing Paul would glory in, by which the world was crucified to him and he to the world. In Christ Jesus there was a new creation; circumcision and uncircumcision were at an end. To all who walk by that rule he wishes mercy and peace, and to the Israel of God.

#### EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.

St. Paul's dealings with the Ephesians cannot be traced from the Epistle itself as clearly as those with the Corinthians and Galatians. But no other Church is so well documented from outside sources. The 19th and 20th chapters of Acts give invaluable hints. From the previous chapter we know that Apollos had visited Ephesus in the heat of his first convictions, before Aquila and Priscilla instructed him about Christ. The opening of chapter 19 shows the character of his preaching. Paul finds certain disciples and asks, "Have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed?" They answer, "We have not so much as heard if there is a Holy Spirit." He asks into what they were baptized; they say, "To John's Baptism." These men were not of any Apollos-school such as later appeared in Corinth—that later school was Christian in the ordinary sense, though, like every school, it might divide Christ. Nor should we suppose that Apollos's Alexandrian character was swallowed up in his reverence for John the Baptist. He would probably have spoken of John as one who came to draw his countrymen away from visible things and fix their minds on the divine and Eternal Teacher, Light, Word. In this sense he spoke of a divine Lord, and his hearers could rightly be called "disciples" by Luke. His acknowledgment of John's mission lifted him above the mere theosophists of his city; it brought him into contact with the people and made him something of a leveller. It may have combined with his Philonic training to break down his Jewish prejudices. What he and his followers lacked, as Paul's words show, was the belief that the King John spoke of had appeared, and was baptizing, as John foretold, with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

This is the first great help toward knowing the state of the Ephesian Church. It would be rash to say these twelve Johannine disciples were the nucleus of the Christian society there, but Luke would hardly have mentioned them just as he records the start of Paul's two years' preaching unless the facts were closely connected. Next comes a more formal break with the synagogue than we read of elsewhere. For three months Paul argued there with the freedom Jews rarely refused to teachers who reasoned from Scripture. But seeing his debates were doing harm rather than good—hardening the Jews' conscience and letting them misrepresent him to the crowd—he withdrew and taught daily in the school of one Tyrannus. There Jews and Gentiles were admitted alike; in the most important city of Asia Minor a Jew declared God's message to both equally for two years.

Next we hear of unusual healings by the Apostle. The common view would say these were more frequent and remarkable in Ephesus because it drew more strangers than any city Paul had yet visited. I do not dismiss that; but Luke himself suggests another explanation deserving equal attention. He has already shown that the Christians in Ephesus needed to feel spiritual power. Their moral preparation, since they began with the preacher of repentance, was excellent; but they had not yet entered into that victory over the powers of evil which our Lord's and the Apostles' miracles displayed. Perhaps they instinctively shrank from believing in powers they saw abused for shameful and demoralizing ends—for it is plain from Luke that sorcery and magic, all the arts that betoken belief in a spirit, but not a holy Spirit, flourished there. Everything in Scripture suggests that displays of *divine* power took a more startling form where superstitions grounded on reverence for *diabolical* power prevailed—that they were the proclamation of a good and orderly government sent to overcome one that was disorderly and malevolent. So a deadly blow was struck at idolatry, which relied for its defence on men's curiosity and fears. And to show that the Christian testimonies against these enchantments were not of the same kind—that they did not depend on charms or magical words—the story of the Jewish youths who tried to imitate Paul's abjuration is told alongside the planting of the Church. Paul was waging no sham battle with evil. He had no new scheme for working on weak women's nerves or evil men's consciences, but the power to make the one reasonable and the other pure.

Next, in Ephesus, idolatry first clearly realizes what a new foe it faces. Nowhere else do we hear of a tumult like that raised by Demetrius and his craftsmen. The historian dwells on it at unusual length, marking both its singularity then and its importance as a type of later events. There was a powerful Jewish colony in Ephesus who had of course stood aloof from the worship of Diana, yet had caused no alarm to those upholding it. Alexander probably appeared in the theatre to assert his countrymen's innocence and to disclaim any sympathy with the new sect. Paul, as the town-clerk testified, had not offended the country's religion or spoken disrespectfully of the goddess or the temple; and in mixing with heathens he was far less exclusive than the older Jews. Yet precisely in this freedom from exclusiveness lay the danger to the craft. If a society of Jews and Gentiles recognizing no barriers were possible, idolatry was hastening to its end. Demetrius saw this: it was catholicism, not Judaism, that would make the silver shrines unmarketable.

Here are hints that give a clue to the aim and connection of this memorable epistle. Here, if anywhere, we may expect to find the ground of a spiritual society with a deeper foundation than the Jewish calling—one founded in the nature of God Himself, explaining and supporting all human relationships, having all spiritual enemies to fight, set out less controversially than in Galatians, with less reference to Jewish opponents and more direct reference to mankind and the universe. All that Paul had taught and endured in this city, its position as one of the world's great markets, and those fears about future disturbers of that Church which he could not shake off when he blessed its elders at Miletus—all these must have been with him as he wrote, deepened by his prison reflections on how the little band in Ephesus stood in relation to the whole family in earth and heaven, and to the powers of darkness striving against it but unable to prevail.

Though the opening of this Epistle speaks much of adoption, redemption, and forgiveness of sins, its main subject is not to be found there. Nor can we say that man's sin or fall is Paul's starting-point, from which he proceeds to a remedy. The teaching of the opening sentence—which is not merely a preface but a statement of the letter's design—is, in the strictest sense, supralapsarian. Paul thanks "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ, even as He chose us out in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love." Here, as the Predestinarian school rightly tells us, is a divine purpose to be carried out in time but not formed in time, not to be judged by time's conditions. They are right that the rest of the Epistle is unintelligible if this Eternal Order is forgotten or merged into the acts by which it was realized; or if the knowledge of that Divine Mind—before all worlds, changeless, untouched by accident—is not held up as the great reward and fruition Paul offers his converts and the whole Church. I heartily agree with all these positions, and wish to show how free they are from the moral dangers Arminian divines have charged them with—how little they need restraint or qualification, and how much they need expanding beyond the limits the Calvinist writers have set.

The satisfactory answer to the charge of immorality lies, as the truest Predestinarians have often said, in the effect the divine Election is said to produce: "That we may be holy and without blame before Him in love." They have not done full justice to their own argument, for many of them merely say Paul never contemplates happiness except through holiness. But I see nothing here of holiness being a means to an end. There is indeed a higher object than any state of mind in the members or the whole Church: all is to the praise of the glory of His grace, all tending toward gathering together all things in Christ as Head, whether in heaven or earth. But for those Paul includes in "us," being holy and blameless is treated as the highest blessing they can inherit. If Election in Christ has this one end, how can believing oneself its object harm anyone's inner life or outward acts? The danger lies rather in *not* thinking oneself its object—in supposing God has not meant us to be holy or given us the means. Terrible danger lies in that belief, as experience shows; and anything that strengthens it in a man makes us accessories to his becoming evil. But there is more. If I credit myself with belonging to a class from which I exclude him, I have put my own Election on a new footing. It is no longer that God, being holy, wishes His creature to be like Him. It is that God, being Almighty, has decreed that certain persons, myself among them, shall have certain blessings. I call them spiritual and divine—but do I mean it? A spiritual blessing is to share the character I count most divine. If God, as I picture Him, is not one whose Will is toward all good, but simply a Great Power who does as He likes, then I may resemble such a Being within my own sphere—but that cannot be my real object. My real object must be to get something from Him: His Will must be a will to grant me tangible benefits, defined by my own taste, from which others are shut out, or to exempt me from penalties others must bear. On this view both the spiritual blessing and the spiritual curse vanish; the old phrases remain but carry a new sense. The good man, who has found sin his misery and the knowledge of God his blessing, does not notice the change; he uses the language of his godly forefathers in its plain, natural sense. But how he groans to discover that words of life to him have become words of death to those who most passionately adopt them, and death also to some—more honest men—who fling them indignantly aside. This is what I mean by saying the Calvinist theory needs not diluting but unfolding; its poison lies not in the breadth but in the narrowness of its assertions; it becomes harmful when it becomes self-contradictory.

How great this contradiction is will appear as we examine Paul's statement, especially the words the Calvinists have borrowed from him. "He hath chosen out" (ἐξελέξατο) and "having predestinated" (προορίσας) are vital words in his introduction and deserve careful study. The modern Calvinist takes for granted that "chosen out" means chosen out of a ruined mass or majority. Yet there is no mention of ruin or majority. The Election is "before the foundation of the world"—not merely before the world fell, but before it existed. "But surely there was a foresight of the fall." You assume this, first, because you confuse ἐξελέξατο with προώρισε, though Paul carefully distinguishes them; and second, because "chosen us out in Him" suggests to you the time when Christ came in the flesh. But if you did not mix in the notion of His appearance, would you have to see this election as a *foresight*? Would you not rather be led to think of an Eternal Son, one with the Father before all worlds—and would not the election then be, as the Calvinists say, not in time but strictly in Eternity? Accept or reject that reading as you like; but it will not surprise you that, having traced the Eternal Son through all the Gospels and Epistles, I recognize this announcement as most Pauline and most consistent with all the New Testament. "But why 'elected'? Why not 'constituted' or the like?" We may find such phrases occurring often and significantly in this and other Epistles. But "He hath chosen out" cannot be dispensed with; no other phrase exactly fills its place. "Constituted," unless interpreted by this, might make us think of an involuntary earth that cannot depart from its law, though it needs a renewing power to make it bring forth according to that law. Paul carries us into the "heavenlies"—not "heavenly places," as our translators render it, wrongly importing place into a sentence from which place and time are excluded—into a region of voluntary beings, spirits standing by a spiritual law and capable of a spiritual blessing. That law must be one of allegiance to God; the heavenly blessing must be to be subject to His Will and choice. The character of that Will—its certainty and security, because it is a Righteous One's—does not change the nature of the tenure. A subject will must be chosen and upheld by the higher Will; it stands by His knowing of it. This principle is asserted in Romans and assumed everywhere, but nowhere brought out so fully as here.

If election, for Paul, has just as much and just as little to do with foresight as creation has, how does "having predestinated" come in? Join it to the words that follow and you see at once: having predestinated us to the adoption of sons (υἱοθεσία). We learned the force of this word from Galatians. Paul follows the Roman custom closely: adoption happens when one who is already a son is acknowledged by his father and freed from the pupillage of infancy. God, having chosen us in His Son before the foundation of the world, purposed to declare this election by manifesting Him. Only then, in connection with adoption, do we hear of redemption and remission of transgressions. The sons, being claimed, are freed from bondage to masters—whether masters the Father appointed or ones they chose for themselves, rightful teachers or illegitimate usurpers. Having broken their Father's laws—whether laws openly made known or revealed in conscience—they must have forgiveness. To leave out these acts of redemption and amnesty would fail to explain how the Father's eternal purpose is brought to bear on human creatures. But Paul does not linger over them; he does not investigate their working, but crowds them rapidly together, fearing lest the main subject of his thanksgiving be lost in its precious details.

It would repay long study to examine the order of these details—how they relate to one another, how all are referred to one ground, the good pleasure of His Will, and one end, the gathering up of all things in Christ; the divine Wisdom and Prudence devising them, revealing the mystery of His Will not suddenly but gradually. But desirable as such minute study is once the road is familiar, the reader must let the Apostle carry him at his own speed, on his own wings, if he would grasp the height from which he is descending and to which he returns.

Some will think the whole question turns on determining who are meant by "us," which Paul uses in the third verse and often after. I confess I feel no anxiety here. Even if the pronoun were singular, I should be content. If Paul had been the only man in the world brought to believe in the true God—to see that God is not what the heathen or Jewish priests took Him to be, and that His only-begotten Son is the Centre in whom all things in heaven and earth are gathered—he would still have to thank God for that knowledge, for choosing him in Christ to be holy and blameless. He could not deny that calling, whether or not he walked worthy of it; God would rebuke him in his conscience if he said, "Thou hast not called me to be holy." So even if he and "those who first hoped in Christ" were the tiniest fraction of the world, he could not help feeling they represented the true condition of humanity, God's purpose concerning it. For God had called them to be sons—how? By causing "His Son to be made of a woman, made under the law." Christ, in becoming man and taking on the conditions of suffering and dying man, so claims *us* as sons. He took not the nature of Paul or James, but of men; He claimed not Paul or James but men to be sons. And since, by this chapter's teaching, the adoption on earth corresponds to the election in the heavenlies and can be no wider than it, what Paul asserts for himself and his little band is a share in the privileges of humanity as it is created, elected, and known by God in Christ. For the original purpose before the world is that which Adam's sin, and every descendant's sin, contradicts: every man trying to stand by himself, and not on God's election, stands on false, fallen ground; every man claiming that election, now shown to all in Christ, affirms that neither Adam's sin nor all the world's sin has defeated the Creator's design.

So the Apostle can pass without hesitation from "us" who first hoped in Christ to "you" who heard the word of truth and believed the Gospel of your salvation. The word of truth was that God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that they might receive adoption. The Gospel of their salvation was that Christ had redeemed them from curse and bondage and brought them into His body, of which He is Head. This word had been preached to them *before* they believed; their belief did not create it or confine it to themselves. But having believed, they were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise—the pledge that they shared that adoption proclaimed to man in Christ, and that Redemption He won by facing men's tyrants—Death, the grave, hell, the evil spirit. This same Spirit was the earnest of an inheritance they would enter when He who purchased them came to claim them.

Paul is sure they have believed what they had a right to believe, what was true for them and for those who did not believe it. And he has no doubt that the Spirit of Truth—the Spirit mocked and parodied by the spirits the enchanters boasted of, spoken of in the magic books they had burnt—was with them, binding them into one and prompting them to love and good works. So he has ground for continual thanksgiving; but also for continual prayer, that they may have ever-fresh wisdom and revelation, the eyes of their hearts enlightened, so they may know what their calling means, what its hope is, what the wealth of God's inheritance in the saints is, and the surpassing greatness of His power toward believers—that very belief being itself the working of this power. At first we sink under this language; the reader may be tempted to cry with Festus, "Thou art beside thyself, Paul!" But if this is the madness the ancients linked with the highest inspiration, it is compatible with perfect practical soberness. The only hope of the Ephesians being kept from the fanaticism and intoxication the magicians spread was that they should confess themselves guided by a Spirit truly familiar yet awful—one leading them to grasp objects as real as any their senses knew, but not fluctuating: the knowledge of the Eternal Being who had first known them. Paul cannot think he is preaching Christ if he hides from them that they *have* received this Spirit, or the truth of the calling this Spirit seals, or the inheritance it guarantees. For he can only measure the power working in each Ephesian convert, in each wretched creature of that city where the earth's refuse was poured, by the power that worked in Christ when God raised Him and exalted Him. The mysterious working of the Spirit who in death still united the Son of Man to the Father, enabling Him to triumph over space and time, is not merely the *image* of the working that begets faith in the most sense-bound man and raises him into union with the risen Lord; it is the very same. Paul cannot separate them; if he did, the believer might fancy his holiness a private possession, the Spirit given to him alone. He would not see that he is faithful and holy only when lifted out of himself, acknowledging himself a member of a living body joined to a living Head—that body being the fulness of Him who fills all in all, to whom every lordship, principality, and power, now and to come, is subjected.

Christ being proclaimed as Head and reconciler of the two worlds, and fulfiller of God's original purpose for those who had fallen from it, Paul can tell the Ephesians that, being dead in trespasses, God had quickened them with Christ. The words wedged between the object and its verb wonderfully illustrate his meaning. The Ephesians had walked according to the course (αἰῶνα) of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit working in the children of disobedience—among whom, Paul says, he himself and all his brethren, Jews or Gentiles, had once lived, doing the inclinations of the flesh and of the thoughts (διανοιῶν), and were by nature children of impulse (ὀργῆς) like the rest. This shows what he believes Christ had freed them from: a bondage of the will. The will was enslaved to nature, regarding itself as part of the outside world, chained to fate. It was indeed so chained, because a spirit of unbelief and disobedience had mastered it, because it had used its awful power of choice by submitting to a tyrant. The careless reader thinks Paul heaps up clauses needlessly, that any one phrase would have done, that there is tautology if not contradiction. But the more we know the philosophers' attempts to formalize the facts of man's freedom and servitude—the proof that he has a will while yoked to fate—and the more we know the contradictions in ourselves, the more we shall value this inspired language, which states the case with all its anomalies, shows where they come from, how frightful they must be when a spirit sinks under the sensual and hugs its fetters, and how impossible it is to escape them unless we recognize a disobedient Spirit at war with God as well as man, and believe that God, by claiming men as sons, declares its yoke broken.

I will not go into the questions this raises about the "wishes of the flesh or the thoughts," since Romans settles the sense of those words, which applies here. Nor will I defend my departure from the usual rendering of ὀργή (wrath, anger); it must justify itself by fitting the context, or else let the old translation stand, to which I only object that it seems irrelevant and assumes an ellipsis. What I want the reader to notice carefully is the three compound verbs: συνεζωοποίησεν (co-quickened), συνήγειρεν (co-raised), and συνεκάθισεν (co-seated)—quickened, raised, and seated *together with* Christ. This joint idea seems to be what the whole Epistle unfolds. The quickening, raising, and ascending are said to have happened *already*. This is not a bold figure of speech; Paul cannot speak otherwise if he is to be exact, or to lay any ground for faith and obedience. The following clause—"that he may show forth to the ages coming on the surpassing wealth of his grace toward us in Christ Jesus"—links the past revelation with the future: the completed manifestation of God's love and of man's redeemed state with the ever-new discovery of that love through all the experiences of the universe, even through men's rebellion.

For he goes on: by this grace—the grace to be displayed in all ages to come—you have been saved, fully rescued from the tyrant's hands, fully restored to your estate as sons. God's grace has freed your wills. And you claim your salvation by believing in your Saviour. Yet even this act of faith is not from you; it is God's gift. For we are redeemed to carry out the divine purpose of our creation. We are created for good works, which God ordained beforehand that we should walk in. Our wills are in their true restored state when they respond and conform to His will, and so become productive of good deeds.

The passage that follows is thoroughly Pauline. He addresses the Gentiles as having been fleshly—given to fleshly notions, appetites, and gods—and therefore *really* uncircumcised, though they bore the name "uncircumcised" only because they lacked the fleshly sign of a spiritual calling that their Jewish neighbours had. He reminds them their misery was not that they lacked this sign, but that they were without Christ—not knowing the true Lord of their spirits, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, which existed to testify of Him; strangers to the Covenants of Promise that spoke of God's electing men to be His people; without hope of the future, rather dreading it; and so without God in the very world He had made, however many gods they fashioned from it. He calls them to believe that they, so far from God, had been brought near in Christ—near to God, to each other, and to those Jews who seemed hopelessly divided from them. The blood of Christ, poured out by the Eternal Spirit, was the life-blood of the whole body, removing whatever had kept its parts divided. For He is our peace, who made both races, circumcised and uncircumcised, one, dissolving in Himself the middle wall of partition—abolishing both the actual enmity between them, arising from their different religious standing, and the divine decree that seemed to declare "these are spiritual, these carnal"—so that He might create the two into one new man, one common humanity, reconciling them, by virtue of the higher reconciliation He made between both and God, by slaying on the Cross that deeper enmity between the distrustful rebel creature and the loving, self-sacrificing Creator. And having done this, He proclaimed His covenant of peace between heaven and earth, both to those far from any spiritual worship and to those God had drawn near by His calling. A Gospel of peace indeed, for through Him we both have access to the same Father by the same Spirit. So, he concludes, you are not strangers, admitted like traders visiting Ephesus, or lodged in its outskirts. You are citizens of this divine city, which holds all the holy men of all ages. You belong to God's own household. You have been founded on the same foundation on which Prophets and Apostles stand. Christ is the Corner Stone holding them and you together. In Him the whole building, fitly framed, shall grow into a holy temple; in Him your whole Church, all its members, has been built together for a dwelling of God through the Spirit.

Everyone must feel an overflowing fulness in this Epistle's style, as if Paul's mind could not hold the thoughts working in it, each utterance trailing a luminous train before and behind that it cannot shake off. Nowhere does the sequence seem more disturbed by ordinary rules than in the passage now following; yet nowhere is the order stricter, more justified to the higher reason. Here one seems to find the very subject and centre of the Apostle's composition. An unhappy mistranslation, in the sixth verse of chapter three, has kept us from feeling this and from seeing the light shed by the revelation he speaks of—not made to former ages but now made to Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit. We read "that the Gentiles *should be* fellow-heirs and of the same body." Why "should be"? Was Paul not the herald of a reconciliation that *had been* made, of a wall that *had been* broken down? Whatever he means, this cannot be it. As the Apostle of the Gentiles, he is not telling them of a blessing yet to come. He might look forward with sorrow to a time when all Israel should be saved; but he was the herald of a gift already given to the Gentiles, inviting them into the fold. On what ground? Because it had been shown him that the Gentiles *are* fellow-heirs and of the same body. Beginning from that highest ground before the Fall, before Creation, he had seen God creating all things in Christ, purposing to gather all things up in Christ, men standing only by God's election of them in Christ. So the truth dawned on him: all men, of every race, form one body in Him; out of Him, circumcised or uncircumcised, they are divided; in Him, circumcised or uncircumcised, they are one by the law of their creation, and become actually one when they believe and submit to it.

Here was the foundation of a Gospel—*the* Gospel entrusted to Paul: good news to men not of something coming to them, but of their actual state, the state that belongs to them though they do not recognize it. Grace was given him to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all *see* what is the economy of the mystery hidden from the ages in God, who created all things. That truth of man's condition, unveiling itself as God unveiled Himself, had now become graspable by all creatures; they could be told of it and know it. And the effect of this revelation is not to be measured by how many receive it, then or ever, on this planet. The revelation of God's love in Christ—His incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection, His victory over rebellious wills—was a revelation to the whole universe, to the principalities and powers in heavenly places. The Church, however small and lowly, declares to them the manifold wisdom of God, according to the fore-arrangement of the ages He made in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Such a soaring flight might, one would think, have tempted the Apostle to forget the poor, humble, sinful people he was writing to—their well-being lost in the glory of principalities and powers. But not so. He cannot even end his sentence without adding, "in whom *we* have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him." And this confidence and faith remind him of all the discipline that led him into them—those tribulations that had often shaken his converts' faith, though it was to them he owed his power to enter their sufferings and to grasp the glory they would inherit together.

I believe there was in the Apostle's mind now a sense of opposites: the union of weakness and strength, tribulation and glory, all that had been and all that was to be; of God's absolute love, its disclosure to man in the Mediator and its working in man through the Spirit; of the fellowship of the poorest earthly creature with the spirits in Heaven; of a canopy of love above and an abyss of love beneath, compassing the whole creation—which could only find expression in a prayer.

And this is the prayer: "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen."

Our translators treat the whole third chapter as a parenthesis. With far better warrant from Paul's own words (τούτου χάριν opening both the first and the fourteenth verse), Lachmann ends the parenthesis at the start of the prayer. There is no reason Paul should not repeat his familiar phrase "the prisoner in the Lord" without conscious reference to an earlier occurrence. What follows grows out of the revelation he has described and the prayer built upon it. He begs them to walk worthy of their calling—the calling that carried out God's purpose before the worlds, the calling of men once hostile to one another whom God Himself seemed to have divided—to be one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. These were the blessings bestowed on them, blessings whose preservation would require strenuous *effort*. The danger was that they should think they must create a state for themselves instead of accepting and remaining in one already given. Lowliness, gentleness, long-suffering, forbearance—qualities that seem negative rather than positive—were what was asked of them, that they might enter the rich inheritance freely given.

But these blessings were common to all. The one Lord and one faith belonged to the whole body. Here, as in Corinthians, Paul is careful to show that each individual also has his own gift. He who ascended on high as man's emancipator—an ascent implying a previous descent, a claim on the lowest depths of earth, a victory over the whole universe—had given these gifts in due measure. He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, each meant to build up and consolidate the whole body. Each was a step toward the great end reached when all meet in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, when all scattered portions of humanity are gathered into the perfect Man, reaching the full stature of Christ. These gifts educate their recipients out of infancy into manhood; out of a state of being tossed by every current of doctrine, carried round in endless circles of error by deceitful men, into steadfast love and steadfast truth in act and word—a steadfastness that means perpetual growth into Him who is the Head, from whom the body draws its form and firmness and continual renewal of life, each part's life serving the whole.

In all this rapture Paul never loses sight of his first principle: that God is regenerating humanity in Christ according to the purpose He formed before the worlds. Nor does he lose sight of the practical result for the Ephesians and the Gentiles generally. All the exhortations to the end of the Epistle assume that the true state of man—and so *their* state—is now revealed in Christ; that a divine light surrounded and filled them; and that if their lives were not clear and orderly, it was because they were shutting their eyes.

The next passage brings out powerfully his distinction between the new and old man. He does not for a moment deny that the Gentiles had a light near them, a life of God within them. But he speaks of their minds darkened, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance in them. He traces that ignorance to hardness of heart, which itself comes from the loss of feeling that follows when men give themselves to lasciviousness and greedy uncleanness. On the other hand, he will not let the baptized Ephesians think the evil once in them was gone, or that they were not liable to walk as other Gentiles walk. Only they need not so walk. They had been taught of Christ, the true Light and Lord of their spirits, and taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus—that is, they had heard how the divine life of God was fully shown in the acts of a man. From what He was, they could know what He would have them be. They might put off the old man, corrupt through deceitful lusts, be renewed in the spirit of their mind, and put on the new man, created after God in righteousness and true holiness. So the new Man is that true and divine Man with whom their spirits deal, of whom their consciences testified until they drowned them in lusts, who now revealed Himself to and in man as their righteous Lord—whose righteousness the man who trusts and rejoices in it can claim as his own.

