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           Title: The Beginnings of Christianity. Vol. I.
      Creator(s): Wernle, Paul (1872-1939)
     Print Basis: Oxford: Williams and Norgage (1903)
   CCEL Subjects: All;
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                               THE BEGINNINGS OF
                                  CHRISTIANITY

BY

PAUL WERNLE

PROFESSOR EXTRAORDINARY OF MODERN CHURCH HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BASEL

  Translated by

THE REV. G. A. BIENEMANN, M.A.

  And edited, with an Introduction, by

THE REV. W. D. MORRISON, LL.D.

VOL. I.

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

    14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
    AND 7 BROAD STREET, OXFORD

  NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

  1903
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Prefatory Material
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INTRODUCTION

   AMONG Continental theologians of the younger generation there are few,
   if any, that occupy a more distinguished place than Professor Wernle of
   the University of Basel, and his work on the Beginnings of the
   Christian Religion, which is now presented to the English-speaking
   public, is the most matured and exhaustive product of his scholarship.
   It may not be possible for all of us to see eye to eye with him in the
   vast and sometimes obscure field covered by his brilliant study; but it
   is impossible for any one to withhold admiration from the freshness,
   the vivacity, the vitality, the penetrating insight which Professor
   Wernle exhibits in his handling of the origin and primitive development
   of the Christian faith. The book is addressed to all who are prepared
   to accept the bolder results of New Testament criticism, and the
   central idea running through the whole of it is a very simple one. It
   is first of all to ascertain what the Gospel is as seen in the teaching
   and character of the Redeemer; and secondly, to measure all the later
   expositions of the Gospel, contained in the teachings of the New
   Testament writers, by the Gospel itself. In order to ascertain what the
   Gospel really is, Professor Wernle considers it necessary to liberate
   its eternal substance from the historic forms in which it is expressed.
   The Gospel arose under a certain definite set of historic
   circumstances, and had to act upon the world through the medium of
   historic conditions. These conditions and circumstances are of
   necessity of a temporary and transitory character: they are not the
   Gospel itself, but only its historic envelope, and Professor Wernle
   strips off this envelope in order to seize hold of the imperishable
   substance of Christ's message to mankind. How far he has succeeded in
   separating the substance from the form of the Redeemer's message and
   personality, and (considering the fragmentary nature of the sources)
   how far it is possible to do so on purely historical grounds, it is for
   the attentive reader to judge.

   According to Professor Wernle, Jesus prepared the ground for a new
   religious community but did not organise it Himself, and the disciples
   of the Master who had denationalised the Jewish conception of the
   kingdom of God were unable to liberate themselves from Judaism or to
   produce much impression upon the Gentile world. Both of these tasks
   were the work of St Paul; and as this work was of transcendent
   importance to the future of the Christian faith, Professor Wernle
   devotes a considerable part of this volume to an examination of the
   character and theology of the great apostle. His treatment of St Paul's
   theology is particularly striking and suggestive. It was a theology
   which derived its character from the situation in which the apostle was
   placed. He had to defend himself at once from Gentiles, Jews, and
   Judaizers, and his theology assumed the form of a powerful apologetic
   directed in turn against each one of these adversaries. The apologetic
   form in which Pauline thought is cast, sometimes affects the clearness
   and purity of the Gospel message, and the comparison which Professor
   Wernle institutes between the Gospel as understood by St Paul and the
   Gospel as taught by Jesus, is fresh and illuminating.

   St Paul was a trained theologian, the writer of the Apocalypse was a
   layman, and this volume closes with an analysis and estimate of that
   remarkable work. It is the oldest and only document springing out of
   lay Christian enthusiasm, and Professor Wernle thinks that it
   represents the general lay opinion of the Church in primitive Christian
   times. At the bottom of this enthusiasm lay the belief that the world
   was rapidly coming to an end, and that the supreme duty of man was to
   seek salvation from the coming judgment by watchfulness and repentance.
   Men in such a condition of mind had no thought of setting up stable
   ecclesiastical forms and institutions. But these men had a new life in
   them--a life of self-mastery, a life of love to God and to each
   other--such as the world had never seen before. And they were conscious
   that this new life of theirs proceeded neither from ecclesiastical
   forms nor institutions, but from the living spirit of the Redeemer.
   Such in brief is Professor Wernle's conception of the beginnings of the
   faith and of its effects on the human mind in apostolic times. The
   entrance of this new faith into the world is the most momentous event
   in human history, and the manner in which it took place is presented to
   us in this volume with unusual life, freedom, sympathy, and power.
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PREFACE

   IN the summer of 1900 I delivered lectures on New Testament Theology in
   the University of Basel. These I have now expanded into a book, which,
   however, is by no means intended to rival any handbook to New Testament
   Theology. My only aim in preparing my lectures was to present my pupils
   with a clear idea of that which I conceived to be the real meaning of
   the Gospel, and to trace the great changes it underwent up to the rise
   of Catholicism. I purposely excluded from the scope of my work all that
   appeared to be unimportant for the aim that I had in view. Theological
   ideas came under consideration only in their relation to the Gospel of
   Jesus. I have striven to be true to my original purpose in compiling
   this book from my lectures.

   In publishing my lectures my aim is a practical one, and there is no
   reason to conceal it. An age of transition such as ours needs above all
   else a constant recurrence to the Gospel of Jesus for guidance. But it
   is well known that the Gospel does not lie everywhere on the surface,
   even of the New Testament, in its primitive simplicity, but has in many
   instances been covered up or transformed.

   Now, though it is perfectly true that "Cowper's pious peasant woman"
   can understand Jesus in all that He was and all that He wanted, yet
   theological enquiry should surely never abrogate its great calling,
   which is to give all possible help to the simple comprehension of
   Jesus.

   This, of course, theology can only do by self-suppression--i.e. by
   helping to liberate the Gospel from theology. If Jesus was, above all
   else, our Saviour from the theologians, then we theologians are truly
   His disciples only by the constant renewal of this saving work of His.

   To do this, two conditions are pre-eminently necessary, the existence
   of which, alas, cannot be assumed as a matter of course amongst
   Christian theologians. They are, firstly, true reverence for that which
   alone deserves reverence; and secondly, fidelity to the Christian
   conscience. I reckon as an essential part of true reverence, the
   frankest and fullest renunciation of that false reverence for formulae,
   symbols, rites and institutions in which the free word of God is
   imprisoned and fossilized. He who does not completely reject the false
   can never find room in his heart for the true. And in like manner
   fidelity to the Christian conscience implies the clearest and most
   unflinching criticism of all that contradicts it, even though it be
   received upon the authority of a St Paul or a St John--i.e. the Gospel
   is to be employed practically as the canon and standard for all its
   later historical accretions. He who cannot see eye to eye with me in
   these two conditions had better leave my book unread; for even if he
   were to read it, he would not understand why I have been obliged to
   write so many passages in the style of a polemical pamphlet rather than
   in that of a purely historical essay.

   THE AUTHOR.

   BASEL, December 1900.
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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

   THE publication of my work in an English translation is especially
   gratifying to me, for it is indebted in more than one place to English
   thought. I consider myself fortunate in having made the acquaintance of
   Thomas Carlyle while I was still a student at the University. He has
   become my leader and the leader of many of my friends. Here and there
   in this book the English reader will perhaps catch an echo of certain
   passages in Carlyle's writings.

   The translation strictly follows the German edition of 1900. It is only
   the first two chapters about Jesus which have been altered, and that
   merely so far as to make them correspond with statements contained in
   the author's later publications.

   THE AUTHOR.

   BASEL, February 1903.
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                        The Beginnings of Christianity.
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THE PRESUPPOSITIONS.
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CHAPTER I.

  THE POPULAR BELIEFS OF ANTIQUITY.

   IT is no doubt true that Christianity is a daughter of the Jewish
   faith: yet it strikes its roots deep down into a soil which we may call
   beliefs common to all the religions of antiquity. In that soil the
   characteristic features of the various religions of the ancient world
   are not as yet distinguishable. Among these common beliefs may be
   included the whole body of ideas concerning the earth, nature, man, the
   soul, and the world of spirits. Before the dawn of science these
   popular ideas bore undisputed sway, and they live on even to the
   present time engaged in a ceaseless struggle with scientific
   conceptions of the universe.

   According to the popular beliefs of antiquity, this earth is, of
   course, the centre of creation, the only scene of any history
   concerning God and mankind. Over it is the vault of heaven, and there
   the sun and all the stars, "the powers of the heavens," run their
   courses, yet the earth is the world; in the Sermon on the Mount, for
   example, the two terms are interchanged as denoting the same idea. But
   the earth itself is small and little known. The thoughts of men can fly
   to the "ends of the world" in an instant. From one end to another
   flashes the lightning, and, like the lightning, so shall the Son of man
   appear to all men at once. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of
   the world and the glory of them from the top of one exceeding high
   mountain. If one wished to speak of a geography of the New
   Testament--the term would be a misnomer--its western limits would be
   Spain and its eastern the kingdom of the Parthians.

   This limited view of earth and world had naturally not been without
   influence upon religion. The unwavering faith in Providence, as well as
   the hope in the coming of the kingdom of God upon earth, have their
   chief support in this undoubted geocentric system. In like manner
   missionary zeal was kindled by the belief that it would be possible to
   preach the gospel to all the world in one single generation. Men had no
   idea then of the size of this earth, such as we know it now, nor of the
   infinite and persistent variety among the different races of men, which
   cause such great difficulties to missionary enterprise. And in like
   manner they had no conception of the universe as a whole or of this
   earth's nothingness in comparison with it. However little reason we may
   have to boast of knowledge for which we are not indebted to ourselves,
   as little right have we to hide from our selves the chasm which
   separates us in this point from early Christianity as a child of
   antiquity.

   The next point of difference goes a good deal deeper still. It is the
   boundless faith in the miraculous which early Christianity shares with
   all world-religions. The whole earth is thereby transformed into an
   enchanted world. As yet there is no trace of any knowledge of the law
   of natural causation. All things are possible for God and for those
   that believe, and all things are mystery.

   In the first place, the world of nature is a world of wonders. St. John
   iii. 8 is a typical instance: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and
   thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh,
   and whither it goeth." And just because of this arbitrary and
   mysterious character it is so well suited to represent the supernatural
   powers of the spirit. This belief in nature as a realm of marvels meets
   us most distinctly in the various eschatologies of the New Testament.
   According to these conceptions the fashion of this world shall pass
   suddenly away, and the heavens shall vanish with a great noise, the
   elements shall melt with fervent heat, and there shall be new heavens
   and a new earth. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to
   blood; the stars shall fall from heaven, the sign of the cross shall
   appear in the air, and the Son of man shall descend upon the clouds of
   heaven. Faith in the miraculous positively revels in the enumeration of
   signs of the approaching end of all things; in the vision of the seven
   seals and of the seven trumpets and of the seven bowls the fancy of the
   writer of the Apocalypse runs riot altogether, passing the bounds of
   all possibility. But this faith will not suffer itself to be limited to
   the distant future. In the history of Jesus and of His apostles it
   finds and creates for itself the material for an actual embodiment in
   the present. Here, too, there is nothing that is impossible, and the
   truth of the saying as to the faith that removeth mountains receives a
   striking confirmation. Jesus stills the tempest on the sea and causes
   the fig tree to wither, in both cases merely by the utterance of a
   word. He walks on the sea by night and enables Peter to do likewise. He
   changes water into wine, He divides a few loaves and fishes among five
   thousand and again among four thousand people. He calls Lazarus forth
   from the tomb on the third day in spite of the corruption that had
   already set in; He himself rises on the third day from the grave that
   is closed with a sealed stone and guarded by a watch; He enters the
   room though the doors are closed, and yet He can eat and suffer Himself
   to be touched; and finally, so we are told in the Acts of the Apostles,
   He ascends visibly to heaven, whence He shall come again visibly. The
   Acts now become the great book of the miracles of the Apostles and of
   the first Christian saints, whose leaders work wonders even with their
   shadows and their napkins. Thus faith in the miraculous surpasses all
   bounds, and yet it is not consciously dealing with exceptional cases,
   far less with breaches of the law of nature the very conception of such
   a law does not exist--but with everyday phenomena which are perfectly
   natural.

   The religious value attached by the early Christians to miracles
   surprises us to-day, even more than the entire absence of the critical
   faculty. It is not merely those Christians to whom we owe our Gospels,
   who find the proof of the truths of their doctrine in the stories of
   the miracles. Jesus Himself appeals to His miracles (and that not only
   in the Fourth Gospel), and sees in them the beginning of the kingdom of
   God. Hence we can readily understand that the miracle of the
   Resurrection must needs serve as the foundation of the Christian faith.
   Whereas, amongst the Jews, miracles were intended as a proof of
   doctrine; amongst the Gentiles they bear witness to the manifestation
   of a God (Renan); and just as it twice happened in St Paul's journeys,
   that he was on the point of receiving divine honours because of his
   miracles--once when he healed the lame man, and again when the viper's
   bite did him no harm--so Jesus was actually regarded by the Gentile
   Christians as God, because of the miracles that were related of Him.
   The theology of miracles occupies a higher position in the New
   Testament than one is usually inclined to accord to it, and the
   Divinity of Christ is bound up with this theology.

   Nowhere is the difference between modern and early Christian modes of
   thought seen in so clear a light as in the fact that the stories of the
   miracles of the New Testament, which were once one of the chief proofs
   of the truths of our religion, are themselves to-day the object of long
   apologetic writings.

   Like nature without, so the human mind within is a mystery to the early
   Christians. Here, too, they have no idea of a fixed sequence of events,
   but everything happens independently and arbitrarily. It is true that
   Jesus, and after Him the theologians Paul and John, just touched upon
   the thought of an inner necessity, but it was only by the way, and led
   to no further consequences. The belief in the freedom of man under all
   circumstances and at all times is for all that presupposed by the New
   Testament authors without an exception. Jesus confirmed this belief by
   the great demand that He made upon man, and it is the very life of
   Christian missionary work. But this belief is simply a special instance
   of belief in the miraculous.

   But the true domain of mystery lies in the real inner life of the soul,
   in the unconscious with its enigmatic utterances. The miraculous itself
   is contained in every human being, and can manifest itself suddenly in
   ecstatic conditions. Unchecked by any Philistine spirit of rationalism,
   the early Christians bestowed upon all manifestations of the mysterious
   inner life of the soul a far more serious and more impartial attention
   than we moderns, who are often inclined to be somewhat too precipitate
   in determining the limits of that which is possible. In those days men
   were at once more childlike and more dogmatic in their explanation of
   mental processes. Even though they built up no system, the conception
   prevailed amongst them that these phenomena were the manifestations of
   some external agent. It was not we ourselves, but a demon, an angel, or
   a spirit that was the efficient cause; sometimes this agent is
   conceived of as intimately connected with our soul, but at others he is
   an entirely extraneous being that has forced his way into our body from
   without through one of its many pores, and now dwells within it and
   rules over it. Here we have the origin of the conception, not only of
   demoniacal possession, but of that of the Holy Spirit, whose
   operations, save that they work the will of a beneficent Deity, are
   pictured as analogous to those of the demons. Speaking with tongues and
   prophesying, the seeing of visions and the state of enhancement, the
   working of miracles, are above all else the manifestations of this one
   and the same spirit, as they are presented to us in chaps. xii. and
   xiv. of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, our principal New
   Testament authority on this subject. The conception of the double
   appears rudely materialized in St Peter's conversation with Rhoda, and
   then in a lovely form in Jesus' words concerning the little children's
   angels, and especially spiritualized in that passage in St Paul where
   God's Spirit testifies to our spirit that we are the children of God.
   We trace these naive conceptions in theological trains of thought: the
   whole dogma of the Atonement, as well as, on the other hand, that of
   Inspiration, stand and fall in their ecclesiastical shape with this
   childlike psychology of the ancient world. Where we stand face to face
   with the phenomena of the unconscious in man and marvel, and yet even
   here at least suspect natural causation, the early Christians at once
   presupposed the supernatural agency of a good or of an evil spirit.

   We may here mention in passing that in like manner the anthropology of
   the early Christian laity--possibly not that of the theologian St
   Paul--maintains its close connection with the popular beliefs of the
   ancient world, when it still conceives of matter and spirit as in some
   manner merged in each other. The soul, the spirit itself, is something
   corporeal, though far more sublimated than our flesh and blood. The
   rich man in Hades sees, hears, suffers thirst and torments in the
   flames, although his body already rests in the grave. At the foundation
   of the rite of Baptism lies the conception, though possibly no longer
   consciously, that the water cleanses the soul together with the body.

   How strange at bottom do the words of Jesus sound to our modern modes
   of thought! "Be not over-anxious for the soul what ye shall eat and
   drink, nor for the body wherewith ye shall be clothed." The
   appearances, too, of the risen Master, with their hybrid character of
   visionary and grossly material features, can be more readily understood
   from the point of view of this anthropology, which is as yet not
   strictly dualistic. It is true that St Paul, as a clear thinker,
   endeavoured to arrive at a distinct separation of body and soul, but
   after all his efforts he only reaches the conception of the spiritual
   body, which still betrays his original starting-point.

   After external nature and the mystery of the soul, we come finally to
   the third great wonderland, the domain of the Spirit. That which has
   become for us moderns a dead formula, or else the play of the freest
   fancy, was the deepest of all realities that regulated life for the age
   of early Christianity. Jews and Persians did, it is true, divide
   spirits according to an ethical standard into angels and demons, but as
   Satan can transform himself into an angel of light, the operations of
   the two groups are often surprisingly similar; and finally, the
   original contrast of harmful and helpful spirits can be plainly traced
   even in the New Testament itself. The spirits fill the whole of the
   upper world, the realm of the air, and yet they live at the same time
   upon earth and among men. All kinds of diseases--even fevers or
   dumbness, but in the highest degree, of course, mental diseases--are
   caused by them. A spirit can enter into a man with seven others or even
   with a whole legion. The expulsion of these inmates is itself the
   effect of a spiritual process, the means employed being fasting and
   disenchantment. The helpful spirits, on the other hand, are welcome
   saviours in every kind of distress, and mediators between men and the
   highest God. Now, no one lived in the midst of these conceptions
   regarding the world of spirits with a more childlike simplicity of
   belief than Jesus Himself. He fights with Satan, and with the hosts of
   Beelzebub in the solitude of the wilderness, and in the midst of the
   habitations of men. He is under the painful necessity of seeing His
   most trusted follower become the emissary of Satan. St Paul is ever
   being parted from God by dominions, principalities and powers, and it
   is in defiance of them that he clings so fast to God's love. In one of
   his last letters he tells us of the prince of the power of the air, the
   spirit that worketh even now in the children of disobedience, and he
   thus summons the Christian to the last struggle of all, not against
   flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers,
   against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts
   of wickedness in the heavenly places. The weapons which he there
   recommends are the grand Christian substitutes for the ancient spells
   and charms. It was only by assuming the existence of demons that the
   early Christian Church could explain the might of Rome and the power of
   the heathen world. And everywhere the clear distinction between good
   and bad spirits rests upon the foundation of the ancient conception of
   the spirit world.

   Nothing is easier than the proof that all these conceptions of the
   enchanted world with its three wonderlands are neither specifically
   Christian nor Jewish, but simply belong to the ancient popular belief,
   and not to it alone. The early Christians were perfectly conscious that
   they shared this belief with the heathen. That is why they made such
   frequent use of all these elements in their apologetic writings. The
   myths and miracles of Jesus are there compared with perfect
   ingenuousness with their Greek parallels (the earliest passage is in
   Justin Martyr, First Apology, chaps. xxi. and xxii.): "If the
   Christians relate cures of lame and palsied men, and of men sick from
   their birth, and the raising of the dead, then all this is similar to
   that which is said to have been done by Asclepius." The belief in the
   Resurrection of Jesus has its parallel among the Jews in the report of
   the risen Baptist, and among the heathen in the belief in Asclepius,
   who was struck by lightning and ascended into heaven. For the
   miraculous birth of the Son of God, both friends and foes of
   Christianity adduced, though with opposite intentions, the
   corresponding cases of the origin of sons of God amongst the heathen.
   Though Jesus compared His casting out of devils with that of the Jewish
   exorcists, this art was not specifically Jewish, but belonged to the
   ancient world in general. The Jew whom Celsus introduces as the
   opponent of the Christian, mentions Egyptian, i.e. heathen Goetes,' who
   for a few obols cast out devils, blow away diseases, bring up the souls
   of the dead, etc. The same applies to the prediction of future events.
   If we find Christians as early as in the New Testament appealing to the
   so-called proof from prophecy in order to convince the heathen, they
   presuppose the fact that their heathen adversaries attach a high value
   to the gift of divination.

   So deeply spread and so deeply rooted was the belief in ecstasy as a
   divinely-caused state, that the apologists declared that
   euhemerism--i.e. the attempt to explain the heathen religions by the
   deification of men--failed because of the fact of oracles. But the
   agreement of Christians with heathen in the belief in demons is most
   palpable in the controversy of Origen with Celsus. Both entirely concur
   in the assumption of an intermediary race or species of beings who are
   the givers of all gifts such as bread, wine, water, air, only Celsus
   calls them demons and Origen angels,--so narrow is the dividing line
   which here separates the friends and the foes of Christianity. A pure
   monotheist was hardly to be found either then or in the time of Jesus.

   Such are some of the reasons that may be advanced in confirmation of
   the statement that the popular belief of the ancient world is the soil
   from which Christianity took its rise. In all these conceptions it is a
   child of its age and no revelation of God. Owing to the rise of science
   the props which still supported this belief in the midst of
   Christianity have gradually been withdrawn. Thus originated the great
   conflict between faith and knowledge. If it were really true, as many
   of its defenders maintain, that faith in the enchanted world
   constitutes the substance of Christianity, then, of course, the doom of
   our religion would be sealed.
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CHAPTER II.

  JUDAISM.

   CHRISTIANITY stands to Judaism indubitably in a relationship at once of
   the closest affinity and yet of the most striking contrast. What did it
   take over from Judaism? What did it reject? It rejected the Jewish
   idea, the pivot on which Judaism turns. To all its other elements it
   stands in a positive relationship; although the part which it rejected,
   involved as a necessary consequence an inner transformation of the
   whole Jewish system.

   What is the Jewish idea? It is the conception of religion as a legal, a
   national system. Nowhere else was it developed with such uncompromising
   severity. Speaking generally, religion is for the Jews a system of law
   (no'mos) which is definitely drawn up between a particular God and a
   particular people. In contrast to all the false religions of the
   Gentiles, the true religion is the Jewish law (or constitution). The
   God of the whole world, so it is said, granted to Israel alone its law
   in order to give them the whole earth for their inheritance, provided
   they were faithful citizens under this law, so that all other people
   might accept the law of Israel and become its subjects. Technically
   speaking, that is the formal principle of Judaism. The material may
   readily be inferred from the contents of the law. That is, it is
   nothing else than Jewish national custom conceived as the commandments
   of God. In other words, it is the sum of all the ceremonial judicial
   and social peculiarities whereby, in the course of time, the Jews
   imagined that they were differentiated from their neighbours. In the
   forefront they placed circumcision and claimed it to be the distinctive
   sign of the tribe. A bold claim, and one that rested on no historical
   foundation--the early Christians knew that already. Then followed
   prescriptions as to the taxes to be paid to God and His holy servants,
   the ceremonial regulating attendance at the Holy Place and the worship
   to be there tendered, penal laws and those regarding compensation, and
   commandments relating to moral and many other matters. All this
   together constituted the immensely complicated body of laws to which
   God had bound Himself and His people. To be religious meant to be a
   citizen of this state, to belong to the Jewish Church.

   For the Church is simply the converse of this constitution. It is
   exactly the same thing if you call Judaism a Church or if you call it a
   constitution. The Church is the realization of the law which exists at
   first as an idea. There never was a time when the Church excluded true
   piety on the part of the individual, but the emphasis was laid on that
   which affected the community--nay, more, on that which affected it as a
   codified system of law. The Church is religion conceived as a spiritual
   State. Such was the position of Judaism from the exile onwards that it
   could only exist as a spiritual State in the midst of the world powers.
   In the time of Jesus religion meant a legal code and a Church.

   It is well known that Jesus did not come forward as the opponent of the
   law or of the Church, but as the enemy of the Scribes and Pharisees.
   The simple reason of this is that they are the visible representatives
   of the Jewish law. For this law demanded a very minute acquaintance. It
   needed men to act as commentators and to develop it still further. It
   was not something that had been laid down once for all. It was
   constantly growing. Only one portion was committed to writing in the
   Thora. The greater part, the customary law, was handed down by oral
   tradition. And the written law itself was composed in a dead language.
   Besides this, the whole was very complicated and very learned. Hence
   the necessity of a learned caste--the theologians who are, of course,
   rather to be considered as lawyers. They formed a close corporation
   into which a man only entered, and that for life, after long years
   spent as disciple at the feet of honoured masters, and after due
   ordination. Nothing could possibly exceed the esteem in which this
   caste was held. The Scribes were God's mediators and revealers--the
   only living authority in God's stead. All others were laymen and in the
   position of minors. Such was Jesus. Hence His attitude of opposition.

   Now the aim and object of the Pharisaic propaganda was to drive this
   learned system into the heads of the people. The Pharisees wanted to
   see the law, which the Scribes first of all distilled as pure theory,
   in a position of practical and universal supremacy. They were zealous
   in good works; they loved a typical ritual; their energy was tireless;
   they were critical and censorious. Such were their characteristics. In
   Jesus' time they posed publicly as the pattern of what a religious man
   ought to be. He that did not accept their propaganda counted as a
   sinner or as am-ha-'arets,' country-folk that knew not the law. The
   Pharisees are the incarnation of the Jewish law. They represent an
   ideal of life which is distinct from everything else. One can realize
   it best by taking note of the judgments they pass on things of the
   world, of their estimate of the actions and destiny of men.

   All external things are either clean or unclean, sacred or common. The
   duty of the religious man is to keep himself undefiled by all unclean
   things, kinds of food, vessels, etc.

   The actions of men are of different value in God's sight. All
   extraordinary works' are especially pleasing to God; such, for
   instance, are, first and foremost, acts of worship, sacrifices, the
   paying of tithes, fasting, pilgrimages.

   The end of man is holiness. He is nearest God who holds himself aloof
   from publicans, sinners, and Samaritans, and renounces the wicked
   world.

   We need no further evidence to see that in opposing the Scribes and
   Pharisees, Jesus indirectly set Himself against the whole Jewish idea,
   law, and Church, and that St Paul rightly understood Jesus when he said
   "Christ is the end of the law."

   And herein it is especially instructive to observe how the layman Jesus
   and the Scribe Paul attack different sides of the Jewish idea and thus
   complete each other in their criticism. It is the content of the Jewish
   ideal of life that arouses the indignation of Jesus--the terrible
   externalization of religion, the essential being completely buried
   beneath hypocrisy and folly. St Paul, on the other hand, fights against
   the form of the Jewish religion which is fitting but for hirelings and
   slaves, and reverses the true religious relationship, the sonship of
   man to God. It is only when we combine the two lines of attack that we
   have a complete criticism of the Jewish idea.

   And then, after all, the same Jewish idea in its modified Christian
   form enters upon a new lease of power--a magnificent dominion destined
   to last for centuries. Would that it had been otherwise.

   But even in the time of its degeneracy the Jewish religion was
   pre-eminent, surpassing every other upon earth. Christianity could only
   arise in Jewish soil. Nowhere else did such faith in God, so high a
   moral standard, and so lofty a hope for the future, lie full of promise
   side by side, waiting to be unified and exalted into a world-religion.

   It is important to realize clearly the distinctive feature in the
   Jewish faith in God. It cannot be monotheism. For a long time past that
   had become the common property of the enlightened Greek world, as far
   as it had any understanding for religion, and even in Israel itself it
   had been modified by a belief in angels which bears clear marks of its
   polytheistic origin. One need but read, for instance, the Epistle to
   the Colossians if one would form some idea of the weakness of Jewish
   monotheism, not to mention the Greek prologue to the Fourth Gospel,
   which places a' God, the Logos, by the side of the God. Neither,
   however, is it the simple belief in Providence, in a God that punishes
   and rewards, that constitutes the peculiarity of the Jewish religion.
   The Christian apologist Lactantius was able to postulate an individual
   Providence as an elementary truth current among all the better
   heathens. When the Jews in Jesus' time pictured the world to themselves
   as a kind of household instituted by God, and superintended by Him,
   then the Greeks presented them with the word for the idea--dioikesis.
   It is only the historical and teleological character of this faith in
   God that marks the pre-eminence of the Jewish religion. While with the
   Stoics the belief in Providence is based upon the order of nature that
   is, on the impression afforded by the world of a rational whole bound
   together by laws of cause and effect--with the Jews it is built up on
   the foundation of the deeds of Jahwe, of His promises and of His
   designs. Jahwe is free, in subjection to nothing but His own will;
   therefore religion never turns into philosophy amongst this people, but
   becomes faith in the God that creates things anew. To the Jews God
   never appears as the being who merely sets the world in motion and
   regulates its course, though that is a part of His government, but He
   is the free creator, the creator in every moment of time. All is
   history, even nature. Wherever they arrive at the idea of a necessary
   causation there it immediately finds its place in history as
   predestination, as the act of God before the beginning of time. And
   even where particular provinces of this history are assigned to the
   supervision of intermediary beings, they do not count as in anywise
   independent powers, but merely as the executors of the commands of God.
   The first of God's acts was the creation of the world, the last shall
   be the restitution of Israel and of the fallen world by the violent
   destruction of the present evil condition of things. The beginning and
   the end are united by an unbroken chain of divine acts. So far removed
   is the thought that the God that creates the new world is perchance
   another than He that created the old world, that it is just the
   apocalypses that are especially fond of singing the praises of God the
   Creator. It is none other than John, author of our book of the
   Apocalypse, who sings: "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and
   honour, and power; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy
   pleasure they are, and were created." So, too, we read in the "Shepherd
   of Hermas" from the true Jewish point of view: "Behold the Lord of all
   power, He that created the world and established the heavens and
   founded the earth above the waters; behold He removeth heavens and
   mountains and high places and seas, and all paths are made straight for
   His elect."

   One frequently meets with the expression nowadays, "the transcendency
   of the Jewish idea of God," but in employing these words sufficient
   caution is not always observed. It is quite true that to later Judaism
   God has become a far-off, mysterious being. Everyone who reads in
   succession the theophanies of an Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and John
   realizes that. A further proof may be found in the awe with which the
   utterance of the name of Jahwe is avoided. "Hallowed be Thy name"--that
   is, may it be thought of with the reverence due to the unspeakable.
   Angels stand between God and man, whole hierarchies of dominions and
   powers and thrones. Living religion is often concerned with them
   instead of with God. One finds indications that God will only fully
   reveal Himself in the future, that at present He is visible to none,
   and no man can approach Him. This can be proved by many passages in the
   writings of St Paul and St John. For Paul, the whole present evil world
   is fallen away from God and is under the dominion of hostile powers,
   sin, death and demons. Satan is called the God of this world. It is
   only in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus that we have irrefutable
   evidence of God and His love. John, too, calls Satan the prince of this
   world, and God, so it is said, no man hath ever yet seen, not even the
   prophets of the Old Testament. All our knowledge of God comes to us
   through Jesus that revealed Him. That, it is true, is a complete
   transcendency of the idea of God. But then we remember that St John and
   St Paul are theologians, they are not simple representatives of the
   popular belief, and that both of them, as Christian apologists, are
   interested in removing the world without Christ very far from God.
   Their writings prove nothing as to the belief of the laity in the time
   of Jesus. If in Jesus we meet with a faith in God of unexampled
   freshness and ingenuousness, which nevertheless is nowhere bound up
   with any claim to novelty, then the foundations for this must have
   already been securely laid among the Jews. Nor is it difficult to find
   proof of this. For Jesus, it is God that gives the rain and the
   sunshine, that feeds the fowls of the air and clothes the flowers of
   the field, that hears all prayers, that protects the sparrow on the
   roof, and much more man himself. That is the simple piety of the
   Psalms. The Psalms of Solomon, which date from the age of Pompey, are
   in point of time our nearest documentary evidence. The greater part of
   the canonical Psalter is not much older. This simple, childlike faith
   in God Jesus presupposes as possessed by those to whom He addresses
   Himself, and it knows nothing of transcendency. But it is subject to
   the narrowest national limitations. The Lord of heaven and of earth was
   the Father of Israel. Only the Jew dare pray to "Our Father." Yet there
   was no loss in this; the limitations of this faith were also a sign of
   its truth and power. The chief point, too, for these simple layfolk was
   that this God, the source of all life in this world, through His deeds
   and through His gifts, promised to found the kingdom of God. Then
   should He manifest Himself fully as the God of deeds who is bound by
   His love but by no order of nature.

   The second great advantage of the Jewish religion is its moral
   character. Jahwe was not only the God of great deeds but the God of a
   lofty morality, who by His person was a pledge for the indissoluble
   connection between faith and life. Both Jews as well as early
   Christians realized how immensely important were the consequences
   implied by this connection, when they compared the Homeric gods with
   their Jahwe. They were indeed themselves aware that the work of the
   Greek thinkers and poets had arrived at a great purification and
   moralization of the polytheistic religion. This, however, they might
   safely ignore, as the influence of Homer never ceased, and could for
   them only be compared to the influence of their Bible. There were, it
   is true, not wanting in the Jahwe of the Old Testament features which
   betrayed the fact that He did not from the first possess all that lofty
   morality. Yet in the great collection of writings these features are a
   vanishing quantity by the side of His ethical character--though even
   thus they were only too visible to the gnostic critic. Or if they were
   once noticed they were immediately cleared of all contradiction with
   the moral consciousness by means of exegesis--especially allegorical.
   For the aim of Jewish theologians was to remove the offence caused by
   any instance of anthropomorphism, which already appeared to them as
   likely to be prejudicial to the purity of the idea of God.

   It is a consequence of the strictly moral character of the Jewish God
   that the outer forms of worship in this religion are entirely
   subordinate to its moral elements. This statement would not appear to
   be consistent with the contents of the Law, the longest portions of
   which are devoted to the regulation of public worship, nor with the
   practice of the Pharisees, who placed the ceremonial law above all
   purely human duties. But it can be inferred, were it but from the
   following two facts, first, that the cessation of the Temple worship at
   Jerusalem had as good as no influence whatever upon Judaism; and next,
   that we find no disputes amongst the Christians as to questions of
   ceremonial or of abstention from public worship. Neither God nor His
   worshippers needed the sacrifices. At the most the priests were pleased
   when rich contributions thus fell to their share. If amongst
   religiously-minded people any importance was attached to public
   worship, then this was simply for the sake of obedience. They just
   accepted the fact that it had been ordered as a divine institution. It
   was a part of the will of God, the strict and punctual observation of
   which, according to the ritual under all circumstances, and simply as
   an act of moral submission, secured the divine favour. But it was not
   the chief part of God's will. Whenever Jesus used the words "to do
   God's will," neither He nor those that heard Him ever thought of the
   sacrifices, but of the regulation of the daily life. It was a moral,
   not a ceremonial doing.' When St. Paul founded his churches amongst the
   Greeks, he noticed for the first time how alien to the Greek mind was
   that which he had assumed as a matter of course. For them the Christian
   congregation was an association for worship analogous to other similar
   associations. It neither ipso facto excluded the participation in other
   forms of worship, nor did it imply any pledge to regulate the life that
   lay outside of the services. It was therefore one of the chief tasks of
   the Christian teachers to impart a simple ethical meaning to the
   ceremonial prescriptions of the Old Testament which concerned
   sanctification.

   It is true that Jewish ethics present us with an entirely contradictory
   picture in which the ugliest features are not wanting by the side of
   the most pleasing and sympathetic. Amongst the former one would reckon
   the preference given to the negative avoidance of sin over the positive
   doing of good, the equally important position assigned to morally
   indifferent and important commandments, the merely external summary of
   duties without any classification, the interest in sexual questions,
   casuistry, and the seeking for reward. It was not without reason that
   the Jew could find his pattern in the Pharisee, who merely exaggerated
   the tendency of the average morality of religious people themselves,
   and this the more readily, because every disposition thereto is
   contained in the written law itself. The seeds sown by the Priestly
   Code attain to their full growth in Pharisaism.

   But, on the other hand, this transformation of morality into its
   opposite, is not the only characteristic that one notices in later
   Judaism. We are not justified in affirming that Jesus came to His
   simplification of the demands of religion through His opposition to the
   Pharisees. He would have delivered His message exactly as He did
   regardless of the Pharisees, and again not as something entirely new,
   but as containing the elements of sound vitality which He found already
   existing. Here, too, there is no lack of documentary evidence in Jewish
   writings. The ethical teaching of the Psalms and Proverbs, and of Jesus
   the Son of Sirach, points in this direction, and analogous elements may
   be found in the oldest form of the "Testament of the Twelve
   Patriarchs." Even a Christian document such as the Epistle General of
   James, derives its life rather from the simple Jewish popular morality
   than directly from the Gospel of Jesus.

   In the first place, we notice here that what is demanded is extremely
   simple. There is scarcely anything ceremonial or subject to national
   limitations. Jesus meets the tempter in the wilderness with the very
   simplest words from the Book of Deuteronomy. In the decisive moments of
   His ministry He appeals to the decalogue, the commandments of love,
   things that everyone knows to be axiomatic truths. Surely this
   presupposes an education in an entirely sound moral atmosphere. In the
   next place, even His spiritualization of the claim, His insistence on
   the motive, are not entirely unprecedented. Does not even the Talmud
   lay stress, only too much stress, upon sins of thought? The "Testament
   of the Twelve Patriarchs," "The Two Ways," "The Shepherd of
   Hernias,"--all writings which do not depend directly upon Jesus,
   emphasize inner purity and simplicity, just as much as external good
   works. Truly, then, there is no lack of parallels to the Sermon on the
   Mount. There is still enough and to spare of what is great and original
   in the work of Jesus, if we freely admit that He could only have arisen
   from this people, and that He found noble forerunners amongst them. The
   morality of a people must in deed have attained to a very high level if
   it strives in so resolute a fashion to pass beyond mere external
   legality in order to reach inner purity of motive.

   And is not, after all, the Jewish eagerness to believe that good deeds
   will be rewarded, the distortion of a true and great thought--that the
   good seed will under all circumstances ultimately bring forth good
   fruit? If we admit that Jesus was a sounder and saner teacher than our
   modern schoolmen, we may well ponder over the fact that He did not
   reject the scheme of rewards and punishments, but made use of it. Was
   not the true conviction thereby strengthened that idle piety is
   something entirely bad, and that God is not mocked? But in so doing
   Jesus did of course lay such stress upon the thought of the coming
   judgment that all easy-going optimism was purified by the most terrible
   earnestness.

   This brings us to the third great legacy which Judaism bequeathed to
   Christianity--eschatology. Just as the origin of the new religion
   cannot be conceived without the Jewish hope in the coming kingdom of
   God, so in the lifelong struggle with the Roman state the victory is
   won through the Jewish hope in the Resurrection. The fact that the
   early Christians did not adversely criticise the Jewish hope in any
   book of the New Testament, and that they were able to treat Jewish
   apocalypses without further addition as Christian, proves how deeply
   indebted they felt themselves to the Jews in this point above all
   others.

   How confused a maze of eschatological conceptions could coexist often
   in one and the same person we can see most simply by a few instances
   from the New Testament. We have an eschatology of the synoptists, and
   that a twofold one (Mk. xiii. and Luke xvi.), we have a series of
   apparently contradictory eschatologies in St. Paul (1 Thess. iv., 2
   Thess. ii., 1 Cor. xv., 2 Cor. v., Rom. xi., Phil. ii.), a whole bundle
   of eschatologies in the Apocalypse, and finally a peculiar variety in 2
   Peter. It is far more difficult to find even two entirely parallel
   visions of the future state, when one looks through the Jewish
   apocalypses dating from the time immediately preceding or succeeding
   Jesus. The thoughts of the learned differed from those of the common
   people, and the ideas of the Jews of the dispersion were unlike those
   of their Palestinian brethren. It will be sufficient for our purpose if
   we examine the different groups of these conceptions.

   The most important chapter in eschatology, especially for the populace,
   excited as it had been ever since the wars of the Maccabees by
   patriotic aspirations, is the national hope. The heading of the chapter
   is "Israel and the Gentile World." The people of God--recipients of the
   promises, and who in spite of them serve the Gentiles, the kings of the
   earth, and the city of Babylon, shall be liberated and exalted to
   lordship, over the whole world, while the neighbouring peoples shall be
   humbled. It is just the chief ideas of the New Testament--the kingdom
   of God and the Messiah--that belong to this political group of
   conceptions. But first the great reign of terror must pass by--the time
   of tribulation and temptation when Israel shall be humiliated yet
   further, and the heathen shall deliver their fiercest assaults upon the
   whole city and the Temple, led at times by Anti-christ, the devilish
   king of the last days, the enemy of God. When the need is highest,
   God's help is nighest: He confounds the enemy and establishes His
   kingdom. In all these pictures the kingdom of God is always conceived
   of as a political organization, in opposition to the kingdoms of the
   rulers of this earth and of the demons. It is placed upon the earth,
   or, with greater particularity, in Palestine, with Jerusalem for its
   capital. It denotes the supremacy of Israel over all the world. Her
   enemies and her tyrants are either rooted out or are subject to her as
   her slaves. They bring their tribute to Jerusalem and accept the Law of
   Israel. On the other hand, the patriarchs and the pious men of old,
   especially the martyrs, have now risen from the dead in order to
   participate in the joy of the kingdom which shall be--so men gradually
   tended to think--for everlasting. Either God Himself is regarded as the
   King, or He has raised the Messiah, the lawful descendant of David, to
   the throne, that He may judge and rule over His people in
   righteousness. While the older writings presuppose the continuation of
   the Davidic dynasty, the later accept the everlasting rule of the one
   descendant of David. Now all this is a continuation of earthly
   cirumstances under somewhat higher and more spiritual conditions. This
   vision of the future might be called a patriotic Jewish Utopia.

   It is, however, characteristic of the age of Jesus that this political
   expectation seldom stands by itself, but has to suffer admixture with
   elements of an entirely different nature, with the eschatology of the
   whole world and of the individual. Two important questions, the fate of
   the world and the fate of the individual soul, are added to the
   previous subject: "Israel and the Gentile World." They are of especial
   importance for the new religion, because though it arose from the midst
   of the national eschatology, it quickly freed itself from it and turned
   its attention to the other problems. In the first place, we find that
   in later Judaism the whole realm of action--heaven as well as earth and
   the world of spirits--are all drawn into the historical drama, until at
   length--though the transition is not yet quite clear to us--the
   conception of the essential similarity between the future and the
   present gives way to the conception of the new aeon which in many
   important points is to be the exact opposite of the present world. Here
   is death, there everlasting life; here flesh, there spirit; here sin,
   there innocence; here God is far away, there He shall be seen face to
   face. This vision embraces the fate of the whole of creation, of the
   whole human race, so that Israel's glory merely appears as one special
   case amongst many. Of course it likewise furnishes us with evidence of
   the incapacity of the Jew to leave the world of phenomena behind him,
   for the future life never appears to him as the spiritual in our sense
   of the word, but always as the hyperphysical.

   In the next place, men are now free to reflect upon the fate of the
   individual. The hope of salvation, first of the rescue of the
   individual in the great struggle that shall be in the last days, and
   then of his future blessedness--this hope takes its place beside that
   of the kingdom of God. The goal is one and the same, but many roads
   lead to it. Either the conception of the resurrection of the dead and
   of the day of judgment are accepted, and the emphasis is laid upon the
   judgment of the individual soul by God. The soul appears before the
   great judgment seat with the result of its whole life, there to receive
   everlasting joy or endless torment. In this case the old idea of the
   shadowy life of the soul in Sheol suffices to describe its condition
   until the day of the final resurrection. Or else the powerful light of
   the faith in retribution is flashed even into Hades itself, and that at
   once, so that for the individual death is followed immediately by
   judgment and the dead are portioned out between Gehenna and Paradise
   without waiting for the final judgment. But in this case the soul
   itself must be conceived of as something phenomenal, as sensible to
   bodily pain and pleasure.

   In all this there is nothing clear and distinct--there is no unity of
   conception. The sources of all these ideas are so various that complete
   harmony is out of the question. Here we go back to the patriotic
   enthusiasm of the prophets and to their prophecies of the coming doom,
   and again to Animism, old as the human race itself, though it has been
   transformed by the dogma of retribution; and, lastly, to possibly
   Persian notions of the resurrection and the new world. It is true that
   attempts at reducing these varied elements into some sort of system are
   not entirely wanting. Such are the millennial theories of our Book of
   Revelation, parallels to which may be found in the fourth book of Ezra
   and in Baruch. First of all, room is found for the national Utopia, but
   then comes the final catastrophe, followed by the universal
   resurrection of the dead and the day of judgment; and so it turns out
   to be merely a provisional state of things preparatory to the new
   world. But for Jesus, the kingdom of God and the new world run into
   each other; there is no provisional state of things, but the most
   intimate blending of earthly and transcendental features. And after
   all, the most important point was not the manner of the realization,
   but the fact itself. Israel possessed the religion of Hope. No other
   people had anything like it. With the same battle-cry with which
   Christianity arose, "The kingdom shall yet be ours," Israel itself went
   forth to the last dread war of destruction and after that into its
   desolation. But as for the kingdom itself, it is in God's hand alone;
   that every Jew and every Christian knew. It is the gift of God, and He
   gives it when He will. Men cannot bring it about. Neither in Jewish nor
   in Christian writings is there the slightest suspicion of the thought
   that men's, acts, their works, or their piety can cause the kingdom to
   come. Complete passivity is man's duty. He must wait, and he must hope,
   and make ready in serious earnest. Between this world and the next
   stand the catastrophe and the resurrection of the dead and the judgment
   to come. It is perfectly immaterial whether this life and the next
   stand to each other, as they do in the popular conception, in the
   relation of the deed and its reward; or, as from a deeper point of
   view, in the relation of seed and harvest. In each case the strictly
   supernatural character of the promise is retained.

   The early Christians clearly felt and expressed their dependence upon
   the Jewish religion. They called their God the God of the Fathers; they
   declared the Old Testament to be their sacred book; they took the
   prophecies and the apocalypses as the basis of their hope. It was only
   the Jewish idea, the law, that they decisively rejected after a short
   period of hesitation; and even this only with the help of allegorical
   explanations which served to hide the defection from their eyes. But
   from the second century onwards, Christianity separates into two great
   movements. The one endeavours to realize the theory that the Christians
   are the true Israel, and finally gives the Jewish Church a fresh lease
   of life in Roman Catholicism. The other movement proceeds in part with
   rapid strides, and in part gradually, to the Hellenization of
   Christianity, to its transformation into Greek philosophy and
   mysticism; but in so doing it clearly shows us that in disassociating
   itself from Judaism, it has disassociated itself from the Gospel, which
   has this in common with Judaism, that it is a religion of practical
   morality.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER III.

  THE FULNESS OF THE TIME.

   WHEN the early Christians maintained that Jesus had come into the world
   in the fulness of the time, they were not at all thinking of an
   especially favour able conjunction of affairs in the world, but simply
   of the termination of that apocalyptic age--the duration of which was
   unknown to themselves--which God had determined should precede the end
   of all things. The historian, too, has to exercise the greatest caution
   in the use that he makes of such statements as to the necessity of any
   occurrence in history. Even if he can prove in a general way that the
   conditions favourable to this or that event were present, he has done
   no more thereby than to point out that the thing was possible in the
   abstract. For who can say that these conditions were not already
   present a few decades earlier, or were present in a still more
   favourable degree a few decades later? By the side of the proof that
   the age was especially favourable to the spread of the Gospel, it would
   be possible to advance the counter proof with almost equally cogent
   arguments that the rapid transformation and decay of Christianity was
   due to the unfavourable circumstances of the age. It is sufficient for
   our present purpose to draw attention to some especially important
   characteristics of the position of Judaism in that age, without drawing
   any conclusions from them beyond what the actual facts warrant.

   First, then, we have the facts that throughout the Mediterranean
   countries we find a type of civilization which was on the whole
   uniform, and that the Jews were affected by it. This is shown above all
   by the universal supremacy of the Greek language into which the Old
   Testament was translated, in which the Jews philosophized, which St.
   Paul spoke and understood, in which the greatest portion of early
   Christian literature was written. Community of language implies to a
   very great extent community of thought. Traces of this community we
   find in the latest books of the Old Testament, but above all in
   Alexandrian Judaism. The Jews take possession first of the forms of
   Greek literature--we even find hexameters in the Sibylline books, then
   of the conceptions and of the aims and objects of Greek philosophy.

   Cosmology and ethics are developed into sciences in the Greek sense of
   the word; allegory becomes the connecting link between the Jewish word
   and the Greek spirit. We can already trace the first steps of that
   Jewish apologetic and criticism which paved the way for their Christian
   successors. The earliest form of Christianity is little influenced by
   all this, as long as it does not go beyond the boundaries of Palestine.
   The Greek spirit had no influence upon Jesus either directly or
   indirectly. But even the great missionary, who in many ways betrayed so
   anti-Greek, or at least anti-philosophical an instinct, cannot avoid
   contact with Greek conceptions. The literature of the sub-apostolic
   age, then, consciously throws the bridge over to the Greek world.
   Besides this, the guild system, which had grown up amongst the Jews of
   the dispersion, and was afterwards taken over by the Christians, was a
   creation of the Greek mind, which managed to bring together again in
   new combinations the individual atoms that were floating about
   separately in that great cosmopolitan age, when all old bonds were in
   process of dissolution.

   The mingling of religions was a prominent factor in the civilization of
   that age. It was effected consciously by the propaganda of the Oriental
   religions, unconsciously by the strange intermixture of all nations.
   This, too, was a preparation for Christianity. The only question is
   whether Christianity had not from the very first partaken of all these
   foreign elements, since Judaism, from which it had sprung, had been
   drawn into the process of decomposition. If in reality the Babylonian,
   Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek religions had been influencing
   later Judaism from all the different quarters of this chaos of people,
   then Christianity would have acquired its character of world-religion
   even from its very origin.

   We are scarcely in a position yet to put these questions, let alone
   answering them. One thing is certain, that Jesus and His Gospel are
   intelligible from Judaism alone; and for this, for Jesus and for His
   relation to Palestinian Judaism, other and more accurate data are
   available. He appeared in the last dying moments of the theocracy and
   before the exclusive rule of the Rabbis which succeeded it. Here, it is
   true, it can be affirmed that only a few decades later the origin of
   Christianity would be inconceivable. The political situation was a
   decisive factor in this case. The little Jewish people had freed itself
   from the embrace of the vast surrounding empire in a magnificent
   struggle for liberty, only soon after to share the fate of every other
   Mediterranean country and bow the neck beneath the Roman yoke. It
   retained, however, its hatred of the foreigner and its aspirations for
   liberty, and consoled itself with the thought of its glorious future.
   It was these feelings, passions, and Utopias that gave birth to the
   last terrible insurrection which ended in destruction. Now Christianity
   arose while the ground was being prepared for this insurrection. In the
   New Testament itself mention is made of the Zealots, of the murder of
   the Galileans, of false Christs, all signs of this preparation. Through
   its most distinctive phrases, Kingdom of God' and Messiah,' the Gospel
   stands in the closest and most direct connection with this period of
   political ferment. It precedes the judgment of the year 70 A.D.,
   exactly as the old prophecy once preceded the fall of the two kingdoms
   of Israel and Judah.

   In the next place we have to endeavour to present to ourselves the
   state of feeling among the Jews before Jesus appeared. It was a
   mysterious and a restless age. True, there was no lack of mercenary
   souls and of worldlings, who, leaving the future to take care of
   itself, devoted themselves to deriving what profit and pleasure they
   could from the passing moment. Jesus comes into contact at every step
   with this materialistic spirit, that knows not the signs of the times.
   But then besides these there are countless others, expectant, anxious
   and exultant souls, eagerly longing for the future. There were men and
   women there ready to sacrifice house and hearth, family and fatherland.
   It was a great time, pregnant with heroes and martyrs.

   All the hopes and longings, the serious earnestness, and the anger that
   lived in this people, were concentrated in one man--John the Baptist.
   He was the "fulness of the time" of Jesus. He stirred the masses as no
   man had done before. His preaching is only handed down to us in the
   Christian tradition, and therefore we do not know it accurately. The
   results of his activity were twofold. He suddenly applied the thought
   of the coming judgment, which lay forgotten and ineffective amidst the
   great confused mass of eschatological fancies, not to the Gentiles, but
   to the Jews themselves, and thereby shook their ecclesiastical system
   to the very foundation. The wrath of God descends upon the children of
   Abraham; it is of no avail to belong to the sacred people. Thereby in
   the next place the Baptist set each individual man the anxious
   question, What shall I do to be saved? This question, with which so
   many came to Jesus, is very far indeed from being a matter of course
   for a Jew, and not for a Jew alone. It was the result of the Baptist's
   preaching.

   Directly, John the Baptist was merely the founder of a sect which
   succumbed to the influence of the Pharisaic tendency. The entrance to
   this sect was through baptism. Then followed ascetic observances to
   prepare for the judgment. There had been many movements like this
   before. The merely negative predominated, and that after all does not
   lead men out from Judaism. John hurled his decisive nay' against all
   the church life of the Jews. Jesus took up the nay' and added to it His
   yea.'

   Jesus Himself was stirred by John to enter upon His own work. That was
   the greatest thing that John did.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IV.

  JESUS. THE CALL.

   CHRISTIANITY arose because a layman, Jesus of Nazareth, endowed with a
   self-consciousness more than prophetic, came forward and attached men
   so firmly to His person that, in spite of His shameful death, they were
   ready both to live for Him and to die for Him. Jesus imparted new
   values to things: He scattered new thoughts broadcast in the world. But
   it was only His person that gave these new values and these new
   thoughts that victorious power which transformed the world. It is men
   that make history and that imprint their personal character on great
   spiritual movements. If our century has had reason enough to learn
   that, then surely it is high time that the senseless chatter should
   cease about the religion of Christ which each Christian ought to
   acquire for himself. As if His power as Redeemer, His
   self-consciousness, His royal humility, could ever find a habitation in
   our little souls, quite apart from the fact that no one takes His
   external mode of life for a pattern. The difference between the prophet
   and the believer belongs to the elementary characteristics of every
   religion. The great historical religions, far from removing it, have
   but deepened and intensified it. It is impossible that a time should
   ever come for Christianity when any single Christian should acquire for
   his fellow-Christians the significance of Jesus.

   What is the starting-point of our enquiry? Not the titles of Jesus;
   their meaning has itself partly to be explained by the
   self-consciousness. Not the stories of the Birth, Baptism, and
   Transfiguration; these are possibly but attempts at explanation on the
   part of the early Church. No; we must begin with Jesus testimony to
   Himself and with His mode of life.

   Jesus comes to a man and says to him, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." He
   does on the Sabbath whatever seems good to Him, and calls Himself Lord
   of the same. As a new Moses He sets His "But I say unto you" against
   the words of the law. Himself a layman, He sets Himself in the place of
   the Scribes and declares to His audience of lay people that all
   knowledge of God has been given Him, and that He will impart it to
   them. He says: "Here is one greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon,
   the least of whose disciples is greater than John Baptist." He
   exclaims: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass
   away." He bids all those that labour and are heavy laden come unto Him
   that He may refresh them. They are to take up His yoke and learn of
   Him. And, on the other hand, He declares it to be the most grievous sin
   and one for which there is no forgiveness, if a man should blaspheme
   against the Holy Ghost who through Him works miracles. He comes to this
   or that individual with the brief command "Follow Me," and He calls for
   an immediate break with his previous mode of life. If need be, all are
   to be able to suffer and to die for Him and for His cause. If any man
   confesses Him before men and suffers for Him, then Jesus will certainly
   plead for him in the day of judgment.

   These passages have all been taken from the Synoptists; they are the
   more significant, because Jesus does not here, as in the Fourth Gospel,
   press His personality upon men's notice, but rather conceals it. Now it
   is clear that a self-consciousness that is more than merely human
   speaks from these words. And this is the mystery of the origin of
   Christianity. What we need to do above all is to accept it as a fact--a
   fact which demands a patient and reverent hearing.

   For scarcely more wonderful than the lofty self-consciousness of Jesus
   is the clear feeling of His limitations. Jesus prays to God as to His
   master, and teaches the disciples to pray to God. The deepest humility
   and subjection to the Lord of heaven and earth is His characteristic.
   Jesus will not suffer Himself to be called good--God alone is good. He
   knows nothing as to the last hour. God alone knows that. It is not His
   to assign the thrones of honour in the kingdom of God. That is God's
   sole prerogative. He speaks of God as the only judge whom man need
   fear. In Gethsemane He prays to God that the cup may pass, yet so that
   not His but God's will may be done. On the Cross there even escapes
   Him--according to the tradition--words that express a feeling of
   abandonment by God. So He stands, altogether a man on the side of men,
   with the feeling of the division that separates all things created from
   God.

   The Church did not extend the reverence that it felt for Jesus to these
   expressions of His humility. In sharpest contrast to what Jesus Himself
   had said it set up the attributes of sinlessness and Godhead, and made
   the right to bear the name of Christian dependent on agreement
   therewith. This tendency can be traced back to the New Testament
   writings of the Apostle John. In the end this has brought about a
   reaction. Men have believed only in the humble words of Jesus, while
   they have increasingly distrusted the declarations of His majesty. But
   both belong together. The most wonderful feature in Jesus is the
   co-existence of a self-consciousness that is more than human with the
   deepest humility before God. The same man that exclaims, "All things
   are given Me by the Father, and no man knoweth the Father but the Son,"
   answers the rich ruler, "Why callest thou Me good? No one is good but
   one, God." Without the first He is a man just such as we are; without
   the second He is an idle visionary. Jesus conceived of Himself as a
   Mediator. The Mediator is altogether man, without subtraction of
   anything that is human. But He has received from God an especial call
   and commission to His fellow-men, and thereby He towers high above
   them. Jesus shares this feeling of being a mediator with other men like
   Him. Even if it has in His case attained the highest degree of
   constancy, depth, and reality, yet no formula can define its exact
   limits.