Because there is this righteousness—one for all of them, not as separate creatures but as members of a body—Paul can bid them speak truth each with his neighbour; can bid them keep their anger, which he would not have them stifle, so governed that it injures no one. He can bid the robber become a labourer and giver, and the foul speaker utter gracious, wholesome words. All these are precepts of plain reason that any heathen would grant. But their ground lies in that righteous constitution for man revealed in Christ, and in the Holy Spirit with which He sealed them against the day of redemption. Paul has already spoken of this sealing and redemption. The goods lying in bond on the quay with the owner's mark, for which he has paid earnest-money and will pay the full price to take possession, suggested the image. Here he dwells on the nature of the seal: the Owner's own Spirit, the Spirit of holiness and love, has been given them—the earnest, the sign of whose they are. Let them remember it is a Person, a loving Person, dwelling with them, and that all bitterness, wrath, and violence grieve Him more than the tenderest friend. Let them remember He seeks to work in them gentleness, compassion, forgiveness—the very qualities God showed to be His own nature when He forgave them in Christ. Having this Spirit, this seal of adoption, they might imitate God as beloved children, walking in love as Christ loved them and gave Himself a fragrant offering. They might put away fornication, uncleanness, and covetousness, and put thankfulness in place of grovelling foolish talk. For surely they knew the fornicator, the unclean, and the extortioner have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God—these habits of mind necessarily cut them off from the divine fellowship. Whatever foolish people might say, this was the misery they had escaped, this the wrath of God resting on the children of disobedience; to be brought out of these was their salvation. Let them not, then, claim fellowship with them. They knew that darkness; now light shone about them, the light in the Lord. Let them walk as children of light. Light is fruitful—in goodness, righteousness, truth; let them test by it what pleases the Lord. Darkness is unfruitful; let them have no share in its works but expose them to the light. The deeds that court secrecy are shameful even to name. But all things are proved and made manifest by light—manifestation being light's very characteristic. And that light is about even the deepest sleeper, a voice ever saying, "Awake, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." Therefore, with this darkness and this light about them, let them walk carefully, not as fools who know not where they go, but as wise men seizing each opportunity and rescuing it from the evil days; keeping their understandings free to know the Lord's will; not sinking into drunkenness, but filled with the Spirit, keeping merry musical hearts, singing within to the Lord and among themselves, keeping up thankfulness for all things to God in the Name of Him in whom He is reconciled to us, and submitting to one another in the Name of Him who came to be servant of all.

On this same ground he rests all human relationships. Wives must submit to their own husbands as to the Lord, because the man is head of the wife as Christ is Head of the Church. The high universal order shows in the individual order; the subjection of the Church to Christ carries the subjection of wives to husbands. But as He, being Head, is the Saviour of the whole body—loving the Church and giving Himself for it, to cleanse and sanctify it and present it glorious—so the husband's love should go out to his wife with a like purifying, elevating power. He should feel her part of himself, love and cherish her as his own body, as Christ loves the Church, since we are members of His body. Here is the ground for the original precept that a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, that they be one flesh. The mystery is very great and deep—the very mystery of Christ's relation to humanity he had spoken of, unknown to former ages, now made manifest. And each husband and wife may enter more into this mystery by living it out in mutual love and reverence.

All other relations rest on the same foundation. The fifth commandment, with its promise of long life in the land, was not a bare command; there was a righteousness at its root. Children obeying their parents, and parents not provoking their children but bringing them up in the discipline of the Lord and showing it in their own acts, are likewise entering this mystery, carrying out this revelation.

In every case a mutual relationship is unfolded. The servant is to obey his master in simplicity of heart, feeling himself Christ's servant, doing God's will, certain that the Lord is no respecter of persons. The masters are to do the same to them, forbearing threats, sure they have a Master in Heaven who will not treat them better than their slaves.

Here is the true divine and human republic, uniting all the universality and spirituality of Plato's republic with the reverence for relationships that Aristotle saw at the base of every sound polity but could not reconcile with the other. In the God-Man—in whom all things were created and men were chosen, who was born of the Virgin and subject to her, who had brothers and friends, who loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus—Paul found the eternal centre round which all parts of human society move in their orbits, kept from discord and from disturbing the unity of the whole.

So what remained was that the Ephesians be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Their task was not to win a position but to hold one already given—and no holiday task. It was no battle with flesh and blood; all the powers of spiritual evil were arrayed against them, assaulting their spirits on every side. They needed a spiritual armour to withstand these foes, to stand firm in the evil day, and, having done all, still to stand. Let them stand, then, on the ground won for them—girded with truth, wearing Christ's righteousness as a breastplate, His Gospel of peace as sandals, faith as a shield over the whole body, the confidence of salvation as a helmet, and the Spirit's sword, the word of God, to strike down the enemy. And if they would know how to wear this armour and use these weapons, how each man is to fight both for himself and his neighbour, let them pray with all prayer in the Spirit, watching and persevering in supplication for all saints—and among them for him who needed the very exhortations he was giving them, who wanted still more spiritual freedom and courage, being, as to his body, an ambassador in chains. But bondman or free, he could wish all the brethren peace and love with faith—no barren wish, for these come not from him but from the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And when they loved that Lord in sincerity, the grace to which their love was only a response would come richly and freely upon them all.

#### EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS.

Because Philippi was where St. Paul first carried the gospel into Europe, it has always held a special interest for western readers. That interest grows when we remember that the neighborhood was the scene of the last struggle for the old Roman republic—where the last obstacle was cleared away to the empire against which the Christian kingdom would one day try its strength. The sixteenth chapter of Acts deepens this and ties it directly to Paul's life. Its incidents are not merely sentimental; they are memorable points in church history. The prayer by the riverside is the only direct reference to Jewish worship in the account, and it suggests thoughts different from the usual references to the synagogue. Nothing tells us whether Lydia was a Jew by birth or a convert, but the words "she worshipped God" likely settle that she was not a heathen. The girl with the spirit of divination is one of those instances found everywhere of magic and enchantment across the Empire and of the trade made of it. Paul's grief at her seeming to endorse his teaching shows how naturally the apostolic teaching about the Spirit stood out as *the* distinctly Christian teaching, how quickly the counterfeit claimed kinship with it, and how strongly Paul felt his main duty was to set the one against the other. Then the Roman magistrates interfere—not from dislike of the teaching itself, but from the Roman habit of indulging their subjects' superstitions and protecting so recognized a business as the diviner's. Still the complaint takes a Roman form: the city's customs were invaded, and the colonists who claimed Roman privileges would not tolerate the meddling of Jews. The prison and the earthquake will only be explained away by those who think the Church's growth was not supernatural, and that a sign of God's presence with truth-tellers is a break in God's order rather than a confirmation of it. How that outward event woke the jailor's conscience, how the thought of deliverance first dawned on him, how the Apostles at once spoke to him of the Lord and Deliverer of his conscience—we have known since childhood, yet the words are far from exhausted and should be studied again with the whole apostolic message. Nor should we forget Paul's insistence on his rights as a Roman citizen and his resolve to assert the law against those who administered it wrongly. His reverence for Roman law as part of God's order in the world is everywhere plain, and we misunderstand him and his work if we ignore it.

Important as these events are, they are not as clearly linked to this Epistle as Paul's experiences in Ephesus are to the letter to that church. It seems the Philippians were shaken more by his imprisonment and likely death than by anything in their own region. His trials would have raised thoughts that could unsettle even Christians longer established than they were. Their shepherd was struck down and in the Emperor's hands—yet it was his own countrymen who had driven him to Rome. He seemed silenced by God's own decree. Many Jewish members of the Church denounced him, denied he was a true preacher of Christ, and claimed he taught a different doctrine from the older Apostles. Such words reached the room where the soldier guarded him, and were heard in every church he had founded, and surely repeated by the Judaizers in Macedonia. We know a little of how such hints work on quiet minds, and what turmoil and unbelief they breed. Imagine them reaching converts already suffering from Jewish and Gentile enemies, who had among them—strange as it seems to those who assume the persecuted early Church must have been pure—careless and inconsistent members; and we have most of the circumstances Paul addresses in this letter.

Disunion threatened the Philippians as it did the Corinthians, but here it seems to have sprung less from intellectual causes and factiousness than from despondency. The whole letter seems aimed against that. It is a constant call to trust, hope, and joy—which troubles need not dampen and may even serve. It is plainly a leading principle with the Apostle, appearing in every letter, that trust and hope and joy are not solitary feelings: they belong to a community, are nourished by mutual exchange, sustained by a common Spirit, and are meaningless unless they point to a common object. The strongly thankful tone that runs through this whole epistle is always tied to calls for fellowship, oneness of spirit and soul, shared work, shared sympathy. These are not mere exhortations to do right and avoid wrong; they rest on the fact that the Philippians are joined to each other and to the Apostle himself, however far away, by a bond nothing can break—one he can realize in his prayers and thanks while imprisoned at Rome as fully as if he were with them. What better thing can he give thanks for than that they share this fellowship with him? What better can he ask for them than that they grasp its full meaning? Every other blessing is contained in it: clearness of mind, freedom from offence given or taken, walking in Christ's light, and the hope of his perfect day.

Why should his imprisonment discourage them? It has made his gospel known in the very palace of the Cæsars. Why should the different opinions about him discourage them? Christ's name was heard even from those who most disliked the imprisoned servant and would gladly have added to his suffering. Was that not cause for joy, to him and to them? Why be cast down that his death might be near? To live on in the flesh was to draw life from Christ; to die was to gain a fuller, richer life. He could not tell which was better, but he did not doubt he would be granted what was most useful to them. He had little doubt he would see them again face to face.

But suppose he did not? Then let them live as fellow-heirs of the inheritance the Gospel proclaims; let them stand fast in one spirit and strive with one soul for the faith of the Gospel, unshaken by their adversaries. Their peace—all the sweeter and more honorable because they were allowed not only to believe in Christ but to suffer for Him—would witness the deliverance God had worked in them, and stand in contrast with those who can never be at peace, who can only cast up mire and dirt. So they would be one with the Apostle, near or far, in the same battle he was fighting. But where was this unity to come from? How could men of so many temperaments and interests truly have the one mind he demanded? That one mind was given them. They were members of Christ—of Him who, being in the form of God, did not grasp at equality with God, but emptied Himself and made Himself of no reputation, took the form of a servant, was made in the likeness of men, and humbled Himself further, obedient unto death, even death on the cross. And it was this humbled, crucified Man whom God highly exalted, whose name is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and earth and below, and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ, to the glory of God the Father.

Here is the central doctrine of this Epistle, as of all the others, cast in the form best suited to their need. It is the same truth of the humble Jesus and the exalted Christ—of the Son who is one with the Father and makes Himself so one with man that His mind is shown to be the very mind belonging to man. It is the only mind that can make us humble, keep us at one, and make us share the glory of Him who created us to know Him and be like Him. On this Paul rests all that follows. He asks for obedience that does not depend on his presence. He asks them to work out their salvation—salvation from the strifes and divisions keeping them from Christ and each other—with the fear and trembling of men who know God Himself is working in them both the will and the action for His good pleasure. On this ground he can tell them to do everything without grumbling or arguing, to be blameless children of God in a crooked and twisted generation, shining as lights in the world, holding out the word of life to those most sunk in death—so proving the Apostle had not labored in vain, but had sent out men who could carry the torch when he could run no longer. Even if he were poured out as an offering for their sakes, he could rejoice with them. Why should they not rejoice with him?

Here, as everywhere, the personal blends with the general and universal. His deep sense of spiritual fellowship with the Philippians does not make him forget their shared friends, Timothy and Epaphroditus, through whom he had reached them and who felt and suffered for them as he did. It hardly needs saying—every epistle shows it—that all personal griefs, sicknesses, and losses of estate or reputation mingle with the Apostle's loftiest discourse without lowering it in the least. Here they fit perfectly, displaying the mind of Him who suffered with each and is exalted to be Lord of all.

But his sorrow over his sick friend gives way at once to the whole letter's refrain: "Rejoice in the Lord." He has said it often; he must say it again. For there are dogs, evil-workers, counterfeit champions of circumcision, hindering them from this joy. True circumcision meant cutting off the flesh so the spirit could rise, renewed to life, freedom, and joy in Christ. Paul had as many fleshly privileges as anyone—all the outward marks that set him apart and gave him grounds to boast of his national election. But he counted them loss and rubbish for Christ's sake. For the righteousness that is in Christ, that comes through faith, that is God's own, he had thrown away all the righteousness that is mere conformity to the law. He longed to know Christ Himself, the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His sufferings. He was being shaped into the image of Christ's death and longed to reach the image of the resurrection. He had not attained it; he was always pressing after it, forgetting what lay behind and reaching upward, wanting to lose himself, to be found in Christ, to reach the mark of God's high calling in Christ. This was the highest goal even the most perfect could set himself—yet it was the common goal for the whole Church. All might have this mind; and any who thought otherwise might trust God to reveal it to them.

He had told them what he strove for; let them strive for the same. Let them consider what he and those most in sympathy with him were aiming at. He knew, sadly, that others had other aims—low, grovelling, earthly aims—and would surely attain what they sought: the ruin of their moral being. But let the Philippians remember that their citizenship is in heaven, where Christ the Deliverer is; that instead of bowing our spirits to our bodies, we wait for Him to transform the body of our humiliation into the likeness of His glorious body, by the power with which He can subdue all things to Himself.

Again and again the Apostle turns to particular cases, gently touching on troubles, jealousies, or divisions he had heard of, and bringing the principle he has been unfolding to bear on them. But since the letter's great aim is encouragement and the lifting of despondency, he seizes the chance to tell the Philippians how much delight they had given him by the tokens of love they had repeatedly sent—gifts precious to him because he was sure they were precious to God. He shows them how everything kind, gentle, venerable, and lovely, whether shown imperfectly in weak human beings or fully in the acts of God, was dear to him and the food of his spirit. He would have them dwell on such things. Then the letter's chief exhortation would be fulfilled: they would rejoice in the Lord. And the blessed effect of that inward joy would appear to all in their evenness and moderation. They would feel the Lord near them, be free of anxious cares, and in prayer and supplication—never apart from thanksgiving—make their requests known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all our reason, would guard their hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus.

#### EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS.

The Acts of the Apostles tell us nothing about the state of the Church at Colosse. Since Paul says he had never seen the Christians there or at Laodicea, Luke was unlikely to mention them. Everything we know must come from the Epistle itself. It raises a question much discussed lately, connected with Bauer's theory about the Pauline epistles.

Our countryman Hammond found Gnosticism everywhere in the Church's first age and supposed the apostolic letters were written mainly to expose its dangers. Modern schools, by contrast, deny that any trace of Gnosticism exists before the second century, and so dispute the genuineness of the epistles that seem to allude to it. The other option is to explain such allusions away as one commentator's fancy — often an easy course, and Hammond certainly strained many passages to fit his theory. But the Epistle to the Colossians contains hints that cannot be got rid of. Anyone familiar with second-century Gnosticism would almost inevitably conclude that Paul is pointing at some of its doctrines and habits. And these allusions did not slip in by accident; they are part of the very substance of the letter. Remove them and its purpose becomes barely intelligible.

But does admitting this mean the writer knew the Valentinians or Carpocratians, or alludes even slightly to the developed forms Gnostic doctrine took when men deliberately tried to combine the Gospel with the teaching of the Magians or the Alexandrian sages? I do not think any such allusion can be detected. Read simply, the letter suggests this: no great schemes about divine emanations have yet been directly blended with the apostles' teaching, though the possibility of all such schemes is plainly there — the seeds of a hundred heresies have been sown, and their growth is beginning to show above ground.

If we grant this — and I only ask the reader to grant it if the Epistle's own evidence supports it — we can do justice to Hammond and to Bauer, and also to another class, like our Bishop Davenant, who found in this Epistle a refutation of various Romish errors. Those who apply the Apostle's teaching to his own times are, I think, the safer guides, though the drier. Yet the others have a freshness and vitality that seems to prove them right even where history says they are wrong. We only distrust them when they tie Scripture to one case and stop us applying it to other cases we care about more today. By taking the Epistle to mean what it says — not reading later information into it, yet using our experience to judge what tendencies are likely to appear in people and societies under similar conditions — we may find in the Church at Colosse ways of thinking and acting that help us understand the Church of the second century and of the middle ages, and that may bear even more remarkably on our own time than on either. Above all, we shall be convinced that the Epistle is thoroughly genuine and Pauline, in perfect harmony with the others we have studied, carrying those distinct local marks we have never found absent from any apostolic letter — marks whose absence would oblige us to reject it almost as much as a flat contradiction of the rest of the New Testament would.

A forger would have to be very skilful to throw into his imitation of Paul not merely his turns of phrase, his openings, and his personal allusions, but the very mind and heart of the Apostle — his passionate vehemence, the tangled sentences that come from the multitude of his thoughts, together with an order that shows itself not in spite of the tangle but through it. His skill is the more remarkable because he does not copy the outside of Paul's mind. He introduces no phrases about justification, by which systematizers would have identified Paul and satisfied themselves the document was his. Instead he seizes at once, with an intuition rare in a dishonest man or a forger, the very principle we have found characteristic of the Apostle in every letter — the one he states in Galatians as the explanation of his conversion and his mission to the Gentiles: that it pleased God to reveal His Son in him, that he might preach Him among the Gentiles. Those words have been the keynote of the other epistles, and they give sense and unity to this one more than to any other.

The passages down to the fourteenth verse of the first chapter recall the Epistle to the Ephesians. The tone is so alike that a careless reader might think he was only hearing the Ephesian lessons repeated. But read again, and its omissions show a different aim. There are the same thanksgivings to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for the young Church's faith and love and hope laid up in heaven; the same acknowledgment of the fruitful, life-giving power in the word of the Gospel's truth; the same prayer that they be filled with the knowledge of God's will, bear the fruit of good works, grow in the knowledge of God, have inward strength for endurance, and give thanks to the Father who called them and fitted them for the inheritance of the saints in light, delivered them from the power of darkness and moved them into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom they have redemption and forgiveness of sins. But what made Ephesians distinctive — its start from the blessings God gave them in Christ before the world's foundation — is absent here. Since that beginning set the tone of the whole Ephesian letter, we would blunder badly to confuse the two just because some thoughts belonged to both Churches alike.

The passage that follows brings us, I think, to the very heart and subject of the Epistle: Christ is the image of the unseen God, first-born of all creation; in Him all things were created, in the heavens and on earth, seen and unseen — thrones, lordships, principalities, powers; all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all, and all things hold together in Him. He is the head of the body, the beginning, first-begotten from the dead, that He might be first in all things. For in Him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, once alienated and enemies in mind through evil works, He has now reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and blameless — if you remain grounded and settled in the faith, not moved from the hope of the Gospel you have heard, which has been preached in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become the minister.

This passage arises naturally out of what precedes; there is no break in the sense, and its opening clause belongs to the earlier sentence. Follow the language and you see everything moving toward this declaration of Christ as *the* image of God, the ground and pattern of the visible and invisible creation, Head of all powers in the unseen world, pattern in death as in life, beginning of the old creation and the new, and Head of the Church — its Head because the whole Divine fulness was gathered up in Him, and because He has actually re-united the torn fragments of humanity in Himself, enabling particular men, such as the Colossians who had been cut off from God by their own evil, to take their proper place again in God's order.

But why does he dwell so on the *unseen* God, and on things *seen and unseen*? Why heap up phrases for spiritual or angelic powers? Why so laboriously tie earth to heaven, the local Colossian Church to the divine order that includes far more than the cosmos of physical science? Because in this Church questions had arisen about the relation of the seen to the unseen — doubts whether the invisible God might not reveal Himself through many subordinate agencies, whether there was any one Person to whom all were subject, in whom God was fully revealed, in whom man could meet Him, in whom the different orders of creation and cycles of history found their common end. Paul's very Gospel was that such a person, such a centre and reconciler, had been revealed. The most natural doubt was whether this could be true; the most sweeping denial was to say it false. All idolatry, so far as it asserts many centres rather than one divine-and-human centre, was fighting this belief, each form resisting the Gospel by keeping one set of men apart from others. Judaism too, when it made itself an exclusive religion, warred against Paul's claim, standing on merely national ground while he held that the Jew was called to bless all the families of earth. And it was certain that as the tendencies of Heathenism and Judaism reappeared inside the Christian Church, this common denial would reappear too. What forms it would take, a wise man could guess but not predict. He would be nearly sure the old idolatries would return in a more spiritualized dress — coarse sensual forms turned into abstract essences, a crowd of half-gods and secondary principles set between creature and Creator; that Jews and Gentiles would each help frame a new demonology mixing the material and spiritual; that heathen mythology and philosophy would prevail in the Churches of the lands they had shaped. But the teacher of the first age need not directly meddle with these later combinations. He served the world better by pointing to the root of these tendencies, the way they would try to remake the new revelation in their own likeness — and above all the one cure for them.

That cure lies first in the full declaration of Christ as the one centre of humanity and the one manifestation of God, a Gospel proved not by argument but by itself, as it met and reconciled the partial theories set against it and the human intuitions to which each of those theories answered. Secondly, it lay in applying this Gospel to the particular inferences the teachers and disciples had drawn from those theories, and the practices built on them — showing that Christ accomplished what they were clumsily and unsatisfactorily attempting.

One first inference, from believing that Christ had disclosed great mysteries of the unseen world without the full belief about His person and reconciliation that Paul urged, was that they had something to do to complete what He had left undone. He had suffered for the world; they too must suffer to attain the spiritual kingdom He had prepared. We need not trace the confusions this opinion has caused in every age of the Church. But was there no truth in it needing to be freed from its dangerous additions? Had not Paul said we must enter the kingdom through much tribulation? What did his own sufferings mean? He meets it at once: "I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I am filling up that which was lacking in the tribulations of Christ in my flesh for His body, which is the Church." This is bold language, easily quoted to support great superstitions and to deny Christ's finished sacrifice. But since the whole aim of the letter is to declare Christ's completeness against those who set Him aside and bring in acts of their own to reach heights He had not brought them to, we may assume these words too correct that error. And they do so most practically. Even if "the sufferings of Christ" meant His sufferings on the cross — which does not seem to me the simplest sense — the phrase "for His body's sake, which is the Church" at once destroys the idea that he suffered to win higher rewards for himself. He could only mean that he was entering into his Master's suffering: as Christ gave Himself for the Church to make it pure, so Paul was allowed to suffer in his small measure in the same spirit and for the same end — the very opposite of supplying deficiencies in Christ's work. But if we read "the sufferings of the Christ in my flesh," we get a sense more in keeping with the whole passage, free of that misconstruction, still honoring the truth hidden in the Colossians' error, and confounding that error even more. He does not even claim the sufferings as his own; they are the sufferings of Christ in him — the pain Christ still feels in His servant, as He felt it on earth, from the world's strife and from the struggle against the powers of evil in which He and all His disciples share. And this conflict of Christ within him was for the sake of His Body the Church, of which Paul was made a minister, to fulfil the word of God — the mystery hidden from the ages but now made manifest to His saints, to whom God chose to make known the riches of its glory among the Gentiles, *which is Christ in you, the hope of glory*; whom he proclaims, warning *every man* and teaching *every man*, that he may present *every man* perfect in Christ; for which end he labors, striving by the energy that works mightily in him.

This passage confirms my reading of the other, though that is a small part of its value. Nearly every word points at some habit of mind the Colossians were prone to — yet without rudely attacking it, indeed while giving it a right direction. Their teachers must have spoken much of an unfathomable abyss or mystery, a divine fulness out of which partial illuminations flowed, and of a perfectness or full initiation belonging to men who had purified themselves above the sensual crowd and the childish wisdom of beginners. Each of these thoughts, pregnant as it is with Pantheism, vagueness, and self-glorification, the Apostle takes up and redeems. There *is* a mystery hidden from ages and generations — but now made manifest, and he is sent to declare it fully. He is to counsel and teach *every man*, to present every man perfect and fully initiated in Christ. How can the wise and the foolish be so levelled? Because the mystery he has found in himself and declares to them is "Christ in them, the hope of glory." As it was Christ in Paul who suffered and strove for the Church, his whole aim was to make each Gentile, each man, know that the same Christ who is in his brother is in him — and so not to exalt himself above his brother, nor dream of mystical flights to scale heaven, but in toil, suffering, and teaching to enter into the loving mind of his Lord.

In the next paragraph, opening the second chapter, other expressions occur that more obviously, though not more really, belong to the Gnostic temper. Spiritual understanding, wisdom, knowledge, insight into mysteries — these the Colossians had learned to prize above all, and each teacher counted himself great as he could claim them, speaking of them as rewards of mortifying the flesh. The initiated man might hope to converse with angels and be admitted to the most secret divine treasures. The philosophized Jewish Christian, fresh from Alexandria, would boast of his advantage: his circumcision was the appointed means of raising him out of his fleshly nature into spiritual apprehension. He would tell the Gentile that baptism might serve as a purification from outward defilement and an entry to the lower heights of knowledge. Likely there were Gentile teachers too who held baptism the beginning of a system of purification by which they might attain a vision as clear as any son of Abraham's. No doubt the one dwelt on Christ's circumcision, the other on His baptism, giving both a mystical meaning, treating them as crises in His life when the divine more fully mingled with the human, or the spiritual displaced the earthly.

Read the next chapter with even these rough hints in mind, and we better understand why Paul stresses his prayer that their hearts be comforted, knit together in love, into the full riches of assured understanding — thus hinting that only by working together as members of one body in the power of love could they gain the intellectual gifts they used as excuses for self-exaltation. We see why he wants for them the acknowledgment of the mystery of the Christ of God, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden — the treasures they fancied they could seize by their high thoughts. As usual, he speaks of the intruders only after speaking of the Church's order and constitution in Christ, which he can rejoice in though he has never seen them with his eyes. He does not wish to make them something other than they are, but to have them rooted and built up in Christ, strengthened in faith, abounding in thanksgiving for the inheritance they had entered. Plausible men with plausible speeches were bidding them seek, as if far off, a blessing already brought near, a state they already lived in. They were told that certain speculations, or human traditions, or outward rites, might gradually bring them into the fulness of the Godhead. But all that fulness dwells bodily in Christ, and they had it in Him; they were partakers of His circumcision, made without hands; they had put off the body of the flesh in Him, been buried with Him in baptism, and raised with Him through faith in the energy of God who raised Him from the dead. So the completeness of Christ's revelation and work, and the complete redemption of their society in Him, became the apostolic witness against the Gnostic tendency and its outward machinery. God had already brought them into the state they were trying to climb into. The knowledge they wanted was the knowledge of that state. They had Christ's circumcision — let them claim their deliverance from fleshly lusts; they had His baptism into death and resurrection — let them live as men dead and risen with Him.