   Let us leave the form of His consciousness, of His call--the Messianic
   idea--entirely on one side for the present and look only at the fact
   itself. And how stupendous a fact it is. Jesus is a simple country
   child without any higher education or knowledge. Above all, He is no
   theologian. Up to His thirtieth year He was an artizan. In His native
   town no one pays any particular attention to Him. His parents have no
   forebodings of His greatness. This layman, an artizan by trade, comes
   forward in God's name. He deposes all the Scribes. They do not know
   God. Jesus alone has recognized Him. He sets on one side the propaganda
   of the Pharisees. "Come unto Me and I will refresh you!" He sets aside
   the Baptist John. He belongs to the old order. His simple word shall be
   God's word--His help God's help. And all this without ever falling into
   the merely fanatical or visionary. He is always modest, humble, sane
   and sober, and yet with this superhuman self-consciousness. It is quite
   impossible to realize such an inner life as this. Revelation,
   Redemption, Forgiveness, Help--He has all those and offers them to such
   as shall surrender themselves to the impression of His personality.
   Jesus' mode of life is as far removed from the ordinary as His
   self-revelation. He stands entirely outside of human society. He does
   not mean to be a pattern for ordinary life. He has forsaken His
   calling, His family and His home, and has given Himself up to the life
   of an itinerant missionary. He has freed Himself from all the duties of
   social intercourse. He enters in again amongst men from without, but as
   a guest and as a stranger. In this manner He suffers Himself to be
   entertained hospitably with food and with shelter and to have His feet
   washed, and then He will leave the place, never perhaps to return
   again. He says expressly that He recognizes but a spiritual family--the
   men and the women that do God's will.

   Besides this separation from the world we must notice the mysterious
   power of working miracles which Jesus possesses in a very high degree
   and which He can transmit to others. Even though Jesus uses all these
   powers in the service of ministering love they only thereby become the
   more extra ordinary. If He passes nights in solitary prayer, if in His
   zeal for preaching and healing He forgets both food and rest, if He
   interrupts the ordinary sequence of natural laws, or, Himself subject
   to some mysterious power, appears to His companions as a being of
   another world and to His ignorant relations as one
   possessed--everywhere there is the same impression of the superhuman.
   All this is quite peculiar to Himself, and is not intended to be
   typical. His companions, too, whom He attached to His own mode of life
   in order that they might help Him in His missionary labours, He
   distinctly separated by this very fact from the disciples in the world
   whom He and His companions wished to serve.

   It is important to notice that the self-revelation of Jesus coincides
   with His mode of life. It was the same great calling which filled Him
   with the consciousness that He was the Redeemer, and which compelled
   Him to work as a homeless wanderer. Both in His words and in His life
   He represents the exceptional.

   The fact that Jesus possessed a peculiar consciousness of His call
   stands firmly established as a portion of the New Testament which is
   proof against all the attacks of controversy. Now we must discover its
   form, the especial idea under which the call presented itself.

   The whole of early Christianity gives one unanimous answer. Jesus is
   the Messiah, and has considered Himself such. The question now arises
   whether the belief of the early Church really was the belief of Jesus
   Himself. For the statement of the Church is attended by difficulties
   which have caused doubts to arise in connection with it.

   The idea of a Messiah originated in narrow Jewish patriotism. It
   embodies the national aspirations of the Jews for a position of
   magnificence in the world such as they conceived had already existed in
   the time of David. The 17th Psalm of Solomon is our chief source for
   this idea. After the Messiah has driven away the enemies and cleansed
   the land of every abomination, He is to divide it justly among the Jews
   and govern them justly and wisely from Jerusalem as a theocratic
   prince. In reality, the idea of the Messiah had something
   archaeological about it, even for the Jews. It had been revived by the
   learned from a bygone age, and had gradually taken root among the
   people. It no longer quite fits in with the kingdom of God, with the
   new earth, with the transfigured body, and the whole transcendentalism
   of later Judaism. Hence the Messiah is a favourite figure in the
   intermediate state of things in learned apocalypses, whilst in the
   final state no room is found for Him.

   The question, then, rightly arises, Can Jesus have clothed His lofty
   self-consciousness in so narrow a national Jewish idea? The answer
   depends, in the first place, on the reliability of the oldest
   tradition, and next on considerations of a general character. We have
   the trial of the King of the Jews, the entry into Jerusalem, the
   confession of Peter, the dispute for the places of honour on the right
   hand and on the left of the Messiah, which can scarcely all be
   inventions of disciples who inserted a later belief in the Messiah into
   the life of Christ. This result of our enquiry into the oldest Gospel
   (Mark's) is confirmed by the oldest collection of Logia, in which Jesus
   answers the Baptist's question, "Art thou He that shall come, or do we
   look for another?" by the simple reference to the beginning of the
   Messianic age of miracles; and in like manner ascribes to His victories
   over the demons the signification that in them the kingdom of God has
   come. Surely facts lie at the basis of these traditions, which, whether
   they be pleasant or not, demand a hearing and can only be suppressed by
   forcible means.

   In addition to this there are considerations of a general character.
   The belief of the disciples in their Messiah must be older than Jesus'
   death, for it could not entirely arise after that death, which was such
   a grievous disappointment to so many expectations. If it is older than
   Jesus' death it is incredible that Jesus did not share it, and yet
   suffered it to be held.

   If Jesus did not consider Himself to be the Messiah, then He must have
   thought of Himself as a prophet. This by itself would possibly be
   sufficient to explain all that was extraordinary in His mode of life.
   But Jesus could not come forward as a prophet--e.g. like John because
   the prophet always points to one higher than himself, and thereby
   assigns a provisional character to himself, while Jesus knew Himself to
   be God's final messenger, after whom none higher can come. That is the
   decisive consideration. The superhuman self-consciousness of Jesus,
   which knows nothing higher than itself save God and can expect none
   other, could find satisfactory expression in no other form but that of
   the Messianic idea. That which weighs with Jesus in accepting this idea
   is not its political but its final and conclusive character.

   This last consideration has brought us face to face with the question
   as to the origin of the Messianic consciousness. It is, however, only
   honest to confess that this origin is a mystery for us: we know nothing
   about it. All that we can say is how this consciousness did not arise
   in Jesus. It was not through slowly matured reflections of an
   intellectual nature: such are never the basis of certainty. The
   self-consciousness of a clever theologian might possibly thus be
   accounted for, but not that of the Son of God. Nor, again, was it owing
   to the influence of His surroundings; the voices of demons and of the
   world might make a man of genius vacillate: they could never impart a
   divine certainty to him. The fact, too, that Jesus appears from the
   very first with unswerving constancy and immovable certainty as one
   sent by God causes us to abandon both explanations. There is nowhere
   any hesitation, or doubt, or development from presentiments to
   certainty. Jesus learns new things as to the manner of His calling, but
   never anything fresh as to the fact itself. He acts His whole life long
   under the stress of compulsion. He knows Himself sent, nay, driven by
   God. He has only one choice: to obey or to disobey.

   The Gospels date the Messianic consciousness of Jesus from the Baptism.
   He saw the Spirit of God descending in the fashion of a dove, and heard
   a voice, "Thou art My Son." The great Old Testament prophets were, it
   is true, called in visions, and St. Paul became a Christian and an
   apostle by means of a vision. So far the evidence is in favour of the
   evangelists' story. But there is one consideration which should weigh
   very strongly in the contrary direction. The strange occurrence at the
   Baptism could have been told the disciples by none other than by Jesus
   Himself. If Jesus told them, then it could only be for the purpose of
   obtaining authority for His mission. But Jesus never appealed to
   visions. That is just His great distinction, His immense advantage over
   Mahomet. The whole edifice of Mahomet's self-consciousness falls to
   pieces as soon as the truth of his visions is questioned. But in Jesus'
   case you may cut out the story of the Baptism and of the
   Transfiguration and everything remains the same. All the outer
   processes which served the Old Testament prophets as means of
   communication with God, fall into disuse when we come to Jesus. That is
   just what constitutes His greatness. The consciousness of His call does
   not depend upon voices and visions, which everyone who has not himself
   experienced them is at liberty to doubt, but simply upon inner
   compulsion. How this compulsion came upon Him, whether it was in the
   end connected with some visionary experience, that is not for us to
   know. And after all, the important matter is not that Jesus had some
   experience of an especial nature with God, but that this experience
   compelled Him to turn to men. The historian who contents himself with
   this observes thereby the reverence that is due to this mystery.

   But then, on the other hand, the inadequacy of the Messianic idea for
   Jesus Himself is likewise clear. Besides the one thought, the Messiah
   is God's last messenger, nothing but Jewish narrowness was connoted by
   this title. Happily Jesus is something else, something greater than the
   Messiah of the Jews. The traces are still preserved in the gospel
   tradition of the wrestling of Jesus with the inadequacy of the idea, of
   His labouring with the conception till finally its contents were
   completely transformed.

   It is the story of the Temptation that shows us first of all that there
   is a complete want of inner harmony between Jesus and the Messianic
   idea. This story signifies the breach of Jesus with all that is
   fanciful and politically dangerous in the conception of the Messiah.
   The Messiah is a miraculous being who can do everything. Is Jesus to
   depend upon this, and thereby win over the people? The Messiah is a
   king of this world who attains to his dominion by force, deceit,
   treachery and cunning, just like other kings here on earth. Shall Jesus
   gain the sovereignty of the world by these means? No. He cries; it is
   the voice of Satan which is thus appealing to My feelings as Messiah.
   Away with it. In so doing He had already won the victory over that
   which presented the greatest danger in the conception of the Messiah,
   and had subjected Himself in obedient faith to God.

   But what next? The Messiah of the Zealots had been cast aside. There
   remained the Messiah of the Rabbis. According to the true dogma, the
   Messiah was to remain concealed somewhere or other, perhaps in the
   desert, until God. exalted Him on His throne. That is to say, He was to
   do nothing and wait for the miracle to be wrought. But Jesus returned
   from the desert back into the world, in order to help men and prepare
   them for the Messianic time. He did not wait, but went about doing
   good. All the great redemptive activity of Jesus has no place in the
   Jewish conception of the Messiah; or, in other words, that which is
   great in Jesus from the point of view of the history of the world, is
   not a consequence of the idea of the Messiah, but is an original
   addition of His own.

   Messiah' and Israel' are two ideas that are inseparably connected
   together in the Jewish mind. The Messiah is Israel's future king--that
   and nothing else. Jesus, too, remained faithful to this dogma, and
   confined His activity during the whole of His life to His own people.
   But through bitter and grievous deception He had to learn that Israel
   as a whole was not receptive: that it would not accept the message, and
   that it was blindly hurrying along the road that led to judgment. At
   the same time, glimpses that open out into the heathen world fill Him
   with hope. And so He resigns Himself to be, if God so wills it, the
   Messiah whom Israel rejects and the Gentiles accept. Thereby all that
   is merely national is almost entirely banished from the idea of the
   Messiah. It is turned into the formal conception of king; judged by its
   contents, it becomes a paradox.

   In the Jewish fancy Messiah is surrounded by all manner of heavenly and
   earthly glory. David's fame is reflected upon him. But the bitter
   experience that Jesus has gained in His dealings with His people causes
   the thought of the necessity of suffering, and even of death, to ripen
   in His soul. From the day at Caesarea Philippi onwards He begins to
   familiarize the minds of the disciples with it, and utilizes the very
   occasion when their enthusiasm bursts into flame, to give them their
   first solemn lesson.

   The thought of death was the stumbling-block to the Jews; it was the
   simple negation of the Messiah. No Jew before Jesus ever applied Isa.
   liii. to the dying Messiah. By thus submitting to this new necessity
   Jesus completed the purification of an idea which was at first by no
   means pure. The Messianic glory now becomes an object to be aimed at,
   not one which falls into the lap of some privileged person by some
   exceptional piece of good fortune, but one which has to be obtained
   through endless labour and renunciation: yea, even by death itself in
   voluntary obedience.

   Thus did Jesus after much labour purify the title of Messiah which He
   had at first assumed through an inner compulsion. Even for us after all
   these centuries there is something surprisingly grand as we observe how
   the idea is emptied of all the merely sensual and selfish elements, so
   that finally the king in all his pomp and glory is turned into the
   tragic figure on the Cross. Herein, in one word, consists Jesus'
   greatness. He introduces the tragic element where others joyously
   revelled in material Utopias.

   But the end of this work is no renunciation of the title of Messiah,
   but the distinct claim upon it advanced before His death. That was
   necessary for Jesus, otherwise He would have had to renounce both
   Himself and God. He left His disciples the hope in the restitution of
   all things as a legacy in connection, it would seem, with Daniel's
   vision of the Son of Man who is to descend upon the clouds of heaven.
   Jesus died with this belief in His speedy return in Messianic glory.

   The belief in the return causes every thoughtful person the greatest
   difficulty at the present day. Compared with this, even the Messianic
   problem has but little importance. In the first place, it is a fact
   that Jesus was mistaken in the point of time: He thought of the return
   as to His own generation amongst whom He had worked, by whom He had
   been rejected. If our account of the trial of Jesus has any historical
   value, then Jesus did in fact say to His judges, "We shall meet again."
   But this meeting did not take place either for foe or friend. Yet that
   is not our real difficulty and stumbling-block. Apart from everything
   else, it is an altogether fantastic idea for us--that a dead person
   should return upon the clouds of heaven. This picture is the product of
   the idea of the world and of the psychology current in antiquity, and
   it is only in connection with them that it is endowed with any
   vitality. And so the doubt will arise whether it was really Jesus
   Himself, whether it was not, after all, His disciples who were the
   authors of this fantastic and erroneous conception.

   But we must silence our modern modes of thought when facts speak so
   clearly and so decisively. However much may be a later addition in the
   eschatological speeches of Jesus, the constant element in them is just
   this thought of the second coming. It is this thought around which the
   whole of the apocalyptic theory has crystallized, and not vice versa.
   The word Son of Man' is not essential. Paul has the idea, the
   expectation, of the parousia without this word. And besides, the chief
   difficulty is, after all, removed as soon as we place ourselves in the
   position of one to whom the ancient cosmology and psychology were
   realities, for then the thought of a homo redivivus' will become
   perfectly familiar to us.

   The question was for Jesus to find a sanction for His mission. The
   superhuman in Him accepted the form of the idea of the Messiah. The
   Messiah is, and remains, king in the kingdom of God. Taking His stand
   upon this presupposition, death appears to Him to be one of two things.
   It is either a proof that He is in the wrong, or it is a transition to
   a higher right that shall manifest itself to a world which now fancies
   that it is triumphing. By announcing His return Jesus declares that God
   is on His side, and that He is in the right. And for this very same
   reason the early Christians laid all the emphasis on the parousia as
   their strongest piece of evidence. Even though this evidence consisted
   merely in a hope--a hope unfulfilled--it was yet powerful enough to
   help Jesus and His disciples over their greatest difficulty.

   At the same time, it is obvious that that which is inadequate in the
   idea of the Messiah, here wins its first and last victory over Jesus.
   In His prophecy of the second coming Jesus yields its due to the faith
   of the age. Here for a moment the wild fancies of later Judaism, the
   magic world of the ancient popular belief, intrude in the midst of the
   grand simplicity of Jesus' consciousness of His call. There was no
   harmony between Jesus and the Messianic idea. He accepted the idea
   under compulsion, because it was the outer form for that which was
   final and highest. He laboured with it, broke it up, re-cast it; yet a
   portion of the deception which it contained was transmitted to Him.

   What were the titles which Jesus chose to express His
   self-consciousness? The question belongs to the close of our enquiry.
   In the first place, because the meaning of the titles can only be
   derived from the self-consciousness and not this latter from the
   titles; and next, because there is an especial difficulty in
   distinguishing in this connection between what is to be assigned to
   Jesus and what is to be referred to the oldest theology of the early
   Christian Church. The evangelists ascribe to Jesus the titles Messiah,
   Son of God, and Son of Man. The first He never used of Himself,
   according to their account. They merely narrate that in His answers to
   the Baptist, to Peter, and to the high priest during His trial He
   accepted it--affirming the fact. On the other hand, the two other
   expressions are handed down to us as self-designations. The word Son of
   God fell into discredit amongst the Jews in later times, because the
   Christians showed a preference for this title. But in the time of Jesus
   it may very well have been current amongst the people as a popular
   Messianic expression. Does not God address the Messianic King in the
   2nd Psalm with these words, "Thou art My Son"?

   And yet it is striking how very seldom Jesus uses the word. In reality
   only once. It was one of the culminating points of His life. In tones
   of exultation He spoke out of the fulness of His heart to those that
   were nearest to Him. Just as Father and Son know and trust each other,
   so do God and He. Thus He uses the Messianic title as the expression of
   the closest intimacy with God, of the most absolute trust in Him. But
   the title did not turn out to be a blessing for the early Church,
   destined as it was to migrate to heathen surroundings. It gave rise to
   physical and metaphysical speculations, and so caused a long series of
   misfortunes.

   The commonest self-designation of Jesus in the Gospels is the phrase
   Son of Man.' Would that we knew for certain whether Jesus used it
   Himself! The phrase is to be traced back to the vision of Daniel (ch.
   vii.), where it is still used figuratively and without any Messianic
   application. Originally it signifies just human being,' homo. Just as
   the hostile empires appear in the vision as animals, so the kingdom of
   the saints appears to the seer as a man. But long before the age of
   Jesus this Man' had been transformed into the Messiah. A very slight
   change was needed for this. Jesus calls Himself the Man,' first where,
   referring to the passage in the book of Daniel, He prophesies His
   coming down from heaven to establish the kingdom of God; next, when he
   foretells His Passion; lastly, in other passages of various contents.
   But did He really so call Himself? One is struck by the fact that He
   speaks of Himself in the third person as though of someone else, and
   that He prophesies His coming as if He were already removed from earth.
   It is as easy to conceive of these forms of expression being used by
   the disciples after Jesus' death as it is difficult to imagine Jesus
   Himself employing them while He was still in their midst. If Jesus ever
   did speak of Himself as the Man, then He can only have done so a short
   time before His death and in the expectation of that death. One will
   then have to suppose that at the time when the thought of His
   approaching death gradually grew to be a certainty for Him, and the
   idea of His future restoration to sovereignty likewise arose in His
   mind, He drew comfort and confidence from this passage in Daniel. It
   suddenly acquired a living personal application to Himself. He saw
   Himself as the Man' exalted to God's side after His death and
   descending from heaven in glory. And now He created the paradox of the
   Son of Man who first must suffer. We may suppose the term to have
   originated in some such manner as this, and yet it is quite possible
   that it was the disciples who were the first to find this explanation
   of Daniel's words. But the expression, which was in any case derived
   from the Jewish apocalyptic writings, was altogether unintelligible to
   the Greeks, and hence we find Paul already avoiding the use of it. It
   was only very much later, when the Gospels had come to be regarded as
   sacred books, that they made an attempt of their own to find a meaning
   in it.

   Thus from the very first the titles turned out to be the misfortune of
   the new religion. With the titles either the old or the perverted new
   ideas creep in--Messiah,' Son of God.' Son of Man.' How inadequately at
   bottom all this applies to Jesus. Not one of these words expresses even
   remotely what He was amongst men, or what He was called to be by God
   for all time. Hence it is a part of true reverence for Jesus that we
   should venerate, not the titles, but Himself.

   There was in Him something entirely new, a surpassing greatness, a
   superhuman self-consciousness which sets itself above all authorities,
   declaring God's will and promises, imparting consolation, inspiring
   courage, delivering judgment with divine power, a new mediatorship
   between God and man, that left all the former far behind it. But this
   that was new in Jesus appeared clothed in a contemporary and at bottom
   unsuitable form, His consciousness as Messiah. And in spite of all His
   labour to change the antiquated, the petty, and the transitory, He did
   not entirely destroy it. Hence immediately after Jesus' death a twofold
   movement can be traced amongst the disciples. Jewish patriots attach to
   the one word Messiah all the fancies and all the political Utopias of
   Judaism. But those who understand Him continue His work and set Him
   entirely free from these Messianic surroundings. The one road leads to
   the Messiah of the Apocalypse, the other to the Second Adam' of Paul
   and the Logos of the Fourth Gospel. The future belongs to the latter
   alone.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER V.

  JESUS.--THE PROMISE.

   JESUS began His ministry with a clear and simple promise: "The kingdom
   of God is at hand." By so doing He proves His acceptance of the Jewish
   eschatology in its simplest form. The Jews waited for the kingdom of
   God as the state of things when Israel should be free and exalted to a
   position of power and splendour, when the Gentiles should be in
   subjection, and the patriarchs and holy men of old should have risen
   from the dead, and God be enthroned visibly amidst the people. Jesus
   original' hope, too, must have been very similar to this, though not
   exactly the same. This we necessarily infer from the following
   considerations. Jesus never explained the conception of the kingdom of
   God, for He presupposes it as well-known, nor does He anywhere
   criticise any false conception of the kingdom of God, He merely lays
   all the emphasis on its near approach, and on the conditions of
   entrance. Furthermore, He addresses His promise exclusively to the
   Jews, His own people, and not to the Gentiles. Lastly, He speaks of
   being together with the patriarchs, and thus reveals the Jewish
   foundation of His message.

   The Jewish starting-point of the promise of Jesus will therefore form
   the first portion of our enquiry. But Jesus' greatness begins in every
   case where He sets Himself free from these Jewish presuppositions.
   Three points deserve notice: The place and the manner; the time; the
   recipients of the Promise.

   1. The national pride of the Jews, the fantastic and material turn of
   the Oriental mind, combine to embellish the Jewish hope in the kingdom
   of God with a number of individual touches. This process can be traced
   from the apocalypses, both Jewish and Christian, down to the Koran.
   Read in the Apocalypse of St John the song of triumph over the fall of
   Babylon, the exultation over her misfortunes, the description of the
   final battle with all its cruel details, the delineation, at once
   fantastic and material, of the Jerusalem which is far indeed from being
   heavenly, with its arrogant contempt of the Gentiles. Mahomet's
   descriptions of Paradise with their repulsive sensuality may be passed
   over in silence. Even so harmless a vision of the future as is
   contained in the Magnificat and the Benedictus, the songs of Mary and
   of Zacharias, that St Luke has preserved for us, is limited to the
   political liberation of the people. We may not indeed conclude that
   because the political and the fantastical elements are almost entirely
   absent from the sayings of Jesus, that therefore He never thought or
   spoke of these things. Jesus never expected that the kingdom of God and
   the Roman empire could co-exist. The latter would have to pass away
   with the advent of the former. His other conceptions, too, will
   probably have been fantastic enough to our way of looking at things.
   But the Evangelists were under the impression that all these
   traits--the political as well as the material embroidery--were
   meaningless for Jesus, did not belong to the essential which alone He
   emphasized. Jesus must have understood how to purify and to simplify
   the hopes of His disciples, and to concentrate them on the religious
   kernel. They remained indeed Jewish hopes, but such as had passed
   through Jesus soul. Without setting Himself in opposition to His
   surroundings, the hopes of a religious genius such as Jesus were from
   the very first of a different nature. All those features of
   vindictiveness, ambition, cruelty, sensuality, the artificial and
   fantastical pedantry, the minute and subtle calculations, did not
   harmonize with the simplicity of His soul. The acceptation of the
   Jewish eschatology by Jesus is of itself tantamount to its
   purification.

   No very great importance, therefore, attaches to the place and the
   outer circumstances of the kingdom of God. It is clear that Jesus did
   not think of heaven or the other world. This earth, or, more strictly
   speaking, the land of Palestine, is the scene of the kingdom. There is
   no breach of continuity between the life that men live here and now,
   and their existence yonder. They eat and drink and take their pleasure;
   they live as men and not as spirits. To speak of the metaphorical
   language of Jesus is of itself enough to impair the naïveté of the
   whole picture. The entire harmlessness and innocence of Jesus are
   reflected in the simplicity of His expectations. For Jesus the earthly
   and the simply human are entirely free from any suggestion of the
   sinful. Why should that God to whom we pray for bread here below be
   less likely to give us food and drink in His heavenly kingdom? There is
   something almost countrified in Jesus' language about the future. Even
   an inhabitant of Jerusalem would have used richer colours in his
   picture. That is why we are told nothing of the city, the length and
   the breadth and the height of which are equal, and the streets of which
   are of gold.

   But what an entire misunderstanding it is of Jesus when emphasis is
   laid, as it often is to-day, upon the earthly elements in His hope.
   That which He pictured to Himself, being a Jew of His age, in earthly
   guise, He would have imagined in a later century just as easily after a
   heavenly fashion. All the emphasis is laid, not upon the place, but
   upon simple happiness and upon community with God. When His kingdom
   comes, all suffering, all sorrow and lamentation, all sense of
   abandonment by God, shall be changed into joy, exultation, and the
   blessed feeling of nearness to God. To behold God, to be called the
   Children of God, to experience God's comfort and mercy--that is the
   centre of the promise. Therefore, too, the picture of the kingdom is
   enriched by a multitude of features which go beyond the earthly
   framework: the resurrection of the dead, the angelic body, the
   everlasting life. Even if this earthly stage is never left, yet the
   barriers between this world and the next have been removed, and the
   visible communion with God and with all His saints conjures forth a new
   world. But there is one fact which, plainer than all else, shows us of
   what little importance this world is after all for Jesus' promise. In
   the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, blessedness and torment follow
   immediately after death, but not upon earth. There is no contradiction
   here for Jesus with the hope in the kingdom of God, because for Him
   nothing depends upon the place, but every thing upon the condition of
   men.

   Expressed in simple terms, what Jesus' promises in the kingdom of God
   is everlasting life, man's entrance into unbroken community with God.
   In common with His Jewish contemporaries, He pictures this everlasting
   life to Himself upon an earthly stage and with earthly features, but it
   is in the centre of the picture that He places that which is
   everlasting--nearness to God, such as is not known here upon earth.

   And the door that leads to life eternal is the judgment of God that
   appoints unto every man everlasting bliss or everlasting torment. The
   later theology, which postponed blessedness to the next world, to
   heaven, understood Jesus after all better than our modern
   archaeologists, who in their interest for earth forget heaven. When He
   said the kingdom of God is at hand, He wished to place all those that
   heard Him in the presence of God and of eternity, in comparison with
   which this earth and world are of very little worth.

   2. The Jews of Jesus' time entirely postponed the coming of the kingdom
   of God to the future. No trace of that kingdom could be perceived as
   long as the Roman ruled in the land. It had not, of course, been so at
   all times. When the Asmonean high priests and kings set up their empire
   and conquered many of the neighbouring tribes, then the Messianic Age
   appeared to them and to many of their followers to have begun already.
   The King and Son of God was there already, the promise which Jahwe had
   given His people seemed to be about to be fulfilled. In the Messianic
   Psalms, ii. and ex., the beginning of the kingdom of God and of its
   king are already celebrated. But all this was nothing but beautiful
   dreams. We do well to remember this when we come to examine the
   question, Does the kingdom of God exist for Jesus in the present or in
   the future? Does He promise it, or does He bring it with Him?

   The Gospels themselves, if asked for an answer, appear to be in doubt.
   By the side of passages which speak of it as still future, there are
   others which declare that it is just being established upon earth.

   The former passages are the most numerous, and are to be found from the
   beginning to the end of Jesus' ministry. His disciples are to hand on
   this same message with which He began: "The kingdom of God is at hand";
   they are not to change it and say the kingdom has come with Jesus. In
   the Lord's Prayer they are to pray "Thy kingdom come," not, "may it be
   fully established," for it is not here at all as yet. So Jesus ever
   speaks of entrance into the kingdom as of a future event. The
   Beatitudes are all promises, one just as much as the other, "for theirs
   is the kingdom of God," as much as "for they shall see God." On the
   last journey to Jerusalem the sons of Zebedee beg for the seats of
   honour in the future kingdom, and Jesus acquiesces in the form of their
   request. And even at the Last Supper He looks towards the future when
   He says that He will not drink of the fruit of the vine with His
   disciples until the kingdom of God shall come.

   The chief passage, too, which would seem to prove the present nature of
   the kingdom, points likewise to the future, if rightly understood (Luke
   xvii. 20: "The kingdom of God is already among you"). In the first
   place, it is quite certain that the right translation is "among you"
   and not "in you," for Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees, so the
   evangelist expressly tells us. And next, we must notice the connection
   of the phrase with its context. It is immediately succeeded by the
   great eschatological speech of the sudden coming of the Son of Man, who
   shall appear all at once like the lightning. But first shall come days
   of tribulation and longing all in vain. The whole speech therefore
   presupposes that the kingdom of God is yet to come. And it is preceded
   by these words: "The kingdom of God shall not come in a way that
   attracts attention, nor will people say, Look, here it is!' or there it
   is!' but . . . ." Now the only possible antithesis to these future
   tenses is: the kingdom will be amongst you so suddenly that you will
   have no time at all for apocalyptic calculations and disputes. For like
   a flash of lightning so is the kingdom of God. This celebrated passage
   proves, therefore, just this: that Jesus, in contrast to all
   apocalyptic calculations, prophesies the coming of the kingdom of God
   as a sudden surprise.