"For," he continues, you being dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, forgiving all our transgressions, wiping out the handwriting of decrees that was against us and contrary to us, taking it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. This language is not new; it has come up in every epistle. But here it applies peculiarly. The failure to believe their transgressions pardoned, the notion that they were still under institutions meant to effect the pardon rather than witness that they had received it, was a constant excuse for Gnostic speculation and asceticism. To say that Christ had nailed both those decrees and their sins to His cross, that in that cross God and man were satisfactorily reconciled, struck the new teaching at the root and killed it. Still he had to go into particulars so they could see how his doctrine met their case. When he says Christ spoiled the principalities and powers, displaying them openly and triumphing over them, we are brought into the heart of their longing after intermediate powers and agencies — another symptom of this Church's disease. What need of such longing if the Lord who took their flesh was above all these and had proved His mastery of them? But with that longing came minute, wearisome rules about food and drink, feasts, new moons, and sabbaths — all an excuse for harsh judgments and for the tyranny of particular teachers. With it came a mock humility, the worship of demons and angels, a pompous contempt of visible things, and an inflation supposed spiritual but really springing from the mind of the flesh. Let them see that the shadows had passed and the substance had come. Let them not look up to angels but hold to the Head of angels, in whom the whole body is knit together by joints and bands and supplied with nourishment for a perpetual divine growth. They were dead with Christ to the elements of the world; why then live by its rules, laying down prohibitions about touching, tasting, handling? Such things belong to the perishable, to human commands. They have an appearance of wisdom — will-worship, mock-humility, contempt of the body all look like promising means to higher ends — but they have no real worth, spring from the flesh, and do not even satisfy the flesh.

In the following chapter Paul still keeps the manner, and partly the phrasing, of those he warns against. The new teachers would have urged them to raise their minds to things above, not to dwell on things of earth, and to put to death their members set on earthly things — their fleshly appetites. Paul honestly takes up their phrases and turns them to another use, drawing out their true living sense, showing that their aim could not be reached by their means, and that a far higher result could be reached by the faith they denied. They were to seek things above because they had been raised with Christ, who sits at God's right hand; to think of things above, not of earth, because they were dead and their life was hidden with Christ in God, and when Christ their life appeared they would appear with Him in glory. But the members they were to kill were not their bodies but the things destroying body and spirit alike — fornication, uncleanness, base passion, evil desire, and the covetousness that is idolatry, for which, as he told the Ephesians, God's wrath comes on the children of disobedience, and in which they once walked. Now they had put off these, and anger, malice, slander, and foul speech. See how far Paul rises above the Gnostic doctors in what he thinks redeemed men may attain — not glimpses of a spiritual world or converse with aeons and archangels, but the very knowledge and nature of God Himself. And see how far below them he dives in naming the vices men are freed from, striking at the root while they played on the surface. Yet he is the plain practical man, they the speculators. He leads his disciples to common homely morality, which the others usually despised and rarely reached. He uses blunt words — "Do not lie one to another" — knowing well that Christians then, as always, are apt to lie, and that high notions of their own spirituality are no protection. *The* protection is what he has urged throughout: having stripped off the old man with his deeds and put on the new man, renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator, where there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.

I know of no nobler passage in all Paul's epistles, none showing more clearly how the plainest law of individual morality is bound up with the great principle of human brotherhood, and how that rests on the divine and glorified humanity of Christ. Nor does any passage, with the one following it, show more plainly how we must claim our rights as regenerate men in order to rise continually to newness of life. They *had* put on the new man; therefore put on, as God's elect, holy and beloved, mercies, gentleness, humility — the very humility the Gnostic teachers mimicked with their humble airs — moderation, long-suffering, forbearing and forgiving one another, as the Lord forgave you; and above all this clothing, that love which is the bond of perfection. That last word shows how well Paul remembers his purpose even when most carried away. The Gnostic problem was how to make a perfect, initiated man above all others; Paul solves it by saying that the love which makes you submit to all others and binds you to all others is the secret of perfection.

On this foundation he builds, as in Ephesians, the whole structure of social life that the Gnostics ignored. But first he treats the spiritual life they did prize, and for which they had so many rules. Paul has few, but very comprehensive: you were called in one body into the peace of Christ, so let it rule your hearts; be thankful; let Christ's word dwell in you richly; teach and exhort one another; sing in your hearts to God; and whatever you do, do all in Christ's name, thanking God the Father through Him. Instead of the self-exalting life, the life of men yielding to a blessed power of good that seeks to bless them. Instead of the individual life, the life of mutual instruction and encouragement. Instead of the ambitious life of the would-be sage or saint, the musical life of the churchman who feels himself one of a family and does nothing but in the Name of its Head.

And then come the plain outward family duties — obstacles to spiritual contemplation in the Gnostic's judgment, precious elements of the unselfish spiritual kingdom in Paul's. They are much the same as in Ephesians, but here serve a different purpose. Like his request for prayer that God would open a door for him to speak the mystery of Christ, like the greetings from and to friends, like the greeting in his own hand and the plea to remember his bonds, they all testify that the highest and most divine faith is the least abstract — the most human, homely, and personal.

#### THE FIRST AND SECOND EPISTLES TO THE THESSALONIANS.

These Epistles stand last among Paul's church Epistles in our arrangement, but are commonly thought to have been written first. I have not tried to fix the chronology of the other Epistles, and I will not go into the proofs offered for this view of these. The reason for placing them where they stand was probably doctrinal: the letters to the Thessalonians speak more plainly of a judgment than any before them, so, though they may be early writings, for purposes of theology and church-history they were put after the rest.

The account of this Church's founding, in Acts seventeen, helps us read the Epistles. Paul seems to have passed quickly through other Macedonian cities because they had no synagogues. Thessalonica had one, and there for three sabbaths he reasoned from the Scriptures. His subject suited the Jewish frame of mind: he did not have to prove there was a Christ, but that *the* Christ had to suffer and rise, and that Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified Man, was this Christ. A few Jews believed and joined Paul and Silas, but most of the converts were devout Greeks—apparently proselytes who attended the synagogue. Then came fiercer opposition from the circumcised party than they had yet met. First they stirred up the mob, which attacked the house of Paul's host. Then, in person or through worthless rabble, they tried to alarm the empire's officers with the old charge: these men who have turned the world upside down say there is another king, Jesus, against Caesar's decrees. I call it an old argument because it had been used against our Lord before Pilate. But it was new in Paul's experience: his sharpest quarrels with his countrymen had turned on whether Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God—they had not yet used the one plea that really weighed with their rulers. Here it worked. The rulers were troubled, took security of Jason and the others, and Paul and Silas were sent away by night to Berœa.

So this Church was founded amid unusual persecution, and the manner of its birth foretold storms in its early life. There was no doubt where the opposition would come from or what shape it would take. A violent Jewish faction would denounce the idea that Jesus was their expected King, would use the help of the rulers they most hated to oppose Him, would set up an idea of the Christ as unlike Him as possible, and would welcome anyone who embodied that idea. To Paul these signs plainly foreshadowed his nation's ruin, the events our Lord said would come before that generation passed. So the thoughts of an Antichrist and of a judgment were pressed on Paul by the Thessalonians' situation more sharply than by any other Church. He could not help seeing a hint that Gentile and Jewish maxims might strangely blend in the coming time—the new Christ might wear the purple, yet might also appear in some form satisfying those who wanted an heir of David. The vision was ominous either way. The Jew must deny the God of Abraham more openly than before to bow to an image opposite to that of a King reigning in righteousness. The tyranny of the Caesars must grow yet more brutal and godless. And Christ's dreadful saying—that love would grow cold, that false Christs might nearly deceive the very elect—suggested, even apart from the Churches' own perils, that Christians would share the world's temptations, and that many would fall into an abyss deeper than that of Jews or Gentiles, since their height had been greater. Add to this the tender, motherly affection Paul felt for this Church, like a mother's for a child in the crisis of a disease, and we have most of what we need to interpret the Epistle.

Persecution seems so common to all Churches that the reader may hardly expect it singled out for the Thessalonians. But after going through so many of Paul's Epistles, I can say boldly that persecution is a leading topic in none of them except that to the other Macedonian Church, Philippi—and there its effects differed from what Paul found here. The Thessalonians were not cast down or overwhelmed by their sufferings; despondency was not their chief failing. The opposition they met led Paul, while with them, to speak much of the coming day of the Lord, urging the hope of it as encouragement to patience. Such words were easily perverted. Why toil for bread if some great event was near, which might take them from earthly things or give them command over them as never before? With such indifference to the present often grows an indifference to ordinary morality, not full-blown but showing itself now and then. Speculation about how near or far these events were would fill their minds. With all brightness in the future and only gloom behind, the world before Christ's appearing looked blank and dreary—how sad to have lived and died then! Mixed with these tendencies, which persecution readily breeds, were the graces God uses persecution to call out—courage, endurance, brotherly affection—not wholly free of those bad habits, yet strengthened by having enemies, and often joined with a reckless defiance and proud contempt of the enemies' opinion.

The harmful influences at work in this Church appear only gradually amid Paul's earnest thanks to God for their work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope. He rejoices that they know their election; that his Gospel came not in word only but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and in full assurance; that they imitated him and the Lord by receiving the word amid tribulation with joy of the Spirit; that they were examples to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia; that their faith was known everywhere; and that from them the word had sounded far and wide. Again and again he recalls the depth of their conversion in those memorable words—that they had turned from idols to serve a living and true God—and again and again he ties that service to waiting for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the coming wrath.

These words show Paul had no intention of explaining away his preaching, or of changing the teaching that first proved so effective, once he found it perverted. This is never his method: he does not qualify truths he had thought necessary before, or swap them for others, but works to bring out their full meaning, since that is the right cure for any partial grasp of them. First he dwells with unusual detail on how he and his fellow-missionaries lived among them—not, as at Corinth, because his aims had been misrepresented or rivals set up, for the Thessalonians returned his love and had been moved from the first by his life as much as his words. That is why he is the more eager to remind them what they saw in him that they knew came from God and that reached their hearts. Was it not his watchful, tender behavior toward them while they were still Gentiles, a gentleness free of flattery and of any greed? Was it not the labor and hardship, working with his own hands so as not to burden them, by which he proved how dear they were? Was it not his holy, blameless conduct among the believers, and the warnings by which he showed them how much care they needed to keep what they had won, and to walk worthy of the God calling them into His kingdom and glory?

Paul could use such language of himself freely when it served a purpose. Any edge of self-praise is taken off in the next sentence, where he thanks God that they received the word from him and Silas not as the word of man but as it truly is, the word of God, which works powerfully in those who believe. That same word worked in the Thessalonians, for they became imitators of the Churches of God in Judea. He mentions those Churches for the reason he gives at once: the Thessalonians' sufferings came from the same kind of people who caused theirs. Jews in Macedonia showed their kinship with Jews in Palestine, who had persecuted the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and the Apostles too, forbidding them to speak to the Gentiles for their salvation, thus filling up their sins—for the wrath had come upon them to the uttermost.

Both his references to his own life and to the Thessalonians' Jewish enemies bear on the weaknesses he saw in them as well as on their hopes. Without directly telling them they were *not* working with their hands, *not* walking wisely toward their heathen neighbors, *not* careful to keep the light burning within and shining without, the memory of what their first teachers were, and the impression that made, was the most effective rebuke he could give. And the hint about the Jews did more than remind them Paul suffered more than they from the same foes: it told them the cause of Jewish hostility—a godless, inhuman refusal to let others share their privileges. It reminded them that the redemption they awaited, and rightly awaited, would also be a day of wrath, not accomplished until God's chosen people had suffered that terrible downfall which, as he told the Romans, he would himself have been accursed from Christ to prevent.

The appearing of Christ, then, which Paul had taught them to expect, was bound up with sorrow and tribulation both for themselves and for the world. It was not something he or they could look to as the fulfilment of selfish dreams. He tells them he had longed to come to them, it seems, for the very purpose of saying this: "Are you not our joy and hope and crown of rejoicing before our Lord Jesus at His appearing?" The phrase seems thrown in by the way, bursting from the fulness of his heart with no bearing on his argument. But an inspired man's words, however little they seem to fit a dry argument, must unfold the thought governing him. In telling them his feeling toward them, he has taught them a whole lesson about the day they both await: it is a day he desires for their sakes and the Church's, because Christ will be glorified in them and shown to be Lord of both Jew and Gentile.

Unable to come himself, he says he sent Timothy to comfort and strengthen them, so their tribulations might not give the tempter an opening but be received as their appointed discipline. Timothy's report cheered him and called out fresh thanks to God, making him pray the more earnestly to see them. He trusted God and the Lord Jesus would direct his way to them; but he trusted still more that God would make them overflow in love to one another and to all, so as to establish their hearts blameless in holiness before God at the appearing of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Everyone must see, from how Paul keeps returning to it, that "the appearing" is the key phrase of this letter. We have already noticed how frequent it is in all his epistles, but nowhere does it stand out so plainly, for nowhere else does he so set himself to clear up the perplexities bound up with it and to tie the Church's life to it. The next passage, which we all know as a standalone exhortation, should never be cut off from what comes before it. The way to prepare for Christ's appearing was to remember those ordinary, plain precepts he had given them and which, in their eager anxiety about the future, they were forgetting. For though such moral rules may look merely hard and external, they rest on the deepest theology. The command "abstain from fornication" rested on the truth that God's will is your sanctification. The rule not to overreach a brother rested on the truth that the Lord is the Judge. Both would be kept if they remembered God had given them the Holy Spirit. Paul was glad they excelled in love to the brethren throughout Macedonia; but he would have them remember their duty also to those outside—that quietness, minding their own business, and working with their own hands were spiritual duties, part of their divine calling.

Let it always be remembered that such lessons were prompted precisely by Paul's belief, which he wished them to share, that the day of the Lord was at hand. The deeper that impression settled in them, the freer they would be from restlessness, the more quiet amid strife, attentive to common duties, and considerate of others. But there was one anxiety that was not selfish, and that grew from the very hope he encouraged: what had become of friends who had died before the Lord's appearing? Was it a calamity to have died before it? The thought was very natural—more natural than we, with our theories of the departed and of ourselves that have little to do with any appearing of Christ, quite realize. Their minds, formed in the Apostolic school, could imagine no blessedness apart from His appearing. Paul's answer gave them his clearest account yet of the nature of that appearing. They were not to limit it by their notions of time or place. If they believed Christ died and rose, they believed in a union of both worlds, a breaking down of the barrier between the state before and after death—the seen and the unseen. If they truly believed this, they would be sure that those they called dead had only fallen asleep, that Christ was as much with them as with Jairus's daughter or Lazarus, that they could hear His voice as those had; and that, being members of Christ's body and drawing their life from Him, God would bring them with Him.

And so he tells them, by the word of the Lord, that "we, the living ones, we that are left over unto the appearing of the Lord, shall not anticipate those that have been put to sleep. Because the Lord Himself with a cry, with the voice of an archangel and with the trump of God, shall descend from Heaven; and then we, the living, shall together with them be caught up in clouds to meet the Lord in air; and so shall we be ever with the Lord." These are among the most musical sentences of Scripture, to which most hearts strangely respond, yet they trouble the understanding as much as any we know. May I suggest that if we followed our hearts, took the words as they stand, and tried less to measure them by our own notions, some of the difficulty might vanish? The first question we ask is: Was Paul then alive at the appearing of the Lord, even granting that appearing was some event of that generation? This question touches a subject we have often dwelt on before; reconsidering it may help us trace the unity of the New Testament books, and would be the best key to the link between the history of the Church and the prophecies of both Testaments.

All the hopes of the old prophets pointed to an appearing of a King of Israel and Son of God. They interpreted the longings, conscious or not, of all men, and said what kind of person "the desire of all nations" must be. I have tried to show the Gospels present such a person. They say: This Jesus is the Son of God and the King of Israel. We tell how, while on earth, the friend of fishermen, the carpenter's son, He showed He held both characters. His crucifixion was the most necessary part of that manifestation and of His work; His resurrection was the final earthly proof that He was what the Sanhedrim and the governor denied; but that resurrection meant He would not remain on earth—it was completed in His ascension to God's right hand, so He was declared Lord and Christ; and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost showed the ascension meant no separation from His witnesses, enabling them to be real witnesses that He is the risen and victorious Lord and Redeemer of man. Was nothing more involved in the ascension and the gift of the Spirit than this? The more spiritual light the Apostles received, the more certain they were that there was. If Christ had died, risen, and ascended, if He was Lord and Christ, if their testimony was true, there would be an appearing of Him in that character—as real as His appearing as a servant, carrying that appearing to its result as the crucifixion carried out the incarnation, the resurrection the crucifixion, and the ascension and Pentecost the resurrection. All these, strictly, were parts of one appearing, acts of one drama leading to a catastrophe that was inevitable if its great Hero, who had governed the world since its creation, had really come to claim His right over it. It was fully in the prophets' manner to treat all the events of a given generation as parts of one appearing or day of the Lord, though the first might be years from the last, though the events might differ utterly—some bright, some gloomy—though a plague of locusts might lead to an outpouring of the Spirit, and that to some battle in the valley of Jehoshaphat. The link between them all was that they proved God present and at work to put down evil and set up righteousness. John the Baptist, the King's herald, had proclaimed the coming wrath as the great result of His coming, the sign that the kingdom he announced had truly been revealed. And all our Lord's discourses, most of all the one before the last Passover, agree with this.

How then could Paul, steeped in the old teachers' lessons and believing the revelations made to himself, doubt that he was living in a day of the Lord—that day toward which all others had led? Whether or not he would still be on earth at its close—at the appearing which, on his Lord's own word, he fully believed would come in that generation—he was already one of those "alive and remaining" unto that appearing, since he had witnessed the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, since Christ had been revealed to him on the road to Damascus and had been revealed *in* him, and since he had preached that Son as the Desire of all nations to Greeks and barbarians. This was no play on words. By it he met the Thessalonians' perplexity, removed their fear about their dead, enlarged their sense of the Lord's revelation, and gave them fresh assurance of the revelation still to come—so near—by treating it as one of a series of events, many already fulfilled.

If we have got past this first difficulty, the rest of the passage will not trouble us; indeed, if we accept it, it will be as full of comfort as Paul told the Thessalonians it was. He certainly affirms the Lord would descend from heaven with the archangel's voice and the trump of God. If we believe our Lord's own words about the earthquakes and the distress of nations in that generation, we may well believe a trumpet did sound and an archangel's voice was heard by mortal ears. It does not matter, for Paul's statement, whether many or any of those bound in "the muddy vesture of decay" recognized it or knew it meant the Lord's descent. What he declares is that those who had fallen asleep before Christ's earthly appearing would hear His voice and rise, as those did who heard it in the days of His humiliation—not, like them, to return and walk again among men, but to be with Him and share His glory. And he says that he and the Thessalonians who had not fallen asleep before Christ's appearing, having survived to that great day, would share the same blessing, since none higher was possible. Only there would be this difference: since Christ died and rose, the grave could no longer be seen as receiving those He had redeemed. Even the word *sleep* would no longer fit. The departure of those in Christ would truly be a translation—they would not sink but rise, not go down to meet the worms but ascend to meet Christ. The phrase "meeting the Lord in the air" seems deliberately used to discourage the carnal notion of His coming down as an earthly king to reign visibly. This translation was an object of faith, not sight. The Thessalonians were not to imagine Him robed in the purple of mockery, but coming in the glory of His ascension, the glory of the Father and the holy angels, that those who shared His sufferings might share it.

I said this very literal reading—the most literal I can conceive, and the most in keeping with the rest of the New Testament—must have brought great comfort to the Thessalonians, and may to us. If events soon to occur showed them that the Lord who died and rose was truly present and reigning over the universe, then, however terrible in themselves, those events would fulfil the hopes of one dispensation and open a higher one. They would mark a crisis in the history of the universe that affected not chiefly its visible conditions but the relations between the living and the dead, and set a wholly new meaning on earthly life and death. And if we had courage to believe that what Paul said actually happened, and that we live in that better age he looked toward, we might claim as ours now many privileges we suppose *may be* ours in some distant future; we might see that far more has been done for us and for mankind than we ever dreamed; and we might look with far greater confidence to what will be done when the mists clear and we walk in the full light of God's face.

But to gain that comfort we must attend, as the Thessalonians had to, to the words that follow: "But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that it should be written to you. For you yourselves perfectly know that a day of the Lord as a thief at night so cometh. When they say, Peace and safety, then a sudden destruction is standing over them... But you, brethren, are not in darkness that the day should come upon you as a thief. For ye are all sons of light and sons of day... let us not sleep, as the rest, but watch and be sober... having put upon us the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. Because God hath not appointed us to wrath, but unto the procuring of salvation, through that Lord of us, Jesus Christ... that whether we wake or whether we sleep, we may live together with Him." (Lachmann reads "thieves," a tempting change one would adopt if the previous verse did not seem to forbid it, and if it were not too obvious a substitute for the usual reading.) Here lay the great correction of both their irregular conduct and their confused belief. The day of the Lord had presented itself to them as a date to be worked out by calculations which, though drawn from the prophets, followed the very methods of the astrologers and soothsayers the prophets denounced. Paul did not want to make them doubt the day was near—that they were on its eve, indeed *in* it, though its sun had not yet climbed high—but such restless reckoning about particular events and supposed predictions hindered rather than helped their confidence and diligence. By "a day" he meant not twenty-four hours but day as opposed to night, light as opposed to darkness—as he explains to the Romans and Corinthians, and here with more detail because of their particular errors. The more we watch his language, the more we see with what divine skill he opens their minds to a deeper grasp of the truth while giving it a practical force and awe they were likely to lose, and how all his corrections encourage rather than dampen their faith and hope. They had not thought too highly of their present standing; they had only made the future an excuse for belittling it. They were sons of light and of day *now*, not to become so later. Yet they were to expect blessings not yet received, a full salvation from all that crushed them. That hope was a helmet, the best guard against the deadliest assaults; keeping it, they stayed awake; losing it, they would sleep.

The exhortations that follow, though fit for any Church, suit this one's temper especially. One can easily see how restless speculation about the coming time, and the advantage it gave clever diviners over homelier teachers, would keep them from knowing and valuing their appointed guides and their quiet labors of love. Though Paul witnessed to their brotherly love, the Church's peace must often have been broken by rival predictors. An impatience of government, matched by a loss of the gift of governing, may have bred unruly spirits needing admonition. The despondent would be left uncomforted by those busy about times and seasons. There would be intolerance of the weak and that pride of half-knowledge most opposed to sympathy and long-suffering. Some instance of revenge or bitterness toward outsiders may have prompted the warning against returning evil for evil. The other exhortation—to pursue good toward one another and toward all—reminded them they were a Church, a body of witnesses whose conduct to each other testified to the world. "Rejoice always" and "pray without ceasing," like the like commands to the Philippians, gain new force from the tribulations both faced. "In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus unto you" reminded them of the truth that persecuted men, and men expecting a judgment on others, easily forget—that God's will is a will to all good, and they were right only when rejoicing in it and yielding to it. The Thessalonians seemed less likely than others to quench the Spirit or despise prophesyings; but the Spirit of God is not the spirit of divination, and prophecies, in the Apostolic sense, are not predictions. Our interpretations have cruelly mangled the beautiful precepts that follow: "Prove all things. Hold on to the good. Hold off from every form of evil." For we have taught a doctrine well suited to our cowardice, but wholly against Christ and His Apostles—that we must abstain from all that *appears* evil in men's eyes. He had told them to test everything to see its worth, and yet we make him tell them to shrink from whatever looks bad to those who judge by appearance and not righteously! Had he preached so at the close of a letter all about Christ's day and judgment, the contradiction would be flagrant. But he is guilty of no such thing. He ends his exhortations with a prayer—not that they abstain from what seems evil to evil men, but that the God of peace would make them wholly holy, and preserve their whole spirit, soul, and body blameless to the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

No one, I think, has ever doubted the connection between the two Thessalonian Epistles. It is closer than that between the two to the Corinthians: the subject is the same in both, and the second is commonly, and perhaps rightly, thought to have arisen from mistakes about the first. From its opening it is clear the Thessalonians' tribulations had continued and grown, while Paul says their faith, patience, and love grew too. This, he says, is "an evidence of the righteous judgment of God, to the end that ye may be made worthy of the kingdom of God; for which also ye are suffering: seeing that it is a righteous thing with God to recompense to those who trouble you, tribulation, and to you the troubled, rest with us in the unveiling of the Lord Jesus from heaven, with the angels of his power, in the flame of fire, giving out recompense to them who know not God, and to them who do not obey the Gospel... Who shall receive the judgment of eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints..." I quote this partly to show how much Paul is occupied here, as in the first letter, with a coming judgment, and partly so the reader may weigh the words he uses for its nature and compare them with like expressions elsewhere. No passage would be so readily taken as a classic and central one on the whole question of judgment and punishment. Let us examine it, to get some light on subjects that so deeply concern all men in all ages.

The Thessalonians' faith, patience, and love were, Paul believed, means to their being made (or counted) worthy of the kingdom of God. If that kingdom is one of righteousness, peace, and joy, then patience, hope, and love are the instruments by which it is enjoyed, as a clear eye is the instrument by which a landscape is enjoyed. So our Lord taught in the Sermon on the Mount: the poor in spirit would have the kingdom, the pure in heart would see God—not paid for these qualities by future gifts, but, being poor in spirit, not craving to rule themselves but glad to have the true Lord rule their hearts; and, being pure in heart, able to know Him in whom they live. The righteous judgment Paul awaits is that which declares who are living as children of God's kingdom; and the righteous judgment on the persecutors is its opposite—the trouble and confusion belonging to those who exalt themselves and trample others. In the revelation of Jesus Christ with His angels—that great daylight of the universe showing all things as they are—there will be recompense to those who have not known God and do not obey the Gospel. This recompense he calls eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and the glory of His power. The wicked man's recompense corresponds exactly to the righteous man's: God's true judgment settles the condition of both, and each gets what he sought. As knowing God and being like Him is the one's reward, not knowing Him and being without Him is the other's punishment. This is called eternal destruction, the most terrible state a spiritual being can reach. We are not told how long it lasts. Time enters as little here as in our Lord's discourse in Matthew twenty-five; in both, the language describes a moral condition, and in both the revelation of Christ, which shows each person for what he is, separates those on the right from those on the left. Nor must we forget this judgment, like that in Matthew twenty-five, was the one that would close that age of the world. Those who had called Jesus a blasphemer for saying He was the Son of God would find out what Being they had worshipped under God's name, and what Being they had rejected when they said the crucified Man was not His true image. What better blessing could a faithful man want than to see in that crucified Man the real King of the universe, the full glory of the Father? So Paul, while cherishing the Thessalonians' hope in this judgment of Christ, shows plainly what was to be feared and hoped in it. It was to be earnestly desired because it was true, not because it favored Christians, Jews, or Gentiles—because it would bring out the true image of God and confound all false images set up by anyone, Jew, heathen, or Christian.