   Finally, the force of the argument derived from a consideration of all
   these passages is confirmed by certain indirect conclusions. To enter
   into the kingdom of God and to inherit eternal life is so entirely one
   and the same thing for Jesus, that either expression is used
   indifferently. The opposite of the kingdom of God is hell with the
   everlasting fire. In the kingdom of God the patriarchs and the souls of
   the saved shall meet together. The resurrection of the dead will
   therefore coincide with the advent of the kingdom. The vision of God is
   a future reward. The judgment and the kingdom of God are to come
   together. The latter cannot be said to be present as long as the
   separation of men into good and bad is still impending. Finally, the
   coming of the kingdom is brought about by the return of Messiah.

   Now if we add to these considerations the fact that the early
   Christians all expected the kingdom of God in the future, we may look
   upon it as one of the facts which we know with the greatest certainty
   that in the message of Jesus the term kingdom of God has an
   eschatological connotation, that it stands for the new world that is to
   come.

   There are, however, it is true, passages which point in another
   direction, and these need to be examined as well. The question is
   whether they can be explained, starting as we have done from
   eschatological premises.

   In His casting out of the devils Jesus saw the beginning of the kingdom
   of God. "If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of
   God is come unto you." His victories over the devils seem to Him to be
   so many blows struck against the empire of Satan, leading on to its
   downfall. God's Spirit works through Jesus and lays the foundation for
   the transformation of the world. When the Baptist asks Him, "Art thou
   He that should come?" he receives the answer: "The blind receive their
   sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear;
   the dead are raised up." Once more it is the miracles by which one
   recognizes the dawn of the New Time. Even though much has still to be
   awaited--hence the warning, "Blessed is he that shall not be offended
   in Me"--yet for the believer a visible pledge of the final
   accomplishment is ready to hand.

   This point we may look upon as established beyond all doubt. Jesus
   regarded--we must admit it--His momentary miracles as the first signs
   of the coming kingdom of God. We may perhaps call that the enthusiasm
   of Jesus.

   Another saying seems to point in the same direction. We have to piece
   it together from Matthew and Luke. Its meaning is somewhat mysterious:

     The law and the prophets until John.
     Henceforth the kingdom of God suffereth violence,
     And the violent take it by force.

   But no sooner do we realize that Jesus uttered this in triumphant
   exultation than the words come to be full of life for us. The kingdom
   is no longer a far-off divine event as in the ages when the law and the
   prophets prepared the way for it. It is even now being established upon
   earth, and that with violence, while men take possession of it. So
   speaks one who beholds with joy how the promise passes into
   accomplishment. Therefore, too, Jesus can say that His disciples stand
   in the midst of the kingdom of God, and are for that reason greater
   than even John himself.

   These words are the expression of a mighty enthusiasm. With more of
   calm, but with no less certainty and joy, Jesus praises the beginning
   of the kingdom here and now in certain parables.

   In the double parable of the mustard seed and of the leaven, Jesus
   contrasts the small beginning with the mighty end. So it is with the
   kingdom of God. It begins small and unnoticeable--so small that the
   great and the wise of this earth pay it no attention whatever. But its
   end brings about the transformation of the world. And so it is that all
   the great future is already contained in the small beginning. As we
   read these parables we must picture to ourselves Jesus going about
   teaching and ministering in that little corner of Galilee, and then try
   and imagine how this obscure activity is to lead up to the great
   world-catastrophe.

   In the next parable, that of the seed growing of itself, two thoughts
   struggle for the mastery. In the first place it is that expressed by
   the words of itself,' the unshaken confidence in the necessary progress
   of God's cause, independent of all human activity; on the other hand,
   the steps in the development, the sure insight embracing the whole
   process of evolution by slow and gradual laws. Of the two the first
   thought is to be ascribed to Jesus with greater probability. There is
   no mention in this connection of miracles. The parables breathe an
   atmosphere of joy, courage, and confident resignation.

   The modern mind is only too apt to read its own thoughts of evolution,
   immanence, and the universal character of the divine and the good, into
   these words. Jesus appears to have placed everything that is
   supernatural on one side. But that is just appearance. Under all
   circumstances Jesus imagined the kingdom of God to Himself as something
   supernatural. It always brings along with it the world of miracles to
   which belong the judgment, the new earth, the resurrection of the dead,
   and the vision of God. And that is just why Jesus and His disciples
   recognize the beginning of the kingdom in the miraculous powers that
   issue from Him. The only thing that is new in Jesus point' of view is
   that He regarded His own work not as preparation but as beginning
   (after all, the difference between the two is very slight) and
   recognized the dawn of the new age in His deeds. Here we stand once
   more in presence of what we have called the enthusiasm of Jesus. There
   was a time in the life of Jesus when hope swelled His breast in a quite
   unusual manner, when the people seemed to be coming over to Him, when
   all the devils yielded to His miraculous powers, when heaven descended
   upon earth. "I beheld Satan fall from heaven like lightning," cried
   Jesus at that time. "The harvest is great, but the labourers are few."
   "Blessed are your eyes to behold what ye behold;--that which prophets
   and kings have sought in vain to behold." At that time Jesus still felt
   Himself to be in harmony with all the good influences at work amongst
   His people. Patriotism and religion were one, and hope ran into vision.
   That was the happiest period in His life. It was then that He uttered
   the words about the kingdom of God being present here and now.

   But the question is whether He retained this enthusiastic belief until
   the end. That period of jubilant hope was followed by a season of deep
   disenchantment brought about by the recognition of the fact that He and
   the people would not agree together in the long run. If the unclean
   spirit that has been driven forth can return to the house from which he
   has been driven, taking unto himself seven other spirits, then the last
   state has become worse than the first. In the end the great miracles
   only serve unto the towns in which they have been performed for a
   greater condemnation; that surely sounds a great deal sterner than the
   answer to the Baptist. Finally, Jesus foresaw destruction for His
   people and suffering and death for Himself. But even in the midst of
   this painful experience He did not surrender the certainty of His
   hopes. At the Last Supper, just before His death, He looked forward to
   the meeting once more in the kingdom of God, when He should drink anew
   of the fruit of the vine with His disciples. He bequeathed to His
   disciples the daily and hourly expectation of the coming of the
   kingdom: they were to be prepared every moment. The present generation
   should not pass away till all be fulfilled. They that have seen the
   works of Jesus shall likewise see the accomplishment thereof. This and
   that particular disciple--the later tradition substituted a vague
   certain'--shall not taste of death until they behold the kingdom. While
   Jesus points so decisively towards the future, the thought of the
   present commencement of the kingdom appears to have receded for Him
   into the background, but He never expressly abandoned it; and so the
   early Church, too, clung fast to it in spite of the Master's death. But
   the emphasis is laid on the future. Just as in the parables before
   mentioned, our looks were forcibly directed away from the small
   beginning to the great end.

   And so Jesus Himself made of Christianity the religion of hope. All His
   work breathes a spirit of expectation, of longing for the great
   invisible, for perfection. The goal of religion has not yet been
   reached. It cannot, it may not, be in our possession. During the whole
   period of His work on earth, Jesus never wearied of directing the gaze
   of His people forwards and upwards, and of balancing the blessedness of
   the future against all the suffering of the present. He did that in the
   Beatitudes no less than in the parable of poor Lazarus. It was only to
   the self-satisfied and contented, to the worldlings, that He had
   nothing to offer. We should picture Him entering into rich man's house
   and poor man's cottage with the greeting of peace, and then inviting
   His listeners in the simplest, most childlike strain to the joys of the
   life eternal. If Paul in a later age preaches the religion of longing
   in words of enthralling eloquence, he is merely continuing in his own
   language the Beatitudes of Jesus. This longing was the best element
   even in the Jewish religion, but here the Jewish nationalism--the
   Church--was in its way. Jesus had to remove the impediment.

   3. The Jews believed that the kingdom was for Israel, and that Israel
   should be the ruling people in the kingdom. It is evident that Jesus
   shared this belief at first. Not only do isolated sayings of His show
   this clearly, but above all the fact that He purposely confined His
   message to His own people. Jesus seeks out the publicans and sinners
   for this very reason, because they, too, are the children of Abraham.
   And therefore His gospel is one of gladness, because it promises His
   people in the first instance joy and happiness. But in course of time,
   the message of judgment takes the place of the message of gladness, and
   the kingdom of God is emptied of all its national connotation.

   From the very first the kingdom and the judgment were for Jesus
   inseparable. By the side of the kingdom was Gehenna, by the side of the
   invitation the threat. So the Sermon on the Mount rightly reproduces
   the thoughts of Jesus. The thought that every Jew as such had a right
   to the kingdom never entered into Jesus' mind. Yet at first the promise
   was throughout of a glad and enthusiastic character. But soon one
   disappointment follows another, and thus the Galilean ministry comes to
   an end. It is to disciples full of enthusiasm indeed, but not of
   changed life, that the word is uttered as to the mere saying of Lord,
   Lord.' To them also refer the parables of the tares and of the drag-net
   in their original form. Jesus cries woe upon the towns of Bethsaida and
   Chorazin and Capernaum, because all the miracles have been of no avail.
   The whole people He compares now to children at play in the market
   place, whom no one can satisfy, neither John nor Jesus; and now to the
   unclean and relapsed spirit, whose last state is worse than the first.
   The Jews cannot and will not understand the signs of the time: they
   live carelessly for the day; they eat and they drink; they marry and
   are given in marriage; they buy and they sell--that is their life, and
   nothing but that. The terrible warnings which God sends them are all in
   vain--the massacre of the Galileans of Jerusalem--the fall of the tower
   of Siloam. All in vain is the great sign that Jesus gives them by His
   preaching of repentance--how far more successful was Jonah with the men
   of Nineveh! In vain, too, is the respite that God still gives them,
   that they may repent before the end. Irresistibly the whole nation is
   tottering down the road to ruin.

   So the glad message of the kingdom finally turns into the announcement
   of the doom upon Israel. Jesus ranges Himself on the side of John. In
   the last days, just before His death, Jesus announced the fall of the
   Jewish Church, and even of the sanctuary, in clear and unmistakable
   terms. Not one stone shall remain standing on the other. At the same
   time the world of the Gentiles bursts into view and takes Israel's
   place. In the parables we are told how, instead of the invited guests
   who refuse the invitation, others are called to take their places at
   the table which is ready; how the vineyard is let out to other
   husbandmen, in the place of those who refuse to pay the fruits thereof
   to the lord of the vineyard; and then without a parable: instead of the
   children of the kingdom, many shall come from the east and from the
   west and shall sit at meat with the patriarchs in the kingdom of God.
   How this admission of the Gentiles shall be brought about Jesus leaves
   to His God. He just gives the promise without giving His disciples any
   command to go forth as missionaries. The history of the apostolic age
   is sufficient proof of this statement.

   But was the rejection of Israel on the part of Jesus final? Not only
   did Paul believe in the final salvation of Israel but also the twelve
   apostles, too, encouraged by this hope, were unwearied in their
   attempts to convert their fellow-countrymen. In this particular point,
   however, much caution must be exercised in the way in which we deal
   with the tradition. It may be that even the patriotism of the disciples
   would no longer resign itself to accept this terrible conclusion. The
   early Christians only retained the parable of the fig-tree to which a
   season of grace had been granted, while the parable of the barren
   fig-tree was turned into a miracle and so deprived of all its serious
   meaning. All indications point to the fact that Jesus broke with the
   national hope more uncompromisingly, more decisively than His
   disciples. For individuals, even for many such, He had hopes stretching
   beyond His death, for that death was itself to be the means of the
   salvation of many. But the people as a whole He gave up as lost,
   obeying therein the teaching of facts better than the great apostle.

   Thus, then, the message of Jesus retains its eschatological character
   from first to last. It is the announcement of the end, of the near
   approach of the judgment and of the kingdom, and such it remains. It is
   only the national element that is removed; the soberness and the glad
   joyfulness remain: they are the marks of eternity. Thereby Jesus so
   purified and so deepened the Jewish eschatology that it was able to
   conquer the world, and that the later change of the earthly expectation
   into the heavenly did not affect it at all. That which is great and new
   in Jesus is not to be found in the thought of a present and immanent
   kingdom of God--thoughts which Jesus Himself soon abandoned, and which
   have never been a motive power in history, but in the denationalization
   of the Jewish hope.

   Here, again, we can trace two divergent tendencies in the early Church,
   both of which start from Jesus eschatology. There is first the national
   Jewish tendency, fragments of which can be found in the
   Apocalypse--even St. Paul did not show himself quite free from
   it--Israel must be saved, cost what it may. And there is the freer,
   broader view which throws a bridge over to Greek thought and finally
   transforms the whole Jewish eschatology into a religious hope of the
   next world. This latter alone understood the meaning of the work of
   Jesus' life.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VI.

  JESUS.--THE CLAIM.

   IN the eyes of Jesus and of the Jews, the kingdom is a gift of God. It
   is established upon earth without any human intervention, in a
   supernatural manner by means of a series of miracles and catastrophes.
   Even in the period of His most confident hopefulness Jesus did not
   expect it to come about through His work or that of His disciples; it
   grows of itself. The thought of hastening the coming of the kingdom by
   any efforts on our part is in its origin neither Christian nor Jewish.
   It only originated when the idea of the supernatural was abandoned and
   the conception of the kingdom of God was entirely transformed. And how
   should Jesus and His disciples be able to bring about the judgment, the
   resurrection, the suspension of death, the vision of God? Such
   phantastic thoughts are entirely foreign to Jesus. What they have to do
   is not to try and hasten the coming of the kingdom, but to prepare
   themselves so that they may receive it worthily.

   Jesus wished to urge men into this preparation by the call to
   repentance. Like the later Christian Church, the Jewish Church had
   certain definite regulations for penance--the Teschuba.' If any one had
   sinned he could recover God's mercy by a confession of sins accompanied
   by sorrow, fasting and self-chastisement. It would seem that the right
   of renewed participation in the church services depended upon such acts
   of penance. Jesus starts from this point, but He immediately makes the
   same change which Luther afterwards repeated in the be ginning of his
   theses. In the face of the approaching kingdom of God, He would have
   the whole life to be such an act of repentance--no merely external
   ecclesiastical penance, but a breach with the former superficial life
   and a drawing near to God. For this penitence is to consist in nothing
   negative or ascetic, as in the Jewish acts of penance, but simply in
   the doing of God's will. He that repents--i.e., he that does God's will
   may hope to enter into the kingdom of God. What, then, does Jesus mean
   by the will of God'? What does the phrase cover as He uses it?

   Two observations are here necessary by way of preliminary to remove any
   possible misunderstanding.

   Jesus makes a clear distinction between the apostles and the disciples
   in the wider sense of the word. There is one little company of men whom
   Jesus removes entirely from their life in the world, separating them
   from their calling, their family, their possessions, their homes, and
   associating them with Himself as His followers in His life of constant
   wandering. But these are the future missionaries, whom Jesus makes
   partners in His own calling. Later on we shall come across them as the
   leaders of the first Christian community. On all the other disciples,
   on the brothers and sisters who do God's will, Jesus makes no such
   claim. He presupposes, on the contrary, that they will live in the
   world amid their usual surroundings. In His words to the twelve, when
   He sent them forth to preach, Jesus enumerates the duties of the
   missionaries, whereas the Sermon on the Mount sets forth the will of
   God for the disciples in the world. If, therefore, the omission of the
   maxims of civic and industrial ethics in the preaching of Jesus is
   often noted, the reason of this omission is that they were assumed as a
   matter of course by Him. As He is not speaking to idlers, He has as
   little need to tell His hearers how they are to earn their daily bread
   as any preacher of to-day. He gives them religious principles, words of
   eternal life, which are to regulate their everyday life in this world,
   but which in themselves are useless unless applied to the life in the
   world.

   The most important sayings of Jesus are grouped together in the Gospels
   after a very external fashion. A great variety of Logia are collected
   together under one or two principal headings. Above all, in the Sermon
   on the Mount, Jesus is the new lawgiver who proclaims a great number of
   exalted precepts without any inner connection. But it is only fair to
   assume that Jesus possessed a definite ideal, and that all His single
   utterances must be understood with reference to that ideal. He looked
   at man in the definite relation in which he stands to the three great
   realities--himself, his neighbour, and God--and that in the presence of
   eternity, of the kingdom, and the judgment. That which does not touch,
   or only remotely touches, these three realities is no concern of His.
   He has nothing to say about it. Whatever, on the other hand, either
   furthers or hinders them, He takes up as the subject of His enquiry and
   determines according to the ideal.

   The end which each man should place before himself is self-mastery and
   freedom from the world. It is only when he has attained to this goal
   that he can appear at any moment before God and will not be surprised
   by the sudden approach of the day of judgment. Self-mastery is to
   extend to the inner life of man--Jesus laid great stress upon this--to
   the words, the thoughts, the heart from which they come forth. Hence
   the importance of keeping words and thoughts under strict control, of
   mastering every evil look and every idle word. The feelings of personal
   honour and vengeance must in like manner be suppressed, for they
   deprive the soul of its freedom. The disciple is to sit in judgment
   upon himself, and strive after sincerity and loyal singleness of heart.
   Nor is he to shrink from any hardship or privation when the need
   arises. Jesus insists upon the strictest temperance which never rocks
   itself to sleep in a fancied security; upon watchfulness and prayer,
   and the constant struggle against temptation. Cut off hand and foot,
   tear out the eye if they cause thee to offend. It is only by means of
   this stern self-discipline that it becomes possible for man to be able
   to appear at any moment before God.

   Freedom from the world and indifference to its attractions, its riches
   and its pleasures, as well as its cares and its sorrows, are a part of
   this self-discipline. Hence Jesus passed terribly severe judgment upon
   the servants of mammon more than upon all others. For mammon's aim is
   to become master of the soul. He would take it captive and drag it down
   so that it forgets the eternal. Therefore he is our chiefest foe, of
   whom everyone should beware. Jesus discovers the danger that threatens
   from this quarter in a great number of sayings and parables. But He
   laid down no universally applicable law of renunciation. He demands
   that the soul should be inwardly free from mammon, and should be
   prepared for an entire sacrifice of all outward belongings as soon as
   God should call for it.

   Another great enemy is the family. True, it is a divine institution,
   but it binds the heart to the world with a hundred chains, and tames
   the conscience and the earnest zeal of the individual. Amongst the
   Jews, family affection was the be-all and end-all of life. Jesus utters
   words which attack this affection with terrible severity and call for
   the severance even of the dearest ties. Let the dead bury their dead.
   His own mission is the destruction of that affection which makes a
   slave of conscience.

   Again, another foe is that anxious care for food and clothing which
   imprisons men in a narrow cell whence they have no longer any free
   outlook on the eternal tasks and objects of life. Such conduct, says
   Jesus, is heathen. Take care, He says, of the great things, and God
   will take care of the little things. Neither, however, does He spare
   the exact opposite of this anxious life, the superficial life of
   routine and custom, the life that most people lead without virtue and
   without vice, and that enthralls them. He would not have the individual
   be the blind slave of public opinion. Let him, on the contrary,
   recognize the critical nature of the times, and the serious earnestness
   of his own life, and go forward to meet eternity.

   In all these demands, therefore, Jesus' object is one and the same: the
   rousing of the conscience in presence of eternity. He gives us no rules
   of life, no laws whatever in detail.

   With other times come other dangers and other duties. While Jesus rends
   family ties asunder, St Paul binds them up and strengthens them, and
   rightly so, for the heathen world presented a new situation. The key to
   the understanding of Jesus is to keep His aim in view and to recognize
   that the way that leads thereto is the awakening of the conscience.

   The aim of Jesus stands out in the sharpest contrast to the modern
   ideal of culture, the free and full development of the individual
   personality such as we associate--whether rightly or wrongly--with the
   name of Goethe. We of to-day count sin as a part of our development,
   and delight therein if it has made us richer. Jesus demands poverty and
   a severe discipline. Better enter into the kingdom of heaven with only
   one eye than keep both eyes and be thrown into the fiery pit. This one
   saying is surely sufficient. By this contrast to the modern ideal Jesus
   approaches very closely to pietism, which at all events has understood
   the seriousness of the Gospel in the face of eternity. There is in the
   ethics of Jesus a kernel of severity and renunciation, nor is this
   unnatural when hell and perdition are realities. But, on the other
   hand, Jesus separates Himself from much that is called pietism. He
   emphasizes the need of the greatest purity, and He does not burden the
   conscience with petty and artificial regulations. It is noteworthy that
   He never opposed popular custom. Straightforwardness, uprightness, and
   unaffectedness, are to be among the marks of the disciple of Jesus.

   As regards duties to one's neighbour Jesus simply formulated His
   demands in the words of God already contained in the Old Testament,
   "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." But the old commandment
   receives a new and exceedingly rich application at the hands of Jesus:
   it is flooded by a mighty stream of enthusiastic love which bursts the
   national boundaries and spreads over, to the benefit of mankind.

   Love is to govern all the relations of the individual to his
   surroundings. To the poor and needy it is to appear as liberality, a
   royal bounteous munificence free from all solicitude. As we ourselves
   receive all our good gifts from God, so the giving of them in our turn
   is to be a matter of course to us. Give to those that ask of thee.
   Blessed are the merciful. I must be ready to pardon the brother that
   wrongs me and that breaks the peace, without setting any limits or
   imposing any conditions, even till seventy times seven. We ourselves
   only live through God's pardoning love. Were it not for this love we
   must all of us needs perish, even the holiest of men. God's pardon is
   only limited by man's inability to forgive. To our friend and companion
   we must show humility and readiness to help and to serve, and to take
   the lower place even if we are the greater. He that will be great, let
   him make himself small and of no reputation. Jesus, Himself, the
   greatest, is the first to serve. Finally, to our enemies and to those
   that oppress us, we must show love, even so far as to pray for our
   enemies and to be the first to give way. There is something petty in
   bearing spite and ill-will. Let the disciple strive after God's
   magnanimity, the love that embraces bad as well as good.

   In each one of these relations Jesus demands love as something rich,
   boundless, and extraordinary. All that is petty, timorous, and
   calculating is to be banished far away. Love is to be revealed as a
   sovereign power that no external law can resist. Yet He is not even
   aiming herein at any extraordinary actions or exceptional works, but
   just at that love which can be realized in the ordinary intercourse of
   every day. The sovereign power of love is a thing to be experienced in
   the simple everyday relations of men.

   This demand for an all-prevailing love appears also to form the basis
   of the need that we feel in modern times for the reform of society, but
   it is something entirely different. Jesus did nothing for society as a
   whole. He did not want to reform it. If we look into them closely, His
   demands are unpractical for any form of society. No social organization
   can ever dispense with law, without falling into a state of anarchy.
   Boundless generosity would imply the abolition of property; boundless
   forgiveness, the abolition of all punishment; boundless humility, the
   abolition of every idea of honour and of order. Even in the oldest
   Christian communities that set up some such ideal, the claims of
   reality soon made themselves felt again and the limits of the possible
   were restored once more. But Jesus entirely ignores the question
   whether His demands suit society or not. And that not merely because it
   was impossible for Him to think of any reform of society while the end
   of the world was so near at hand, but above all because it was the
   individual and his inner life that was His aim and object. Enmity,
   anger, hatred, jealousy, implacability, are ungodly and wicked. No one
   can appear before God with them. On the other hand, love is that which
   is truly Godlike. It ennobles and elevates one's own soul and helps
   one's brother to draw nearer to God. Love, that is, not for the sake of
   the consequent effects upon society, but because it alone deserves
   love.

   This, too, is the reason why Jesus entirely neglects social ethics in
   His demand upon men. There is at first sight something paradoxical in
   the fact that the genius of love showed no interest in the outward
   forms of human society. The state is, of course, out of the question,
   being the rule of a foreign power. Jesus saw therein chiefly the love
   of rule and dominion on the part of the great of the earth. His
   disciples should look upon politics as a deterrent example. But even
   into the ethics of family life Jesus does not enter further than to
   proclaim the indissolubility of the marriage tie in opposition to the
   practice of divorce for frivolous reasons. In so doing He sets up an
   ideal for the individual without further troubling Himself how it can
   be maintained in this present evil world. He said nothing as to the
   relation of master and servant. He even showed no desire to remove
   poverty out of the world: "The poor ye have always with you." The
   reform of the laws of the land is a matter of complete indifference to
   Him; in His parables He reckons with existent injustice as with
   something that must needs be in this world. There is a characteristic
   little story, too, of a man who asked Jesus to settle a dispute as to
   an inheritance and receives the answer, "Who made Me to be a judge over
   you?" At the present day every clergyman has to pay far more attention
   to such questions than Jesus ever did. But if we rightly look upon
   these matters as coming within the scope of Christian love, we are not
   for all that to distort the picture of Jesus into that of a social
   reformer. His work was to awaken the individual to love and to make the
   individual realize his responsibility towards his brother. And thus
   Jesus did a work which, beyond all others, was for eternity, and still
   to-day He calls us back from the distracting maze of programmes and
   panaceas for the reform of the world to the reform of our own selves,
   which is the thing that is chiefly needed.

   Lastly, we come to the question, What is Jesus' demand upon man as
   regards his duty towards God? There are exceedingly few sayings in the
   Gospels which refer to the direct relation of man to God. This
   observation leads us straight to the centre of the question. Jesus is
   naturally far removed from every kind of speculation as to God, simply
   because He is of a Semitic race. In spite of the apparent exception in
   the case of Spinoza, the men of that race have had to forego indulgence
   in the speculative flights of the imagination. Neither, however, is
   Jesus a mystic, nor does He claim of anyone a mystic absorption in God.
   There is not even the slightest suggestion of such a thing. Each one of
   the petitions of the Lord's Prayer deals with a single concrete
   blessing. It never rises into that sphere where world and time and
   space are forgotten. Never in any one of His demands does Jesus leave
   the circle of the active daily life as it lies spread out before
   eternity. He demands no life with God alone, by the side of one's work
   and intercourse with one's neighbour. Hence it is that the gnostics
   already found nothing very congenial in the Gospel. Everything with God
   and under God, but nothing in God alone. And a proof of this is that
   even the kingdom of God, towards which the soul is to uplift itself in
   longing, is no mystic heaven, but something concrete, a social
   organization. The watchword God and the soul--the soul and its God--may
   apply to St Augustine; it does not apply to Jesus.

   But the ordinary everyday life is to be lived under the influence of
   the principles of self-mastery and love with the constant upward look
   to God, in fear and in confidence, in faith and in longing. Jesus laid
   the very greatest emphasis on the fear of God, for our Father is the
   Lord of heaven and earth and the judge of every evil word, who can
   condemn body and soul to hell. In forbidding men to judge; in bidding
   them have no fear of men; in His parable of the talents, Jesus reveals
   a fear of God such as no Old Testament saint expressed more strongly.
   The fear of God is always the foundation on which those features of the
   Divine character, which inspire confidence and trust as to a friend,
   are built up. Where there is no fear, there Jesus' faith in God exists
   not. And yet Jesus brought the love of God home to His disciples with
   the greatest heartiness and simplicity. He teaches them to pray to Him
   just as children to a father, bringing to Him definite wishes in simple
   and earnest tones, full of confidence, feeling sure that they will be
   heard. They are to cast all their cares upon Him and to trust Him that
   watches over them more than over the flowers of the field or the fowls
   of heaven. They are to believe Him--that is, they are to endure all
   difficulties as children under His protection, and that bravely. So
   shall they (even in the present, in the midst of trouble and distress)
   make trial of God's love, and soon He shall grant them the attainment
   of the object of their desires--the kingdom of God. Hoping and
   possessing are inseparably connected. The simple belief in Providence
   does not stand by itself alone, but draws its greatest strength from
   the sure expectation of the glorious future that awaits it.

   However certain it is that the difficulty of the great demand which
   Jesus made was substantially lessened by the limitation of His outlook
   on the world, of which this earth and Israel were the centre, and by
   the boundless belief in the miraculous, it would still be a mistake to
   exaggerate the distance which separates Him from us. Even to His
   disciples it seemed very strange that Jesus was able to sleep in the
   midst of the storm. In fact, they and others with whom Jesus had to do,
   constantly reflect our own weak faith. When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane
   He knew full well that His enemies were plotting His death, and yet He
   accepted it as God's cup. The demand of Jesus was therefore hard or
   easy, even in His own time, according as it was received. The
   difference between the religious and the irreligious man is ever
   this--the one thinks more of God, the other of the world. Jesus called
   upon His disciples to think so greatly of God that the fate even of the
   smallest was embraced by His love and His forethought. Whether they
   understood that or not did not matter. Enough if they believed it,
   paradoxical as it seemed, and thus made their way as pilgrims through
   this world to the kingdom of God.

   Such, then, was the will of God which Jesus preached--a life of
   righteousness in the three great realities. As often as He sent forth
   His glad invitation to enter the kingdom of heaven--whether He were
   speaking in the open air or in a crowded room--He brought these simple
   conditions home to His hearers. The right conduct of the individual in
   the present was of greater importance to Him than the joys of the
   future. He aroused the frivolous, softened the hard-hearted, and gave
   courage and comfort to the sorrowful. Just as He Himself insisted, with
   the greatest possible emphasis, on the simplest of duties, so He would
   allow no other standard to be set up either before God or man. On the
   judgment day God Himself will measure men by their self-control, their
   love and their trust in Him, and men too are to take these for their
   criteria. True, the heart is concealed from them--only God's eye can
   pierce as far as that--but they have the fullest right to demand deeds
   as the fruits of the heart. Goodness must come to the light. If it
   shuns the light it is non-existent.