And now, on the strength of Christ's appearing and that blessed gathering into Him which fulfils their life as members of a Church, he begs them not to be quickly shaken or agitated—by spirit, word, or letter claiming to be from him—into thinking the day of the Lord was coming instantly. "Let no one deceive you in any wise," he says, "because it will not come unless the apostasy come first, and there be revealed the man of sin, the adversary, that lifts himself above every one called a god, and above every form of worship, so as to set himself in the temple of God, showing that he is God." I could spend volumes on this if I ranged over eighteen centuries asking which famous name best fits and fulfils the description. But since reverence for Paul's words and the harmony of Scripture have forced us to suppose he speaks of events in his own day, I set such questions aside and only try to learn from the passage itself what kind of manifestation is meant. Then we shall better judge any historical facts that answered to the words at that time, and may afterward deal fairly with all the alleged later fulfilments.

There is no doubt, then—few have doubted—that this describes the appearing of an Antichrist, anticipating the appearing of the Christ Paul has spoken of so much. Whatever is opposed to the lowliness of the Son of Man—to the King who came meek on an ass, to Him who ministered instead of being ministered to, who gave Himself for the world—is gathered and concentrated here. The man of sin is set against the Lord our Righteousness; the son of perdition against the Saviour; he who exalts himself above all called God against Him who made Himself of no reputation; he who sits in God's temple showing himself as God against Him who said, "Father, not my will but Thine." Clearly a power is described that claims rule over both the Gentile and the Jewish world, exalting itself above every Gentile worship and proclaiming its superiority to the one Jehovah. The word *apostasy* seems to mean that reverence was paid to this power not only by Jews and heathen but by professed disciples of Jesus. Now, since the deified Emperor always strove to set himself above all called God and to claim all the empire's gods and worships as his own, since much in the old Roman law and faith resisted this, since the temple at Jerusalem was the one abiding witness against it, and every holy man upholding its true worship was a personal check on this final brute-worship, I take it that the whole period from Augustus onward was an approach to this antichristian idea, but that it was never embodied even in Nero. It is no new theory of mine—biblical scholars have often suggested it—that Vitellius shows all the marks presented here. That is better considered when we examine the Apocalypse. I do not ask anyone to accept it, nor pledge myself to it. I feel the uncertainty of even the best such identifications the more strongly as I feel the truth and certainty of Paul's assertion that such a power did exist, and had not yet reached its worst development.

He asks whether they remember he told them these things while with him. Their special opposition from the Jews made such teaching more needful for them than for others. He could not tell them Jesus was, or would be shown to be, the Christ without telling them what a different, opposite idea of a Christ was abroad, and how the world in all its parts would at last find a representative of that idea. He says they also knew what the restraining influence was that kept this mystery of iniquity from breaking out fully at once. Later he seems to make this restraint a person: "He that lets will let till he be taken out of the way." Since Paul must have looked for the great divine center of resistance to the antichristian principle in Jerusalem, and must have felt its Pharisees and Sadducees more possessed by that principle than any worshipper of Jupiter, it is a not unreasonable supposition, held by many, that he located the restraining power in the church at Jerusalem, and especially in the Apostle James. The effect of his "being taken out of the way," on the city that revered his righteousness, and still more on the Church, would answer strikingly to the words of the brother-Apostle so often called his rival. When that great obstacle was removed, the mystery of iniquity long at work seemed to burst forth most mightily where least expected, and nothing but the destruction of the city and temple—so nearly contemporary with the fall of the Capitol, the downfall of Vitellius, and the beginning of a better era—could have kept that hideous, godless tyranny, upheld by all lying wonders and the tricks of diviners, from fixing itself permanently over the world. To the old prophets the overthrow of such a power would have seemed a day of the Lord indeed, far more wonderful and pregnant than the fall of Sennacherib or Belshazzar. But linked with the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man, it could be seen as nothing but His appearing to claim the kingdom He had proved to be His Father's, which the power of evil sought to wrest from Him.

On this firm ground Paul can raise thanksgivings and arguments as earnest as in the first letter. He thanks God for choosing them as a first-fruit unto salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. He prays God would comfort their hearts and strengthen them in every good word and work. He entreats, as he might command, that they keep the rules he gave and separate from every brother who walks disorderly. He explains this by bringing out more plainly a charge he had hinted at before: some were not workers but overworkers—busybodies. "If a man will not work, neither let him eat" is his rule, first shown in his own example. He will have no trifling here—no dainty saints so busy with their spirits they neglect their manual callings, no waiters for the Lord who will not do what the Lord commands. There must be discipline with such people, only they must be warned as brothers, not treated as enemies. Then he asks the Lord of peace to give them peace always in every place, and prays that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ might be with them all.

#### THE PASTORAL EPISTLES.

The same objection raised against the Epistle to the Colossians is raised against these letters. With the Epistle to Timothy, the objection I already discussed—that Gnosticism is dated too early—is pressed even harder. But the further objection, that these letters assume a Church organization that did not exist until after Paul's death, bears on them as pastoral letters, and touches far less the letters addressed to the various societies in Italy, Greece, or Asia.

The subject is interesting, and I would be neglecting the purpose of these lectures if I passed it by. There is good ground for saying that the nature of the Church in the Apostle's day should not be inferred from what we read of it even at the start of the second century. For example, it would be a great mistake to think the Roman Empire's feeling toward Christians under its *worst* rulers in the first period was as hostile as under its *best* rulers later. Nero treated Christians no more cruelly than his other subjects; he persecuted them at all only by accident, impulse, or temporary convenience. Trajan persecuted them on principle, from the very policy that made him kind to his subjects generally. That vast difference presupposes others. Since it was the Church's organization in the great cities that alarmed intelligent rulers like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, there is ample excuse for supposing such organization was lacking earlier. And this view is strengthened by noting how little the canonical epistles say of what later seemed the most conspicuous feature of Christian society. "The names of bishops, presbyters, or deacons occur here and there in the letters to the Churches, but their appearance seems accidental; the doctrine and even the practice of the epistle seem hardly affected by whether they are present or absent. So it is easy to suppose they were inserted later, when they were felt indispensable to the Church's existence. And where they do come forward prominently, in these letters, is that not a reason to suspect *those* letters are spurious?"

If the conclusion we reached about the Epistle to the Thessalonians is right, we must certainly expect the Church to stand out much more substantially in the coming age, after the great crisis Paul speaks of, than before. Consider that crisis and the reason is plain. The national organization the Jew regarded as sacred and divine—the world's central organization—was to be shaken and broken up. The expectation was that the Church would emerge from this wreck as the root of a new human community. Only in that form would it be the fully developed society of which Pentecost's society was the germ; only then could the world the Cæsars ruled feel it as a rival kingdom. Before that, Romans still saw it as one of the Jewish sects, as the hostile Jews always sought to represent it. How did it seem to the Church's own members, teachers, and Apostles? We have seen this cannot be answered simply; the answer emerges gradually in different aspects. James and Peter were anxious to recognize the old Jewish organization, to speak of the twelve tribes, to make their countrymen aware of their peculiar calling, to present Christ as the son of David come to gather them though scattered among the Gentiles. These Apostles of the circumcision were of course reluctant to seem to be *setting up* a society; they wished only to witness for the true Lord of the society they belonged to and gloried in. Still they *were* a body of witnesses. They needed ministers; deacons were chosen to meet a new necessity; the apostles held the office Christ gave them; the reviving family character of the old Jewish commonwealth suggested the position of the Elders. When an *ecclesia* of Jews and Gentiles grew up in cities Paul visited, all the various functions and gifts appeared, as in the Epistles to Corinth and Ephesus, and were traced to the one Lord and one Spirit. Everything necessary to a body politic was found in each. And Paul carefully reminded each that it was a divine society called out by God, not one he had built or could organize. Here, as at Jerusalem, we hear of the Elder and the Deacon—but their existence is assumed, with no formal account of their creation. They unfolded like trees or flowers, not inserted by any plan or paper constitution. The other name, "Overseers," so important later, appears with no formality in these Epistles; the name is full of meaning, but the meaning is not drawn out. We feel we are in an order—but an order set within another it is not yet able to displace, one that, until God decrees its end, is dear and venerable to the Apostle of the Gentiles as to the Apostles of the circumcision.

My conclusion is this. There is nothing in the Epistles to the Churches, and I think we shall find nothing in the pastoral Epistles, that anticipates the complete, expanded society we meet after the Apostles have left the earth. But there are all the seeds and preparations for that developed order—just as we found at Colosse the seeds of the various later forms of Gnosticism. The pastoral Epistles carry us one step further than the Ecclesiastical Epistles in the history of the Church's constitution. But it is just the step made necessary by what we read there, the step that makes the facts of the second century not incredible or unintelligible.

##### FIRST EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY.

It is generally agreed that Overseer and Elder are not carefully distinguished in Acts or in the Ecclesiastical Epistles. But when someone is left to watch over a Church's affairs, we feel at once that the first name suits his function and the second clearly does not. Without assuming that "Elder" necessarily implied age, we may take it that a young man like Timothy would not have borne that name in a Church he belonged to locally. And the opening of this Epistle gives the clearest support for my remark that the Church's offices evolved by a divine law, not by an artificial rule.

The Apostle is traveling from Ephesus to Macedonia. He sees at Ephesus certain people introducing strange doctrines, giving heed to fables and endless genealogies that stir up disputes. He wants Timothy to stay and warn these men of the harm they may cause. Here at once, in a particular case, we see how the need of a Christian overseer might arise. From this starting point we may learn by degrees what other duties fall to him and what else his office implies.

The phrase "interminable genealogies" is thought to carry us a step further into the history of Gnosticism than the Epistle to the Colossians did. The descent of the various æons and their spiritual relationships are so prominent in the second-century heresies that we assume these must be meant. The opinion seems not unreasonable, but Paul's surrounding language obliges us to qualify it. These genealogists were clearly Jews who set great store by the law. If they owed anything to Persian or Greek teaching, it was wholly subordinate to what they took from the Hebrew sages. So I think we should read the words by what we know of Jewish notions about angels and archangels rather than by the Gnostics in Tertullian or Irenæus. We may hereafter need to reckon with the Jewish element in Gnosticism much more than some modern historians allow. At all events, the men Paul set Timothy to control substituted law for Gospel, and thereby, as Paul says, "hindered that which is the true end and issue of the commandment, love out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned."

The words we translate "godly edifying which is in faith" are made a little harder by Lachmann, who reads οἰκονομίαν (stewardship) rather than οἰκοδομίαν (building). But either reading—Lachmann's perhaps even more—hints at the character of Timothy's office, borne out by the rest of the letter. Preserving the Church's order and all that made for true fellowship among its members was to be his first and special aim. He was to understand distinctions in order to preserve unity; to keep notions from replacing belief and action; and for that end to detect what is true in each notion, so that the assumption and exclusiveness that made it false could be rejected. The great opposition of Law and Gospel supplies the test at once. "The law is good, if a man use it lawfully." But the Law exists to restrain and condemn crimes that oppose the healthful Gospel of the glory of God, with which Paul felt entrusted. To put the mere prohibition of evil in place of the power that delivers from it, the righteousness of letters in place of the righteousness of a Person, the righteousness that merely condemns the sinner in place of the righteousness that saves him out of sin—that destroys the life of the Church and of the individual alike. Whoever truly watches over one will also protect the other.

Then, after asserting this great theological principle Timothy is always to keep in view, comes one of those passages of personal feeling and thanksgiving that seem at first to break the argument but in fact bring out its meaning better than the plainest logic could. He thanks Christ, who enabled him for the ministry into which He put him, having judged him faithful—him who was before a blasphemer, persecutor, and injurious. Why do these words come in here rather than elsewhere? Why speak of receiving mercy because he did it ignorantly in unbelief, of grace abounding with faith and love, of the saying more fitted for a young convert than a bishop—"Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first"? Because in this way he shows most strikingly how the Law could not raise a man who kept its precepts most diligently out of the most evil habits of mind, into which he fell through his very zeal for the Law's authority; because he would show the Gospel doing for him what the Law could not; because he would proclaim to all sinners the blessings he felt he had a claim to only as a sinner. So the words that follow gain full force: "on this account I found mercy, that in me first Christ Jesus might show forth all longsuffering for a pattern to them that should hereafter believe on Him unto life eternal." He himself is the sign, to the hardest legalist and the most corrupt Gentile alike, of the power in Christ to raise them out of both conditions and bring them to that eternal life men crave and find in Him. And perhaps it is not over-refinement to think that in "eternal life," and in the doxology that follows—"to the King of the Æons, the incorruptible, unseen, only God, honor and glory for the æons out of æons, Amen"—there is a silent allusion to the opinions beginning to attach to these words, and a striking testimony against them, since Paul draws all thought away from periods and from spiritual beings to the one original ground of both. However that may be, Timothy's commission clearly rests on this Gospel and its relation to the law, as made necessary by the confused teaching of Rabbinical speculators and allegorists. The words "according to the prophecies which went before on thee"—or rather that were pointing toward thee—seem to say clearly that Paul was not choosing his delegate arbitrarily but conforming to indications that, in every man's case if he will look, declare what he is meant for, and that an Apostle could only regard as divine. I cannot explain the words "in them" in the next sentence; perhaps they mean Timothy should wage his warfare remembering those warnings and foretellings of his calling, needing them when his belief in it grew weak. In any case, the words mean his life, in himself and in the Church, could be nothing but a fight, and that the fight would be won if he put on the armor of faith and of a good conscience—one, he hints, being necessary to keep the other safe. He had seen a tendency to separate them growing in the Church: Hymenæus and Alexander had failed to keep a clear conscience, and so their faith ran aground and was shipwrecked. He had delivered them to Satan—the same formula, doubtless with the same meaning, as with the Corinthian offender—not to shut them out of the kingdom, but to teach them not to blaspheme.

The second chapter opens with hints about a Church's order. Nothing is more worth noting than Paul's first exhortation on this subject: "I exhort then first of all that there be made petitions, supplications, thanksgivings for all men." The Church's order is founded on these prayers. The man left expressly at Ephesus to guard against strange doctrines is told "first of all" to see that prayers are made for all men. If his aim were only to block Gnosticism, no diviner means could be conceived, for Gnosticism is by nature separating and exclusive, busy dividing the initiate from the ordinary Christian and man. But since Paul's zeal against the innovators was wholly subordinate to asserting the Gospel and the divine kingdom, we can assign no lower ground for this command than that he saw common united prayer for all men as the very expression of the Church's mind, the sign of its calling, the means of its triumphs. He adds, "for kings and all those in authority, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all piety and reverence." But lest this be mistaken for the ground of the prayer—lest Christians think they pray for Nero to disarm his hostility or to escape his cruelties—he adds at once, "For this is good and acceptable in the sight of our Saviour God, who willeth all men to be saved, and to come to a knowledge of the truth." A startling assertion whose strangeness we can hardly grasp. You are to pray for all men, even the worst tyrant; because it is not proper in men's eyes but good and acceptable to God, who hates mere appearances, since He wills that *all* men be saved and come to know the truth. He must mean that the prayers, and so the life, of a Church—which depends on and is realized in its prayers—are possible only while it acknowledges a Will to good, a Will to salvation deeper than anything Christians can imagine, so deep that we must suppose the whole world, and the very worst man in it, an object of God's care, and therefore a fit object for the care of those whose wills seek to conform to His. And lest this Will be thought other than the one Paul preached, he adds: "there is one God, one Mediator also of God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, He that hath given Himself a ransom for all"—the testimony to be made in its own times—"unto which have I been appointed a herald and an apostle. I say truth, I do not lie, a teacher of nations in faith and truth." That Will that all men be saved is the Will revealed in the one Mediator Jesus Christ. When we call Him a Mediator or a ransom, we mean this or we mean nothing. He is a ransom for all or for none. If anyone is excluded, the Incarnation and Sacrifice mean nothing; there is no Gospel from heaven to earth. So Paul speaks vehemently—as those who know his style know he does only when some great point is at stake, a matter of life and death. He swears he is no liar but a truth-speaker when he says this Gospel, so contrary to men's narrow notions, so outrageous to the pride of Jews and Christians, is the good news entrusted to him, and that if he may not say it, he is no teacher of the Gentiles at all. Such language is not new to us; we have found it in every Epistle. But here it comes out more broadly than almost anywhere, because he would have Timothy understand that unless he sets this as the ground of the Ephesian Church's life, he fails in his office and is no true overseer.

Then he shows this united prayer as what keeps the men and women of the Church in their proper relation—uniting them in Christ, yet teaching them their divine, original distinction, and the subordination due from the weaker to the stronger. He wills that the men pray everywhere, "lifting up holy hands without wrath and disputation"—for these are *their* special temptations, rising as readily in the Church as in the world, from theology as from business, and cured only by the awe and fellowship of prayer. He wills the women to join too, avoiding the outward vanities of dress that are *their* special temptation, which interfere with humble, reverent prayer, and from which such prayer and its higher graces are the deliverance. But the woman might have another weakness—not from her own sex, but from ambition to be like the man. She was to pray with the man; there they were one and equal. But he was to teach and she to learn; quietness was her ornament. Adam was formed first, then Eve; the woman was deceived; the man fell by yielding to her. Yet the promise of a child, which was the first woman's deliverance, shall be a deliverance and blessing to all who follow her, if they remain in faith, love, and holiness, with modesty.

After laying down these fundamental principles about the Church, Paul turns to the office of its guardian. Most who read the description of a Christian overseer or bishop in the third chapter have been somewhat startled that the ideal is not loftier, that the qualities named are mostly what one would ask of an ordinary superintendent of a village or city, not the transcendent spiritual qualities we imagine belonged to a ruler in Apostolic times. Much is to be learnt from this. Had Paul been setting up an order separated from the world, pursuing objects the world had no part in, this commonplace morality—forbidding a ruler to be "a striker, given to much wine, greedy of filthy lucre"—would have been passed over or assumed, and only the marks of the abstracted, spiritual man dwelt on. But since he believed he spoke of a society God, not he, was setting up in the world, one meant to explain what human society is, to be light and salt, he would rather assume the inward spiritual qualities implied in its very nature and its relation to the invisible God, and would show its ruler how in his own person he might display that simple, broad, manly character the world honors but cannot produce—how in daily life he might prove there is another life than the animal one, another end than money, a power to restrain passion not in those who cultivate indifference but in those full of burning zeal. Probably a closer look at Church history would show that keeping this gracious, orderly, humane bearing amid the provocations and degrading influences of society has been harder, rarer, mightier, bringing less honor to man and more glory to God, than maintaining the separate ascetic devotion often set up against it. Some, like Bernard, were called to that other service, and deserve all admiration and love. Between the dangers of the two positions there may be little to choose, and whoever rushes into either without a vocation may bitterly repent it. But it must be a great mistake, against Paul's teaching, to hold that he who can order God's household and keep in it the character of a Christian family is not bearing as true a witness for the kingdom as those who retire from men and leave the impression that heaven is for solitaries, not for society. If people read the Epistles literally, without importing their own notions, it would be almost needless to add that Paul does not merely permit but commands that Overseers be taken from those already husbands and fathers. I see no way to avoid this inference; and the further we read in Church history, the more we find its explanation in the nature and temptations of the office.

Those who have accepted the maxim of three orders in the Church without weighing it are puzzled to find no mention of the presbyter here, Paul passing straight from overseer to deacon. I stress this precisely because I value the presbyter's office highly, and because I do *not* think the usual objections hold against the view that his office in the developed Church is the flowering of the Jewish priest's office. I welcome the omission here as proof that, while the Jewish polity stood and sacrifices were offered daily in the Temple, his office—though it existed in the Church, with a far more domestic character than the Jewish office it was translated from—had not yet acquired its full meaning, and had more to do with the Church's discipline than its worship. This confirms remarks I made on the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which I shall return when I connect that Epistle with the Epistles to the Gentile-city churches. I must note that the allusions to deacons are in the same spirit as those on overseers. All show a Divine order, but one that, because divine, is also human and *natural*—natural as opposed to artificial. The deacon is to be tested before admission, and a chief test is that he be the husband of one wife, ruling his children and house well. His wife too is part of the Church order; her gravity, sobriety, and freedom from gossip are signs of a divine calling. Here as throughout the New Testament, work or service is regarded not chiefly as a means to reward but as itself a reward. He who does a lesser work well may hope for a wider sphere; but to be discharged from work in this world or any other would be a penalty, not a prize.

The famous passage in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter has caused endless dispute—on one side, surely needless. Those who feel the Bible from first to last sets forth God's manifestation in Christ can hardly care whether the word θεός (God) stands here. If it does not, perhaps they may connect it with "the living God" in verse 15, treating what comes between as parenthetical; or connect it, against grammar, with "*mystery*," though then the masculine needs explaining; or understand "*Christ*," the relative used oddly for the demonstrative. In no way can the doctrine depend on this passage. In every way it must witness to some divine mystery that "was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up into glory." Since such language is monstrous except of a person, those who believe the mystery at all will identify it with a person. Far more important than this word-fighting is Paul's assertion that the Church is a Church of the living God, and that the truth on which it stands and which it upholds is the union of flesh and spirit, visible and invisible, human and divine.

The reference right after to those who in later times would fall from the faith explains, I think, the teaching Paul dreaded at Ephesus and how he wanted Timothy to counter it. Some may think the doctrines he names—forbidding marriage, commanding abstinence from meats—do not deserve such strong language or signal a coming apostasy. But taken with all he has been saying, and especially these last words, one sees that whatever despised human relationships or led men to think the earth unredeemed was in fact a denial that Christ was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, received into glory—a denial of the Gospel entrusted to Paul, destroying the very meaning and life of the Church, which exists to witness the reconciling of heaven and earth. Such a revolt also denied the great truth the Jewish people were set apart to proclaim, indeed every truth implied in civil polity among the nations. If every creature of God is not good, if we may not thank God for it, if it is not made holy by His word and prayer—the evil being not in things but in our selfish appropriation of them—then the earth is the devil's property, and Christ's baptism, temptation, and agony have not taken it from his hands. All Paul's exhortations, showing that a truly heavenly society must be a truly earthly one, that there is no inward spiritual root from which the fruits of common social morality do not spring, had been striking at these errors. He now bids Timothy openly denounce them as profane, old wives' fables. But to do so effectively he must exercise himself in real piety, which holds the promise of the life that now is and the life to come. Paul is not here preaching the doctrine he held devoutly as a Pharisee and renounced when God revealed His Son in him—that men are paid for piety by prizes in this world and a larger reversion in the next. His piety was itself the entering into a divine life, now and hereafter. He exercised himself, and bade Timothy do so, in faith and trust in a God "who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those who trust in Him." For this he labored and agonized, hoping in the living God, this Saviour of all; and to keep that hope he had to fight principalities and powers in high places. It was the cause of all the hatred of those who cast out his name as evil.

The exhortations that follow concern Church-order and government, and will be best understood by those of longest experience, even in a commercial western city rather than Ephesus, in the nineteenth century rather than the first. Timothy is told to let no one despise his youth, to remember the gift in him given through prophecy with the laying on of the presbytery's hands. Having this gift, he can be a pattern of the believers in word, conduct, love, faith, purity. He can give himself to reading, exhortation, instruction, dwelling in these things so that his progress becomes plain to all. He is to exhort older men as fathers, younger as brothers, older women as mothers, younger as sisters, with all purity. He is to respect the true widow, but not provide for widows who have children or descendants to care for them; to let those care for their own is acceptable to God. There were to be no "Corbans" in the Christian Church: anyone who did not care for his own house, especially his relations, had denied the faith and was worse than an infidel. Timothy was not to respect people zealous for the Church's work who neglected their own. For this reason younger widows were not generally to be used for Church service; they were apt to be idle triflers and gossips. Better for the younger women—even, from the context, the younger widows—to marry, bear children, and rule their households. Elders who had presided well (here we have the name, and a not very distinct allusion to a special kind of government) should be held worthy of double honor—meaning, I think, some financial provision as well as respect, for he quotes, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn."

Then the discipline of offenders is touched on. No charge against an elder is to be heard except before two or three witnesses. Offenders are to be rebuked openly before all, that the rest may fear. Timothy is solemnly charged to remember these rules. He stands in the presence of God, of Jesus Christ, and the elect angels; how dare he let prejudice or partiality enter his decisions? Here again the Church's spiritual principle—that men are actually brought into God's presence and the invisible world—becomes the security for ordinary human justice. And it cannot be repeated too often: whenever churches or churchmen forget or disbelieve their high calling and God's continual judgment of their hearts, they become far *more* unjust, partial, and unprincipled than states or statesmen at their worst. They become corrupters of states, or, while statesmen keep any sense of moral duty, they draw down righteous reproof and bitter contempt. So we should pray to fall into the hands of any court rather than a religious one, unless it is truly possessed by the truth Paul here presses so gravely on the bishop of Ephesus. Timothy is further told not to lay hands suddenly on anyone, however eager to send out laborers, lest he share in other men's sins—their false teaching and bad example becoming his. He is to keep himself pure, and careful of his body's health as of his spirit's. How the next passage connects with this I cannot say, nor its exact meaning. It might suggest that all bodily weaknesses are in some sense signs of inward evils, yet that those in whom such weaknesses show are no worse off than those whose evils stay hidden; there is the same righteous judgment, the same revealing to the man of what he is. This might comfort Timothy, whose bodily weaknesses perhaps discouraged him and, hindering his activity, seemed sentences of God. Both good and evil deeds, Paul seems to say, come out into view before the day when all secrets are revealed; and since what makes manifest is light, we are to receive such discoveries as from Him who is light. I do not affirm this is Paul's meaning, but I have found no other that fits as naturally here.

Then arose the questions that constantly troubled the early Church about master and slave. I will return to this with the Epistle to Philemon. Here the principle of Divine order—ultimately the great principle of civil freedom—is asserted. Let the Christian slave show all respect and honor to the heathen master, out of reverence for God's name and doctrine. Let him honor the Christian master all the more because they are brothers. Then their services become mutual, benefits given and returned, and what was a bondage becomes a relation.

These plain practical exhortations Paul calls healthy words, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, the doctrine according to godliness. Those who set themselves against this teaching, who have a more refined Christianity, he treats with little ceremony. Such men are puffed up, have no real knowledge, and love controversies and word-fights, from which spring envy, strife, evil suspicions, the busy quarrels of men corrupted in reason and estranged from truth, who suppose godliness a means of gain. He dwells on this charge, feeling he has touched the very root of the evil. In that rich trading city, trade notions were sure to mingle with Christian thought. In his allusions to bonded goods and the seal, Paul had shown how trade could be turned to spiritual profit—but it could as easily be turned the opposite way, infecting all visions of the spiritual world and rendering them useless for reforming the visible one. The fine Gnostic speculators were really *trading* speculators, teaching men how to get a greater return for their sacrifices than others, how by certain trains of thought or outward rules to increase their happiness here or hereafter. Paul admits godliness is great gain when joined with contentment; the poorest man with food and clothing has an infinite treasure, for though we bring nothing into the world and take nothing out, we may have God as our eternal portion. "But those who will be rich fall into a temptation and a snare, and many foolish and mischievous lusts, which drown men in ruin and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil, through aiming at which some have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." The reader knows these words. But has he weighed them alongside the warnings against false teachers just before, and the whole letter? Has he seen that the love of money is the root of all evil not only because it draws men from the spiritual world, but because it makes that world a mere collection of prizes to be seized, so that selfishness becomes the law of heaven as of earth?

"But thou, O man of God, fly these things," he goes on; "pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness." These are the true prizes of the kingdom, the treasures brought near to men, which Paul calls his dear son to claim for himself and his brethren. "Fight the good fight of faith"—believe earnestly that these are God's own nature, given to you in Christ. "Lay hold of eternal life"—the life of a spirit, of a man, opposed to that of an animal, of time or sense—for you were called to it and confessed the good confession that it is yours before many witnesses. And you are not the first: "Christ Jesus witnessed it before Pontius Pilate. Therefore I call upon you, as in His sight and the sight of God who quickens the dead, to keep the commandment spotless until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will make in His own time, who is the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone hath immortality, who dwells in light inaccessible, whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be honor and eternal power. Amen."

Here, as in every such rapturous passage of Paul, the practical aim is never for a moment forgotten. He is still applying a direct remedy to a gross evil. This declaration of the heavenly wealth laid up in God, belonging to the spirit of man, ends in the exhortation it should never be parted from: "The rich in this world command not to have proud thoughts, nor to hope in the uncertainty of wealth, but in the God who giveth us all things richly for enjoyment; to do good, to be rich in noble works, ready to give and share, treasuring up for themselves a good foundation for the future, that they may have hold of that which is truly life." Here is the proper earthly sequel to his vision of heavenly things.

And the whole letter is wound up with an exhortation to Timothy himself that shows its perfect unity, and how the purpose Paul set at the start stayed with him to the end: "O Timothy, preserve the trust given thee, turning away from the profane empty talkings and oppositions of what is falsely called knowledge, which some professing have gone astray about the faith."

##### SECOND EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY.

The second Epistle to Timothy is somewhat more personal than the first—personal about both writer and receiver. But all its indications about the Church of Ephesus are like those we have already noticed; only Paul's sense of the evils from the false teaching he denounced is keener and more plainly expressed.

The passage from verse three to verse fifteen of the first chapter seems to show there had been great discouragement in Timothy, and perhaps the timidity that discouragement breeds. As always, Paul first dwells on the tokens of faith and earnestness Timothy had shown, and strengthens him by the example of his mother and grandmother, before hinting at his weaknesses. But neither early zeal nor others' lessons could sustain his position at Ephesus. Paul reminds him of the gift of God in him by the laying on of his hands, and that he has received a Spirit—not of cowardice, but of power, love, and a sound mind. Assured of that mighty Helper, he can bid Timothy "not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of himself His bondsman, but be a fellow-sufferer in the Gospel by the strength of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to His own purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, and now manifested through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." I think we have never felt the force of these words, or how their parts relate—why speak of a purpose before time, a manifestation in time, a calling and salvation that do not depend on men's acts but originate them, of the death Christ destroyed, the life and immortality He brought to light—until we connect them with the feebleness and despondency of a minister of the Gospel, and see how the loss of any clause would rob him of something he needed to keep from utter hopelessness. Then comes, as always, Paul's own experience and sympathy: he too is a herald, apostle, and teacher of this Gospel like Timothy, a sufferer for it, with every temptation to be ashamed of it. "But he knows in whom he has believed, and is persuaded He is able to keep that trust against that day." Let Timothy keep before him the wholesome words heard from Paul, interpreting them by the faith and love in Christ Jesus, and keep the goodly trust committed to him by the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them both.

One cause of Timothy's depression appears next. There had been a general falling-away from Paul among his disciples in Asia, two especially named. Paul trembles and hopes for another—Onesiphorus—who had often stood by him bravely in Rome and Ephesus. But whatever others do, he begs his own son to be strong in the grace in Christ Jesus, and to commit to faithful men, able to teach others, the words heard from him. Timothy must remember he is Christ's soldier, to suffer with his Captain; to please Him he must not entangle himself in worldly business that would hinder his warfare. Or let him think of himself as a wrestler—no crown unless he wrestles by the rules; or as a husbandman, who ought himself to share the fruit he ripens. These parables he must lay to heart, and God will give him understanding of their meaning. Let him always keep in mind Paul's Gospel—of Jesus Christ, of David's seed, risen from the dead—or rather keep Him in mind. Then he would understand why the servant suffers as a criminal, since the Master so suffered; that God's word is not bound though the speaker is in bonds; and the great reward of suffering. Paul suffered for the elect, that they too might gain salvation in Christ with eternal glory. The word may be trusted: fellow-suffering is the way to fellow-life. If we endure with Him we shall share His kingdom; if we deny Him He will deny us; but our faithlessness will not make Him unfaithful, for He cannot deny Himself.

These great maxims for the Christian minister himself he was also to witness, as in Christ's sight, to others. Paul begs him again to have nothing to do with word-fighting, but to present himself as an approved *workman* to God. Not that words are not sacred: he had a word of truth to divide rightly, not to set one part against another. Those who used words otherwise cultivated impiety; their words became vain talk, indeed cancers destroying life instead of feeding it. For instance, Hymenæus and Philetus had become gossips and arguers about the resurrection, and, perverting Paul's own words, taught there was no future resurrection.

But this did not weaken God's foundation. There were two great practical rules for them: "God knoweth them that are His," and "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." The first would keep them from judging others; the second would tell them their own privilege and duty. Timothy need not be discouraged to find in God's house, as in any great house, vessels precious and worthless, for honorable and dishonorable uses. Each must see that he is purified from what is base, a vessel fit for honor, useful to the Master, ready for every good work. Let Timothy avoid the youthful lusts that corrupt, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Let him have as little as possible to do with foolish questions, even in argument, for they breed strife. And God's servant should not be striving—this we may suspect was one of Timothy's youthful faults—but gentle to all, ready to teach, patient, meekly instructing opponents, in hope that God may give them repentance and knowledge of the truth, and that they may escape the devil's snare, having been led captive by him to do his will.

It is no part of Paul's encouragement to tell Timothy he will meet no such opponents or that bright times are near. On the contrary, he says bad times are at hand. Even without his hints in other Epistles, we cannot doubt the "last days" here are days Timothy was beginning to experience and would experience more and more. The men who would be lovers of self and money, braggarts, proud, evil speakers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, having the form of godliness but denying its power, were men Timothy was to turn from. So graphically does Paul describe them that every age has rightly been sure they apply to itself. Always there have been religious teachers who "creep into houses and lead captive silly women, laden with sins, led about with divers lusts, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth"—the trade of both Romish and Protestant deceivers, who find their most profitable converts among such women. But because the lesson is universal, it is no less true that it belonged specially to that time: everything Paul said was realized by his son in the Ephesian Church, and everything it foretold came to pass in that generation. It was Timothy who needed reminding of his country's traditions about the magicians who withstood Moses, and assuring that the new enchanter would be foiled like the old; Timothy who needed reminding that his master and father had not crept into houses or courted popularity but had believed, loved, suffered, and been persecuted everywhere; Timothy who needed telling to abide in what he had learnt and to keep to the holy Scriptures he had known from childhood, able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus; Timothy who needed telling that every inspired writing is also useful for instruction, conviction, restoration, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, fitted for every good work.

Paul is so sure a time was near when Church members "would not bear sound teaching, but according to their own lusts would heap up teachers, having a restless itching to hear, but turning their ears from truth to fables," that he uses one of his most solemn charges: Timothy is to "preach the word, be instant in season and out, reprove, rebuke, exhort, be sober in all things, suffer evil, do the work of an evangelist, fully fulfil his ministry." There is one more reason for this. Paul thinks he has nearly finished his own fight; his race is almost won. He looks to a crown that, as always, is not a crown *for* righteousness but a crown *of* righteousness—the very thing he told the Philippians he was pursuing, which he now hopes fully to attain: to dwell wholly in God's righteousness, forever delivered from his own. This crown he believes the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give him at His appearing—and give also, for how could he bear a selfish possession, to all who love that appearing. Even with this in view he craves human sympathy. He longs to see Timothy, mourns the loss of Demas, wishes for Mark (probably the John Mark over whom he had parted from Barnabas), and speaks sorrowfully, not bitterly, of his loneliness of earthly sympathy when he first defended himself before the Emperor. Among these notices of friends is an allusion to an enemy, Alexander the coppersmith, whom Timothy must beware. The seeming harshness of the parenthesis vanishes if we take Lachmann's reading, "The Lord will reward him according to his works." There is no real severity in wishing the law "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap" to be fulfilled in every case. If anything in Alexander was right and true, the righteous Judge would acknowledge it; what was false and opposed the truth in him or others, the same Judge would destroy. It was fitting that an Apostle who had fought the good fight and was about to be offered up should desire that in this and all things God's will be done on earth as in heaven.

##### EPISTLE TO TITUS.

The Church at Ephesus must always interest us more than the Church in Crete, of which Acts tells us nothing and later history very little. The Epistle to Titus gives a few unflattering hints about the islanders' character, which here as elsewhere was reflected in the Church's character. Even if we had only the one passage showing how carefully Paul studied every people he came to, and how sure he was that every national peculiarity would affect the faith and conduct of Christians and need watching by His ministers, the letter would be of great value—correcting many confused notions and interpreting the experience of pastor and missionary. There is a notion, constantly alternating with the practical discoveries that refute and embarrass it, that a man born from above has nothing to do with his own past or his people's life, that he is moved into a wholly different state with no inherited temperament from his ancestors. So it should be carefully remembered that few letters speak so much of the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit as this very one, which quotes the Cretan prophet that his countrymen are "liars, evil beasts, slow bellies," and makes that a reason for Titus to rebuke sharply—not the unbaptized, but the baptized.

The reasons for leaving Titus in Crete are not quite those for leaving Timothy in Ephesus. First, Titus is told to "set in order the things that are wanting, and establish presbyters in each city"—no such command was given Timothy. The difference seems to be that an island the size of Crete needed only one central overseer with a number of distinct city rulers looking up to him. Here is a further step in Church organization, though still nothing giving the presbyter his later character. The next difference is that the Cretan teachers needing control, though of the circumcision and given to Jewish fables and men's commandments, seem far less Gnostic than those we heard of lately. Questionings, genealogies, and legal strifes are noted; but the context suggests the Judaizers were drenching the Church with idle legends and Rabbinical debates about trifles—things people in every age call religious because they touch places or persons in the Bible—rather than with the high-flown speculations that amused a more educated people. To these he refers when he says, "All things are pure to the pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but their mind and conscience are defiled." A good meaning and use could be found in these fables, as in the Jewish rules; possibly Titus himself had found such profit and doubted whether to discourage them. But Paul, wholly manly and practical, had learnt to see the harm this trifling did—even when harmless and childish in itself—to a people who needed moral life and restoration, a power to make them right, true, orderly citizens and men.

I have called Paul's mind practical and moral, and his object a moral society in Crete. Anyone reading honestly must see this: his wholesome doctrine aims to make old men sober, grave, reasonable; old women not slanderers or wine-bibbers; young women lovers of husbands and children; young men sober-minded; servants obedient, masters just; the overseer himself a pattern of uncorruptness, dignity, healthy speech, hospitality, love of goodness, justice, holiness, moderation. But all these great moral effects had no other origin than the saving "grace of God which had appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live temperately, righteously, and piously in this present age, awaiting the blessed hope and manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and cleanse for Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works." Thus the good news that God had shown His love and glory in Christ, who gave Himself to deliver men not from punishment but from sin, and would at last show His righteousness and glory as the great reward, was the only power by which Paul hoped to accomplish anything, for Crete or for the world.

And he has the same hope for Cretans as for himself. He has not called them hard names without being ready to call Paul harder. Though bred at Gamaliel's feet and striving to keep all the law's righteousness, he knew in himself an ignorance, disobedience, malice, and envy that put him at least on their level. "But when the goodness and philanthropy of our Saviour God appeared, not from works of righteousness we had done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, that being justified by His grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." This doctrine Paul declared trustworthy, and would have Titus very confident about it, that those who believed God might be careful to lead in good works. These things he sets, as good and useful, against the foolish questions and debates he wished to put down. A heretical man who persisted in raising such disputes was to be rejected after one or two rebukes; the overseer's act would only ratify a sentence the man's own conscience had already passed on him.

#### THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON.

This beautiful little Epistle gives me a chance to make a few remarks about how the teaching of the New Testament has shaped later ages. That such a short letter was kept in the canon, when so many others that must have looked more important to the Church were left out, seems to me a striking proof of the divine care watching over the Church's judgment. Mr. Canning, in one of the debates on freeing the West Indian slaves, said that Christianity grew up amid the tyranny described in Juvenal's sixth Satire, that it accepted the institution of slavery, and therefore could not be called essentially opposed to it. That challenge deserves a fair answer, and I think the Epistle to Philemon supplies one. In his letters to the Churches, Paul had not declared slaves free of their masters, nor demanded that masters dismiss their slaves; he had simply said they were brothers. Here he explains what that means. He asks a master to take back a runaway slave, as both a servant and a brother. He says he could command this as an Apostle, but instead he begs it for the love of Christ and for the love Philemon bears him, Christ's prisoner — because such pleading is stronger than commands. This is how the Apostle and the Church destroy slavery: they strike at its root by declaring that a man can never be a thing, a piece of property. And they strike not only at that one arrangement which produced and sanctified that hateful notion, but at every arrangement that stands in the way of recognizing God's Fatherhood, Christ's Brotherhood, and the dwelling of Christ's Spirit in men, so that their true manhood may be drawn out.

So we see that the principle I have traced through all Paul's Epistles — "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles" — is the law of this Epistle too. And we see how any theory that confines this teaching to the Church, and so keeps the Church from witnessing it to the world, destroys its meaning and effect. If Christ is not in every man, then Christians can and will treat as property, or worse, all who do not bear their name. And soon they will feel entitled to treat men as property, or worse, even if they *do* bear it. No faith will be kept with heretics — for what has a heretic to do with Christ? No faith will be kept with those we think ungodly or who differ from us — for what have they to do with Christ? So, in our zeal for Christ, we end by destroying all the life and morality He brought into the world, and we have to invent a new morality of our own to replace what we have lost. May God grant that earnest, faithful study of Paul's Epistles, and the discovery how perfectly they agree with every part of the New Testament, may save us and our children from this terrible danger and strengthen us in the true faith of God's elect.

### CONCLUSION.

In my Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews I did not try to settle whether St. Paul wrote it. Having now looked at all the other letters ascribed to him, we might be better placed to pursue that question. But I still find it, as I did when studying the disputed letter itself, so secondary and unimportant that I do not wish to take it up at the close of a volume devoted to a far greater aim: showing the essential agreement of the first three Gospels, the Epistles of James and Peter, and all the letters we ascribe to Paul, with each other and with the principles unfolded in a book so unlike them all in form and style—the Epistle with which I began. I have wanted to show that the plainest Evangelist is setting forth the same Son of God and Son of Man who is the subject of Hebrews; that the Evangelists, like the writer of that Epistle, see Jesus' acts as the fulfilment of the Old Testament—not because they matched particular predictions, but because they revealed Him who was implied in all the Jewish institutions, whom the Prophets had learned from those institutions to see already as the Mediator between God and man, the King, High Priest, and Prophet from whom all their own kings, priests, and prophets drew their functions and their light. I have wanted to show that the first three Evangelists, like the writer of Hebrews, saw their own time as the winding-up of an age to end in a great judgment, and expected that judgment to bring in another age, the revelation of the kingdom of heaven their Lord had spoken of; and that the Apostles of the circumcision, as well as Paul, speak of an apostasy likely to precede the end, one that would somehow affect the Church, the Jewish nation, and the heathen world.

But if these facts show the unity of all these New Testament writers—a unity from their common testimony to the Son of God and His kingdom—we have equally had to acknowledge their diversity. Each Evangelist saw his Lord under a particular aspect; James and Peter, though usually grouped together, each had his own character and function; and Paul was markedly different from both. It has been a chief concern of ours to find out what his distinctive principle and work were: how he came to seem at odds with the original twelve, and what connects his letters, though they are addressed to churches and persons so different, and each is plainly fitted to its readers. I have gladly taken help from the name the Church has always given him. He is emphatically, by his own declaration, the teacher of the Gentiles. But that name needs explaining. If we take it to mean that he thought little of his Jewish calling, gained nothing from his training under Gamaliel, or did not first invite Jews into the fold and call them to acknowledge the Son of David before turning to Greeks or Romans, both his acts and his writings refute us. Likewise I am grateful for the hint of our Protestant tradition that he above all is the teacher of Justification by Faith. The immense worth of that doctrine has become ever clearer to us in Romans and Galatians. But if we put any notion or dogma about Justification before the revelation of Jesus Christ, made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection, then the meaning of Romans escaped us and his Gospel became a dead letter rather than the power of God unto salvation. And if, to make the Lutheran principle stand out, we overlooked the words in Galatians, "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles," the whole purpose and coherence of that Epistle perished, and instead of defending Luther we drained his teaching of life. But if we take that passage as the key to Paul's mind, we can understand that he was the Apostle of the Gentiles because he was the Apostle of *Humanity*; that he preached Justification because he testified that Christ, Son of God and Son of David, had justified *Man* by rising from the dead; that the baptized Church was the witness of this Justification, and that each person, by believing in the risen One, himself became a justified and righteous man. And so all his messages belong together: the mystery in Ephesians, hidden from ages but now revealed, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs of the same body; the mystery of Jesus Christ crucified, the wisdom and power of God and the living bond of human fellowship, announced to the Corinthians; the mystery of Christ's resurrection, the goal of all his striving, as he told the Philippians; the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory, unfolded to the Colossians; the mystery of Christ's unveiling as the judgment and deliverance of the world, set before the Thessalonians; the mystery of Christ the Mediator between God and man, the ransom for all, to be the subject of Timothy's preaching; the mystery of God our Saviour's kindness and love, by which Titus was to lift the Cretans from their debasement; the mystery of Christ the Brother of man, which broke the chains of Onesimus. All belong to the same Pauline message, and mark not only the same divine and universal Teacher but the same human agent.

If, then, those who deny that Paul wrote Hebrews rest their denial only on peculiarities of style they think impossible for the Jew of Tarsus, or on the weight of the Alexandrian fathers and the Western fathers who agreed with them, or on any external evidence whatever, I shall not argue with them—partly because I am nearly indifferent to the outcome, partly because I know how much our prior habits of mind sway us in weighing such arguments, and partly because I value their learning above my own. But if they argue *this*—that Paul, as Apostle of the Gentiles, was unlikely to write to the Hebrews, or that if he did he would surely dwell on the calling and privileges of the Gentiles—then I object. It is vital, in understanding Paul, to remember that he saw his calling to preach among the Gentiles as the carrying out of the promise to Abraham, that he adapted himself to every people he wrote to, and that his teaching about Christ as *the* Man who fulfils the promise that man should have dominion over all creatures, made a little lower than the angels to be crowned with glory and honour, is the characteristic doctrine of all his Epistles. Or if it is urged that Paul must have written formally about justification by faith and would not have spoken, as this Epistle does, of kings and priests and sabbath-days and the temple and the sacrifice, I protest that this objection rests on a theory that narrows and misrepresents the purpose of all his writings, and makes them useless for defending the very truth it tries to confine them to.

This is all I care to say about authorship. But I cannot close without noting those distinctive marks of this Epistle that are rightly held to be more prominent here than anywhere else. Although the idea of Sacrifice is present in every letter and every line of Paul we have read, nowhere is it developed as it is here. Though I have shown in my Lectures that it does not stand alone but is bound up with all the institutions of the Jewish nation, the common sense that it holds the central place among those institutions—and therefore in the book that expounds them—is the more justified the more we reflect on it. And though I have been careful to show that the Son of God and Son of Man of the first two chapters is the subject of the Epistle, as He is of all the New Testament, and that a doctrine of Sacrifice must not be put in His place here any more than a doctrine of Justification in Romans, it is plain that this Person is brought before us here especially in His twofold character of Priest and Sacrifice, His other characters not swallowed up but in some sense subordinate to these. Far from wishing to overlook this, I would earnestly point the reader to it. Whether or not Hebrews is Paul's, it is needed, I think, to complete the circle of thought into which Paul leads us. It is needed to show us the deep common ground of those societies, each with its own purpose in God's kingdom. It is needed that we may understand how each nation, and the particular Church that represented its character, was connected with that one Nation whose foundations were laid in God's eternal and righteous Will and in man's surrender of his will to it. It is needed to show how impossible it was for that nation's calling to be fulfilled, or reconciled with other nations, until there was One who, an heir of David, could say in stooping to the death common to Jew and Gentile, "Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God"—One who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, that we, purged from dead works, might serve the living God. It was needed that we might know how a spiritual and universal order could rise out of the ruins of a legal and national one, and in time make each nation capable of institutions more truly divine, of a life more orderly and free, than the Hebrew ever knew. And it is needed, I think, so that we may connect the varied aspects of humanity we find in Paul with the profound and simple theology of the Apostle John, and with his vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, as a bride adorned for her husband.

### LECTURE I. HOW THE NEW TESTAMENT FULFILS THE OLD.

HEBREWS I. 1-4.

*The passage:* In earlier ages God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, at many times and in many ways; but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the worlds. This Son is the brightness of God's glory and the exact image of His being, and upholds all things by His powerful word. When He had by Himself cleansed our sins, He sat down at the right hand of God on high, having become as much greater than the angels as the name He has inherited is greater than theirs.

Christian apologists have perhaps overrated the argument for their faith drawn from its small beginnings and its wide spread. The facts do impress anyone who meets them for the first time. A thoughtful man hears how Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, called Simon Peter and Andrew from their nets, and they followed at once. He remembers that he hears this in some Western capital, among people utterly unlike the Galileans in manners, government, and knowledge, yet a people who have for centuries revered the names of Andrew and Peter and treated these records as oracles. Or hearing the Advent Gospel, he reflects how One who rode on an ass into the chief city of a Roman province, cheered by a few of the poorest, then cast out by its rulers as a blasphemer and put to death by their heathen masters, has been acknowledged as King of the World by the most enlightened part of the empire and by nations Tiberius never knew. Such thoughts *may* lead to the question: whence came this wonder, and to what power should it be traced? But once the surprise wears off, they as often lead the other way. The contrast between Christendom as it now is and the Book it appeals to seems so great as to break all real connection between them. "These Jewish records and this European world of ours — what have they truly in common? They may have left us a legacy, but what can they tell us of the changes worked in our belief by the mixing of races, the progress of society, new discoveries, and greater corruption? How can they explain why Christendom is divided about the very meaning of its own existence — why one body claims the name for itself alone and others denounce that body as having abandoned the very principle the name rests on?" Such questions were often asked in Bishop Warburton's day; he foresaw they would still be asked in ours; he believed they could be answered. He wished his Lecturers to face the whole difficulty squarely: to defend the truth of Christianity precisely on the ground that the Prophecies of the Old and New Testament correspond to the history of the Christian Church, and not to shrink from the hardest part of the problem — the Romish Apostasy.

These instructions can perhaps be obeyed literally if we treat prophecy as certain words fulfilled in certain isolated events. But the Bishop plainly meant us to examine the character and setting of later history, and I doubt whether we can grasp the Jewish Prophets at all unless we examine the character and setting of their national history. Their chief work is not to unfold the future but first to explain the present: they told their countrymen what their situation meant, how they had abused it, how full of significance everything around them was, and how empty their lives had become. We wrong them badly if we treat their words as oracles blurted out in wild inspiration, or their books as scattered Sibylline leaves. Their power to announce what must be seems bound up with their divine gift of seeing the eternal beneath the temporary, the substance through the shadow. They are certain that God's purpose will stand; men's unwillingness to see it will not defeat it; through mercies and judgments He will unfold it ever more clearly to the heart of the true Israelite; and in due time it will be *fulfilled*.

Fulfilment, then, seems to mean the carrying out of a purpose that was hidden in earlier times, gradually made plain to the divinely taught teachers, and through them to all who learned from them. If so, we are surely right to ask the Scriptures what this divine purpose is, by what education men in the old time were made aware of it, and what results are promised from its full revelation. If we then compare those expected results with the state of the world since the Scripture record ends, we at least show that we do not shrink from the test Warburton wished us to use. This way of applying it also suits a modern historical student better than any other. He usually cares little for coincidences, and those offered by Scriptural interpreters he tends to think either accidental or produced by twisting words and facts. What he wants is a law that connects the various facts of church or general history; he will listen to whether Scripture recognizes such a law, but he will grant its superiority only if it explains the actual course of events better and clears away apparent anomalies more successfully than any law of his own.

Yet such a student may reasonably distrust anyone who claims to draw the whole purpose of Jewish history out of the Biblical documents and to trace its rise from dawn to noon. And no onlooker's distrust can match what a man who has attempted the task, and failed repeatedly, must feel about himself. So the student may fairly ask: can your New Testament really be a key to the Old if it contains no book especially devoted to this subject? And the man who trusts that God will not leave His creatures without the help they need to know what He has revealed will search hard for a guide through this maze — and, I believe, will not search long.

From the earliest times there have been disputes about who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, and even about its place in the canon. But no one, I think, has ever doubted that the writer, whoever he was, meant to set out the relation between a dispensation he believed was passing away and one he believed was beginning. No outside evidence is needed to show this; it appears at every turn to the most careless reader. To an ordinary historian today it does not matter what the book claims for itself; he may view it simply as the work of a very early Christian Jew who knew his country's institutions thoroughly, loved them, yet was sure a death-sentence lay on them and that they would give place to something better. Seen so, it must be interesting, and *may* supply the key we want. Those convinced of its authority will read it differently, expecting and gladly finding in it a guiding light on God's dealings with man. And all will admit its usefulness for my task, since it bears so directly on the chief points between Protestants and Romanists, forces us to consider them historically as well as theologically, and, above all, is so solemn and practical that it reminds us we are dealing with realities that concern our own lives and every human being's — restraining, if anything can, the mean and spiteful tricks of religious dispute.