   Thus far we have come across no suggestion of Church, sacrament or
   dogma. The will of God, as it is fully and completely contained in the
   Sermon on the Mount, is no less entirely distinguished from the claims
   of the later Church than from the Jewish law, and it ought really to
   produce an impression of entire novelty amongst us at the present day.
   But towards the end of Jesus' activity on earth, there is a fresh
   addition--the claim of the confession of adherence to Jesus. This was
   the starting-point of the later development, and so it appears at first
   as if Jesus Himself was the cause of that fateful dogmatic after
   growth, and burdened the simple and eternal will of God with a minimum
   of dogma and ecclesiastical organization.

   It is therefore very important to gain a clear idea of the particular
   kind of faith that was demanded, and of the circumstances under which
   Jesus called for it. Jesus wants no confession in the later
   ecclesiastical sense. He did not even insist upon the words "Thou art
   the Messiah or the Son of God," but simply on the recognition that God
   had sent Him, and that His words were God's words. "He that heareth you
   heareth Me, and he that heareth Me heareth Him that sent me." Hence the
   frequent connection, "I and My words," "I and the Gospel," and that
   just in the passages relating to the confession. This simple
   recognition that Jesus was sent by God was really a matter of course
   for all that accepted His message, for the cause and the person were
   one. Jesus was His message. More than this He did not ask. He would
   have no faith in Himself that in anywise competed with the reverence to
   be felt for God. God remains God and Jesus His messenger, through whom
   He could speak.

   Now it is one of the grandest features in Jesus' character that He only
   came forward with this claim for confession after Caesarea Philippi,
   i.e. only from the time when danger approached His disciples and
   Himself.

   He would have set no value upon a confession unattended by danger and
   suffering. Such would have come under the category of the mere lip
   worship Lord, Lord.' But now that danger approaches, confession becomes
   necessary, so that the cause should not perish together with the
   person. Jesus does not shrink from laying this readiness to suffer
   martyrdom upon each disciple as a positive duty. That is the original
   sense of the words self-denial' and carrying one's cross': no ascetic
   practices, but suffering in the following of Jesus. In fact to follow'
   Jesus means in the Gospels to suffer with and for Him. Jesus' prayer
   for those that confess His name shows us how important this new
   condition was felt to be. Martyrdom thereby acquires the power
   indirectly to atone for sin. But the first demands that Jesus makes
   still hold good. No different conception is attached to the doing of
   the will of God. It becomes more serious, that is all; it implies
   greater sacrifices, since he who sets out to do it, thereby enrols
   himself a member of the fellowship of those that suffer with Jesus.
   Surely this readiness to face death on the part of men who had cut
   themselves off from their families and had refused to obey their
   ecclesiastical superiors for Jesus' sake was something entirely
   different from the zeal for creeds of present-day comfortably-situated
   and illiberal theologians.

   The demand that Jesus makes is something so completely simple and
   positive that it can be described in its entirety without any reference
   to the law, the Pharisees, or Jewish ethics. Jesus was not one of those
   who can criticize the work of others but produce nothing of their own.
   Nevertheless we shall realize His work better if we compare it with the
   above-mentioned tendencies and forces.

   When we examine the relation of Jesus to the Jewish law, we shall do
   well to leave on one side the statement in the Sermon on the Mount: "I
   am not come to destroy but to fulfil," and simply to look at the facts.
   For that statement belongs in its present form to the age after St.
   Paul, and is intended to formulate the result of the struggles of the
   apostolic age possibly already from an early catholic standpoint. One
   reason is sufficient to show that it cannot be ascribed to Jesus, for
   its form betrays a theologian for whom the question "destruction or
   fulfilment of the law" implied a problem to be solved.

   For Jesus there was no such question, no question at all regarding the
   law in the strict sense of the word, for He was a layman and was in any
   case but moderately acquainted with the law,--had perchance never
   studied it at all. Hence He always believed Himself to be in agreement
   with the law. In the law stood the commandments to love God and one's
   neighbour; there stood the decalogue; there, too, stood the words that
   one should serve God alone. In the law, again, righteousness and love
   and truth were commanded. There was thus sufficient reason for Jesus to
   recognize in the law God's will. So He could see the way to everlasting
   life directly marked out in the law. "Keep the commandments," He says
   in answer to the question as to how salvation is to be obtained. Thus
   Jesus found His own demands sanctioned by the sacred book. He even
   found support in the law against the decrees of the elders. In
   comparison with them it proved itself to be the will of God as yet not
   overlaid by human additions. Jesus spent the whole of His life in the
   faith that He had the law on His side and that He Himself was its true
   interpreter.

   At times, it is true, He came to a certain extent into collision here
   and there with this or that passage in the law. He could not approve of
   the granting of the bill of divorcement, in spite of Moses, who
   authorised it. But here there was a simple way out of the difficulty.
   It was one law against the other--God in Paradise against Moses on
   Sinai. The reason of the contradiction was the consideration which
   Moses showed for the hard-heartedness of the people. If the antitheses
   of the Sermon on the Mount, "Ye have heard that it hath been said to
   them of old time, but I say unto you," are to be ascribed to Jesus
   Himself and do not (which is just possible) owe their present form to
   the early Church, then He set himself still more frequently against the
   letter of the law, namely, whenever He showed that the inner
   disposition was what really mattered and so removed narrowness and
   imperfection. But all these were exceptions. For Jesus God's will never
   contradicted the law.

   It was His incomplete knowledge of the law which was in this point the
   cause of an entire deception on the part of Jesus. He took from the law
   only that which harmonized with His views, and so overlooked the fact
   that His opponents, too, had the law on their side, and that with far
   greater right. Pharisaism is a product of the religion of the law.
   There is an unbroken line of descent from Ezekiel through the code of
   the priests to the Talmud. The separation of sacred and profane, the
   preference for the ceremonial, the importance attached to that which
   was morally indifferent, the spirit of exclusiveness, the national
   fanaticism were all rooted in the law. The law implied the supremacy of
   the Jewish idea, the petrification of true religion, deadly enmity to
   the prophetic spirit. The law necessitated the existence of the
   Scribes, the murderers of Jesus. But all this Jesus concealed from
   Himself throughout His life on earth. He separated the human, the
   non-Jewish element, from the rest of the law, gave Jewish maxims an
   entirely contrary meaning, deepened and combined all that was limited
   and transitory. Jesus' attitude to the root principle of the law was
   entirely negative. St. Paul was right when, in opposition to the
   disciples themselves, he called Jesus the end of the law.

   Jesus, therefore, stands to the law as He did to the conception of the
   Messiah and of the kingdom of God. He employs the old words throughout,
   and that bona fide. He thinks that He is their true interpreter, and
   discards just that which is characteristic and Jewish from their
   contents. And yet in this very self-deception the great essential
   feature of His character betrays itself. He would be positive. He would
   build up. He would not destroy. The converse of Jesus positive attitude
   towards the law is His uncompromising rejection of Pharisaism. It is so
   unsparing, so entirely without any exception, that the very name of
   Pharisee has become a term of abuse for all ages. Jesus did riot,
   however, begin the battle. The Pharisees drove Him into it by
   constantly waylaying Him and spying upon Him. Then their vulgar
   self-advertisement and their prostitution of piety greatly stirred His
   indignation. Finally, the whole tendency seemed to Him nothing but
   hypocrisy.

   The aim of the Pharisees was to establish a definite ideal of piety
   among the people. Jesus sets up His own--which is related to it in all
   points as yea to nay--in opposition.

   It is not the things without in the world that are clean or unclean, it
   is the human heart within. This inner habitation must be set in order
   by the sweeping out of evil thoughts.

   All that is without belongs to God, and we have power over it. God
   takes no special pleasure in works of supererogation such as the
   offering of sacrifices, tithes, going on pilgrimages and fasting, but
   He looks for the weightier matters in the law, righteousness and truth
   and love. Man is to serve Him in his daily life. That alone is the true
   divine service.

   Man's end is not a sanctity which withdraws itself timidly from this
   wicked world, but love. This love goes out in search of them that have
   gone astray and have become estranged, for they are our brothers, and
   casts down all the barriers that sanctity erects. A Samaritan that
   practises love is dearer to God and to man than a priest and a Levite
   with all their zeal for holiness. In opposition to the perverted
   sanctification of the Sabbath, Jesus says there is no alternative:
   either save souls and do good, or do evil and destroy souls.

   That was an opposition which went right down to the root of things: it
   was a reversal of all values. The demand that Jesus made was certainly
   not one whit less exacting than that of the Pharisees. Nay, it was more
   severe, for it embraced the whole of life and made every evasion
   impossible. Jesus banished sophistry and hypocrisy, and restored
   conscience and reality to their rights. He exiled religious self-esteem
   and self-conceit, and brought back love and humanity. He set up a
   religion of morality as against one of ceremony.

   Above all, this struggle reveals the great reforming element in the
   demand of Jesus. He will have the sanctification of life in the world,
   the sanctification of one's calling, one's everyday life, one's work
   within the limits of human society. All the demands that Jesus makes
   are set up, not for monks and ascetics, but for men in the world. Here
   is the battlefield, here the preparation for eternity. Hereby every
   form of pietism is condemned. Conscientiousness, love, trust in
   God--these constitute religion.

   The relation of Jesus to Jewish ethics as a whole can now be
   considered. The result is a surprising one. Jesus eliminated the Jewish
   and retained the human. The sum of His commandments is addressed to the
   man in the Jew and to man in general. It is true that Jesus does not
   declare the principle in so many words, "Gentiles can be saved just as
   well as Jews." As a matter of fact His dealings are with Israel alone.
   But what sayings He utters are for all the world to hear. Love makes
   the Samaritan better pleasing to God and man than the unloving priest
   and Levite. The publican who simply and humbly comes into God's
   presence receives God's pardon sooner than the boastful Pharisee. The
   Ninevites and the Queen of Sheba will be the victors over Israel in the
   day of judgment. Even now there are heathen here and there whose great
   faith puts the Israelites to shame and makes its way up to God. All
   depends upon the doing of the commandments, upon the fruits and upon
   nothing else. And here we have the abrogation of the Jewish system of
   ethics, of the Jewish Church, nay, of every Church whatever. As soon as
   man examines himself in the presence of God and eternity, he recognizes
   that everything that is particular and separate is without permanence.

   This discovery of the eternal in man was possible for Jesus, because
   His aim was not to set up certain detailed laws, but inner principles,
   capable of endless application and adaptation. It was only for marriage
   that Jesus laid down a definite law, and this indicates the ideal. So
   St. Paul already understood Jesus' words, for he approves of divorce in
   certain definite cases. With this exception Jesus did not legislate on
   any particular point. Conscience is by its nature an individual matter.
   Jesus awakened it, but left it untrammelled. There is nothing less
   cabined and confined than love, nothing more delicate; and trust in God
   is of man's inmost nature. In many cases the legal appearance of some
   of Jesus' words can be traced to the efforts of the early Church to
   codify the Master's sayings. Jesus asked only for such things as are
   matters of course, which every man's conscience sanctions, and that is
   why He gave no reasons for His demands. Ecclesiastical dogmas need, to
   be sure, to be buttressed by arguments; for the understanding of the
   Sermon on the Mount they are superfluous.

   There remains, however, an apparent contradiction. What is the relation
   between the eternal contents of the demand of Jesus and its
   eschatological foundation? Jesus commandments were to prepare the way
   for the approaching judgment and kingdom of God, their aim was future
   blessedness. In the back ground of all lies the alternative of the two
   roads, the prospect of heaven or hell. And is this demand to be forever
   valid in spite of this? Not in spite of, but because of this, Jesus
   appeared with His eschatological messages--that is to say, with the
   announcement that eternity was near at hand. His demand is that man
   should prepare to meet eternity, and fit himself to live in it. But he
   can only do that if the eternal within him is endowed with power and
   with victory. The approach of eternity awakened in Jesus the
   recognition of all that is essential, of all that endures in the sight
   of God. Jesus was able to lay the foundation of the religion that was
   to last for ever, just because He was the prophet of the judgment that
   was to come. And even though later on the eschatological drama receded
   ever further into the background, and this earth and the present raised
   their claims on man ever louder, yet eternity surrounds us even in the
   garb of time, and its demands are the same yesterday, to-day, and
   forever.

   One man alone, Paul, maintains the demand of Jesus in its sublimity,
   and even he not quite uniformly. In the early Church the new law' at
   once secures a footing.

   Paul's Gentile Church fell in like manner under the sway of the
   religion of law. A new Church--the Christian--took the place of the
   Jewish, and its claims are mostly the same: external, ceremonial,
   legal, and theological. Jesus' words condemn His own Church down to the
   present day.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VII.

  JESUS THE REDEEMER.

   WHOEVER, refusing to be led astray by words, surveys the short history
   of early Christianity, cannot fail to be struck before long by a
   curious observation. All high-sounding words such as redemption,
   atonement, justification, the new birth, and the receiving of the
   spirit, are wanting in the early Gospels, and yet every reader feels
   that those that were about Jesus were raised to a state of peculiar
   happiness. On the other hand, the greater the frequency of these
   theological expressions in the later writings, the further does the
   actual fact of redemption, as of something experienced and imparted to
   us even to-day, recede into the background. Even St. Paul, who himself
   was certainly to be counted amongst the redeemed, set up general
   theories about redemption, which were more than once contradicted by
   experience in his own congregations. Talk, especially theological talk,
   about redemption, stands frequently, if not always, in the inverse
   ratio to the actual experience thereof.

   We must speak of Jesus as Redeemer, because His activity is not
   exhausted in the promise that He gave and the demand that He made, nay,
   more, in describing these we have not even mentioned that which was
   highest and best in the work of Jesus. He did not merely set up a goal
   for men and point out the direction thither, but He helped them Himself
   on the road. And this in ways so manifold as completely to outdistance
   the poverty of the dogmatic conceptions.

   In the Gospels, Jesus appears before us first of all as the physician
   of men's bodies, as the redeemer of the sick and suffering. However
   great the number of miraculous narratives that we set on one side as
   exaggerations or inventions of a later age, a nucleus of solid fact
   remains with which we have to deal. Jesus possessed a healing power,
   strictly limited, it is true, by unbelief, but capable of producing the
   very greatest physical and psychical changes wherever He encountered
   faith. This power operated especially in the case of mental diseases,
   but was by no means confined to them. Now even though here, too, we see
   Jesus completely dominated by the conceptions of His time, and in part
   even not scorning to make use of its remedies, we can yet feel the
   moral grandeur of His character, and the boundless sympathy with every
   form of distress through all the outer folds of magic. He is a
   wonder-worker, but how infinitely exalted He appears when compared with
   any other worker of wonders. In the time of His enthusiasm Jesus
   explained this Redemption' as the beginning of the kingdom of God. On
   another occasion He places Himself on a line with the Jewish exorcists,
   and once again He expresses doubts as to the persistence of this
   driving out of demons. Jesus confines Himself strictly within the
   limits of miracles of beneficence; every request to perform a miracle
   for mere display, as a sign, He refuses with an emphatic no. Towards
   the end of His ministry an almost entire cessation of His miraculous
   activity is to be noticed. Yet He bequeathed His powers to the apostles
   if they made use of His name. The whole of the Redemption' was
   naturally of a transitory character. The evangelists assigned so
   important a place to it because of its value from an apologetic point
   of view. But there is no doubt that this side of Jesus' work as
   Redeemer was a very great religious consolation to those that
   experienced it. And it is an essential feature in the picture of Jesus
   that hunger, sickness and suffering moved Him to help scarcely less
   than mental trouble and distress.

   Closely connected with the healing of the sick is the restitution of
   the alienated, the publicans and sinners. The Pharisees outlawed these
   people: Jesus loved them. His great compassion for the common people
   was especially directed towards this class. And that gained for Him the
   names, given in derision and mockery, of "glutton and winebibber,
   friend of tax-gatherers and godless people." He ate and He drank with
   them; He sought shelter with them. He called one of them out of the
   tax-office to be His partner in His work as missionary. One can
   scarcely conceive the strange character of this Home Mission work' of
   Jesus. For Jesus brought these alienated classes back, not to any
   church party, but to God. It is probable, too, that when He preached to
   them He spoke little of sin and of repentance, but He entered
   sympathetically into their daily life, and He showed them that God was
   to be sought, not outside of it, but within it. Then at times He would
   call forth such striking decisions as that of Zacchaeus. He Himself
   preferred this company to that of the very pious. He felt there a touch
   of sincerity and simplicity and humanity, which are only rarely to be
   met with amongst religious people.' Jesus did not say that the
   publicans and sinners were sick,' but merely that they were in need of
   His love. Some of His greatest sayings, perhaps even the parable of the
   prodigal son, arose from His defence of His intercourse with them.

   His Home Mission' won for the new religion its most valuable adherents,
   because they were theologically the least corrupted. But it was
   attended by consequences which were Hostile to the Church. For this
   love finally embraced even Samaritans and heathen, and leapt the bounds
   of any and every ecclesiastical system. As soon as the new Church was
   formed, therefore, it again applied the Pharisaic measure to the
   publicans and heathen, so in St Matt. xviii. 17, the unrepentant is to
   be treated as you would treat a heathen and a tax-gatherer.

   Furthermore, Jesus redeemed' His listeners from the theologians, and
   that had consequences that reached still further. The Jewish religion
   was decaying, above all, because of the fact that instead of the
   prophets as mediators between God and man, stood the Scribes, their
   exact opposite. As the whole of the religion was founded upon the
   sacred book, and this was written in a dead language and stood in need
   of explanation, the interpreters of the book came to be looked upon as
   the sole revealers of God. Over against them stood the laity, the
   "multitude that knew not the law," the unenlightened and immature. A
   perverted distinction, for, in the sight of God, it is the learned who
   are the laity rather than the others. These Scribes were ingenious, and
   had a good memory--other gifts they had none. The people were under the
   impression that they laid upon their shoulders a number of grievous
   ordinances with which they likewise burdened themselves, and that they
   endeavoured to close the kingdom of heaven to those that sought to
   enter therein. Jesus deposed the Scribes. He refused to acknowledge
   their gift of revelation. They did not know God. The conclusion to be
   drawn from this is, however, not that the laity are no longer babes in
   spiritual things or that no mediator is any longer necessary--which is
   the fancy of a fantastic liberalism--but that He is the one mediator.
   No man--no layman even--hath known the Father but the Son, to whom
   all--i.e. in this case, all knowledge--hath been committed, and who can
   reveal God to whomsoever He will. Thus, then, Jesus brings redemption
   as the revealer of God in place of the Scribes. Herewith the old
   religion of the prophets has come to life again. God's word is no
   longer contained in a book: it is living. He speaks to the world, not
   through oracles and wonders, but through Jesus' words. Since, however,
   the Son Himself is no theologian, but--in learning--a layman, so God is
   by Him revealed to the childlike and simple. Every child can understand
   Jesus. For He brings nothing but what is obvious to every conscience.
   He places each single person in the presence of reality and eternity.
   So Jesus can call the multitude to Him: "Come unto Me. all ye that are
   weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy and My
   burden is light." His revelation' implies the great simplification of
   religion, the emphasizing of the essential, of the really important. It
   implies the end of theology. Christianity is in its essence a layman's
   religion, for its prophet was Jesus, a layman. But even the rise of the
   Pauline theology brought about the great change, though Paul himself
   still knew what Jesus meant. As for Christian dogma with its revelation
   of a body of doctrine, it is the veriest caricature of the Gospel.
   Jesus redeemed the people from the Scribes, and by the Scribes He was
   put to death. The two events are related as cause and effect. The
   evangelist, St Mark, has seized upon this connection very admirably
   when he portrays Jesus as one who did not preach like the Scribes, but
   finally comes to His end by them. In his book the lay character of the
   Gospel once more finds utterance.

   Next to this, and as an immediate consequence of this redemption from
   the theologians, comes the redemption from the Jewish Church. It is in
   reality .already contained in the fact that the individual who was
   aroused by Jesus' call was made dependent simply upon himself and his
   own conscience. Wherever men realize their individuality and individual
   responsibility, there the authority of the Church ceases. When Jesus
   claimed the personal allegiance of His followers, He was taking a step
   that was entirely hostile to every ecclesiastical organization and was
   aiming directly at separation. Jesus finally demanded of His disciples
   that they should place His person above everything else, and should for
   His sake be prepared to endure the breach with their people and the
   rulers. It would seem that in His last speeches He directly foretold
   the conflict with the Jewish monarchy, and demanded of them in this
   case the completest freedom and constancy. It was indeed an immense
   demand to make of His disciples, laymen of Galilee, brought up to feel
   the deepest reverence for Jerusalem, the Temple and the Sanhedrim. But
   for all that they did not belie His expectations. Jesus really trained
   a company of martyrs, men who did not fear the council, and obeyed God
   rather than men. These disciples possessed richly all those virtues
   which the Christians, in later times lost in their own Church.

   Jesus' aim, however, was never merely negative. Side by side with the
   separation from the Jewish Church went the foundation of the new
   Christian fellowship--a fellowship, not a Church. Why should Jesus have
   founded a Church, filled as He was with the expectation of the near
   approach of the kingdom, which was to put an end to all human forms?
   The great interest felt in the Church is a product of later times, when
   the expectation of the kingdom no longer occupied men's minds in the
   first instance. In Jesus' teaching there is as yet no mention of any
   external organization, nor does He therefore say anything of the
   founding of sacraments, the outward signs of membership in the
   fellowship. He does not even, in any of His recorded sayings, exhort
   the brethren to foster the growth of the fellowship. But nevertheless
   He did found a fellowship through Himself and the Apostles. Whoever is
   faithful to Him, whoever receives Him and His messengers, whoever keeps
   His commandments and professes His cause before men, he belongs as a
   matter of course to the company of those that acknowledge the same Lord
   and Master. So then Jesus could from time to time speak of His
   family'--that is, all the brothers and sisters that do God's will. It
   appears also that He said that whoever forsook his home and his family
   for His sake should be recompensed a hundredfold, even in this present
   time--i.e. in the community of those who were of like mind with
   Himself. Jesus set up the keeping of the commandments, the fruits,' as
   the criterion by which men's fidelity to His fellowship was to be
   judged. By these the sheep were to be distinguished from the wolf, and
   the brethren that were to be recognized by these tokens were exhorted
   to lay to heart, as their first and foremost duty, the rendering of
   mutual service and assistance. In proportion as all these commandments
   are conceived of as purely spiritual precepts without any legal
   addition, the deeper, the more heartfelt, is the obligation incurred.
   Hence, and hence alone, it came about that within so very short a time
   after the first dispersion of the disciples, a new fellowship could be
   formed, and in this case as an external organization.

   The full scope of the redemptive activity of Jesus was only attained in
   this fellowship of the disciples, when the new life that was in Him was
   transmitted to receptive hearts and minds. All that was peculiarly His
   own in His piety and devotion was transplanted and became the germ of
   the piety of the new community. All that is rightly called Christianity
   is, directly or indirectly, the after effect of the new life in Jesus,
   and must be guided by Him. The first striking characteristic of the
   piety of Jesus is the hitherto unexampled concentration and
   exclusiveness of the religious relation. God was one and all for Him,
   and the service of God the sum of His life. There was no distinction
   here between Sunday and week-day, between sacred and profane. Eating
   and drinking and sleeping, joy and anger, were all under God's eyes. He
   combined an entirely open mind towards the whole wealth of existence
   that was accessible to Him with a complete subordination of all things
   to God. Of all later writings it is perhaps only Luther's "Table Talk"
   that reveals a similar combination. A being so completely united with
   God always exercises an influence upon his surroundings. Henceforth
   religion is placed in the centre of life, and becomes the dominant
   power. The enthusiasm of the disciples that found vent a little later
   in the speaking with tongues, and in the joy with which they embraced
   martyrdom, is a proof of this. These men were really able to offer up
   everything to God.

   The next characteristic of the piety of Jesus is a combination of
   opposites which is quite peculiar to it the union of the blithesomeness
   and innocence of childhood with the courage and the serious earnestness
   of manhood. This cannot, of course, be imitated in its perfection by
   any one, but its effect nevertheless is that the predominance of the
   one quality always tends to be mitigated by the joint action of the
   other. It is probably impossible for anyone to form a conception of the
   childlike gladness of Jesus. His life was passed in sunshine and in
   joy, in childlike trust towards God, in glad exultation over Nature and
   good men. In the midst of the raging storm on the lake, He can sleep
   like the child in its mother's arms; for why should anything hurt Him?
   He looks at the birds. They toil not at all, and yet they enjoy
   everything so gladly; or He sees them sitting so safely on the edge of
   the roof, and no danger threatens them. Then, again, He finds that the
   meanest flowers of the field are robed far more beautifully than King
   Solomon in all his grandeur. Truly, men might learn some profitable
   lessons here. But dearer than all to Him are the little children. He
   folds them in His arms, He presses them to His heart. For He feels that
   He is amongst those of like nature with Himself. We men should be able
   to accept God's love as the child does the fairy tale that is told him.
   That is what the words mean: "He that receiveth not the kingdom of God
   like a little child cannot enter therein." All moody and
   self-tormenting thoughts, all carking cares, everything done under
   compulsion, all unnatural excitation of one's feelings, is entirely
   alien to Him. He possessed the full freedom and freshness of an
   entirely unspoilt and simple and great soul that rested in God's love.
   But side by side with this there dwelt in this same soul an intense
   earnestness. Eternity was ever present to Him. There was no playing or
   dallying, no forgetting of oneself even for a moment. His gaze was
   directed straight forward to the goal. God's thoughts fill His mind at
   all times. God's will is to become His. There is a fearful
   alternative--a narrow and a broad way. At the one end stands hell,
   where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies. Better enter
   into the kingdom of heaven with one eye or with one foot, than descend
   to hell whole with all one's limbs. This terrible saying stands side by
   side with that of the reception of the kingdom of God like a little
   child, only the two together give us a complete picture of Jesus. And
   now this strange combination of sharp contrasts originating from Jesus
   imparts itself to others, and produces results of which none can
   foretell the end.

   First of all, there was the certainty of the goal. Men's hopes were
   established and assured. For the Jews the end of the world was
   something uncertain and mysterious. They spend their time in minute
   studies and subtle reckonings as to its coming, and at the same time
   snatch at the pleasures of the fleeting moment. Better enjoy something
   tangible here than trust to an imaginary happiness yonder. Through
   Jesus hope has become an assured certainty, and thereby a power in
   men's lives with which the world has to reckon henceforth. Eternity is
   no longer a mere thought but actual reality; whether it comes sooner or
   later, the goal stands firmly fixed before men's eyes. And that is how
   the early Christians were enabled with quiet confidence to support
   their disappointment when the parousia did not come as they had
   expected. "The kingdom shall still be ours," was their consolation.

   In the next place, man's freedom, his power to do the good, was
   incomparably strengthened. In all that He says Jesus appeals to the
   will, to the power of free choice. He conceives of God's commandments
   as entirely capable of fulfilment. He has absolutely no doubt that man
   can do a thing; he is merely lacking in will power. Jesus could so
   believe and so speak because He Himself freed and strengthened the will
   more than any other in the history of the world. His enthusiasm, His
   love, and His courage come to be mighty impulses, the originating
   causes of all that is good in His disciples. He is able to demand all,
   because everything becomes possible through Him. He is really able, as
   the legend says, to make Peter walk upon the sea. It is at all times
   incredible what a good and holy man can bring about in weak and little
   souls. He enlarges the bounds of that which is possible in the domain
   of ethics, just as a discoverer in that of physics. Jesus' disciples
   were no heroes. His whole intercourse with them up to the denial of
   Peter is a proof of that. And yet what a brave company Jesus made of
   them--ready to defy the whole world. In the great and everlasting
   struggle between the powers of good and evil, which runs through the
   whole history of the world, the appearance of Jesus implies the
   greatest addition of power on the side of the good, so that because of
   Him it is inconceivable that it should ever be conquered.

   It was possible for Jesus to strengthen man's will power to this
   extent, because He freed him at the same time from the terror of sin.
   The Jewish feeling of sin, which was rather the consequence of
   misfortune than of moral depth of character, had already become
   something morbid, resting upon men's minds like a nightmare. Paul is
   its great interpreter. It is true that the most important Jewish prayer
   contained the splendid sixth petition--

     Forgive us, our Father,
     For we have sinned.
     Forgive us, O King,
     For we have done unrighteously.
     Dost thou not forgive and pardon gladly?
     Praised be thou, Lord, most merciful,
     Thou that dost pardon so greatly.