In my first three Lectures, then, I mean to show that the writer of Hebrews sets out a principle he says was implied in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New; that he traces its gradual working through the Old; and that he helps us see what changes its full manifestation would bring.

If I am allowed to give next year's three Lectures, I mean to show that this same principle, under different aspects, is central to the other books of the New Testament: the first three Gospels, the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, and the writings of John.

In the third year I hope to apply this principle to the history of Christendom — in its growth out of the Roman Empire, in its direct conflict with Mahommedanism, and in what is called the Modern Period, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century.

This inquiry will bring us into direct contact with the Romish system. But to complete the course and fulfil the Founder's intention, the last three Lectures should consider that system formally, in relation to the Scriptural principle we have been drawing out, to its working in the Church, and to the future of the world.

This plan spares me from having to open with a debate about the Epistle's author. The learned who reject the usual tradition do so because they think the writer's purpose, though it harmonizes with Paul's, is not identical with it; differences of style and the opinions of several early Churches, especially in the West, support their conclusion. On the other side, obvious external differences have not stopped earnest students from still thinking it Paul's, because they feel, consciously or not, that his life's aim would be less intelligible if this letter were not one expression of it.

For every reason, then, we should put off this question until we have found the letter's main character and can compare it with other parts of the New Testament. I am not afraid its credit will suffer while the point stays open, or whatever the answer proves to be. Those who have found by experiment that it binds the books of Scripture to each other and to human history will believe it belongs among those books, whoever wrote it — for its tone and its peculiarities, great and small, fix it in the apostolic age. Those who care nothing for its contents will hardly attend to it even if they thought the whole college of apostles had written it.

The questions to whom the letter was sent and what occasioned it cannot be so set aside, for they bring some of its most striking features into view. Everyone must notice how intensely earnest its practical exhortations are. In a book more systematic and logical than any other in the New Testament, one might have expected these to be kept in the background, not to interrupt the argument. Instead they recur constantly, enter into the very substance of the letter, and everything else seems subordinate to them. They differ in kind from those found elsewhere: they are not merely warnings against particular faults or false opinions, as in Corinthians and Galatians, but express very plainly the writer's fear that his readers are likely to become apostates from the faith of Christ.

People with exaggerated ideas of the purity of the apostolic churches — ideas certainly not drawn from the one authentic record we have — may well be startled by such warnings. But the surprise deepens when we consider *what* body was being addressed. Other signs in the Epistle leave no doubt. Its title, if we could trust it, might point to the Jews scattered through the Roman provinces who believed Jesus was the Christ — those Peter addresses. But even if such Jews were not absent from the writer's mind (and it is hard to think any part of his nation ever was), they were not the ones to whom a letter chiefly about the temple worship, the priesthood, and the holy city would most apply. Distant Jews only imagined these things; those in Palestine saw them daily. We must conclude, then, that these were the members of the mother-church of the world, the successors or survivors of those baptized when the Spirit came at Pentecost — and one who knew and loved them well feared their faith was weakening daily and that they might lose it entirely.

Yet, remarkably, these Hebrew Christians are not charged with openly abandoning any truth their early teachers gave them, nor with plainly deserting the duties of their position. The one complaint is that they had stayed content with their first shallow understanding, had not worked toward fuller and deeper knowledge, and were still taking the food of children when their years should have made them able to eat the food of men. This, the writer hints, was their besetting fault. It may look far from deadly, and their friendly teacher is quite willing to think it is not; still, he could trace too many signs of decaying belief and energy resulting from it to doubt that, if allowed to grow, it would make useless all the teaching they had received from apostles and martyrs.

It is worth finding out the grounds of this fear, both for our own good and to explain the Epistle.

1\. We should always remember that the Jews who believed Jesus was the Christ regarded themselves as the true Jews, and accused their countrymen of rejecting the real heir of David, who had come to fulfil the covenant made with their fathers. So when the apostles went up to the temple at the hour of prayer after Pentecost, this was no concession to others' prejudices, no lapse into old habit. They felt they had more right to that worship than anyone. When priests and Levites let sheep and oxen be sold there, their Master had driven them out, refusing to let His Father's house be a market. He had warned them that a day was coming when not one stone would stand on another, and every event since made them sure some awful judgment hung over the nation. But they were not to anticipate it: while the Temple stood it was God's temple, and while the sacrifices were offered they were the sacrifices He had appointed. Stephen may have said words that gave color to the charge that he had spoken against the Temple and the customs of Moses, but nothing in his defence shows he thought either should now be abandoned; rather, he deeply revered them as the shrines of a presence their fathers and they, uncircumcised in heart, had been despising. Peter's visit to Cornelius changed nothing in this feeling; the opposition to it showed how thoroughly Jewish the disciples were, and even when they yielded to the divine demonstration they saw in it only the fulfilment of the promise that David's Seed should reign over the Gentiles.

When Greek proselytes mixed with the Hebrews in the church at Antioch, and the heathen there gave them all the name of Christians, the Jerusalem Christians were affected only by being led, perhaps, to make more zealous use of their own privileges. The same happened when they heard that Paul had founded societies of Gentiles more than Jews, had appointed elders and deacons over them, and had called each one an *Ecclesia* — a body called out or elected — language that seemed strangely to threaten the idea of Abraham's children as *the* one elect family. Yet Paul in every city went first to the synagogue; his churches rested on a Jewish base; he too spoke of the promises to the fathers, went up to the feasts, and purified himself in the temple. From the conversation in Acts twenty-one it is clear that James, the presiding apostle at Jerusalem, not only kept the Mosaic law strictly but practised even its voluntary rituals. The Jewish historian and the oldest Christian annalist confirm this and agree that the Jewish people at large deeply revered him; every party in the city felt him to be its righteous man. His practical holiness was the strongest possible witness against the Pharisee's formalism and the Sadducee's heathenism — against his nation's endless religious divisions and moral debasement. It witnessed that the disciples of Jesus were not, as their enemies said, a Nazarene sect binding themselves by a new name; it witnessed to the sacredness of the old dispensation, without which the Gospel would have become mere speculation and its other preachers unintelligible to their warmest admirers.

Yet it is easy to see how men calling themselves James's disciples, and thinking they were because they zealously took his part, might pervert his very example, even turn it upside down. What in him was a thankful resolve to use all the blessings given him as a Jew so as to come nearer to the Lord of the whole earth would become in them a resolve not to mix with the uncircumcised. What in him was being set apart from a divided, exclusive world would become in them exclusiveness and division under a new pretext. What in him was the confession of his Master as the divine Fulfiller of the covenant with Abraham and David would become in them a notion of Him as merely that covenant's servant. And this vast difference might be quite invisible to these Jewish Christians. Their phrases might be borrowed from James; their reverence for holy places and love of their Jewish calling might look like an exact copy of his. But the contrast would show in the whole tone of their lives, and above all would reveal itself, after his death, to those who, like him, expected the destruction of the City and Temple and felt that the loss of such an intercessor, and the crime that caused it, must hasten the judgment. Such men would see that while James by word and life was preparing himself and his flock for that day, it would fall on his pretended admirers like a thief in the night. The Jewish institutions they had wrapped all their devotions and hopes in, for whose sake they had stopped assembling as a Christian community, would pass away with a great crash. Where would they be found after such an earthquake? What faith had they that could survive it?

2\. But it would be unjust to think these Christian Jews merely wanted to preserve the Jewish state with all its present wretched accidents. They knew the priesthood had been degraded by the Herods and made a mere tool of the Roman procurator; they knew the law had been corrupted by Pharisaic traditions; they knew society was in a worse state than in Jeremiah's day before the great captivity. But had not Christ come to restore the fallen tabernacle? Had He not declared the true meaning of the law? Had He not, by His poor life, borne witness to a more than patriarchal simplicity?

Thoughts very like these James must often have set before his disciples. In them lay the deepest truth, and they seemed almost impossible to misuse. Yet how easily one could dwell on the words "Reformer" and "Restorer" until their meaning was wholly lost. If Christ were only what those words imply, He might have told certain great truths and hinted at desirable social improvements, but He would have accomplished nothing. He might be greater than all earlier teachers, yet the universe, and men, and their relation to God would still be a riddle. All the questions men had asked for so many centuries, all that laws and governments and priesthoods and sacrifices implied, would not have been really explained by this great Prophet. There had been a vision of something bright and good in the world, which surely could not vanish without leaving some shadows; but it had vanished, and whatever these Hebrew Christians had bound up with it would vanish too. If so, then the covenant with Abraham, and all the institutions they spoke so much of, had been hollow pomp — promising much, performing almost nothing.

Would not such reflections press more and more on those who used this language? Would they not take on an awful meaning, a seeming confirmation, from the day close at hand — so that they must look forward to it not as a day of redemption but as one of defeat and dismay? And when it came, would they not be found to have lost not only their Christian but even their Jewish position?

3\. That last cast of mind led the Hebrew Christians to dwell on our Lord's poverty and humiliation, since these were the great contrast to the pride and pomp He came to purge from their countrymen. But calling themselves James's disciples, they could not always rest there. They knew their teacher had spoken of Him not only as poor, not only as sharing every human sorrow, but as divine. He had asserted both truths plainly, and did not feel them to be irreconcilable. But how were they to be reconciled? The Jewish Scriptures spoke of *angels*. Might these not be intermediate beings, hovering between earth and heaven, far below Him who fills all in all, yet far above His creatures here? Might they not, for great ends and at set times, take on real or apparent human flesh and live among men? Might our Lord be one of them — perhaps their chief? Speculations of this kind, closely tied to the idea of the Messiah, occupied the deep-thinking Alexandrian Jews and appeared in cruder, more practical forms among the despised Samaritans. Soon after the fall of Jerusalem they were working powerfully in the minds of believers in Jesus, mingling with the seemingly simple view of Him as the great Reformer, the poor man. In the next Lecture I try to show how little the Angels actually named in the Old Testament belong to this region. These ideas, then, must already have taken hold of the Church in Judæa. But where would they lead?

That middle region between heaven and earth is the home of all the demons of Greek myth, indeed of all the objects of human worship that in any age have shadowed forth men's deepest wants — their sense of their own evil, their sense of the blessings and curses of the outward world. So the very forms of idolatry the Jewish law had condemned, which the Jews believed the God of Abraham would destroy, were likely to invade the heart and conscience of anyone who entered this strange circle. Those forms had by now lost much of their definiteness and beauty, but not their power. It was an age when men talked much of emanations from the Divinity, when old idolatries were evaporating into personified qualities or natural forces, and shapeless monsters of superstition were bred from atheism joined to the terrors of a guilty conscience, afraid where there was nothing to fear. Even in Rome, where religion had become mere state machinery — where Cicero's wonder that two augurs could meet without laughing grew daily more reasonable, and the emperor was the one truly acknowledged god — dreams, portents, and Babylonian numbers never had greater sway over tyrant and slave, soldier and matron. Where, then, could a Christian Jew who once began using the invisible world as a playground for fancy be expected to stop? His Lord would soon become one of a crowd of godlike figures, symbols, or emanations, and his plain Christian faith would vanish altogether. And it would carry with it his Jewish reverence for the one Lord Jehovah. Indeed, the paganism left behind would be far less real than the paganism of old — a heap of shadows with scarcely a subject, images with scarcely the dream of an original.

There was ground enough, then, for the fear that seemed so strange at first — that the Christians of Palestine might become, in the fullest sense, apostate. And yet anyone who rudely attacked the notions and habits leading to this would have attacked precious truths and undermined their reverence for the apostles and martyrs from whom they had received them. Unless each of these convictions could be shown to rest on real ground — unless their sense of the sacredness of the Father's law and covenant could be deepened — unless they could see that Christ had indeed come to fulfil that law and covenant, had actually fulfilled it, and had stamped on it exactly the permanence Scripture said belonged to it — above all, unless their dim sense of something Divine and something Human in their Lord could be lifted out of the cloud-land of fancy and shown to rest on an eternal foundation able to sustain both past and future — they could not be readied for the coming calamities, or saved from utter shipwreck of faith. To these points, then, the writer turns in my text, which I believe is the key to the whole Epistle.

"*God*," he says, "*who in sundry times and divers manners spake in times past unto the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by a Son, whom He hath made heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high, being made so much better than the angels, as He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they*."

The balanced, antithetical form of this paragraph is obvious and often noticed. But it is strange to suppose the form was a mere rhetorical trick familiar to a Hellenized Jew trained at Alexandria. We need not refute this by proving the Book's divine authority. If a writer who believed his country's last and saddest crisis was upon him, and who feared for the moral state of his readers, could deliberately sit down to balance sentences and make words jingle, we must dismiss him as devoid of truthfulness and human feeling, unable to teach anyone. A good man writing at such a time would have chosen the roughest words that could carry his meaning. But if any part of his truth came out more clearly in this antithetical form, he was bound to use it — for him it was the simplest, most natural way. The charge of artifice really lies against us, who invent rules of composition and canons of taste, calling one style easy and genuine and another laboured, without ever testing a style by the only true measure: its fitness to carry the thought entrusted to it. The more we study this passage, the more we feel that had the writer refused to be antithetical he would have sacrificed not accidents but the very essence of his meaning, and failed utterly to make his purpose plain.

The paragraph opens with two words our translators render "in sundry times and divers manners." The second phrase is fine. The first is generally felt to be unsatisfactory. Paul's words, "We know in part, and we prophesy in part," exactly explain the original. It does include the idea that the prophets' teaching was fitted to the *times* in which they appeared: a plague of locusts called for one kind of revelation, an Assyrian invasion another, an approaching captivity a deeper one still. But the leading thought is that there were many parts or divisions in the prophetic harmony; no single utterance held the whole mystery, and each part had its own "manner" — the form of history, discourse, song, or vision best suited to set it forth.

To Hebrews of the Christian age these prophecies appeared as documents to be read, translated, and annotated. The power to view them as parts of a whole was valuable, but could easily become a curse — as the Scribes and Pharisees had made it. For while they worshipped the letter of prophecy, they forgot it had come from the lips of living, suffering men and gone to the hearts of actual men. So it is not idle that the writer keeps reminding his readers throughout that the words were "spoken": if they were to be felt, they must be felt as spoken words, not merely book-words. Felt so, the phrase "God spake them" would also be recognized as real, not formal. Those who heard the prophet, whether they repented or turned away in rage, confessed his voice a divine voice. It exposed evils in them no human eye could see; it brought what was working confusedly in their spirits into terrible clearness; it set past, present, and future before them as one — one for them and one in Him who is, and was, and is to come. They did not ask how this could be. If they believed a man a prophet at all, they believed God was speaking in him. They had no doubt that He had spoken to their fathers out of the fire and proclaimed the law kept in the ark; it could not be a different voice now driving that law into their inner man, making them sure it was as true for them as for their fathers, that they had broken it as their fathers had, that its blessings and its curses alike applied to them. Indeed, did not this human speaker's voice seem in one sense even more divine than the thunder? It was less terrible to the ear, but seemed to bring more the assurance of a personal presence to the heart. The whole training of the Jew was meant to draw him away from outward, visible things. The material terrors of the plagues and the wilderness had passed; if renewed, it was in plagues and earthquakes or in Sennacherib's army. God's voice might be heard in these, but the words of the man who made that voice intelligible, telling why it spoke and what inner corruptions had provoked it, must seem to come from an even more secret and holy place.

Yet even while their fathers confessed at each crisis that God was speaking in the prophets, it must often have been hard to reconcile this with what they were told — and what the prophets themselves told them — of the Unseen, Eternal Jehovah. Why did holy men arise except to testify that no creature may measure itself against the Creator? How then could these creatures, men of like passions with themselves, seen going in and out among them, dare to say God's word was in them? This was the great perplexity of the Jew's life, woven into every thought of his nation, himself, and the divine Lord. His race was taught to think itself elect and holy, yet it was stiff-necked, of unclean lips, guilty of rebellions no heathen could match. Being in the covenant, he must count himself righteous, and when he drew near to God he knew this was no delusion — yet he was conscious of endless evil. He dared not think of God except as the High and Holy One inhabiting eternity, yet dared not doubt that men, that he himself, were meant to bear that High and Holy One's image.

These are strange contradictions, which, had they rushed on any man all at once, must have crushed him. But they came, like the prophet's revelation, in separate portions and various ways; and as each new difficulty rose, there came with it the sense of a solution — one he could act on even then, and which would one day be complete and all-sufficient.

That day, says the writer, has come; we are "at the end of those days" the prophets belonged to. Now God has spoken to us by a *Son*. Here is proof how far the antitheses are from being oratorical ornament, and how essential to the meaning: our translators made a slight, natural oversight that has, I believe, darkened not one sentence but the whole Epistle. By putting the possessive pronoun for the indefinite article — *His* Son for *a* Son — they shifted the emphasis from the right word and led readers to take "Son" as a mere synonym for Christ or the Messiah. If that were all, there would be no link between the chapter and this opening, and neither would apply directly to the Hebrew Christians' case. The Old Testament passages he quotes are not meant to prove that the holy Israelites expected a Messiah; every Pharisee granted that. The Palestinian Christians did not need to be told Jesus was the Messiah of prophecy; every act of their lives professed it. The real question to debate with the first was: what kind of Messiah did your fathers expect? and with the second: what manner of person is the one you call by that name? The writer's answer is: only to a Son of God belong those Old Testament words that, as you Pharisees agree, mean a Messiah; and only to a Son of God belong those acts that you Christian Jews attribute to Jesus of Nazareth.

I leave the working-out of these two claims, and how he links them, to another Lecture. But for now it matters greatly to notice *how* he describes the Son in whom God spoke: "*whom He hath constituted heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds*." We often say revelation is progressive, and this writer fully justifies the word. But by *progress* some mean a continual journeying away from the centre, toward the circumference. Here we are taught that each step brings us nearer the ground of things — nearer the throne of God. Revelation in this sense is truly God unveiling Himself. First He speaks in the mere things He formed, which are furthest from Him; then in men whom He made to rule those things; last in Him who by eternal law is heir of all things, in and for whom they were created. The world's order and the succession of ages spoke of God's permanence; here He speaks in Him through whom He framed that order and that succession. At each step we are led into a higher, more awful region — yet not one more remote from humanity and its sympathies; rather into one where humanity has reached its peak, where every faculty and affection has its full growth and fruition. Cold, lifeless things are found to have a personal centre; the dead, abstract course of time is found to have a living Mover. It is the Son of God, "*the brightness of His Father's glory, the express image of His substance*." We have glimpsed His glory in creation, and more brightly in the tenderness of human beings. Here is the source of both; here is the mystery the prophets saw in fragments and spoke in various ways; here is the whole Word of which they uttered separate syllables. Men are told they are made in God's image, but knew not how. Here is His exact image — shown not in the heaven above nor the earth beneath, but in a man. In Him creation has held together despite all its inner confusion and discord: "*He has upheld it by the word of His power*." In Him we see how humanity has been a holy thing, though each man felt himself unholy: the moment He clothes Himself with its vilest accidents, it becomes actually holy, and the sinfulness of each man's separate nature is *purged* out of human nature when He inhabits it and takes it to Himself. In Him it is proved that man is meant to dwell with God: having purified the soul and body He took, He "*sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high*," claiming for all men the privileges of spiritual beings — the power to rise above the limits of space and time and enter fellowship with Him who fills all in all. And since He, in His human nature, has been made "*so much higher than the angels, having by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they*," man must not think himself subject to angels or place them in any middle space between himself and the Lord of all. He must confess that he too is a spirit, as they are, brought into direct relationship with Him before whom they veil their faces.

Such a doctrine was surely an awful one, and the Hebrew Christians must have felt it so — their teacher wished nothing more than that they should. A feeble, frivolous temper had grown in them, glad to lose itself among shadows and unwilling to face realities; they would have hidden among the forms and images of their ritual as Adam hid among the trees. Under pretence of exalting their privileges as Jews, they were shrinking from the greatest privilege of all — knowing Him who had called them to be His people. The writer wants to convince them that they can no longer deny their spiritual rights. They must either acknowledge and walk in them, or sink into a far thicker darkness, a deeper atheism, than their fathers ever knew. That is why fierce rebukes and awful warnings mix so strangely with words of the highest hope and encouragement: in his mind the two were never apart. A spiritual creature must have capacities for the highest vision and infinite love — and also for utter self-concentration and despair. A crisis was near that would test everything. Not earth only but heaven too would be shaken; not an ordinary civil state but the divine polity itself would seem overturned. If the outward forms of that polity were their only proof of a bond between God and His creatures, their belief would vanish. But if through those forms they had risen to grasp a relationship with God — of which all human relations are lower forms, grounded on the divine nature itself, on the union of a Son with a Father in one Eternal Spirit — then they would know there was something that could not be shaken but must remain, and that this something was a resting-place for the hopes of their race and of all creation.

### LECTURE II. THE DIVINE EDUCATION OF THE JEWS.

HEBREWS II. 6—8.

*The passage:* What is Man, that you keep him in mind? What is the Son of Man, that you visit him? You made him a little lower than the angels, crowned him with glory and honor, set him over the works of your hands, and put all things under his feet.

The opening words of this Epistle are the key to the whole of it: "*God spoke to our fathers*." This states the principle on which the Jew's history and life rested. Everything earnest and brave in the Jew came from the conviction, "We are the Lord's servants; He has made Himself known to us; He has chosen us; He is reigning over us." Everything cowardly, sensual, or idolatrous came from lacking this conviction—from forgetting the Covenant, from the feeling that after all the law came from no unseen Being and the prophet did not utter the Word of the Lord. Whatever explanation of the Old Testament we adopt, whatever interpolations we imagine, we can build it on no other basis than this. The moment we try, the records become a heap of incoherent fragments. It takes no learning to prove they do not form a whole; they *cannot*, once what unified them is gone. The Jews were no nation unless the Divine Covenant was real, not a fiction; they have no history if their books record only certain limited speculations about God, not what He spoke to man.

*God has spoken to us by a Son*. This is the fact the New Testament unfolds. Put any other fact in its place—say these books set forth an idea, not a fact, or are occupied with many subjects rather than this one—and it takes no great argument to show they too are a collection of incoherent fragments. You have taken away the bond that holds them together, and they must fall to pieces. Try to rebuild them on some other ground, and you find a hopeless, unintelligible mass that no re-forming can bring into any reasonable order.

But the writer wants to do more than state what a revelation assumes and what the later revelation was; he wants to show that the later was implied in the earlier—that the prophetic speech was a riddle until the speech in a Son explained it, and that only those who acknowledged that speech as the one adequate Divine utterance could understand their own oracles. To establish this he refers to many Old Testament passages. Understanding how he uses them is the only real difficulty in interpreting the Epistle. He who evades it must throw the whole book aside as unintelligible; he who overcomes it will, I think, find brightness where he had found the most obscurity.

Some quotations in the first chapter—important for the subject and for correcting a practical error—raise no difficulty. They concern angels. In the Jewish scriptures, the writer says, angels are always spoken of as mere servants, ministering spirits. No divinity is given them; they are sent on errands of mercy, doing works for man, not claiming to be his masters or to mediate between him and his Creator. That idea of mediation does run through the Old Testament—not in what it says of angels, but in its words about one of whom it is written, "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee."

Here the difficulty begins, one that has troubled simple readers and theological students still more. The passages that follow seem tied to events happening when they were written, events in which the speaker or the nation was deeply concerned. Are we to suppose they did not refer to those events? Did they have a double sense, like a heathen oracle? Or was a later writer allowed to put in a sense not originally there? Every commentator has had to meet these questions, and the answers given have chiefly been three.

Some assume that a New Testament writer, by his commission and inspiration, could declare such and such a meaning to be the true one, and we are bound to accept his interpretation however far it differs from what we would naturally give.

Another class say: no doubt we should accept an inspired writer's word, but should we expect from one so gifted merely a set exposition of a few passages, rather than receiving him as a guide to the right principles of interpretation? May we not suppose the writer of Hebrews is sanctioning the use of allegory, stamping it as the true Divine method of reading the Old Scriptures, and so confirming beforehand the later doctors who applied it?

An opposite and bolder school cries: would it not be truer to say the writer had learned the allegorical system of the Alexandrian Jews, and adopted it readily—partly because it suited his feeling, partly as an argument aimed at those he addressed—and that by doing so he helped form a very perverse and perplexing system in the Church? In spite of his authority we must return to a fair reading of the original text, from which his translations sometimes depart widely, and give it the most literal meaning we can.

I fully agree with the first school that the interpretations in this Epistle are the safest to adopt in reading the Old Testament. I agree with the second that neither a Divine nor even a great human teacher merely gives us samples of a method without initiating us somewhat into the method itself. And I am wholly with the last in holding that reverence for Scripture binds us to seek an exact meaning for the passages quoted, found only by considering the occasions that called them forth and their historical contexts. But I differ from the first where they think it ever safe to treat Scripture as a mere set of words; and I differ from the other two in their common belief that the writer ever resorted to allegory, or ever once overlooked the circumstances under which the words he adopts were first spoken and the meaning they must have carried to those who first heard or spoke them.

There is an ambiguity in the word "literal." Sometimes it means "exact"; sometimes it is the opposite of "spiritual" or "inward." In the second sense it names the result of *merely* staring at words and syllables—a result almost worthless, for no one who spells out a sentence without asking who spoke it, to whom, when, and where will find what it means, or even that it means anything. The most exact interpreter takes most heed of everything that raises a sentence from dead to living. Such exactness, I hope to show, belongs to every reference in this Epistle; the absence of anything allegorical must be tested another way. Compare it calmly with any book, Jewish or Christian, that is confessedly allegorical, and I shall be surprised if you are not struck by a direct opposition between them. Two hints, out of many: the writer, mentioning the Temple-worship, names the cherubim and the mercy-seat, and says, "of these we cannot now speak particularly." Could an allegorist have resisted speaking particularly on exactly those things, drawing endless spiritual analogies from their form and position? Again, he spends a whole chapter on the faith of the Jewish elders—illustrated by their common acts and ordinary daily history: Abraham living in tents, waiting for a son, ready to offer him up; Moses hidden three months, refusing to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. Could an allegorist have endured such plain events, rather than dwelling on the meaning of the patriarchs' names and treating each act as a type of something Divine or future? In general, this writer is impatient of shadows; he always wants to turn them into something practical and substantial. Where the allegorist avoids history and treats institutions as merely earthly things, this writer shows that the history and institutions of the land were the very instruments through which the Divine revelation was made and by which minds were awakened to receive it. The passages he quotes were all bound up with parts of the Jewish constitution, familiar to the Palestine Jews in that connection—and far from hiding this, he wants them to notice it. His whole art seems devised to press this on them. Sometimes he dwells on a significant word; sometimes he neglects words—not quoting or translating with strict accuracy—if by a plainly recognized departure from the letter he can bring the subject more vividly before them, and show that the principle lay not in the words but in the fact or institution they spoke of. By this he counteracted what was harmful in his countrymen's reverence for institutions while justifying it and setting it on its right ground; for he showed how what they were tempted to worship for its own sake had been a method of Divine education to bring out the great idea of a Son—the idea realized in Jesus Christ. The steps of this Divine education mark, it seems to me, the pauses and stages of the Epistle; tracing them, we shall better value it as an exposition of Scripture and history.

I. The passages quoted in the first chapter plainly refer to the office of the Jewish King. With one exception they are all from the Psalms, and that exception is very significant: "I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son," from 2 Samuel 7. There David, after overcoming his enemies, plans to build a Temple. A prophet tells him the purpose is approved but will not be carried out in his reign: when he sleeps with his fathers, God will set up his seed, who shall build the house and whose throne shall be established forever—"I will be his Father, and he shall be my son." Every Hebrew would turn to this as the title-deed of the Jewish kingdom, the statement of the principle on which it stood. The words said directly that God had set it up; that the visible king held from the Invisible and witnessed His power and presence; that David's continuing house meant the permanence of the Divine rule and of the nation in Him. All this would be granted. The writer's aim is to show that this document held more than the mere setting up of a human kingdom by Divine will. When God said "I will be to him a Father," He signified a real relation between Himself and the human king—indeed between Himself and the nation and each of its members. This was the mystery every true Jewish king felt to be the basis of his power, what made it real power and not arbitrary; losing that faith, he became a self-willed tyrant. Yet it was a mystery, and one it might take ages to unfold.

That a Greek should look up to one dwelling on a Thessalian hill among a council of warriors like his own chiefs, and call him "Father of gods and men," was nothing strange. But that a Hebrew king should dare such language about the [I Am]{.smallcaps}—Him whom none had seen or could see, who dwelt in thick darkness, from whom the Law came amid thunder and lightning—this was wonderful. Was it that awe of Jehovah had grown less since Moses? No; nowhere is that awe deeper than in the shepherd-king's songs and in Solomon's consecration prayer. As nearness to the Divine Majesty was felt more, its awfulness was felt more too. How this could be must be learned from the experience of those who lived under this kingdom, and the Epistle turns to them next. The quotations from the Psalms seem chosen from different parts of the history, to show through what opposite circumstances and conflicts the idea grew in holy Israelites' minds—the idea of One to whom "I will be his Father, and he shall be my Son" might strictly be spoken, and in whom they must be spoken to the visible King.

The second Psalm speaks of a time when Jewish and heathen foes both rebelled against the anointed king. The holy man—king or another—is sure they will be confounded, because a king sits not in the palace but on Zion, where the Invisible Presence dwelt, to whom the Lord says, "Thou art my Son." The writer of the 97th, perhaps surrounded in Samaria or Phoenicia by worshippers of heroes and demigods who taunted him with atheism and may have stirred his own doubt whether homage to an unseen being could be real, finds relief in "The Lord reigneth"—He is the true King—but expands it into the assurance that God would raise up a true image of Himself to put down all false images, One to whom He was even then saying, "Worship him, all ye angels," heroes, gods, whatever you be. The singer of the 45th, at some festivity celebrating a royal wedding, sees a higher king, perfectly loving righteousness and hating iniquity, the true bridegroom of the nation and of humanity. The writer of the 102nd, "sitting like a pelican in the wilderness," reviled all day by enemies, is sustained by belief in a king who would reign over his own people and the heathen, because the earth is God's, who laid its foundation of old; the heavens are His work and may perish, but He endures. Finally the writer of the 110th, who probably saw no signs of royalty but lived when a priest ruled, sees that the perfect King must unite priestly and kingly offices, and that to such a one the Lord says, "Sit at my right hand till I make your foes your footstool."

A Hebrew would gladly dwell on these as showing his nation's glory and its privileges held in reserve. But was that all they meant to the holy men of old? Surely not. David asked, in my text—which throws the clearest light on all the rest—"What is *man*, that you are mindful of him? or the son of man, that you visit him? You made him a little lower than the angels, crowned him with glory and honor, set him over the works of your hands, and put all things under his feet." Through this revelation of a Divine King he was led to feel not just his own greatness, or Israel's, but the greatness of *man*.

The Jew's elevation could not be meant to degrade the human race he belonged to; it must raise it, and witness to the state God created it for. The first records of Jewish history had said all creatures were put under man, that he was made king of the world in the image of God. As yet those words seemed poorly realized: the ruler seemed slave to the servant; man's homage from the creatures was often exchanged for his homage to them; one death claimed both. Yet the feeling lay deep in all hearts that dominion over the earth and intercourse with heaven were meant for them; they had wrestled with Death as a strange intruder and unlawful usurper. So the vision of one in whom not the Jewish nation only but humanity had its true head and representative must be realized. And did not the Hebrew Christians believe there was one who had exercised kingship over all material things here on earth, proved the great tyrant an intruder, and overcome him? Though they did not yet see all things put under man, did they not see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor?

II. The Jewish king chiefly embodied dignity, glory, and superiority. These were often shown in deepest weakness and involved condescension to the meanest—David's history showed the anointed ruler might be a fugitive and outlaw—yet these were not the first things one thought of about the office, nor did the writer want them to be. Those he addressed tended to lower the dignity of man, to make him the servant of angels. They showed this even when they spoke nobly of Christ as the poor man, for they meant He was nothing else and had no royalty.

But one order of men brought this suffering character before the Jews directly. The prophet was the reprover of kings; he interpreted the office and showed how it must be fulfilled—yet he was himself the suffering Israelite. The next quotations plainly relate to this: they touch the new prophet's person, his own feelings, and the witness he bore by his life more than his words. They show how the very inspiration that most raised a man above others made him more completely their brother, even in the depth of sorrow; how it bound him to greater trust and dependence than other men, and turned human relations into the means by which he and others grasped the Divine relation. There is a strange ambiguity in the words the writer wants us to notice—removed only when it was clearly shown how "he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one." As the idea of a king could be realized only in one shown to have dominion over nature and man, so the idea of a prophet could be realized only in one who had full fellowship with the lowest human estate—who, because the children shared flesh and blood, himself took part of the same, and because they were all their lives subject to the fear of death, himself entered it and overcame it.

III. In both offices, King and Prophet, there were plain signs of incompleteness, witnessing to something mightier behind, and each obviously needed the other; neither's meaning could be fulfilled till they were united. But was there this incompleteness in Moses, their first legislator? Was not the Divine King's authority marvellously joined in him with the suffering Prophet's? The awful Name was spoken to him from the bush; he spent forty days and nights on the Mount in communion with the [Lord God]{.smallcaps}; yet he was also the guide of the people through the desert, bearing their burdens and sins, feeling with them, interceding for them. Every Jew must have thought of this, and these Christian Jews, who liked to see their Master as the great reviver of the Jewish law and polity, would be especially tempted by it. Had the writer followed chronology he would have met this first. But he could not meet it effectively without first showing what was implied in their later history—in the covenant with David and the teaching of the holy men after him. From those he had gathered that a Son of God was promised to the Jewish nation, and that its greatness could not be realized except in such a person. Now, granting all Moses' glory, it was certain he never claimed this honor—he expressly disclaimed it. He proved himself a faithful *servant* in a great household God was raising up. If there was such a Divine family, it must have a ruler as well as a servant. So Moses' acts and words and office must also have been a prophecy; a Son of God must have been implied in them, one who would fully realize the idea of one admitted into the Divine converse yet sharing human griefs. The legislator was a witness of things to be spoken later. Did not Israel's journeys through the wilderness, felt then and interpreted after, betoken an imperfection? Their state was one of progress and transition; they were on their way to a rest Moses was not allowed to bring them to. All the way the promise was set before them; they were to trust it would be kept, and their distrust caused them, and even their leader, to die without seeing the land.

IV. Into that land Joshua led them. Was this, then, the promise fulfilled? This question leads the writer to another Jewish institution—one Moses pronounced holy in words showing it was held from an earlier time, one that deeply affected every Jew's life and was still kept with almost idolatrous reverence. The sabbath had been expressly linked with the hope of rest in Canaan, but it had also been enjoined in solemner words linking it to the Rest of God. It embodied a twofold idea: God resting in beholding what He made, and man resting in beholding God. Through the writings of holy men we trace a sense of a higher rest not gained by conquering Canaan, of a day implied in that sabbath, of something in its meaning not yet accomplished, though the works were finished from the world's foundation. No Jew, the writer argues, could understand the Scriptures or expect the promise to the Fathers fulfilled who was not looking for such a rest; otherwise he was repeating his forefathers' very sin—the sin for which they fell in the wilderness—resting in the present and visible, not confessing his relation to an unseen Lord, and not looking to have the darkness over that relation removed. Only the acknowledgment of One in whom both God and man could rest—in whom the fellowship of heaven and earth was fully realized—could satisfy the sabbath's meaning and the hopes it awoke in those who truly profited by it.

V. And such a one, he goes on, must be a priest, the High Priest of the Universe. This office naturally stood out most to a Hebrew Christian then. However degraded its present holders, it was the office Aaron fulfilled; they had the law that ordained it and its whole history of preservation and restoration. From here it becomes the Epistle's leading subject. The argument runs thus. First, what a priest must be: he is appointed for man in things toward God, so he must share men's feelings and wants, and there must be clear evidence he does not take the office himself but is called by God. The Jew would grant this and say, "Our priest meets both conditions—he is one of us and feels with us, yet he belongs to a tribe the Law openly designates for this service." True, the writer says, but does that legal designation satisfy the idea of the High Priest that your holy men, raised under the Law, themselves held? The 110th Psalm speaks of a Priest after the order of Melchizedek as the highest conceivable order. What order was that? Your early records tell how Abraham, returning from the slaughter of the kings, found a priest already dwelling in what later became the holy city. His name marks him a king. Nothing is said of his parents or nation, yet Abraham, father of your nation and ancestor of the Levites, recognizes his priesthood and does him homage. And the Psalmist thinks *this* priesthood—resting on no formal enactment, marked by no tribe or nation—the highest of all. He evidently supposes a priest may be, and the highest Priest must be, called in some more direct, absolute way than by an outward Law, however solemnly proclaimed. And the Psalmist himself hints what that designation must be: the oath "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee" must lie at the root of it—only a *filial* priest can satisfy the idea. Only one who, like Melchizedek, is both king and priest, shown by some tokens to be a Son of God, can meet the first condition of a perfect Mediator. And only such a one can meet the second: the priest's own sinfulness was the great hindrance to the full sympathy with a sinful creature that the office implies. Only One holy, harmless, separate from sinners could truly be touched with the feeling of their infirmities and so be their needful Intercessor. Only One who had been on earth, suffered death, and passed into the heavens, now at God's right hand, could have that permanent priesthood which the legal succession in Aaron's family had only pointed to. Only One who had actually gone from the visible world into the presence of the unseen God could lead men in.

VI. The idea of a constitution older than all formal enactments—grounded, as we might say, in the nature of things, or, more devoutly, on the "oath of God"—has now been brought before us in these remarks on the priesthood and Melchizedek, and has been assumed throughout the letter. On it the writer grounds another doctrine. Christ, ascended on high, has become the Mediator of a New Covenant. Now the Jew's Covenant was the most sacred thing of all to him. He might reluctantly admit that Christ's coming made it wider and let the Gentile share some of its privileges, but it was made to his fathers and to him, and the highest gift he could claim was its fulfilment. Nothing could be sounder, and his teacher would strengthen him in it—but what fulfilment was he looking for? As the priesthood needed something deeper than an ordinance, so must the Covenant. Their prophet Jeremiah had felt this. He had spoken of a New Covenant for the latter days, of this tenor: "I will write my laws in their hearts and minds." He had seen that the Covenant too rested on something older than the choice of one family or nation, and must be referred to that constitution in the Son of God which exalted not a nation only but mankind. It too could be fulfilled, as the prophet foresaw, only by a Man's ascension to God's right hand and the gift of the filial Spirit, who would write the Law in the worshipper's heart—changing it from a law of carnal commandment into the power of an endless life.

VII. Having established that Man was brought into God's presence by Christ's ascension, and that he was treated as a spiritual being to be ruled and guided by God's Spirit, the writer turns to Divine Worship. The ark that went through the desert and the temple raised on Zion testified generation after generation that the Lord was in their midst; disbelieving this had been their greatest sin and the root of all others. Yet the Temple itself witnessed that something was hidden from the worshipper: a veil hung over the mercy-seat. By the very figures they prized, they were reminded that they were not yet admitted into the pure presence of Him they served. Yet everything in their Covenant and discipline had taught them to be content with nothing less—everything meant to draw their minds from the visible to the invisible, from the shadowy to the real. If they had really entered the temple-worship, really sought the Unseen Presence, they could not rest until the figures were exchanged for the reality, until they could enter it and hold actual, awful communion with the living God.

VIII. But what was the Veil? The other services—the purifications—told them. Something overshadowed the worshipper's heart and separated it from Him he would draw near to. It was the inner man that aspired to fellowship with the unseen God, and it was within, in himself, that he found the obstruction. All the appointed ceremonies for purifying the flesh reminded him of this fact but could not change it. The Covenant told him there was something from which he must be separated to be united to God. The blood sprinkled on the book of the Covenant, on the worshippers, and on all the temple vessels seemed to connect purification somehow with death. All this was a wonderful education for man's spirit; but, like every part of the Jewish discipline, it led him to see that his relation to the Creator must live in a person, not in a *thing*—an animal—and to expect that that Person would somehow show what *sacrifice* meant, what death meant, and how the very thing that seemed to divide every creature from God could become the instrument and bond of reconciliation.

IX. That the Jewish psalmists and prophets came to feel no purification was enough that did not reach the conscience, their confessions and prayers abundantly prove—the 51st Psalm is only the most striking specimen of a tone running through all. But the mystery of Sacrifice, though bound up with the purifications and every other service, stood out as involving something deeper than the rest, and it revealed itself through still more terrible struggles and doubts, sometimes reaching despair. The writer cites the 40th Psalm as illustrating the whole subject. The man there seemed to himself stuck in deep mire with no ground; there was a fathomless abyss within him that no ordinance or grace he knew or could imagine could close. But he waited patiently for the Lord, and gradually saw implied in that Institution—which of itself availed him nothing—One who could offer the real, acceptable sacrifice, One who could say, "Lo, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do your will, O God... your law is within my heart." This entire consent of the will to the Divine will, he saw, must be the ground of all sacrifice. Resistance to that loving Divine will had been man's curse, what divided each from his fellow. He who delighted to do it, who had the law in his heart, must be [the]{.smallcaps} Man—must fulfil the idea of Man—and yet be the Son of God, in whom God's very Being and Character shine forth. All other notions of sacrifice were either leading to this or else false; this alone could take away the sin of the world, its disobedience and selfishness. He who could offer it must be the reconciler of God and man, the living complete atonement between heaven and earth; He who by the Eternal Spirit offered Himself to God could alone purge the conscience from dead works to serve the living God, and alone give the Spirit by which all creatures united in Him might offer themselves as sacrifices well pleasing to the Father.

Thus far we have traced, through the various parts of the old Economy, the unfolding of the great truth the writer says lies at the root of the new. I beg you not to trade this view of the Jewish Scriptures too quickly for a more modern one. Learned men often satisfy themselves with a phrase like "a Theocratic Idea lies at the basis of the Jewish commonwealth." I do not say such a phrase means nothing to those who use it—they should ask themselves seriously what it means, and not become the victims, as so many have, of their own generalizations. It may convey their apprehension more honestly than language which seems to me more real and living. But remember: such paraphrases bring us no nearer this writer's meaning; they destroy it. *He* thought the living God had actually made Himself known to the Jewish people, was their King and Teacher, gave them their institutions, and through them and every event of their history was educating them to know Himself. This education, he affirms, bore toward one object: God would speak in the latter days by a Son—One who had always been a Son, the brightness of His glory and express image of His person, in whom He made the worlds. How God unveiled this Son to His servants' hearts—showing them He was implied in every part of their polity, that their life, personal and social, was intelligible only in Him, and that they could reach their true stature as Israelites and as men only when allowed to behold themselves and God in Him—we learn from the passages I have considered. We gain little by reducing them to "they merely set forth the theocratic idea of a Jew"; but by patiently considering them we may learn better what that theocratic idea was. We may find it was no notion of a Being who sometimes interferes by strange acts in the world's affairs, nor of a sovereign who by mere pleasure decides one nation shall be better than the rest, nor of a lawgiver laying down arbitrary rules with terrible penalties and promised rewards. Such notions did often arise in Jews' minds—they so counterfeited the truths that they could be justified by particular words and acts taken apart from the whole revelation. But they were exactly the notions the old prophets rebuked, against which they proclaimed the Lord God of righteousness, who by a Divine order of His own devising was leading His creatures away from the idols of sense that divided and brutalized them, into the knowledge of Himself, the unseen and living Lord, the God of all the families of the earth—and thus into the free exercise of the capacities that knowledge alone could satisfy, and of every other capacity He had given them for their good and His glory.

### LECTURE III. THE FILIAL DISPENSATION.

HEBREWS XI. 39—40.

*The passage:* These people all earned a good reputation through their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised. God had provided something better for us, so that they would not reach completion without us.

However much we may want to understand rightly how the Jews were under a divine Ruler, we are often told this is only a matter of historical interest. The crisis the writer of the Epistle expected was, they say, the end of theocratic government. This view is held about equally by those who think the Jewish theocracy was real and by those who think it was merely a way of thinking natural to a Semitic people. The first say: the Jewish nation stood alone. Other nations had a general providential direction; the Jews in a special sense had a divine King, who not only fixed their births and deaths but ordered their society toward a particular end. When that end was reached, such a government was no longer needed among men. The words heard in the temple, "Let us depart," and the events that followed, showed it had ceased, and the Canon of Scripture became its one record. The others say: in society's infancy men needed to feel under some mysterious guidance. The Hebrews were not alone in this—every nation imagined a tutelary divinity; most, through conquest or mixture, enlarged their mythology and lost the definite sense of a Governor, while the Greeks found philosophical explanations of their early personifications. The Hebrews, separated by circumstance and rigid custom, kept the feeling longer; the priests kept it alive artificially after the nation had outgrown it, until Vespasian's army destroyed both it and its shrine. After that the world moved on more freely, still often haunted by revived theocratic notions, but gradually freeing itself from such dreams toward a full development in which they would vanish entirely.

We can grant this second group two points where they differ from the first. Whatever made the Jewish nation peculiar, it was not that it alone recognized a divine government. Whatever made its institutions peculiar, it was not that other nations had nothing like them. Of all the institutions this writer reviews, only one was exclusively Hebrew: the sabbath. Kings, prophets, lawgivers, priests, temples, purifications, and sacrifices were found everywhere. Was there nothing in common between these things among Jews and among Gentiles? History shows that everywhere men believed the visible king must have an invisible counterpart; that some men's words came from an inner inspiration; that law must have divine authority; that buildings must be set apart for permanent worship; that the worshipper must be cleansed of earthly pollution and must offer God what was dearest to him, even himself. Did these institutions not mean the same to the Jew? Was he sent to tell men these convictions were false and merely their own invention? No—he was sent to say these convictions are deeply true and must have come from God, but that men had corrupted them. The invisible King is not the copy of the visible one but his original; the prophet's inspiration is wholly spiritual, not the vapor of some fountain; it is the I Am, not a wood-nymph, who teaches the lawgiver; the priest enters an unseen Presence he may not picture; the idol in the temple destroys the temple's witness that God differs from his works; purifications must mean that the inner man approaches the living God, or they mean nothing; sacrifices must express the lower will's submission to the true divine will, not a way of bending the higher will to the lower. The great mark of the Jew's high calling was that he could bear this witness to the world, against its evil bent and his own. His covenant was, "In thee and thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed." The clearest proof of that covenant's reality is that he did not trample the faith of mankind but justified it, kept it from being smothered under evil, and foretold that the blessing he awaited would satisfy all nations and that Israel's glory would light the Gentiles. Throughout he testified against the idolatries that divided the nations from the one Lord in whom they could be one. So there is no ground for thinking the theocracy would naturally pass away once the Jews' exclusive position collapsed, as if it were bound up with that position. If it was a truth and not a fiction, it was a truth for all mankind—asserted by the cries of every people and by the very fact of Jewish separation.

If, on the other hand, it was a fiction, then like all fictions it could last only a while, and the destruction of Jerusalem was as likely an event as any to end it—one it could scarcely survive. But those who hold this must do more than repeat learned phrases—"proper to an infant society," "kept alive past its time by priests," "crushed by the Roman legions." They must show by what other belief than that the unseen Lord was his King the Israelite was kept from the bondage to the senses that is thought typical of infancy, and typical of his Semitic kin—yet was not his. They must show by what other faith he could withstand the taunts of the priests and prophets of a hundred groves and high places, who called him irreligious, even atheistic, and whom he could only answer: "Whether I am religious I neither know nor care; I hold to the Covenant God made with my fathers and with me; I obey his law." And they should consider whether the belief has ever left any living man's heart that his personal and social life is as sacred as the courses of the planets and the round of day and night; whether that belief is not strongest in the brave and free and weakest in the base and cowardly; and whether it is not easier for a waking heart and mind to imagine nature exempt from a governing divine will than to imagine himself, his relations to others, and the course of history under such a condition.

The writer of this Epistle certainly could not bear such a thought. He had been formed in the belief that the more fully man is brought under God's government the more blessed he is, and that to escape it is to be cursed. His conviction that the world had just received its greatest blessing did not change this belief but deepened it. He says the Patriarchs were *looking for* "a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker was God." Their faith made the promise real to them, yet they did not receive it; the actual gift was kept for a later day. Indeed—and he applies this to the Jews at every stage—*they without their children could not be made perfect*. He urges the Christians of his day to believe they had received *a kingdom which cannot be moved*, and tells them the coming earthquake, which would *shake not earth only but heaven*, would make it plain. The natural conclusion is that our Lord's ascension would establish some fellowship larger, deeper, and more divine than what existed before. I cannot see how these words could mean anything else to a Hebrew Christian.

He knew what he had been told of his nation's fathers. The sense of belonging to a divine kingdom had gone with them through life; the dread of death that sometimes seized them was the fear of not finding that kingdom again in the unseen world—of passing beyond God's order and government. Their sustaining hope was that He who is and was and is to come must reign here and everywhere, that no corner of His universe would stay outside His dominion. And now, says the writer, He whom they awaited has come—the Son over the house, the King in whom the right is. The *city that hath foundations* is revealed, and you have received a kingdom. His words about the past rise into poetry; his vision of present and future becomes almost rapture. Could he mean to deceive men he was preparing for terrible calamities? He surely would have deceived them if his sense of "city" and "kingdom" did not at all match what those words had meant for generations.

There is, however, a passage where he speaks of *a world to come which is not subject to angels*. Here, it is said, he clearly means not an earthly society but a heavenly one that men enter after death. If so, why not let this passage decide the meaning of the more doubtful ones—why not take City and Kingdom, like "World," to mean a wholly heavenly state? I have no doubt all these words express the same idea and all mean a state strictly *heavenly*—one that only death can fully open to any man, since He who opened it first overcame the sharpness of death. But if that world not subject to angels is one men do not *enter* until death, the Epistle's whole argument collapses. Its writer holds that by His resurrection and ascension Christ claimed for man the blessing of fellowship with the Lord of angels. In man's earlier growth, before he had understood the highest capacities of his being and realized his true place—though God was teaching him by various means—there was reason enough for him to feel subject to angels, to think they stood between him and the Holy One. But now his privilege and duty were to deny such subjection and mediation utterly, and to reject it as treason against the Lord who had taken his nature and clothed him with spiritual glory.

You can see at once this would be worthless if one could reply: "Yes, after death we may enter such a state, but on earth, by your own account, we still remain under angelic rulers and dependent on angelic intercessors." So the world to come the Epistle speaks of cannot answer to our ordinary idea of a future state; it must mean some order established among human beings even here—one not yet shown to be the divine order of the universe, but of which Christ's coming was, to those who grasped it, the clear sign and cornerstone. In that sense it fits perfectly the idea of a city or kingdom to which the Jew had been trained. For he had never been taught to see the invisible world as wholly separate and far off. In daily toil, among his flocks and children, on the judgment-seat, in battle, he had sought and found God. Could it seem more perfect to him that heaven and earth should be hopelessly divided? And could this be the blessing brought by the appearing of One who was both Son of God and Son of Man, who had hallowed both and gone up on high? Would he not rather expect that the old dream of a ladder set on earth and reaching to heaven should now become firm, solid reality?

But what signs were there that such a society would rise from the ruins of the Jewish commonwealth? Every institution that heathen had received as a witness of a link between the visible and invisible worlds, and that the Jew had recognized as coming from the Lord of all, had lost its original meaning and become its opposite. The idea of a king ruling in the name of an unseen King was surely not kept alive in the Herodian princes or the tetrarchs who governed by Rome's leave; everywhere that idea had been swallowed up in the worship of an emperor who was, in his own and his subjects' eyes, the real King of kings and God of gods. The prophet, from whom men had asked a higher truth than they could find themselves, had become among the heathen the lying augur; in Judæa a claim to the name rested on being a more reckless assassin than one's fellows. The Law in which the Greek had heard the Eternal Voice and on which Roman greatness had rested was now thought to depend on Cæsar's will, while the Jew's confidence that he held *the* divine Law excused every crime. The sabbath had been a main reason for calling Christ a blasphemer and putting Him to death. The priesthood everywhere seemed grounded on denying anything unseen. Abominations were set up in every temple and might soon be set up in Zion. Purification rites elsewhere had become filthy orgies—and the Jewish rulers were practicing such things even as they taught the people to shout "Crucify Him!" before Pilate. Sacrifices in Rome and Jerusalem alike were prized as ways of buying the right to sin.