   It was therefore an article in the Jewish creed that was firmly
   believed, that God pardoned the Israelites when they prayed to Him. But
   what was the use of fine words if the individual had no sense of
   personal certainty and was unable to derive thence the power to live a
   glad and joyous life? He was weighed down for all that by the feeling
   of sin. Jesus routed these wretched and morbid feelings all along the
   line. They vanish before His presence like the mist before the sun.
   Jesus turned the theory contained in the Jewish prayer into a fact, and
   gave to all that were about Him the certainty of pardon and courage and
   joy. If He uttered the divine declaration, "Thy sins be forgiven thee,"
   to any anxious soul, then all trouble was at an end. As against the
   Pharisees He appears as the advocate of the true Father of Sinners, and
   in the parable of the prodigal son He proclaims the principle, that
   when God pardons, His justice is by no means diminished. But He taught
   His disciples just simply to pray to God for forgiveness and to look
   upon this as a fundamental law in the family both human and divine.
   Jesus has made it perfectly plain that the child of God is separated by
   no sin from God's love, as little as the child of an earthly father
   from that father's love. He looked into the human heart deeper than
   most rabbis, and He read there "no one is good," "ye that are evil." In
   the heart dwell evil thoughts, and even if the spirit be willing the
   flesh is weak. He that thus makes His way down into the depths is
   inaccessible to any easy-going optimism. But Jesus did not suffer
   Himself to be driven to despair by this discovery of sin, because He
   knows that God's mercy and love are greater than all our sins. If it is
   human to sin, then to pardon is divine. Nay, more: man would cease to
   be in the right relation to God were he ever to forego his claim upon
   the divine pardon. These are bold articles to put in any creed, yet
   they are only fraught with danger for those that know not the God of
   Jesus. How miserably all those finely constructed theories of sacrifice
   and vicarious atonement crumble to pieces before this faith in the love
   of God our Father, who so gladly pardons. The one parable of the
   prodigal son wipes them all off the slate. Sin and its burden lie far
   away from the disciples of Jesus, and still further is the theology of
   sin and propitiation.

   The depth and the reality of the sense of the peace of God which Jesus
   bestows upon His disciples by this glad gospel is proved by their new
   relation to the world. Here, too, Jesus brings redemption from all
   cares and terrors. Since Jesus treads them under foot, the demons are
   no longer powers to be feared. Imagining that they were surrounded at
   every step that they took by a whole host of evil spirits, the Jews had
   come to find it hard to go forward otherwise than timidly and
   anxiously. The world--so it was said repeatedly--had been handed over
   by God to the devil, for was he not the prince and god of this world?
   Jesus, who had a mistaken belief in the reality of demons, conceived of
   His life as a joyous and brave battle against them, and cried aloud to
   men: "The world belongs to God, and it is He that giveth us the
   victory." Through His own fearlessness He freed His disciples from all
   fear of men. He showed them by His own example that fear of men cannot
   exist side by side with fear of God, and that he that stands under
   God's protection need not be in the least distressed because little men
   hate him and oppress him. Even though God should suffer them to be
   vanquished here, they will even then rejoice in Him and will die with
   these words on their lips, "The kingdom shall still be ours." He
   removed all that was painful from the cares caused by poverty and
   necessity by helping them to carry God's fatherly love into all that
   was dark and difficult. The words, "Be not over anxious," which Jesus
   carried with Him from place to place, acquired all their power through
   Him who was free from all anxiety, who had nothing and yet was so glad.
   He taught them also bravely to win their way through the temptations of
   the world. He Himself overcame them by prayer and a brave word. But
   above all, Jesus caused men to look upon suffering and even death in a
   new light.

   By its precipitate judgments the Jewish doctrine of retribution turned
   every misfortune into a divine punishment, thereby doubling the
   distress. Jesus entirely rejected this doctrine. He shows, on the
   contrary, in the parable of Dives and Lazarus that an entirely poor and
   abandoned man can be so much happier than a rich man who satisfies his
   every desire, because death so often brings with it a reversal of men's
   positions, and therefore Jesus says: "Blessed are the poor, the hungry,
   the persecuted, for the future is theirs."

   More important, however, than all this both for Himself and for His
   disciples was His own death and the whole series of events leading up
   to it. At first it was a bitter necessity for Him, a divine purpose
   coming into collision with the human, which just had to be obeyed. Then
   later He began already to see some positive object therein. Some good
   end must surely be intended by His death. It must be fraught with
   blessing for many among the people who as yet believed not in Him. And
   then once more, in the hour of bitterest anguish, when all consolatory
   thoughts were like to be driven away again by the rude reality, Jesus
   still clung firmly to this. "It is the Father's cup." And thus He began
   His great work of recoining the value of things. Through Jesus' death
   the disciples were gradually enlightened. The dogma of retribution was
   not true. Suffering and death are not methods of punishment, since God
   has inflicted them upon His own Son. Thus the Christians were set free
   from all the bitterness that the fear of death contains. It is true
   that even the first generation of Christians did not rest content with
   the teaching of Jesus herein. The thoughts of punishment, retribution,
   and expiation, were lodged too firmly in their heads. They must needs
   be applied to Jesus in a new form. But nevertheless in the judgment
   that they passed upon their own misfortunes we can see that they began
   to grasp the new idea--that the cross' comes from God's love--this idea
   is the fruit of Jesus' death.

   Thus, then, Jesus does, as an actual matter of fact, redeem His
   disciples from the influence of all powers hostile to God, and in so
   doing transforms the children of a world of vanity that passeth away
   into the children of God. For this was ever Jesus' ultimate aim: so to
   unite God and man as He was united with God. He never reduced this aim
   to a theoretical formula, nor did it ever occur to Him or to those that
   accompanied Him, to remove the boundaries that separated the Master'
   from His disciples,' yet He admitted His disciples so closely into His
   relationship with God that the prayer of both is the same. And for
   Jesus and His friends everything in fact centres in prayer. In prayer
   man assumes his normal position--God the giver and he the recipient.
   Jesus and His disciples prayed with such joy, intensity and certainty
   of victory as perchance never before or since in the history of man.
   Philosophers may smile at this, because they do not understand it.
   Those have ever been the greatest epochs in the history of religion
   when the believer trusted God most of all, and therefore, too, received
   most from Him. Here the bounds of possibility are enlarged, new forces
   are set free, and cause the world to wonder. We are, however, here
   concerned with the contents of the Lord's Prayer.' It is not only the
   simplest summary of the redemption' which Jesus effects: it constitutes
   the bond between Jesus and His disciples. He that can really pray
   it--not as a mere formula--has reached that stage beyond which nothing
   higher is to be looked for under the present conditions of existence.
   Such a one calling upon God as his father is himself His child and in
   so far like unto Jesus. When he prays for the coming of God's kingdom
   he enters upon the possession of eternity. And finally, by asking for
   his daily bread, for forgiveness and protection during the short time
   that still remains, he receives the means of his existence, his peace
   and the certainty of his salvation from God's hands, and no power in
   heaven or on earth can separate him from God. Therewith his redemption
   is completed, as far as it is possible upon earth, and the future is
   already within his grasp. He that so prays has gained for himself a
   share in the divine power and love within the bounds of this earthly
   life.

   The disciple of Jesus prays this prayer without making any claim upon
   his Master's advocacy or mention of His name. Thereby we are clearly
   given to understand in what sense Jesus would be the Redeemer, and in
   what sense He would not. His calling was to bring God so near to the
   men of His time and not to them alone--by His whole manner of life and
   personality, to bind them so firmly to God in the presence of eternity,
   that they should never more be able to part from Him. Herein He
   succeeded so entirely that the thought never occurred to His first
   disciples that He was setting Himself by the side of God, or was taking
   God's place as the central object of man's devotion.

   They prayed to God alone, and they handed down the saying of Jesus that
   He, too, was not to be accounted good. And that was the final proof of
   their redemption. But through His humility and His truthfulness, and by
   His entire subordination to God, Jesus showed more than by all else
   that He deserved the name of Redeemer in the fullest sense of the word.

   Looked at from a purely historical point of view, the death of Jesus
   was the necessary consequence of His revolt against the divine
   authority of the Scribes and the propaganda of the Pharisees. After His
   capture, however, Jesus was compelled in the presence of the Sanhedrim
   to confess Himself Messiah, and thus furnish an ostensible reason for
   His conviction. It would seem that the Roman governor accepted this
   political pretext. But that was not the real reason of the hostility
   and the violent conclusion of the struggle. The spiritual leaders of
   the people, and the party that stood in the greatest odour of sanctity,
   recognized that a spirit had appeared in Jesus, which was bound to
   sweep them away. Finally, the danger came to be so great that only the
   immediate removal of Jesus appeared to offer any possibility of safety.
   The death of the leader seemed to them to imply as a necessary
   consequence the defeat of the cause, the confusion of His adherents,
   and the impossibility of belief in an executed criminal. These
   calculations appeared to be confirmed by the flight and the dispersal
   of the disciples after the capture of Jesus.

   Contrary to all expectations, the dispersed disciples began to gather
   together again, at first in Galilee and then in Jerusalem. "He is not
   dead," they cried in triumphant enthusiasm to the murderers of Jesus;
   "He liveth." The reckoning of the Sanhedrists turned out to be at
   fault. Their clever calculations proved to be the greatest folly and
   impolicy, for faith in the crucified and risen Lord brought about that
   which faith in the living Christ had not accomplished: the foundation
   of the new Church, the separation from Judaism, the conquest of the
   world.

   Whence this sudden change? For that the disciples fled in confusion and
   consternation is a certain fact. Their answer was: the Lord has
   appeared to us, first to Peter, then to the twelve, then to more than
   five hundred brethren together, then to James, then to all of the
   apostles, last of all to Paul. From these appearances--the first must
   have taken place, according to the oldest accounts, in Galilee--they
   inferred the facts of the resurrection and of the present life of Jesus
   in glory. In the very earliest time, when St. Paul obtained this
   information from St Peter, they were content with drawing these
   conclusions and required no further proofs. The new faith rests upon
   the appearances alone.

   Our judgment as to these appearances depends upon the credibility which
   we attach to St. Paul and his informant, and still more upon our
   philosophical and religious standpoint, upon our faith.' Purely
   scientific considerations cannot decide where the question at stake is
   the existence or non-existence of the invisible world, and the
   possibility of communicating with spirits. Hence, too, all attempts at
   explanation, which rest upon the axiom that our world of phenomena is
   the only reality, are merely subjectively persuasive and convincing.
   The Christian faith always reckons with the reality of the other world
   which is our goal. A Christian, therefore, has no difficulty in
   accepting as the ground of his belief in the resurrection, the real
   projection of Jesus into this world of sense by means of a vision.

   But there is another reason which prevents the historian from resting
   content with this supposition even if he approves of it. The mere faith
   in these miracles makes the origin of Christianity dependent on a
   chance, as though the cause of Jesus had come to nought but for this
   story. But in Jesus' person there resided so mighty a power of
   redemption, there was so great a certainty of ultimate victory, that it
   could not be destroyed by any death however disgraceful. "He was too
   great that He should die" (Lagarde)--i.e. the impression that He had
   made, the fellowship in which one had lived with Him, these were too
   great, too firm, too indestructible. As during the time of His earthly
   life He had continuously imparted to His disciples joy, consolation,
   courage, and certainty of victory, so after His death He did not cease
   to take up again after a short interval of confusion His work as
   Saviour of mankind.

   Of John the Baptist, too, it was said that he had arisen, and worked
   though Jesus. But his sect disappeared in the confused jumble of Jewish
   sects. But Jesus was really the Redeemer even after His death, and
   instead of His influence decreasing, He now really began to draw all
   men unto Himself. Even, therefore, though He may have helped by means
   of His appearances to enable His disciples to recover from their
   perplexity, the fact that these appearances produced this effect was
   the consequence of the earlier impression which death had not been able
   to efface. Faith in the resurrection is the fruit of salvation through
   Jesus.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VIII.

  THE LEADERS.

   JESUS did not leave His disciples without leaders. During His lifetime
   He had organized and trained a compact body, a little company, the
   twelve. By participating in His missionary labours they were to
   multiply His activity, and when He was not Himself present, they were
   to take His place. Upon the twelve He had laid the duty of leading the
   same wandering life as His own. He had given them the authority to
   preach and to heal which He Himself possessed. He made them sharers in
   all His rights. "He that receiveth you receiveth Me; he that receiveth
   Me receiveth Him that sent Me." It was the twelve who accompanied Jesus
   when He entered Jerusalem, who received His last commands and were
   witnesses of His capture.

   The first appearance of the risen Master, soon after the first flight
   of the disciples, fell to Peter, the captain of this company. The
   second was to all the eleven. We know nothing beyond the bare fact of
   these appearances; we do not know what words were then heard. The
   consequences alone are evident: the assembling of the company in
   Galilee, the start for Jerusalem, city of danger and mournful memories,
   their appearance there with the glad confession of the Messiah.

   Round the nucleus of this little company there gathered the former
   disciples as well as the new adherents. The old name, the twelve,' gave
   way to the new official designation, the apostles,' though it is
   possible that this did not take place before Greek soil was reached.
   The chief recommendation of the new name lay in the fact that it could
   be transferred to the later missionaries as well, but its original
   meaning was strictly limited: "One who had companied with Jesus in His
   missionary work, and had been witness of the resurrection."

   Nothing can exceed the significance of the apostles in the history of
   the development of Christianity. Jesus did not Himself found the
   Church. He who shattered the institution of the Jewish Church had no
   understanding for such an organization. But the company of the apostles
   is His own peculiar creation. He had faith in the power of the word and
   in the influence of personality. The call of the companions of His
   mission was the result of this faith. In this call He was not uniformly
   successful; that is proved by much else besides the one name Judas
   Ischariot. But, on the whole, the work that He had begun lasted. The
   foundation of the Church, all the work of consolidating the early
   community of believers, rests upon the apostles, upon their enthusiasm,
   their courage and their endurance. Here, again, the saying is proved
   true, that it is men that make history. The belief in the resurrection,
   the future foundation-stone of Christianity, arose in the circle of the
   twelve, and here alone.

   The apostles were animated by a lofty self-consciousness. They felt
   themselves to be the representatives of Jesus. They were continuing His
   work. As ambassadors for Christ, they were ambassadors for God. The new
   office of mediation between God and man was continued by the apostles.
   Their manner of life was an extraordinary one, like that of Jesus.
   Besides their work as missionaries, the twelve had no calling: for
   their sustenance they depended entirely on the hospitality of the
   faithful.

   But Jesus' miraculous powers likewise continued effective in the
   apostles. It came to be universally accepted that an apostle could
   prove himself such by signs and wonders. Jesus Himself, so it was said,
   had given them power to tread on serpents and scorpions without danger.
   As a reward for their faithful services they should sit upon twelve
   thrones in the future kingdom and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

   In sayings such as these can be traced the glorification of the legend
   which dates from the earliest times. The self-consciousness of the
   apostles and the veneration of the disciples helped to complete each
   other almost from the first. At all events it was counted as an
   especial privilege of this early time that the twelve were there to
   lead; the twelve in whom Jesus Himself continued to live.

   In spite, however, of all their high authority, there was not the
   remotest attempt to place the apostles on the same level as Jesus.
   Subordination to the Master, resting in the feeling that he owes his
   position to Him alone, is the sure sign of an apostle. The apostle is
   to give nothing of his own, but only that which Jesus has already
   given. He is to create nothing original: he has simply to hand down
   that which Jesus has already created. From the very first the apostles
   were to be the incarnation of the idea of tradition. However much they
   might differ externally from the rabbis, they were to agree with them
   in the value they attached to the careful handing down of the sacred
   tradition, in the one case the oral law, in the other the words of
   Jesus. Not only were the apostles intended to be this thing, they were
   this in reality. The messenger is completely lost in the Master. No
   single original saying of an apostle has been preserved for us, and yet
   this want of all originality does not diminish their authority in the
   very slightest; it was looked upon as perfectly natural.

   In the Acts they lead a collective life, partly all together, partly
   two and two. They are merely types; there is no single person. It is
   true that there were differences enough of temperament, education and
   culture among them, but, on the whole, they were the representatives of
   the cause of Jesus; that, and nothing more.

   The clearest proof of this is to be found in the way in which they
   conceived of their calling. It was just to hold firmly to the calling
   of Jesus. The judgment and the kingdom were near at hand. In spite of
   the rejection of Jesus on the part of the Jews, which His death
   involved, the duty of the apostles, after their Master's death, was to
   preach repentance to these very Jews, to see whether they might not yet
   be converted in time. It is true that Jesus Himself had passed judgment
   upon the Temple and upon Jerusalem, in words trenchant and
   unmistakable. But could it not yet be averted, after all, even in the
   last hour, if the Jews should turn and repent? Once before, Isaiah's
   disciples had tried to avert in the last hour the terrible doom
   prophesied by him over Judah, by the reform of which our book of
   Deuteronomy is the witness. The disciples of Jesus made a similar
   attempt when they set out upon their missionary labours. Jesus had
   broken entirely with Israel: this they could not grasp. They suffered
   themselves to be imprisoned, to be ill-treated, to be executed by the
   Jewish authorities, and proved thereby that Jesus was to them more than
   all else in the world. But for all that, their own beloved nation was
   not to be abandoned. And so the picture has a reverse side: foreign
   mission work makes scarcely any progress in the hands of the twelve.
   They rejoiced whenever news was brought to them that Gentiles had
   joined the ranks of the disciples, but they did not go forth
   themselves. The Messiah was to meet His own again in Israel. We have a
   clear proof of this in the agreement come to at Jerusalem (Gal. ii.).
   James, Cephas, John, the pillars of the Church, declare their
   determination to remain constant to their mission to the Jews. If this
   is true of the leaders, it is certainly true of all the twelve. They
   just suffered St. Paul's work; they did not further it. Truly there is
   a certain grandeur in the way in which these messengers of Jesus, in
   spite of all, never wearied of the attempt to win over the very people
   that persecuted them, and whose rulers showed them such illfavour. It
   was also necessary and salutary that the connection between the old and
   the new religion should be maintained until the separation could be
   effected without damage. But progress on the line clearly marked out by
   Jesus there was none.

   By the side of the twelve there early arose an authority of quite a
   different kind: the brethren, and the whole family of Jesus. While
   Jesus lived they believed not, or at least they doubted. It was only
   after His death that they were convinced of their brother's high
   calling. He appeared to James. This occurrence immediately secured him
   and the whole family a place at the head of the new community. Paul
   speaks of James, the brother of the Lord, once side by side with Peter,
   another time as a pillar, together with Peter and John, thus making his
   authority equal to that of an apostle. But that which secured the
   brethren' their prerogative was just this tie of relationship, and not
   the call to the work. The veneration felt for Jesus was transferred
   quite naturally to His brethren after the flesh, and these again were
   nothing loth to share in the honour paid to their great brother. The
   apostles and brethren of the Lord almost became rival powers. We can
   find traces of a dynasty of Jesus at Jerusalem. After the death of
   James a cousin of Jesus is chosen to be his successor, and so it goes
   on, to the great detriment of the new community. The free spirit of
   Jesus had not descended upon James, nor had he learnt anything from his
   experience in life. In him the unnatural reversion to Judaism found its
   leader. Those fanatics who so cowed Peter at Antioch that he refused to
   eat any longer with the Gentile Christians were "certain that came from
   James." Fortunately, however, the first generation of Christians was
   spared such struggles for the succession of the Master as are known to
   the oldest history of Islam. But while the apostle to the Gentiles
   represents the upward progress and expansion of Christianity, we have
   in James the drag on the wheel, the reactionary element.

   Both together, apostles and brethren, were the authorities on the side
   of tradition. By their side the prophets, the representatives of the
   new ideas, find a place. This place depended upon special psychical
   gifts and upon religious enthusiasm.

   The prophets did not present an entirely new feature in contemporary
   Jewish life. They had never entirely died out since the age of the
   Maccabees. A prophet, John, is Jesus' forerunner. In the story of the
   birth of Jesus, prophets and prophetesses find a place. Jesus foretells
   the coming of false prophets, and they appear in great numbers in the
   period immediately preceding the final insurrection of the Jews. They
   were the stormy petrels before the coming of the terrible tempest.
   True, it is possible that the arrival of the Christian prophets on the
   scene stood in some connection with the first rumblings of that
   mysterious political movement. But for all that something new does here
   begin, something unknown to the Judaism of that time. Shortly after the
   death of Jesus, the pent-up fires of enthusiasm break forth in the
   community of believers at Jerusalem. That mysterious movement began
   which, on the one hand, spread, all-powerful, like wildfire amongst the
   masses, causing the risen Lord to appear to five hundred brethren at
   once, transforming high and low, men and women, into inspired beings;
   and, on the other hand, caught up single individuals out of their
   ordinary every day life and drove them out into special forms of
   activity which often lasted a lifetime. The conception which men then
   formed of these single individuals--who alone were rightly call
   prophets--was that which had been held in all ages. A spirit enters
   into man from without, and from him tells forth God's message by
   ecstatic "speaking with tongues," by intelligible words or by symbolic
   action. His word then counts as the pure word of God. With reference to
   the future it is an oracle; with reference to the present, a command.

   Both from the Acts of the Apostles and from St Paul's letters, we see
   that prophets' are amongst the distinctive marks of this first age of
   Christianity. But we learn at the same time that their authority was
   secondary. That is to say, that the ultimate authority, the foundation,
   was in all cases the tradition of Jesus. This might be supplemented by
   the prophetic word, by the spirit, but never transformed. That was a
   principle which does all honour to the perception of the guiding minds
   of the new religion. For the spirit which spoke out of the mouths of
   the prophets was impersonal, vague, and beyond control; all manner of
   influences and tendencies there competed with the influence of the
   Jesus of history. It was, after all, the religious impulse in its
   exclusiveness, for it forced back all other spiritual powers, but at
   the same time in its arbitrariness, and often in its moral
   indifference. To make the spirit of the prophets the ultimate authority
   would have been tantamount to subjecting oneself to the whims and
   fancies of men whose religious nature was powerful while their moral
   character was immature and undisciplined. It was therefore indeed
   fortunate that the word of Jesus, handed down by the apostles, was
   accounted higher than the Spirit, that the master of sane sobriety and
   temperance kept in check all those waves of exuberant enthusiasm and
   unrestricted power. Yet even with this restriction--this subjection to
   the apostles--the influence and significance of the prophets were the
   greatest that can be conceived. God spoke again. He continued to speak.
   Once more there were men of God on earth, directly inspired. He that
   laid hands upon them and blasphemed them committed the sin that should
   never be forgiven--blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. These prophets are
   of no great importance for the development of theology, but the history
   of the mighty religious impulse of the earliest age of Christianity
   would be unintelligible without them. The spirits of these men are
   still quivering with all the gladness, restlessness and enthusiasm of
   Jesus.

   But the list of the leaders of the oldest time is far from being
   complete yet. We come next to the teachers, men likewise filled with
   the Spirit,' who, through their spiritual gifts, fathomed the hidden
   meaning of Holy Scriptures. They are the representatives of the
   Gnosis,' i.e. of the right spiritual understanding of the Revelation of
   God. Thus, Christian theology begins with them. Apollos is the first
   typical teacher.' A great future awaits them. Furthermore, there are
   the mysterious seven deacons. Stephen and Philip belonged to them. They
   were all Hellenists, and, as it appears, originally representatives of
   the Hellenists in Jerusalem.

   Then there were apostles of the second rank, missionaries like
   Barnabas, Judas, and Silas, chosen by the Churches and sent forth by
   them or by the twelve as their delegates. As time went on and the
   twelve died one after the other, these apostles in the wider sense of
   the word stepped into their place. Lastly, there were the heads of the
   different Churches, called presbyters or bishops. They, too, were
   chosen on the ground of spiritual qualifications and by the voice of
   the Spirit. But their position, on the whole, was entirely subordinate
   to that of the itinerant leaders into whose hands the Spirit placed the
   supreme authority over the whole infant Church that was now just coming
   into being. These presbyter bishops did not then dream of the position
   of dignity to which they were destined later to attain.

   Look where you will, there is nowhere a want of leaders; it is rather
   the superabundance, the too great variety in the body of officers, that
   strikes one. There would appear to be no one man in supreme command, no
   one to dominate all these different spiritual forces and carry on the
   work of Jesus without hesitation or confusion. There is indeed
   something marvellous in the sight--so soon after the death of Jesus--of
   this great organized host of able, enthusiastic, and courageous men all
   engaged heart and soul in the work of preserving for the world their
   Master's in heritance. The cause of Jesus cannot fail.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IX.

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHURCH.

   EVEN in Jesus' lifetime there was a Christian fellowship in the ideal
   sense of the word, the number of all those who recognized Him as the
   Lord, as their Head, and kept His commandments in their daily life. But
   there was no coherence, no organization. These followed only after
   Jesus' death, under the impression produced by the appearances and
   under the guidance of the apostles. We cannot fix any exact date, but
   we may look upon the return of the disciples to Jerusalem in
   expectation of the second advent of Jesus in the place where He died as
   the decisive occurrence.

   The Christian Church is the child of enthusiasm. The less likely we are
   to imagine this as we look at the Church to-day, the greater the
   importance of reminding ourselves of this fact. The Church originated
   in a hero worship--theologians call it Faith the truest and the purest
   that has ever been. It united all the worshippers indissolubly together
   and created the new forms quite of itself. They were the tokens of the
   same love. Jesus Himself and none other was the centre of the new
   community, present in the veneration, the love, the enthusiasm, the
   faith of His disciples. The watchword of the brethren in its simplest
   form was just this: Jesus is the Lord--with Him through life or death
   into the kingdom of heaven; without Him we are lost. All the feelings
   of love and reverence for the nation, for the family, for friends,
   cherished in each individual soul, were now uprooted and transferred to
   Jesus and His followers. The saying of Jesus, "He that is not with Me
   is against Me," was now fulfilled in all its practical consequences.

   The common faith immediately finds utterance in confession. Faith in
   Jesus as the Messiah is still in the background during His lifetime.
   Jesus forbade His disciples to speak of it. He had asked men to receive
   Him simply as sent by God. Now the formal confession "Jesus is the
   Messiah" becomes the distinctive mark between friend and foe. This
   confession rested at first on the unique impression made by Jesus the
   Saviour. It then acquired consistency and certainty by means of the
   appearances, and culminated in the hope that He should come again in
   glory on the clouds of heaven to inaugurate the Messianic kingdom. For
   faith in the Messiah was hope for the future. Jesus had not yet been
   Messiah. He had merely been a candidate for the office. Hence they
   spoke of the approaching advent of the Messiah--not of His return. Thus
   there crept into the confession, through this element of hope,
   something that was uncertain and yet certain, an anxiety, a yearning, a
   longing. In reality it could only find expression in enthusiasm. A
   terrible fact--death--seemed to contradict it. The appearances brought
   comfort, but along with it new questions and perplexities. The
   expectation of the advent in the immediate future placed men's minds in
   a state of perpetual tension. Thus this confession of the Messiah was
   no mere theological formula, but the expression of a very disturbed and
   stormy frame of mind; and only thus in connection with all that rich
   spiritual experience and longing and love and courage did the
   confession of belief in Jesus, who lives in spite of His death and
   shall come again in glory, create the Church.

   Faith is enthusiastic. Those who are enthusiastic for Jesus are ipso
   facto friends and brothers. Wherever enthusiasm is genuine, it is
   satisfied with a minimum of outward forms. Wherever an extensive
   apparatus of forms and ceremonies is counted necessary and holy, there
   as a rule enthusiasm has already beaten a retreat. At first enthusiasm
   embraces every one in a similar state with open arms. Herein we may
   discover the explanation of the fact that the early Church exhibits
   rather an enthusiastic than a legal character. All manifestations of
   anything extraordinary were reckoned the surest sign of a disciple:
   above all else the speaking with tongues. The impression made by the
   story of what Jesus did and of His appearances was so great that it
   often happened that not only believing disciples but strangers and new
   comers who were present fell into an ecstatic condition as they
   listened--an indubitable sign that they were brethren, as God had
   vouchsafed the Spirit unto them. So great was their joy, their
   gladness, that articulate speech formed no adequate expression for the
   overflowing enthusiasm. It could only find vent in stammering and in
   stuttering and in inexpressible sighs. In accordance with the
   psychology of that age these phenomena were immediately ascribed to
   supernatural causation. They were in truth simply the expression of a
   mystic state of psychical exaltation. The mystical element in religion
   had become a living reality. Yet this talking with tongues was never an
   isolated phenomenon. The enthusiasm of the disciples found vent in
   deeds as well, such deeds as man only accomplishes in extraordinary
   times. Through the migration from Galilee to Jerusalem a great number
   of the disciples had lost the means of earning their daily bread and
   had sunk into poverty. Without the support of their friends in
   Jerusalem, especially of some rich men among them, they would have
   actually starved. So it came to pass that the richer brethren gave the
   poorer so generous a share of their earnings and their possessions that
   the legend of the universal communism of the early Church arose in
   later times. Many a man in his enthusiasm sold his fields and brought
   the money to the apostles at Jerusalem to be divided amongst the poor.
   Charity was exhibited on an unbounded scale. Men gave of their own in
   so heroic a fashion that the rigid conception of property was actually
   shaken, and it was revealed that there lay in the words of Jesus a
   power to change the outer forms of life.

   All this enthusiasm was crowned by the heroism of the martyrs. There is
   an early Christian hymn:


   "Let them take our life,

   Goods, honour, child and wife:

   Let all these go.

   Yet is the gain not theirs:

   The kingdom still is ours."

   These simple fishermen and artizans of Galilee surrendered their all,
   even their lives, and with a glad courage, that shrank not from death
   itself, set the seal upon their discipleship of Jesus. They translated
   Jesus' words into deeds and accounted death for nought. The first
   community of believers was welded together by the blood of the martyrs
   far more than by the speaking with tongues. But this was all the
   organization that existed thus far. He that spoke with tongues of
   Jesus, he that for His sake gave all his belongings to the poor and
   died for Him, was His disciple; of that there could be no doubt. No
   outer sign was necessary.

   And yet an outer form did come to be needed for the whole community. In
   the first period of its development Christianity existed as a sect
   (heresy). The metamorphosis from sect into Church was a very gradual
   process. Step by step the Christian sect separated itself from the
   Jewish Church. By slow degrees it emerged from its obscurity into
   publicity. But it was only in the reign of Constantine that the
   transformation was completed. At first it was a sect, and nothing but a
   sect. No one thought of leaving the Jewish Church. All shared in the
   public worship of the Church and were subject to the public discipline.
   But the community lived its own life hidden from the public gaze. The
   earliest services of the Christian Church were secret conventicles,
   meetings in the house of a friend with closed doors. We need but read
   the closing words of the Gospels, or the 15th chapter of the Acts, if
   we want proofs of this. Even the missionary work of the apostles was in
   part secretly carried on, and Jesus Himself had said, "Whatsoever ye
   have spoken in darkness . . . . and that which ye have spoken in the
   ear in closets." Secret assemblies then such were the meetings at which
   the Spirit was given, at which the prophets prophesied, at which "all
   things were in common," and every meal a Supper of the Lord. Punishment
   and imprisonment, even death itself, were the inevitable consequences
   of any appearance in public. They ventured forth, it is true, again and
   again, but again and again they met with stern repression. For the
   Scribes in the Sanhedrim aimed at nothing less than the complete
   extinction of the sect. It was this policy of coercion which forced the
   Christians into the position of revolutionaries both in Church and
   State. We Christians of to-day should ever remember that our earliest
   forefathers were sectarians, like the Anabaptists in the time of the
   Reformation, and that they only managed to exist by constant opposition
   to the State Church.

   Their life as sectaries imparted a sectarian character to the outer
   forms current among the brother hood. Every one free from suspicion
   was, it is true, allowed ready access to the meeting-place of the
   brethren. But admission to the brotherhood itself was only granted
   after the observance of due formalities. This was the place occupied by
   baptism. Baptism was no original Christian institution, but was
   borrowed from the disciples of John with one addition. By the utterance
   of the name of Jesus, a Christian character was imparted to the rite.
   We have no tradition as to the use of baptism in the earliest times.
   Its meaning is contained in the old expression, "Baptism of repentance
   for the forgiveness of sins." It was preceded by a profession of faith,
   a confession of sins and prayer to Jesus, then the pure water cleansed
   body and soul alike, and when the disciple came forth from the water,
   he was accounted pure and a brother.

   As yet no instruction preceded baptism. It was not necessary. The
   confession of faith in the Messiah was so simple. But as a rule adults
   only were baptized. Had not Jesus promised children the kingdom of God
   without laying down any further condition? The baptized now shared in
   the meals of the brethren. The chief meal was always, or at least
   frequently, connected with the repetition of a portion of the account
   of the Last Supper. At the same time they would speak of the blessing
   of the death of Jesus, and rejoice at the thought of His coming again.
   But the baptized were also subject to the strict discipline of the
   brethren. Unworthy members were excluded either permanently or for a
   time. He especially who was a cause of offence to the little society
   was compelled to leave the community. As far as possible the judgment
   was to be given without partiality or respect of persons, even the most
   important members, the hands and the feet' of the society, were to be
   put forth. Either the apostles or the prophets or the community as a
   whole were to pass the sentence. It was then counted to be passed by
   Jesus Himself, for His real presence in every assembly, were it but of
   two or three, was firmly believed in by all. Lastly, the apostles,
   prophets and teachers, secured a certain amount of connection between
   the scattered congregations by their constant journeys from the one to
   the other. Wherever they appeared they stood in God's stead. They
   conveyed the collections to their right destination, they fostered the
   brotherly love both of individuals and of churches for each other, but
   they were always reckoned as the servants of the community, not as its
   masters.

   The foundation of the sect, however, brings about the first great
   change in the new religion. It can be traced in a certain increasing
   rigidity both without, where it assumes the shape of exclusiveness, and
   within, where it becomes legality. Between the brethren and those that
   are without, an impassable barrier has been set up by the institution
   of baptism and the profession of faith in the Messiah.

   The words orthodox' and unorthodox' come to be used as shibboleths, and
   take the place of the distinctive mark given by Jesus Himself:--"By
   their fruits ye shall judge them." True, it cannot be for gotten that
   to do God's will alone leads into God's kingdom. But the opinion very
   soon gains ground that the doing of God's will presupposes faith in
   Jesus, and is, therefore, only possible in the company of the faithful.
   That is the first fatal step away from Jesus towards orthodoxy. Jesus
   had by preference taken as His types people like the publican, the
   Samaritan, the prodigal son, who were outside the Church. In people
   such as these He could trace so much more clearly just the really
   important things, humility, love, repentance. But in His sect it
   becomes a principle that outside of the brotherhood there is no safety,
   and that all good works--even the best done by those without are
   worthless, or at most form a step towards the righteousness which can
   be reached by the faithful alone.

   Enthusiasm and legality would appear to be contradictories, and yet the
   whole history of sects presents them as existing side by side. Often
   enthusiasm is but the sign that something new, something exuberant,
   would fain free itself from the confinement of narrow forms. Amongst
   the brethren the Gospel very soon became a new law. As soon as the
   living person Jesus was no longer in their midst, and yet at the very
   same time His authority was immensely increased through the
   resurrection, necessarily His every word, even His mode of life, came
   to be an authoritative standard. So the rules for the missionaries were
   gradually laid down after the pattern of Jesus' life, and often they
   proved to be fetters for the new circumstances. So, again, the new law
   was now formed for the early Christian community out of the most
   important of Jesus' sayings, and thereby words of temporary application
   often received a typical meaning for all generations. The Lord's Supper
   was celebrated with a scrupulous frequency, and finally exalted into a
   Sacrament founded by Jesus Himself. Perhaps, too, the example of Jesus
   legalized the idea of the reception into the Church by baptism. In the
   same way faith in the Messiah comes to be claimed as a dogma which must
   be believed. It is no longer self-understood. In the long run, faith in
   an absent person can only be maintained by legal forms. Thus, then,
   this development of the sect implies at the same time a diminution of
   the first freshness, freedom, and originality, a gradual increase of
   that mere mechanical copying which belongs to the essence of a Church.
   The whole frame of mind altered. Mourning their Master, they began to
   fast again like the Pharisees and the disciples of John.

   And yet this sect, sharply defined against the world, and with the
   Gospel for law, was the necessary vessel for the eternal treasure of
   redemption in Jesus. This was the first body which the soul of Jesus
   took unto itself in order thence to begin the long journey out from
   these narrow borders into the wide world. All reverence to the Divine
   in this brotherhood. Here within this small compass lies hidden the
   life that is destined to give the world comfort and to inspire it with
   strength. These rude but strong characters, at enmity with the world,
   their expectant gaze turned towards the eternal mansions, are called to
   be the conquerors of the world.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER X.

  THE OLDEST THEOLOGY.

   THE Spirit' did not merely move men to talk with tongues in the early
   Church. He did not only kindle the glad ardour of sacrifice, and
   inflame the courage of the martyrs--he was likewise the creator of the
   oldest theology. New thoughts and pictures, and peculiar frames of
   mind, come into being amongst the brethren in contrast with the
   unbelieving world. They are felt to be new, and yet they make their way
   with an irresistible compulsion; they obtain authority as inspirations
   of the Spirit. They originate partly from enthusiastic laymen who by
   sudden illumination solve some dark mystery, partly from learned
   students of the Old Testament to whom deep insight into passages
   hitherto obscure is vouchsafed by the spirit that prevails in the
   community. If the formation of the new thoughts is thus guided by the
   Spirit, we can still more clearly recognize the Spirit as their
   ultimate source by the opposition of the world which lacks the gift of
   the same Spirit. Or, to express the same thing in the language of
   to-day, only he who shares to some extent in the enthusiasm of the
   disciples for Jesus can understand their thoughts about Him.

   Now, as the Christian brotherhood was from the very first a lay
   brotherhood, their theology was bound to partake very largely of the
   lay character. A theology arises in which unbridled fancy and
   enthusiastic feelings have a greater share than the clear conceptions
   of the understanding, which is founded, not upon learning, at least not
   in the first place, which is ready to accept at once moods of the heart
   and mysterious echoes from the unconscious as divine revelations, and
   above all, takes the miraculous into account at every turn. These
   laymen often accept the contrast to the Scribes as their guiding line.
   Whenever any very artificial theory is advanced in the Gospels, which
   does not appeal to the heart, it is prefaced by the words "The Scribes
   . . . . say unto Him." They themselves would by preference be reckoned
   among the babes and the foolish to whom God has revealed that which has
   remained hidden from the prudent and the wise. This contrast, however,
   soon ceases to be as complete as it was at first. In its teachers the
   brotherhood acquired a learned element which differed from the rabbis
   only by its readiness to enter into the spirit of the sect. The special
   service which these teachers rendered to the community was the
   unsealing of the treasures of the whole of the Old Testament, which had
   otherwise remained a closed book for the laity, even were it only by
   reason of the difficulties presented by the language in which it was
   written. But they were also the first to borrow from the Jewish
   professional theologians, and introduced from thence into the lay
   theology--anticipating St. Paul herein--all manner of speculations and
   mystic doctrines as well as the whole apparatus of legal conceptions.
   Between these two elements--the lay and the theological--there were, of
   course, many transitional stages, and for this reason alone it would be
   impossible to arrive at any certain differentiation.

   There were really two different motives at work leading to the
   formation of this earliest theology. On the one hand, the personality
   of Jesus Himself challenged reflection in the highest degree, almost
   more on account of that which lay hidden in the future, than on account
   of that which men already knew concerning it. They could not but feel
   impelled to examine in every direction and to attempt to understand His
   Messiahship, His death and His resurrection, and above all the mystery
   of His miraculous personality.

   To this inner motive, the impression made by the personality of Jesus,
   there was at once added another--the apologetic interest, the
   determination of the relation to Judaism. The object was to win Jews
   for Jesus, to defend Him against them. In both cases, whether it were
   attack or defence, the employment of Jewish words and conceptions,
   common to friend and foe alike, was obviously necessary. All the oldest
   Christian theology is therefore Jewish in the means which it employs.

   The whole of the great impression made by Jesus culminates in the
   confession "Jesus is the Messiah." This was likewise the chief point of
   contention with the Jews. If the Jews said, "He is not the Messiah
   because He died," the Christians replied, "Yes but He is, for He shall
   come again." Jesus answer before the Sanhedrim, "Ye shall see the Son
   of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming upon the clouds of
   heaven," forms the sum total of the earliest Christian apology. The
   parousia is the proof that Jesus is Messiah. True, the proof lay in the
   uncertain future, but the comforting thought, "Qui vivra verra," helped
   to remove all scruples. Hence the centre of gravity of the Christian
   faith was transferred to its eschatology.

   Through that one word Messiah it came about that the whole figure of
   Jesus was placed within the framework of the Jewish picture of the
   things to come that lay there ready and to hand. In the latter no
   change was made whatever; the only addition was the name of Jesus. This
   oldest Christian dogma is nothing but the filling up of a Jewish
   outline with a concrete name. First of all, the prophecies of Daniel
   are taken for guidance. So Jesus Himself had done. Hence the "Son of
   man" becomes in the Gospels the usual self-designation of Jesus. This,
   however, is but the starting-point. Soon all the Jewish apocalyptic
   theories with their richness of fantasy, claim the person of Jesus for
   their own. Contrary to all expectation, He becomes a mighty conqueror,
   hastening on a white steed at the head of the heavenly host to
   annihilate all God's enemies upon earth. How strangely inappropriate to
   Jesus that the "eagles" should be "gathered together" to devour the
   dead bodies of the slain! First come the storm-signals of wars and
   rumours of wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes, signs in the
   heavens, and, most terrible of all, in the midst of these tribulations,
   Antichrist. In all this domain there is the completest agreement
   between Christians and Jews. Rightly could the heathen Celsus make
   merry over their petty quarrels as to whether the Messiah was called
   Jesus or whether His name was as yet unknown.

   The Jewish faith swallowed up the Christian, and in reality it was the
   Jews who came forth the conquerors from these disputes. Jesus the
   Messiah' is a Jewish idea. It remains such in spite of all the new
   meaning which Jesus put into the conception. All that there is
   inadequate in it, which He Himself had repressed as far as possible,
   recovered the lost ground immediately after His death.

   But how can Jesus return as Messiah if He rests in the grave? This
   objection is met by the proof of the resurrection. Unfortunately, the
   reality of the appearance was convincing to believers only, for it was
   only disciples that had seen the risen Lord. The enemies of the faith
   might without further ado declare them to be either deceivers or
   deceived. The belief in mere visions would never have made any
   impression upon Jews. An objective proof must be furnished.

   The story of the empty grave was circulated at a very early period with
   the object of providing this desideratum. But who had found the grave
   empty? Again, it was only disciples, and women too so writes the oldest
   evangelist. Was that a sufficient foundation? It was strengthened by
   the additional facts that apostles themselves found the grave empty,
   and that the women had besides seen the living Jesus close by the
   grave. Thereupon the Jews circulated the report that the body had been
   stolen. The story of the watch set upon the grave, making such theft
   impossible, serves to refute it. And, finally, in order that the
   impression of a possible self-deception, or that the visions were of a
   mere phantom, should be entirely removed, legends arose of appearances
   of a more material kind wherein Jesus eats and drinks and suffers
   Himself to be felt, and Himself declares He is no spirit. It is true
   that these final stages in Christian apologetics are, in part at least,
   only reached late in sub-apostolic times, but it was necessary to
   exhibit the whole process in this place in order that it might be seen
   how one proof has to support the other, and no single proof is
   sufficient by itself. Faith in Jesus living and victorious can never be
   forcibly attained by arguments such as these, in great part invented
   for the purpose. Strange how blind men have been to this fact! No, this
   theology also was Jewish and obsolete.

   But the death of Jesus? How was this greatest stumbling-block, this
   direct negation of the Messiahship, to be united with the faith? The
   oldest theology of the Cross originated in this question. Jesus own
   forebodings and His prophecies were appealed to as proving that His
   death had been no surprise to Him. Hence the emphasis laid upon the
   prophecies of the Passion in our Gospels. But that was but a poor
   comfort! Some few scanty indications given by Jesus as to the salvation
   to be brought about by His death were taken as a starting-point. It
   would seem that Jesus had Himself imagined that His death would
   exercise a salutary influence on many of His fellow-countrymen who were
   as yet unbelieving. But the actual setting of all these sayings we owe
   to the first community of Christians. The picture of the Martyr whose
   sufferings exercise a vicarious power and enlist God's mercy for His
   people had long formed an essential portion of the Jewish faith. The
   fourth book of the Maccabees is the best known document to which to
   turn in support of this statement.

   This thought is now brought into connection with the sufferings of
   Jesus. Then come the theologians who skilfully apply all their
   juridical and ceremonial conceptions to the death of Jesus. When St
   Paul became a Christian he already met with the formula, "died for our
   sins," on the lips of the leaders of the early Church. Now, all this is
   again Jewish theology. The real conclusion which the disciples should
   have drawn from the death of Jesus, is that even death itself is no
   punishment sent by God but a gift of His love. Christian apologetics
   working with Jewish conceptions overlaid and concealed this thought, so
   full of comfort. Forensic metaphors and ideas of propitiation began the
   process which is to transform the mystery of love into an arithmetical
   problem.

   It was the teachers, too, not the laymen, who tried to explain the
   death of Jesus by the Old Testament. They transferred the scheme of
   prophecy and of fulfilment to the death of Jesus, and indeed to all the
   events of the Gospel history, and so removed by this argument from
   prophecy any rock of offence that still perchance remained. Such of
   them as spoke Greek preferred to make use of the Septuagint in this
   attempt, for this translation often served their ends better than the
   original Hebrew. Whoever has bowed in reverence before the great and
   original personability of Jesus must look upon this undertaking of the
   ancient Christians as almost an insult. What concern in all the world
   have prophecies of past centuries with our Jesus? Is it conceivable
   that all that was new and free that He brought into the world should be
   merely the mechanical result of causes that had existed long ago? The
   thing could not be done at all without a forced and artificial system
   of interpretation. And even the best analogies would seem to have come
   down to us from late times. So we come to the formulae:

   Died according to the Scriptures.

   Rose on the third day according to the Scriptures.

   Born at Bethlehem according to the Scriptures.

   But, after all, a great undertaking is connected with what had else
   been merely an insupportable extravagance, viz., the conquest of the
   Old Testament by Christian ideas. Apparently the interpreters proved
   their thesis from the Old Testament. What they really did was to put
   their meaning into it. And so it became possible to preserve the
   endless treasures of this sacred book.

   To laymen, who had not the same intimate acquaintance with the Old
   Testament, the whole earthly life of Jesus, forming as it did but the
   ante chamber to His reign in heaven, appeared less in the light of
   prophecy than in that of the miraculous and supernatural. Did not the
   greatest miracle of all, the Resurrection, reflect a halo upon the
   Master's earthly life, removing Him from the rest of mankind and
   causing the miraculous to appear to be the element of His being?
   Miracles were to prove Jesus to be the Messiah; the more miracles and
   the greater they are, the more likely that God has destined Him for the
   highest honour. One craves for something a little more substantial than
   hope in the uncertain future. The miracles of Jesus are the sure pledge
   that through Him the kingdom of heaven shall come, and that "He it is
   that shall come." Thus the foundation is laid for the strange and
   fantastic picture presented to us in the Gospels. St Mark gives us the
   first outlines, and even he often approaches very near to the limits of
   docetism, and afterwards this tendency knew no bounds. One specially
   noticeable feature in the picture is the story of the Transfiguration.
   Jesus' most intimate apostles are represented as once in His life
   beholding the Master in His Messianic glory and as hearing the divine
   confirmation of His claims, "This is My beloved Son; hear Him." We are
   expressly told that this story only became known after the
   resurrection.

   Thus, then, one was at the same time brought to the ultimate question,
   What is the foundation for this element of mystery and miracle in the
   personality of Jesus? The answers to this question are exceedingly
   instructive, although their date is entirely a matter of conjecture.
   One thing is evident. Jesus was man and as man Messiah. This firm
   conviction could never be abandoned amid Jewish surroundings. With this
   presupposition the answer that appealed most convincingly to the early
   Church and its enthusiasm was the story of the reception of the Spirit.
   Thereby Jesus completely came into line with the Christian prophets,
   and, generally speaking, with inspired men. Dating from one certain
   moment, the Spirit of God descended upon Him, to dwell in Him and to be
   the source of all His miracles. This particular moment was connected
   with Jesus' baptism, the earliest event known in His life. The Spirit
   works in Jesus just as He does in all Christians, only Jesus is the
   leader of all inspired men, for He is the Son. Just because of this
   connection of ideas this theory seems to be the oldest.

   But was not the Messiah David's son? Curiously enough the very passage
   of Scripture accepted by the Scribes but rejected by Jesus, is quoted
   in confirmation of the Messiahship. St. Paul is already familiar with
   it as something that needs no proof. The genealogies of our first and
   third Gospels must be ascribed to the earliest community. One is almost
   inclined to believe that it flattered the family of Jesus to be raised
   thus suddenly to the rank of a Davidic and Messianic dynasty. They
   certainly did not refuse the honour, as we can see from their
   confession to the Emperor Domitian. For us there is something that
   almost provokes a smile in this attempt to found the majesty of Jesus
   upon a royal genealogy.

   The next attempt to explain the mystery of Jesus--the story of the
   conception by the Holy Ghost which later won its way to general
   acceptation--no longer belongs to the earliest brotherhood. Many of the
   Jewish Christians themselves rejected it. But, on the other hand,
   Jewish teachers began from very early times to bring the idea of
   pre-existence into connection with Jesus. Strictly speaking, the Jewish
   theory was contained only in the affirmation that the name of Messiah
   lay hidden with God before the creation of the world. Now this name was
   Jesus. The new thought was very naturally inferred that Jesus Himself
   lay hidden with God from of old. The same goal was reached as soon as
   Jesus' words about His being sent by God were taken literally, and the
   conclusion was drawn that if God sent Him Jesus must have been with God
   before. Although the first three Gospels as yet nowhere give expression
   to the pre-existence and the heavenly origin in Jesus own words, these
   theories are for all that to be ascribed to a much earlier date than
   theirs. The course of history is by no means such that that which is
   logically posterior should likewise always appear last in point of
   time. There was then a ferment in men's thoughts, a crop unparalleled
   for its richness, and one consequence of this was that dissimilar and
   even contradictory explanations appeared simultaneously.

   Speaking generally, all this theological activity betrays a certain
   dilettantism. There is a want of creative power in these early
   Christians. They have experienced something altogether abnormal in
   Jesus, but in order to express it their own words fail them. So they
   turn to the Jewish categories nearest at hand and attempt to confine
   the indefinable within these definitions. After all, how very petty are
   these first Christian thoughts about Jesus compared with the deeds of
   Jesus Himself and His own inner life. The real superiority of the new
   religion over the old is rather concealed than expressed by the
   earliest Christology.

   No one will blame these early Christians because of their transference
   of Jewish ideas to Jesus. The same hero-worship, the same faith which
   moved them to speak with tongues and enabled them to face the martyr's
   death, likewise impelled them thus to formulate their creed. The great
   picture presented by this first Jewish Christology, quaint and
   extravagant as it is, is inspired by pure love and enthusiasm.

   The theology of the early Christian Church has, however, yet one other
   fruit to show--and therein consists its true greatness. It was the
   collection and the arrangement of the most important sayings of Jesus,
   the handing down of the Gospel itself. It is a mistaken view to look
   upon this work as one that was merely receptive. The power to recognize
   the essential and to adapt it to the needs of the brethren was also
   requisite. The first in the field was the author of the Collection of
   Logia, perhaps the Apostle Matthew, who grouped the most important
   words of the Master under different headings from a practical point of
   view for catechetical purposes. Above all, he brought together the
   principal sayings in which God's will is clearly taught to all men by
   Jesus--these formed the nucleus of the later Sermon on the Mount. It
   began with the gracious promises of the Beatitudes, and ended with the
   judgment upon all those who know God's will but do it not. Still to
   this day the passage relating to the true standard of judgment
   expresses the clear consciousness that the kernel of the Gospel is
   contained in this sermon. All depends upon the fruits: and what they
   are is just what the whole sermon tells us. Then a second address
   brings together the duties of the missionaries. Controversial
   collections of Logia are attached to this; the relation of the
   Christians to John's disciples, to slanderous fellow-countrymen seeking
   for a sign, to Scribes and Pharisees--all this is made clear by words
   of Jesus. Finally, light is in like manner thrown upon various aspects
   of the Christian life-prayer, the question of riches and of anxious
   poverty, the forgiving spirit, hope, and confession of sins. The man
   who made this collection had a wonderful grasp of the essential
   elements in the message of Jesus. At the same time he gives us the best
   picture of the early Church in its greatness. From his writings we can
   see what the hope of heaven and expectation of the judgment to come
   meant for the life of these Christians. The advent of the kingdom and
   of the Lord Himself in the immediate future is the presupposition of
   the whole of this Christianity. Then he leads us into the midst of the
   actual battle, he shows us the pride of the Christians towards the
   disciples of John, their fierce anger against the Pharisees, the
   official patterns of piety, their fidelity to their Master even unto
   death, stronger even than family affection and the fear of man. But
   above all he understands the awful seriousness for the individual of
   the claim which Jesus makes. He knows that the sum of the Gospel is
   something absolutely simple and practical, but for that very reason
   that which decides for heaven or for hell. For all that, however, he
   climbs the heights of joy and of childlike confidence. And so he
   achieved this result. Without any additions of his own, merely by
   selecting the words of everlasting life, he has bequeathed to us a
   picture of all that is essential in Christianity which is striking in
   its grandeur.

   St Mark, the exponent possibly of a Petrine tradition, gives us another
   collection of Logia, arranged some what differently, not in the shape
   of long addresses, but by way of a narrative. He shows us how this
   tradition first attached importance to the occasion and the situation
   of each saying, how it inquired into the persons concerned, and then
   how groups of related anecdotes came to be formed. St Mark's groups,
   too, contain a portion of the theology of the early Christians.

   The first of his groups collects words of Jesus in which His power to
   forgive sins, His intercourse with publicans, His opposition to
   fasting, His lordship over the Sabbath, are all illustrated in contrast
   to the Scribes and Pharisees and the disciples of John. The same
   heading, "Jesus and the parties," may be placed over the controversies
   in Jerusalem with the priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the
   Scribes, which illustrate Jesus' attitude to the people, to the Roman
   government, to the resurrection, to the law and the prophets. A third
   controversy sets forth Jesus' attitude to the tradition of the elders.
   The enemies, it will seen, are the same as those against whom St
   Matthew's Collection of Logia fights. And the same subjects meet us
   here as well as there, the kingdom of God, the second advent, the
   confession of sins, love of the brethren, and prayer. An especial group
   brings together the principal sayings about marriage, children, riches,
   self-denial and the duty of serving. It is true that the chief
   commandments in which God's will consists are nowhere set forth in
   order. The reason for this will be that the Logia Collection had
   already obtained so firm a footing. What St Mark's tradition does for
   us is partly to complete St Matthew's Logia, partly to bring them home
   to us with greater vividness. And yet the picture of the Gospel thus
   presented to us is an independent one and has peculiar features of its
   own. We see the opponents better before us, we share in the rejoicings
   when Jesus answers, concise, full of irony and the confidence of
   victory, ever hit their mark full in the centre; we live through the
   education to independence and freedom under the guidance of Jesus. St
   Mark's authority, the man who handed down to him the groups of stories,
   was without doubt a layman who saw in the Scribes the deadly enemies of
   Jesus and His cause. It was just his hostile feelings against the
   theologians which enabled him to grasp in so masterly a fashion the new
   and revolutionary elements in Jesus.

   But the treasury of the early Christian brotherhood was not yet
   exhausted. The first and the third evangelists drew still further
   riches from this marvellous store; above all, the numerous parables
   which partly in all probability lay before them in written collections.
   St Luke especially must have been acquainted with a wonderful tradition
   of parables. It is a pity that those who took up arms in defence of the
   position that Jesus was the Messiah were but seldom clear as to the
   real sources of their strength. They did not perceive that the simple
   setting forth of the words of Jesus without any addition or explanation
   constitutes the best defence of Christianity, because better than all
   titles and legends it sets forth Jesus the man.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XI.

  THE PARTIES AND THE ISSUE OF THE STRUGGLE.

   IN one respect the development of the whole of the early Christian
   community was from the first reactionary--that is to say, in its far
   more positive relation to the Jewish nation. The belief in its
   incapacity and rejection by God with which Jesus left the world gave
   way to renewed patriotic hopes and renewed loving efforts. For Jesus
   there was finally no further doubt as to the certain separation between
   the kingdom of God and Israel, but His disciples clung to the old
   connection with a desperate tenacity, nor could all the persecution
   they had to suffer at the hands of the Jews cool the ardour of this
   religious patriotism. Here on this ground, Paul, with his ardent love
   for his native land, with his readiness to be banished from God's sight
   for His people's sake, stands shoulder to shoulder with the twelve
   apostles and with James the brother of the Lord, of whom Hegesippus
   relates that he was once found on his knees in the temple praying for
   the forgiveness of the sins of his people. Even at the beginning of the
   Jewish war, when the apocalyptic leaflet (contained in St Mark xiii.)
   was circulated amongst the Christians, they did not believe in the
   destruction of the temple, but only that it would be sore oppressed by
   Antichrist. It was only the catastrophe of the year 70 that opened the
   eyes of the Christians and led to a new judgment as to the Jewish
   people. Before the Jewish war this relation of the Christians to the
   Jews had no where been felt as a cause of the formation of parties.

   Parties had, however, arisen through the relation to the law--though
   not at first. Both for Himself and His disciples Jesus had to the very
   last clung to the faith that they had the law on their side against the
   Pharisees. Nor was this faith in anywise diminished at first in spite
   of the self-deception on which it rested. They disputed with the Jews
   about questions of Christology, not about the law.

   Amongst the brethren the word of Jesus was the ultimate
   authority--hence a free and natural life such as Jesus had brought into
   the world. There was no return to the ideal of the Pharisees, or to the
   asceticism of John the Baptist. All the emphasis was laid upon
   conscientiousness, love, the longing for God and trust in Him; but it
   was in these very points that they believed they were but faithful to
   the law. God's will as it was written in the law was declared in the
   words of Jesus. As soon as God's will was grasped in its inner meaning,
   becoming the deepest motive of the heart instead of an external
   ordinance, every contradiction seemed to be removed. This oldest Jewish
   Christianity is therefore to be conceived as entirely anti-Pharisaic,
   nay, more, as at bottom not Jewish at all--for how could it otherwise
   have bequeathed to us the picture of Jesus such as we have it? Yet at
   the same time it was a Christianity filled with the deepest reverence
   for the authority of the law.