If you turned instead to the Christian assemblies, there was, amid much that was discouraging, a beautiful realization of human brotherhood and devotion to an unseen object. But how would an onlooker, especially a Jew, judge their distinctive ordinances? He might say: "You keep the ceremony by which we admit Gentile converts to the outer sanctuary and call it a sufficient sign of entering God's covenant; you have another rite that seems a love-pledge to a departed Friend; you let those He chose as apostles exercise a fatherly rule over you, and to meet the material needs of your members you have handed some of the apostles' duties to other officers. But can such customs—created by no awful penal edict from God's throne—make up for the loss of those sacred institutions that all nations confusedly recognized, and that we received in purity from the Lord of all, who taught us to understand them?"

One might think the writer of this Epistle had overlooked both objections. His references to distinctly Christian ordinances are rare. He assumes Christian assemblies exist, warning the Hebrew Christian not to forsake them; he mentions Baptism once or twice, perhaps the Eucharist once; that there were rulers in the Church he mentions in passing, using the vaguest possible word for them. Yet the Jewish objection to the dignity of Christian ordinances is met far more satisfactorily, for the whole doctrine of the Epistle answers it. The Aaronic priesthood rested on a formal positive law; *therefore*, he argues, those who held it were discontented and craved a priesthood resting not on an outward command but on God's oath. The priesthood is only one application of this principle, though the most striking. Each institution is shown to be imperfect insofar as it was merely an institution: until its eternal ground was revealed—in Man's relation to God, in the Son's relation to the Father, in God's self-affirming Being—its truth and meaning stayed hidden. Once that ground was declared, the communion of man's spirit with God for which he had been trained would become fully possible, and whatever method divine Wisdom chose to set forth the union of Humanity with God as a fact, and to bring men into that communion, would surpass the earlier methods that had seemed merely formal and arbitrary. Granting this, the Christian could say: "Just because our ordinances have the character you describe—no legal penalties, only a few loving words of command, speaking of a relationship to One Unseen and to all His brethren, requiring the inner man's obedience to an authority that can enforce no other—for that very reason they embody the whole mystery of the New Dispensation that law and letters could only shadow from afar. In the water our Master was owned as the Son of God and the Spirit came upon Him. We ask no other witness that the Father has made us sons in Him and given us His Spirit, no other proof that in us Jews as in heathens everything that is merely our own must be washed away. Our Master, the night He was betrayed, said, 'This is my Body, this is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me.' We ask no other proof than this bread and wine that place does not separate us from Him; that we are as truly with Him now He is ascended as He was with us when born of a Virgin and dying for us; that being with Him we are united to all who own Him on both sides of death; that He can raise us to fellowship with them and Himself, and fill us with His own life, so that we give up our selfish position and our own life. We want no other ground for obeying His Apostles than that He chose them. Fatherly rule we feel to be the highest rule, speaking to our spirits, not our senses; and filial subjection the most perfect, since it is a subjection of the spirit that only the Divine Spirit can give."

So without any exaggeration the writer could describe those he addressed as having come to the heavenly Jerusalem, joined to the company of the firstborn and the spirits of just men made perfect, standing in the presence of Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant and of God the Judge of all. Either the ordinances given them meant nothing—mere impious formalities—or they meant this: an actual fellowship between earth and heaven, a declaration that man had been brought into the condition all past discipline had prepared him for. They said the revelation of the Unseen God, longed for by prophets and kings, had been made to the covenant children; that the words "In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed" were fulfilled, since the Jewish blessing, the glory of Israel—the knowledge of God—had through their seed been brought within reach of all peoples; that out of the defined national society had grown a society with no possible limit, because its basis lay in the original constitution of Man, that is, in Him in whom all things were created, in His relation to the Father whose brightness and express image He is.

The belief that such a heavenly commonwealth was already set up on earth could steady a Jewish Christian facing any collapse of the structure God had raised for his fathers and himself. It would explain at once why he need not look for a new Sinai, a new priestly order created by edict to replace Levi, or the sudden coming of an heir to David's throne or a new dynasty to replace the old covenant kings. To expect these would show he had missed the divine purpose and the prophetic idea, or was content to live without its real fulfilment.

But did the Epistle's doctrine also answer the other part of the question—not the supposed feebleness of Christian ordinances, but the abuse and subversion of those institutions in which both heathen and Jews had seen a proof of the Divine Presence? These still existed and would likely survive the coming judgment on the Jews. If they survived, what witness would remain on earth that they had any worth—that they were not simply the property of Oppression and Falsehood? The Jewish nation was bringing forth something larger and deeper than itself and would die in the birth. How would its child, the New Society, relate to these old social forms—stand aloof from them, destroy them, or remake them? To an unbelieving Jew or heathen the question would seem absurd: what could these tiny bodies, scarcely able to survive in their own homeland, have to do with the great kingdom of the world? How could the emperor's policy and the vast machinery of pagan life be touched by such men, any more than by other fanatics needing the sword or a contemptuous toleration? But suppose someone then or later believed that a stone had been cut from the mountain without hands, destined to break in pieces all that opposed it—would this Epistle help him decide whether any of these old institutions could exist and harmonize with the power growing among them, and on what conditions? Let us test the question with each.

I. The Davidic king had witnessed to the nation's permanence in an Unseen Lord; that king and nation alike were in covenant with Him and united to each other by their common allegiance to Him; against all idolatry that confuses visible things with the Invisible Lord, as destructive of national life; and against all Babylonian attempts at universal dominion as the impious effort of a creature to become absolute and independent.

These principles of the Jewish kingdom were declared by lawgivers and prophets and interpreted by the history. In them lay the undeveloped truth that One who is Son of God and Son of Man is the real Head of Humanity, and the promise that He would be shown as Lord of the universe. Among those who believed this truth had come to light, was there any place for a visible king?

If Humanity had indeed been glorified, there could be no one claiming to be king of *the* exclusively righteous Nation. Still less could anyone claim to be king of the *world*; a Roman emperor must interfere with the belief in a crucified man reigning over creatures whose nature He took, even more than a Babylonian monarch interfered with the belief in an unmanifested King on Zion. Wherever the conviction grew strong that Jesus of Nazareth was truly King of kings, it must struggle with Cæsar's claim to that title until one gave way. But if out of that kingdom distinct nations should arise, it would not clash with the new dispensation for each to be ruled by a man confessing allegiance to the divine Son, reigning under a covenant, judging in His name, even warring against false gods somewhat as the old Jewish kings did.

Is there anything in that glorification of humanity the Epistle speaks of to make such a result impossible? Might one not rather expect that, if such a revival of national life ever happened, this would be its great sign and even its moving principle?

II. The Jewish prophet witnessed that men on earth can receive divine communications; that every true teacher must receive them; that only so far as he does can he understand past, present, or future, sympathize with men's needs, or open to them God's mysteries. In himself and his words the prophet pointed to One who would perfectly do this—declare the counsels of the Holy One, have full fellowship with men, and reveal the Father. Were those who believed this had come to say, "The prophet's office is now obsolete; we no longer need it"? They could rightly say so of many accidents belonging to the Jewish prophet—his exclusiveness, the gradual dawning of light, the seemingly sudden and chance character inspiration had while man's relation to God was not yet set forth. It was now also less possible than ever for any man to call himself *the* prophet of the world; any such claim must wrestle with the belief that the divine filial prophet had actually come, until one was overthrown. But could the truth "Man has been brought near to God; the Spirit of God has come to dwell among men" *extinguish* human inspiration? Could it do anything but expand and deepen it, taking it out of the realm of strange phenomena and showing it as the rightful law of all thought, feeling, and act—making it an anomaly that any gifts by which men help their brethren should seem self-produced rather than springing from and renewed in the Perfect Wisdom?

III. If the prophet's office meant communication and submission between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, the lawgiver's office meant just as clearly that man resists the divine will, that all men have tendencies toward such resistance. It declared a distinct, formal, divine punishment for transgression, that *every disobedience must receive its just recompense*. This penal law too came from God's voice—here He spoke not through the creature but directly and terribly to it. The law was dispensed *by* the judge or king, but he could not dispense *with* it; he was its servant, not its master, and its sentences bound him as much as the meanest subject. Yet, as Deuteronomy shows—and it is a key to all the books and the whole history—there was always a recognized meaning in the law higher than its letter, and this meaning was its essential righteousness, mercy, and grace; it was what the true covenant-servant sought to fulfil and delighted in, the law he meditated on day and night. The terrors remained for the evil nature in him, and he used them to coerce it, knowing they would prove real against anyone who set up idols or moved his neighbor's landmark; yet to be told there was no law, or that he was not under it, would have been the heaviest curse. How was this changed under the new dispensation, resting on One who had the law in His heart and perfectly fulfilled it? There must have been a change. Since what had been only an idea under the Jewish economy—something above positive penal law—was now accomplished in a Person, the law of life in that Person must be the highest utterance of the Divine will, and penal positive law only secondary. Man must be seen first in his true state, his relation to God, and his evil rebellious nature treated as a hateful growth to be cut off. But while that evil nature exists and shows itself in its fruits, can penal law be said to have lost its function or been absorbed into a spiritual principle? Since every distinction grows sharper in stronger light, such confusion would suit the new economy even less than the old. So if the Christian Faith ever triumphed over what upheld imperial power and became the ground of society, one would expect, along with the revival of distinct nations and sovereignties, a revival of reverence for Law as having its source in God's unseen majesty and its force in "The Lord saith." The deepest and most dreadful issues, as in this Epistle, would concern the abuse of spiritual privileges and rejection of the divine voice from heaven. But it would be acknowledged, so far as the Christian principle was, that the Divine Voice still speaks also in language suited to earthly minds—heard in every threat of specific punishment for specific acts against a nation's peace; that the judge is still a divine officer to mark the bounds of right and wrong, and all civil and military authority divine instruments to uphold the one and punish the other, so that whenever these powers make unjust decrees or habitually do wrong, it is felt as a betrayal of a trust that He who gave it will come out to avenge.

IV. The sabbath needs special attention in relation to the new economy. Its obligation to a Jew rested on a literal positive law, yet it belonged to a time earlier than all such law. As the Epistle says, it spoke of a rest accomplished and a rest not yet accomplished; of God's rest, the rest of Creation; of man's rest, the rest of deliverance from bondage; of man's rest as the image of God's; of man's rest as perfect only when he entered into God's rest.

By the Epistle's teaching, the command ordaining this, like every institution, was leading toward the discovery of a Person in whom its meaning was fulfilled—One in whom God and Man meet and are reconciled, in whom both may rest. Did the institution lose its meaning for those who believed this Person had come? As always, once the ground of a precept is known, the precept cannot be urged as bare authority apart from its ground. To keep a mere creation-sabbath simply because the command requires one is to ignore the reason the command itself gives. So some change must be expected here, or it would stand as an unexplained anomaly. But could anyone claim that the relation of work to rest, shown in the sabbath's relation to the six days—so hard for the Gentile world to grasp, as its whole mythology and philosophy show—had ceased to exist or needed less to be woven into human life than before? Could anyone say that, because the meaning of man being made in God's image was now revealed, the idea of man's rest and work as images of God's had lost its point or needed less expression in practice? Could it be argued that, because Christ had glorified poverty, the poor man's rights that this ordinance so blessedly asserted, and tied to what is most divine, need no longer be put forth so plainly, or the method no longer be counted divine? Could it be said that, because Christ had fully entered God's rest, that rest should no longer be felt by the weary and oppressed as a reality breaking through their ordinary experience?

V. That same entering of the Son of Man into God's perfect rest, which substantiates the sabbath, also substantiates, by this Epistle, the idea of the Priest. The Jewish High Priest represented the holiness of the separated, sanctified nation; he was divinely chosen to his rank as the nation was chosen to its. His was a family designation, since all Israel was a family; he headed a body of priests, all consecrated by formal ceremony—he representing the nation as a whole, they its individual members. He drew near to God in the nation's name, offering its sacrifices, setting its greatness and holiness not in itself but in Him who had taken it into covenant. Yet in all these respects, the Epistle teaches, the office was imperfect. Its designation was merely legal, not a sign of any direct relation between priest and Lord of all. It was tribal, not universal; at best he represented a nation's purity, not humanity's. He only *represented* that purity, not showed it forth; he had to offer for his own sin as well as the people's, so he was not truly one with them—sin cut him off from them and from God. He did not actually enter God's presence; the temple's arrangement showed the veil could be drawn back only at set times. Suppose, then, the faith took hold that a filial Priest had appeared, with the highest designation, representing all humanity, perfectly pure, perfectly sympathizing with men, seated at God's right hand—what place would remain for priests on earth? We must answer: if the Epistle's argument means anything, for a *High* Priest there could be no place. Anyone claiming to be *the* Priest of the Universe would clash not with some accident of the New Dispensation but with its primary idea, the thing that had been unfolding for ages; such a claim, however disguised, must fight the principle it opposes until one is overthrown. Even if the attempt to set up a mortal High Priesthood began from an earnest wish to make the Invisible Priesthood more real to men, and even if it seemed to do so, hidden in it—to appear one day—would be the denial of a real relationship between man and God. From it would come the degrading of man's spiritual rights, subjection to creatures, and all the evils the writer saw threatening the Palestine Christians. It would mean the loss not only of the Christian idea of priesthood but of the Jewish one—the formal adoption of the heathen notion, which the heathen himself resisted as a corruption, that the priestly order is separated from humanity rather than its representative, not the head of a kingdom of priests but someone to be admired precisely because he is wholly unlike ourselves. From the world's experience alone we might guess this principle, rooted in man's nature, would assault Christianity; from the Epistle alone we can say what the effect would be if it prevailed. But are we therefore to say the idea of priests on earth is impossible—men who witness of the ascended filial High Priest, of the real relation between God and man, of Humanity's spiritual glory; joined as an order through the generations, yet without tribal limit, resting not on a carnal command but on the gift of the divine Spirit; declaring that the oil of gladness is not theirs alone but flows from the head to the skirts of the garment, and that the gifts they receive for helping their brethren show that all such gifts, given to any class for any work, have the same source? Would such an order clash with any maxim of the new economy—with the heavenly character of the Head, the privileges of the body, or the distinctness of any member? Would they have only a figurative right to the name of priests? In what one mark of the office would they be lacking, except those that belonged to an imperfect age, or that one property which is His alone and apart from whom they are nothing? Should we not rather think that if the priestly idea dropped out of Christian thought, the sense of what mankind gained by Christ's ascension would vanish too; that if it were limited to Him who alone fully realizes it, belief in His union with His brethren would weaken; that if it were claimed only by the whole Christian body, belief in that body's unity in its parts and as a whole would evaporate, leaving only a vague blessing for each person, enough to raise him in his own esteem but not to assure him he may draw near to God with a pure heart?

VI. It must have deeply moved a Palestine Jew when this letter was written to reflect: "This temple made with hands is about to perish—He said so who glorified it and called it His Father's house. We know His glorified Body is the great Temple of all, and that we are spiritual temples in which He promised to dwell. But suppose the earth is not at once destroyed, and buildings still go on being raised—will those who receive Christ's gospel be barred by their faith from raising temples to the Unseen Majesty of heaven and earth?" Again the Epistle seems to settle the answer. A temple that means, as the Jewish one did, that the veil between men and God is not withdrawn, binding men to a figurative worship and teaching them that God lies hidden somewhere in the forms of nature and art rather than embodied in a man, would be at odds with the Christian revelation. And because that temptation lies near men's hearts and kept reappearing in Jewish and heathen life, it was not unreasonable that Christian men might for a time be turned from outward forms and their link with the invisible, or at least held back from elaborate efforts to express their awe of one through the other. But since the imagination, blocked in one direction, tends to run wild in another—playing as mischievously with intellectual as with sensual shapes—such a restraint, needed for a time, might not continue. The Jewish temple, far from leading to idolatry, had been its great witness against it: animal and earthly forms had been redeemed and dedicated to the Unseen God so they would not be honored in themselves; the setting apart of a building signified that God is not a presence in earth or air but a living Person. Such a testimony might be needed as much in the new time as the old. The belief that Christ redeemed the earth by dwelling on it proved no part of it was unholy, but not that no place might be set apart as a witness of its holiness and a mark of His dominion. His going into the unseen world might show men were not to dwell among visible things, but not that visible things could not be turned into tokens of the invisible, drawing men away from themselves. He had spoken in parables from nature and then promised to show men plainly of the Father: this might prove the purely spiritual vision is the highest and best, a blessing the poorest saint may reach sooner than the most learned—but not that He would not hereafter give His servants, as of old, the power to translate the language of earth into that of heaven, making wood and stone testify of the Holy and Infinite Presence and of man's ascent into it, as once they testified to Greek minds of the human and finite and of men's power over it.

VII. Tomorrow the Church will speak of One who was presented pure to God in the substance of our flesh. Here is the realization of the idea of purification that took various forms under the Old Economy. Some of those forms were plainly suited to an Eastern people's education, beautifully blending moral training with the removal of physical evil and care for bodily health. To make these universal would set aside the idea of a dispensation for all peoples; to treat them as sacred merely because a divine Lawgiver gave them would exalt law above its own end, against the Epistle's maxim. To use any outward purification merely to mark the conscience's need of cleansing, without showing that cleansing could be truly effected by a divine process, would destroy the difference between the two economies. To use outward for inward purifications would restore not the Old Economy but the pharisaical version of it. And to teach that any purification could make men pure in themselves, apart from Him in whom man's purity dwells, would deny the central truth of the New Testament. But the Palestine Jews had been taught in practice that an outward act of purification was the entry into the Christian family. This act had every mark of universality, intelligible to all peoples. Its accompanying words showed it spoke of nothing legal but of adoption into a filial covenant; of nothing external but of service to an Unseen Lord; of nothing merely future but of a purity already won for men in Christ; of nothing unreal but of the cleansing of heart and conscience from the corruptions of world, flesh, and the Evil Spirit, worked by the indwelling of a Divine Spirit. To suppose this token of an accomplished, continuing blessing—gathering up the whole aim of the Old Economy and the great revelation of the New—could ever become obsolete would be to suppose that every dark dream of heathenism and every imperfect notion of Judaism would be allowed to prevail against the truth that came to satisfy the one and disperse the other. Such dreams might return—probably would—but in every age this simple rite of Baptism, read by the words of Scripture, would prove the great barrier against them.

VIII. I have been led without meaning to into the Epistle's next subject—the *Covenant*. It would misuse language to call this a Jewish institution; it was rather what explained all the institutions and assured the Israelite they were truly divine. Believing in it, kings, priests, law, sabbaths, temple, purifications were all precious beyond words; losing faith in it, all became dreary formalities, dead letters, mere temptations to idolatry or self-glory. In Ahaz's day, forgetting the Covenant was the sin, leading to Syrian idols and distrust of God's care for David's house; in Zedekiah's day it led to the wilful confidence that Nebuchadnezzar's armies could not destroy the city; in our Lord's day it led to a feeling that God could not really show Himself to His creatures, that He was far off—to theories about Him instead of faith in Him, to sects instead of national fellowship, to failure to recognize the true King, to the cry "We have no king but Cæsar!", and so to ruin and destruction. Now the Hebrew Christians are told in this Epistle that the Old Covenant has passed and a new one has taken its place, of which they are heirs. Two questions then arise about themselves and all later Christians: how is this Covenant different from the Jewish one, and will forgetting it have the same effects? To the first they could answer at once, if they understood the Epistle's doctrine: a covenant of sonship differs from one of servitude, and adoption is better than mere election. Circumcision cuts us off directly from other nations, and only by implication from our evil natures; in baptism the main thing is separation from the evil nature, and only incidentally from any other people. Circumcision was Jewish, baptism is human; circumcision marked the males of one country as the Lord's subjects, baptism marks men, women, and children of all countries as adopted into one family, sealed with the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

To the second question the Epistle's warnings replied even more decisively. The Jewish Christians are reminded again and again that their sin was essentially their forefathers'—the sin of distrust, of not believing they had been taken under God's government and that He was really in fellowship with them. But the degree of wrong and danger differed greatly. To disbelieve in the heavenly Covenant was worse than disbelieving the earthly; to deny their birthright in the divine kingdom was to throw away a blessing far greater than Esau's; not to claim citizenship in the New Jerusalem was an exile beyond any comparison with that of those who gave up circumcision and the Law to be like the heathen around them.

So if the tendency to forget the Christian Covenant—which appeared so early—should in some form mark the Church in every age, now tempting men to make it less broad, now to empty it of spiritual reality and reduce it to a form, now to treat its sign as something in itself apart from Him who gave it, now to make its worth depend on human acts or feelings, now under some pretext to shut baptized men out of its privileges and responsibilities—then from Scripture's hints we must expect all other evils—superstition, relapse into Judaism and heathenism, party spirit, godlessness—to follow in the train of this sin; that divine judgments would often bring men to feel it; and that, since it contains the principle of apostasy, apostasy would be its final issue if the warnings went unheeded.

IX. Following the Epistle's order, we come at last to sacrifices—a subject closely tied to priesthood yet treatable on its own. Remember that the Jewish notion of sacrifice is not only in the daily offering or the yearly atonement. Every Jew was regarded as a sacrificed man. The firstborn, the chief of a man's strength and the family's representative, was formally devoted to God and formally redeemed from death by giving up an animal. Sacrifice, then, was not merely a remedy for transgression, an anomaly. It was seen as the true state of a creature in covenant with God. By entering that covenant he gave himself up; the sign of death was set on him; he held his life only on reprieve, though it might last seventy years or eighty. Every daily animal offering renewed the confession that death was his natural condition, from which God was keeping him. Every offering for a particular sin acknowledged he had departed from the true state of an Israelite, broken from allegiance to the King and union with the members, and asked to be restored—a witness that giving up what caused the separation is necessary to restoration.

The Perfect Sacrifice realized this idea in both aspects. He offered Himself as a Son, because His delight was to do the Father's will in human flesh, as it had been before the worlds. He offered Himself for transgressions, because the creatures whose nature He bore, instead of delighting to do His will, had rebelled and lived to themselves. How, then, would those who believed this atonement made think of sacrifices afterward? Animal sacrifices could not stand now the human Sacrifice was offered; figurative sacrifices had been lost in the real one that took away the sin of the world. There might be new attempts to put the figure in place of the reality, the imperfect for the perfect. Since the flesh strives so hard against the Spirit, and man tries so hard not to be a receiver, such devices of a conscience deluding itself could well be predicted. From these untruths others must follow—fearful confusions of the spiritual with the sensible, perhaps even of the thing offered with Him to whom it is offered. Such contradictions, if they appeared in Christian doctrine or worship, would have a long and desperate struggle with the principle they disturbed, until it cast them out. But what would they have to fight, if not the principle of Sacrifice in its highest form?

Must not that idea reach even more deeply into this dispensation than into the old? Must not the presenting of the one real perfect Sacrifice to the Father, and the continual thanksgiving for it, be the central act of all worship and all fellowship among men? Must not the offering of the worshipper's own soul and body as living sacrifices be the necessary fruit of that act, giving meaning to every service, from the greatest to the meanest? Must not a return to Jewish and heathen notions of sacrifice, with their dark superstitions, be the reaction against a mind that undervalues sacrifice? And must not that mind at last destroy the very idea of communion between heaven and earth, and between man and man, replacing the creed and practice of the Gospel with those of unmitigated selfishness?

With these hints gathered from this Epistle as our guides, we may venture on the difficult problems the Church's history presents, trusting that even if we do not solve them all, we shall at least learn to draw a clear line between what is God's work and what, however closely mixed with it, springs from an evil, counterfeit, destructive principle.

## APPENDIX.

The members of the Maurice Memorial Union first meant to publish a complete American edition of his works. But out of respect for Macmillan's copyrights, held for Mrs. Maurice, this is put off while she lives, and they issue only the present volume, which Macmillan does not reprint. Mr. Maurice said in his lifetime that he "would rather all the other works would go out of print than it" — a remark easily understood by those who have read his two volumes, *What is Revelation?* and *Sequel to the Same*, where he discusses Sir William Hamilton's doctrine of the *Unknowable*, and the opposite but equally logical conclusions drawn from it by Mr. Mansell and Mr. Mill, and asks whether the Almighty Father *cannot* reveal Himself.

His other studies in the Scriptures can be had from Macmillan in New York:

*The Patriarchs and Lawgivers* of the Old Testament.

*The Prophets and Kings* of Israel.

(These two show the truth of Coleridge's saying that the Bible, rightly interpreted, is the best handbook for the devout statesman.)

St. Luke's *Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven*.

St. John's *Gospel of the Word*.

*Christian Ethics* (lectures to the Working Men's College on St. John's Epistles).

*The Apocalypse; a Vision*.

(Of this the Nonconformist said Mr. Maurice had never been more reverent, more careful of the letter of Scripture, more discerning of the *purpose of the Spirit*, or more sober and *practical in his teaching*, than here. He shows that the historical references are to passing or recent events, and that their spiritual meaning must apply to the crises of history in every age, which display the same principles and everlasting laws.)

*The Doctrine of Sacrifice Deduced* from the Scriptures. (On "Sacrifice" in every aspect the Bible presents it.)

*The Ten Commandments* Considered as Instruments of National Reformation.

*The Lord's Prayer* (nine sermons preached in 1848).

*Grounds of Hope* for Mankind (three sermons preached in 1867).

*Ecclesiastical History* of the *first two Centuries*.

*Theological Essays* (containing the remarkable one on the word Eternal).

*The Religions of the World*, and their Relation to Christianity.

*Learning and Working* (this volume also contains four lectures on *The Religion of Ancient Rome* before the Greek influence entered).

His last publications were:

*Nine Lectures on Conscience*.

*Twenty-seven Lectures on Social Morality* (treating domestic morality and worship, national morality and worship, and universal morality and worship).

A new edition of the

*History of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy*, up to the time of Hegel and after.

Besides these, there are many works on the education of women, on Queen's College, and the like. Of special interest to England: *Exposition of the Book of Common Prayer*; *Dialogues on Family Worship*; *The Claims of the Bible and Science*; and, from his earlier life, many pamphlets on social subjects — "Christian Socialism," "Co-operation," "The Workman and the Franchise." Somewhat later he wrote on the controversy between Protestantism and Romanism, to which belongs the Essay on Development that introduces the English edition of the "Commentary on the Hebrews." Also pamphlets on "Sunday Excursions," the "Opening of the Crystal Palace on Sundays," and so on. To a man so alive, truly *nothing human was foreign*.

Sermons preached in country parishes (published after his death).

Since his death, Mr. Thomas Hughes, M.P., has edited a volume of his shorter pieces, called, from the first of them, *The Friendship of Books*.