   Here was an inherent contradiction, for the same law was also the
   authority for the Pharisaic Scribes. Now, as soon as it was recognized,
   the contradiction was bound to lead to the formation of parties
   according to the answer which men gave to the question: Should Jesus'
   word and the law remain connected or not?

   The first missionary journey to the Gentiles afforded the occasion.
   Nowhere could any other feeling than that of joy prevail at the thought
   that Gentiles were to be admitted into the Church. But what was to be
   the condition of this admission? Was it to be Jesus' word or the
   ceremonial law? For the Jewish Christians, circumcision, the Sabbath,
   the regulations as to food, etc., were such old customs that they were
   scarcely any longer felt as burdens, but all the more unendurable were
   they for the Gentiles.

   Barnabas and Paul simply set aside the law altogether for the Gentiles
   who sought admission--the sole condition then demanded having faith in
   Jesus. News of the great invitation only reached Jerusalem when it had
   already become an accomplished fact. It came through a hostile channel,
   being reported by narrow-hearted brethren who were Pharisees in all but
   the name. What was now to be done?

   Thus early in the history of the young community do we come to the
   parting of the ways. True, at first the leaders, James, Peter, and
   John, united with Paul and Barnabas and declared the Gentiles to be
   free. But it was only now that the difficult question arose: What was
   to be the consequence for the Jewish Christians? They themselves were
   to remain faithful to the law. Such was the decision given at
   Jerusalem. But was mutual intercourse henceforward possible? Could a
   Jewish Christianity that remained true to the law, and a Gentile
   Christianity that was free from the law, continue side by side in a
   brotherly relationship?

   The extremes quickly fell asunder. Paul placed Christianity in
   opposition to the law, and proclaimed the freedom of the Jewish
   Christians in Gentile countries. James and his party completely
   identified Christ and the law, and claimed the right to force the
   Gentiles to observe the law. In between these two extremes, the
   apostles remained in the old position of doubt and uncertainty which
   they had taken up at Jerusalem, without any definite principles,
   buffeted about by every storm and tempest, ill-fitted for leadership.

   Such was the origin of Judaistic Christianity, a reversion to the
   Judaistic type in the very heart of the early Christians, occasioned by
   the progressive measures taken by St. Paul. It was an altogether
   reactionary movement. The law was set above Christ, the Jewish idea
   maintained in its fanatical narrowness and intolerance. The majority of
   these people were sincere enough, to be sure. One does not make a
   burden of one's life in mere superficial lightheartedness. But for them
   Jesus had come into the world in vain.

   This tendency falsified the picture of Jesus by the insertion of many
   foreign Judaistic features. To say the very least, it wrongly exalted
   the utterances of a moment into the position of universally binding
   principles. It was this party which set on foot the mission in
   opposition to St. Paul which sometimes questioned his authority for
   taking up this work at all. In Galatia its emissaries tried to win over
   the superstition of the heathen to the side of Jewish ceremonies,
   guided by the right instinct that the two were closely related and
   common foes of the Gospel. At Corinth they exploited a temporary wave
   of ill-feeling on the part of the congregation against their apostle,
   and attempted, first of all by mean denunciations, to rob him of the
   confidence that was felt in him, and so to have free play for their
   proselytizing efforts. The pious zeal of the narrow-minded, the
   passions of partizans and the malice of the wicked, here made common
   cause and did not shrink from employing even the worst means. But all
   this counter-mission ended in an utter want of success, and that for
   this reason, without going any further--the immense majority of the
   Gentile Christians did not want to become Jews. Even in St. Paul's
   lifetime the Church, in so far as it spoke Greek, could boast of a
   freedom that was securely assured.

   It was only in Palestine and the neighbouring districts, where there
   had always been a strong Jewish element at the foundation, that this
   Jewish Christianity tenaciously maintained itself, but it was without
   any importance whatsoever for the fate of the Church at large. It
   retained its sectarian character all the more readily as it had itself
   split up into numerous subordinate sects. To these two main currents of
   thought in the apostolic age--Judaism (the law for all Christians) and
   apostolic Christianity (the law for the Jews)--numerous gnostic
   variations akin to Essenism must soon be added. It is only in
   connection with the evolution of Islam that they are of any importance
   in the history of the world. It was just out of such a Jewish Christian
   sect that the faith of Mahomet developed into a world religion. Neither
   the political occurrences in the two Jewish wars nor Hadrian's edict
   against circumcision inflicted so heavy a blow upon Jewish Christianity
   as the circumstance that both Jews and Christians alike rejected this
   compromise the former with curse and excommunication, the latter with
   the charge of heresy. So it was just put on one side--a proof to the
   world that compromises are to be saved by no sacred tradition, that
   there is indeed no such thing in history as standing still, but only
   progress or regression.

   Such was the end of Jewish Christianity. The enthusiasm of the early
   days was succeeded by stagnation, decay, and finally dissolution.

   Its enthusiasm, as well as all its living fruitful germs, St. Paul took
   over into his Gentile Church. By his progressive tendencies he drove
   the Church at Jerusalem into reactionary courses, and so sealed its
   decay and ultimate ruin. He was the disturbing, the exciting element in
   the earliest form of Christianity. He pulled down as much as he built
   up. He destroyed the peace, the vagueness, the compromises of this
   first age, and in so doing he understood the mind of his Master and the
   new mode of government of his Master's God.
     __________________________________________________________________

ST PAUL.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XII.

  THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIS CALL.

   JOHN the Baptist came as "more than a prophet," as greatest "among them
   that are born of a woman." He set himself against the existing order of
   things and roused the whole people. But all that he left behind him was
   the ascetic sect of the Baptists which vanished in the chaotic
   confusion of different religions. Jesus followed. He grasped and
   combined all that was sound, deep, and genuine in the Jewish religion
   and rejected all that was morbid and artificial. He brought to His
   disciples the redemption and freedom of the children of God. But the
   immediate result of His activity--the early Christian
   fellowship--remained a mere sect composed of communities of pious Jews
   who longed for the Messiah and the kingdom, lived strictly according to
   the commandments of Jesus, and loved their own people. Almost exactly
   as they lived a few decades after the death of Jesus, Mahomet found
   them living centuries later. This Jewish Christianity lived apart from
   the main current of the world's history, in watchful expectation of the
   last day, and occupied in devotional exercises. The introduction of
   Christianity into the history of the world is entirely the work of St.
   Paul. He is not the founder of the new religion, and he did not wish to
   be accounted such. When he called Jesus his Lord and Redeemer he merely
   gave expression to actual facts. But it was he who brought Christianity
   out of Palestine and transplanted it among the Greeks and Romans, chief
   of all civilized nations. It could no longer now remain a mere Jewish
   sect. It had to measure its strength with the religions, the
   civilization, and the philosophy of the leading nations in the world's
   history. It had to enter into their needs, their language, and their
   social intercourse, assuming now a friendly, now a hostile attitude. It
   was bound to undergo a radical transformation, not merely of external
   form but of innermost essence. For as a simple community of brethren,
   believing in the Messiah and obeying the words of Jesus, there was no
   hope of its enduring in the midst of the civilization of the world. The
   new start is one of such importance that we must distinguish the
   pre-Pauline from the post-Pauline Christianity, or, what amounts to the
   same thing, the Palestinian sect and the world religion.

   But in so doing we are realizing one of history's secrets. History
   makes great leaps, reveals deep chasms and yawning abysses, never
   advances in a straight line, and thus mocks all a priori theorizing.
   Paul never knew Jesus during His lifetime, and nevertheless it was he
   who best understood Him. He was one of those Scribes and Pharisees on
   whom Jesus called woe, the cause of whose moral and spiritual malady
   was just the theory "True religion is the law of the sacred nation that
   and nothing else," and now this Scribe destroyed the whole of this
   theory, took Jesus away from the sacred nation and brought Him to
   mankind.

   All this he did, not through calculation nor yet capriciously, but in
   the full consciousness that he was called thereto by God. The
   consciousness of this call is very evident in all his letters, most of
   all in those to the Galatians and in the second to the Corinthians,
   where he has to meet the attacks of his adversaries. What a proud and
   defiant note is struck in the beginning of the letter to the Galatians:
   "Paul, apostle, not by men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ
   and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead," upon which follows
   the explanation: "When it pleased God, who separated 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 heathen, immediately I conferred not
   with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were
   apostles before me, but I went into Arabia." The second epistle to the
   Corinthians, the greatest apology of the apostle, would almost have to
   be transcribed from beginning to end, so full is it of a divine
   self-consciousness which reaches its height in such expressions as
   these:

   2 Cor. iii. 4-6. "And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward:
   not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of
   ourselves: but our sufficiency is of God: who also hath made us able
   ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter, but of the spirit."

   2 Cor. iv. 6. "For God who commanded the light to shine out of
   darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge
   of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

   2 Cor. v. 18-20. "And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to
   Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of
   reconciliation, to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world
   unto Himself, . . . . and hath committed unto us the word of
   reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God
   did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, that ye be
   reconciled to God."

   Declarations which attain a similar high level are to be found in 1
   Thess. ii., 1 Cor. iv. 9-15, Rom. i. 15, and also in the Epistles to
   the Ephesians and Colossians. In all these passages St. Paul draws no
   distinctions between the general calling of an apostle and the special
   calling of a missionary to the heathen, but shows himself prepared to
   receive both at once at God's hands: and it was just missionary to the
   heathen that God chose him to be.

   The lofty expressions "Workers together with God," "Fellow-workers unto
   the kingdom of God," come down to us from St. Paul. He did not reserve
   them for himself alone, but applied them to the other apostles as well;
   to none other, however, than these. The same enthusiasm which we
   noticed above in the sayings of Jesus concerning the beginning of the
   kingdom, can be read in these words. Like Jesus, too, it is God's word
   that he is going to declare: no one is to look upon it as man's. Just
   as the power of God is contained in the Gospel unto the salvation of
   all them that believe, so St. Paul feels himself to be the man who
   transmits this power to others. He is the necessary link between the
   Cross and Resurrection of Jesus and the great mass of humanity.
   Employing rather the language of the lawyer, he calls himself a debtor
   to barbarians and to Greek, to wise and to foolish; or again, using the
   expressions of ritual, a priest of Christ to the heathen in the sacred
   service of the Gospel of God. All these high attributes amount to the
   same thing in the end: his position as mediator between God, Christ and
   man. The twelve apostles likewise looked upon themselves as mediators
   between Jesus and the congregations of Christians--i.e., as bearers of
   Jesus' word. St. Paul, however, went further than this: he sacrificed
   his life, devoted his whole being to this work of mediation. He even
   went so far as to ascribe to all that he experienced--his sufferings,
   as well as the consolation they brought him--a salutary purpose for the
   congregations; nor did he shrink from the bold thought of vicarious
   suffering. "I now rejoice in my sufferings for you and fill up that
   which is behind in the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for the
   Church." He often gives a somewhat different expression to his faith,
   saying that he must be offered up as a sacrifice for the congregations.
   Thereby his lofty and proud claim to be mediator on God's side is
   exchanged for the humble but rich calling of the ministry--servant to
   the congregations for Jesus' sake.

   The apostle's self-consciousness has in fact limits which it never
   exceeds. Christ stands high above him. Indeed the distance between the
   Master and His fellow-missionary has already been considerably
   increased. Jesus is Lord--Paul is servant; Jesus sinless--Paul sinful
   and pardoned. He believes in Jesus Christ and cries to God through His
   mediatorship, prays at times to Him. Whereas there is no doubt that
   Jesus is already to be counted entirely on God's side, Paul reckons
   himself and all his fellow-Christians in the churches among the men in
   need of salvation. Nor is he strictly subordinate to Jesus merely as
   Christian, but also as apostle. Jesus is Lord over the faith--St. Paul
   is not. Jesus can lay down commandments. "The Lord says," so runs the
   formula of the Christian law. St. Paul can only give advice. His words
   never have the legal authority of the Master's words. Even as apostle
   he has ever to remember that he as well as all other Christians will
   have to appear before the judgment-seat of Christ and there receive his
   sentence--according to his deserts either praise or else blame and
   punishment.

   St. Paul's likeness to Jesus strikes one at once, and at the same time
   the dissimilarity between the two is no less obvious. In the case of
   both there is a self-consciousness which goes far beyond all that one
   usually meets with; there is the claim to have been chosen by God from
   out of the mass of mankind for an especial purpose; in both, again,
   there is nothing like fanaticism, but clear recognition of their
   limitations, and there is a deep humility before God. And yet the word
   mediator' cannot be applied in the same sense to both. Whereas Jesus
   maintains that He knows God in an entirely new way--as the Son--Paul
   boasts of this knowledge of the glory of God which is reflected in the
   face of Jesus. He feels that he is not a creator; he merely transmits
   historical facts. God--Christ--Paul, such is the order. He held this
   conviction so firmly that he did not forget it for one single moment
   during the whole of his life. That great word of his, "if only Christ
   be preached," which the captive apostle uttered at Rome in the midst of
   all manner of doubtful associates in his missionary labours, is
   sufficient proof of this. That was the ground of his energetic
   rejection of the thought of a Pauline party--it was something
   altogether abhorrent to him. "Has Paul been crucified for you?" "Have
   ye been baptized in the name of Paul?" "Whether it be Paul, or Kephas,
   or Apollos, all is yours, but ye are Christ's and Christ God's." But if
   the question is asked how it comes about that Paul felt the distinction
   from Jesus so far more clearly than the apostles, then the answer is
   easy to find. He had not eaten and drunk with Jesus, he had not lived
   with Him for months. He knows only the risen Lord, that sitteth at the
   right hand of God--the heavenly Being. On the other hand, it must not
   be forgotten that this heavenly Jesus inspired him with greater courage
   and confidence of victory. Thus faithfully serving his heavenly king he
   can go forth out into the wide world more securely and under better
   protection, overcoming his enemies by land and by sea and winning
   victories. The greater the master, the greater the servant.

   It was as apostle of this Jesus, sitting on the right hand of God, that
   St. Paul founded the Gentile congregations, safeguarded their liberties
   at Jerusalem, withstood St Peter to the face at Antioch, drove the
   Judaizing party from the field, even if they appealed to the authority
   of one of the twelve, and dying as martyr left behind him the great
   free Gentile Church which had not been before him. He achieved greater
   results than all the other apostles, nor was he afraid of saying so
   quite plainly. But this great work in its entirety rests upon his faith
   in the divine calling which had been vouchsafed him. Without this faith
   it is incredible that St. Paul would have accomplished a tithe of what
   he did. His apostolic self-consciousness is as closely bound up with
   his work and his position in the world's history as the Messianic with
   the message of Jesus.

   Whence came the certainty of the apostolic calling? By far the most
   beautiful answer is to be found in the First Epistle to the
   Corinthians: "Necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is me if I preach not
   the gospel." The calling to go forth as missionary is an inner
   compulsion which St. Paul cannot at all withstand. As the lion roars,
   so he must preach. Thus spake the old prophets. So Jesus might very
   well have said. The question, however, as to the origin of this
   compulsion must not be avoided. St. Paul gives us a clear account. He
   became at once Christian and apostle--such is his answer--to the
   question through the vision on the road to Damascus. Unlike Jesus, he
   ever turns back to this vision as to the call which he received. "Am I
   not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord?" The Lord "appeared to me,"
   just as He appeared after His death to the twelve. He can tell us the
   very day and the hour. From that moment he dates the new life and the
   new calling. All at once, without any break, the persecutor became the
   missionary--he himself looked upon it with amazement, how his
   conversion and his call came about without the slightest human
   intervention. "I conferred not with men. I went not to the apostles."
   The origin of his apostleship was not tradition but revelation, the one
   being regarded as excluding the other.

   A contradiction, however, is contained herein which was immediately
   noticed by St. Paul's contemporaries. The apostleship is the
   incarnation of the tradition. The apostle is one who hands down the
   tradition: he is one of a company who secures for the Christian
   community the connection with the Jesus of history.

   Revelation, on the other hand, is the prophet's privilege. He has not
   to impart the old message of Jesus, but new words of God, just as they
   flow from the fountain source. Either, therefore, St. Paul is an
   apostle and hands down the tradition, or he is a prophet and declares
   the revelation. A combination between the two would only be conceivable
   if St. Paul had merely received the title of prophet by revelation, but
   had been obliged to go to the apostolic tradition for the contents of
   his message. Such a combination St. Paul refused by not going up to
   Jerusalem after his call, but by going forth to preach the Gospel on
   his own account. By so doing he afforded his opponents the opportunity
   of rightly contesting his title to the apostleship in the hitherto
   legitimate sense of the word.

   The apostleship that rests upon revelation--such is the great leap that
   history takes. Interpret and explain the vision itself as you will, you
   must admit the leap. It was not the apostles whom Jesus called while He
   lived on earth, to whom He confided the whole of His message--it was
   not they who really continued His work, but the great persecutor of the
   Christians whom a revelation summons to the leadership. The leap, the
   revelation, were necessary if the cause of Jesus was not to stand still
   or even retrograde. The new way called for a new man bound by no
   tradition. Only a prophet, no ordinary apostle, could utter the word
   that should set the stagnant masses in motion. But then he must of
   course be an apostle as well, in order to carry his work through to the
   end. Such are the conclusions that we can draw, but the thing remains a
   mystery after all. The step forward that was then taken in the world's
   history rests upon the actual contradiction contained in the
   combination of apostle and prophet in one person. And as a matter of
   fact, what was there that was not new in this apostle by revelation? If
   the beginning of his career was unparalleled, the continuation was
   unusual. He avoids all intercourse with the apostles and goes forth
   into distant countries. He leaves Israel to its fate and turns to the
   Gentiles. He does not place the great provinces that he has just
   conquered under the authority of the twelve and the Mother Church of
   Jerusalem, but keeps them in full freedom under his own control. When
   disputes arise he does not give way to his older companions in one
   single point, nor does the former persecutor hesitate to administer an
   open rebuke to the Lord's favourite, Peter. New, too, is the Gospel
   that he proclaims. Instead of the story of the words and deeds of
   Jesus, the message of the crucified and risen Lord alone. True, the
   name of Jesus stands in the centre, but is it not another Jesus? And
   new, too, is the apostle's mode of life. He foregoes the right of being
   supported by his work as missionary and earns his daily bread by the
   sweat of his brow. Finally, he can never quite rid himself of the
   effects of his education as Rabbi they always cling to him. The apostle
   is a prophet; he appeals to revelation and yet at the same time he is a
   Scribe. He examines, proves, draws conclusions, and occasionally
   silences his opponent with a whole host of startling and surprising
   texts. In a word, Paul is the exact opposite of all that had till then
   been understood by the word apostle.'

   Hence the necessity and likewise the difficulty of his apology. A very
   great many Christians could not grasp the fact that one whose past
   record was the worst imaginable, who did not know Jesus and possessed
   no authority but that of a vision the invention of which was the
   easiest matter conceivable dared place himself by the side of the
   twelve whom all men revered, who already were almost accounted as
   saints.

   Fortunately Paul did not attempt the proof of the truth of his vision.
   He needed none himself, and he would in no case have convinced his
   adversaries. True, he appealed to it, yet never to it alone. On the
   contrary, he marshals a whole row of other reasons of a somewhat varied
   character.

   First of all he adapts himself to his opponent's mode of thought, to
   the high esteem in which they hold the original apostles. It is true he
   is the least of the apostles not worthy to be called an apostle,
   because he had persecuted the brethren. It was only God's grace that
   enabled him to take his place by their side and even to work more than
   they. But the twelve and he declare the same Gospel. Have they not
   handed down to him the fundamental facts of the death and resurrection,
   to be by him transmitted to the new congregations of believers? This
   statement does not quite tally with that to the Galatians--"The gospel
   which I preach I received not of man." The very same Paul who in the
   heat of the argument maintains his entire independence and the
   originality of his message, claims to be a bearer of the apostolic
   tradition as soon as any one of the fundamental articles of the faith
   held in common of all Christians is attacked. Notice the satisfaction
   with which he emphasizes his reception by "the pillars" in his account
   of the great dispute at Jerusalem: "James and Kephas and John, who
   seemed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of
   fellowship." In this passage he formally substantiates his claim that
   he has been duly received by the twelve. But above all, the collection
   for the poor in Jerusalem is intended to prove to everybody, and
   especially to the disseminators of slanderous reports, that Paul is no
   separatist or sectarian. On the contrary, he is a faithful servant of
   the Mother Church of Jerusalem, and now discharges his own debt of
   gratitude and that of all his Gentile converts by this readiness to
   spend and be spent.

   It is, however, to the success of his work that St. Paul is able to
   appeal still more frankly and proudly. The Churches that have been
   founded by him are the seal of his apostleship, his letter of
   recommendation known and read of all men. "From Jerusalem and round
   about unto Illyricum"--so he writes to the Romans--"I have fully
   preached the Gospel of Christ," and that, even where the ground had not
   yet been broken, "not where Christ was named."

   Such is his glorying as a Christian. There are no vain boasts, no
   boundless conceits. On the contrary, he has remained constant, just
   within the bounds which God has set him. Have not the twelve apostles,
   too, been obliged to confess that God's grace has granted him so great
   a measure of success--more than to themselves? As a part of this
   outward success he twice reckoned his apostolic signs and wonders as a
   proof that he was in nowise inferior to the other apostles. The Acts of
   the Apostles give us examples of this activity, which, however
   strangely it may strike us, in St. Paul especially, just formed a
   portion of a missionary's regular inventory. Many of these signs
   consisted of cures of sick persons; a still greater number, probably,
   were instances of mighty psychical convulsions finding vent in ecstatic
   experiences. The Galatians "suffered many things" when God ministered
   the Spirit to them and a power worked in their midst. At Corinth the
   proof of the possession of the Spirit and of this power inflamed a
   fanatic and undisciplined enthusiasm accompanied by the speaking with
   tongues, prophesying and healing of the sick. But St. Paul was not the
   man to rejoice at the sight of such external signs alone. Where no
   moral change followed upon them he might very well have been inclined
   to see even something Satanic in them. New men--new moral
   creatures--such the apostle ever puts forward as the surest proof of
   his apostleship. To the Thessalonians he writes: "Ye received my
   message not as the word of men, but as it is in truth the word of God,
   which effectually worketh also in you that believe." When his opponents
   in Corinth asked for a sign as a proof that Christ really spoke in him,
   he cries out to the congregation at once in anger and in joy: "Examine
   yourselves whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves; know ye
   not your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?" He stands firm in
   the faith that these Corinthians, to whom so many crimes still cling,
   and who are now at variance with their apostle, do still, in spite of
   all, show forth the fruits of Christ and are redeemed to a better life
   through the apostle, and Jesus that works in him. Here, then, the proof
   by external results changes into the self-certainty of faith.

   But now the Jews arrived with their whole host of accusations and
   slanders. They were past masters as critics and as spies. "Paul," said
   they, "was careless and changeable in his decisions; he hypocritically
   hushed up the unpleasant consequences of his latitudinarian gospel; he
   did not draw his support from the congregations, because he was afraid
   to do so; his sufferings and attacks were proof enough that God had
   smitten him," and many other statements of a like nature. In short, his
   whole mode of life and all his methods were a clear refutation of his
   claim to the apostleship. His self-defence is proud and of a grand
   simplicity: "For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our
   conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly
   wisdom but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the
   world."

   And again, in 1 Thess. ii. and 2 Cor. vi. he rises to those powerful,
   but never vain descriptions of his activity in which the majesty of his
   style reflects in every line the feeling that he is standing at the
   height of his task. Such was his refutation of all these calumnies, and
   no man before him ever spake thus. But even in these passages, where
   the apostle is witness on his own behalf, the greatest emphasis is laid
   upon his suffering and privations. Not one of his opponents can come
   anywhere near him in this respect. And so, wishing to present all that
   he has undergone at one view, St. Paul composes the famous enumeration
   of his hardships in 2 Cor. xi., where he assumes his mask of a jester
   whose boasting the world "suffers gladly." And though he mounts up to
   his vision, that other title on which his fame rests, and remains for a
   moment in silent contemplation of these holiest mysteries of his life,
   yet he descends immediately again to his sufferings: "Most gladly
   therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities; for when I am weak
   then am I strong." It is as though he himself felt that such visions
   after all only form the culminating points of a life for the man that
   has himself experienced them, but that all men, even including all his
   enemies, must in the end bow down in acknowledgment of the incomparable
   height of his suffering in the service of the brethren.

   When on some other occasion his right to call himself a minister of
   Christ was called in question--probably on account of his not having
   known Jesus--he cries out at once in entreaty and as a challenge: "If
   any man trust to himself that he is Christ's, let him of himself think
   this again, that as he is Christ's so are we Christ's." The halting
   sentence expresses the one thing to which he attaches the greatest
   importance--respect and toleration for the faithful fellow-worker. He
   himself acted in accordance with these opinions when the factions arose
   at Corinth and also at Rome. He never wishes to drive others from the
   field; he merely wishes to maintain the place for himself which belongs
   to him by the side of the others. Even in the very heat of his
   self-defence he proclaims the principle that he has been called to be
   the servant, not the lord and master, of the congregation, and that he
   has to appear before the judgment-seat of Christ.

   And so he gains the victory over all the attacks of his adversaries,
   the good and the bad alike, be cause his words and his life, the
   visible success and the inner self-mastery, have ever been in the
   completest harmony. Called to be an apostle by a revelation in an
   apparently illegitimate manner, he brilliantly legitimized himself by
   the services which he rendered. And in a fortunate moment the original
   apostles, including St James, confirmed this by holding out the right
   hand of fellowship, nor could any thing that was set in motion from
   Jerusalem in later times affect this position.

   We have in reality only reason to be thankful to the Jews. Had it not
   been for their denunciations, we should have lost the apostle's proud
   and frank apology. The man of God had no reason to fear the light,
   since with "unveiled face he reflected, as in a mirror, the glory of
   God," for a world that hailed the light with joy.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XIII.

  JESUS BROUGHT TO THE GENTILES.

   ST PAUL knew that he was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles.
   External circumstances favoured this conviction. He himself was a Jew
   of the dispersion, a seasoned traveller accustomed from his earliest
   years to the life of the Greek towns. The pride that he took in his
   peculiar and independent position must have caused his work amongst the
   distant Gentiles to appear especially desirable to him, unhindered as
   it would be by the tradition of the early apostles. Next may be
   mentioned the opposition of the Jews, which he knew only too well from
   his own past. And besides it was advisable for the renegade--such he
   appeared to his friends--to depart to a safe distance. Such
   circumstances and such considerations no doubt contributed largely to
   aid St. Paul in forming his decision; but the really decisive cause was
   the clearly-felt impulse that urged him to go forth from the very
   moment of his call. He was under a necessity--he had to go to the
   Gentiles.

   A tremendous task was laid upon him, to announce Jesus as the Saviour
   of the heathen. Yet the way had been paved--stepping-stones at least
   were not entirely wanting. First of all, Paul had a companion,
   Barnabas, who gave him the benefit of his riper knowledge and past
   experience. In the next place, the separation between Jew and Gentile
   was not absolutely complete. Little communities of Jews were scattered
   far and wide in all the larger Mediterranean towns; their synagogues
   attracted a number of Gentiles who became members of the community in a
   variety of ways, or were at least on terms of friendship with it. The
   first thing that St Paul did, therefore, was to visit the Jewish houses
   and synagogues in order by this means to obtain access to the
   proselytes and Gentiles. It was thus possible to take for granted that
   many of the Gentiles would be acquainted with the Jewish
   presuppositions of the Gospel--especially with the Old Testament. The
   entirely Jewish character of St. Paul's mission and theology is of
   course sufficiently explained by his own Jewish education, but becomes
   still more intelligible to us when we remember that the surroundings in
   which he worked had already been interpenetrated by Jewish influences.

   In spite, however, of this Jewish preparation the attempt to bring
   Jesus to the Greeks was something entirely new. How was it to be done?

   Several ways might be tried. One had already been attempted: the
   preaching of the twelve. It consisted of two simple parts: the promise
   and the threat, together with the demand. First the message: The
   judgment and the kingdom are close at hand: the Messiah is coming,
   Jesus the crucified and risen Lord; He is coming as judge of the world.
   Thereby fear and hope are aroused; and then the exhortation: Do God's
   will as Jesus taught it, and attach yourself to those who expect Jesus
   as their Lord. Why should the Gentiles refuse to give ear to this
   simple appeal?

   St. Paul rejected this method with the exception of the first part, the
   announcement of the judgment. It is not that the presuppositions were
   too Jewish for him. He never experienced any difficulty in explaining
   the conception of the Messiah. But for himself this description of
   Christianity as a scheme of a promise and a claim upon conduct was
   altogether inadequate. Christianity was entirely a religion of
   redemption for him. He knew what that meant--to wish to do God's will
   and not to be able to do it. All the weakness, the powerlessness and
   perversity of men when left to themselves, had become intelligible to
   him through his own failures, and at the same time he had experienced
   the rescue from this state, the uplifting power--God's grace. Now, with
   such an experience the scheme of salvation put forward by the earlier
   missionaries--it was that of Jesus Himself--could never satisfy him.
   Jesus the Redeemer, not the lawgiver, that was his watchword. It was a
   great piece of good fortune for Christianity. As a mere teacher of true
   religion Jesus would only have taken His place in the ranks of the
   Greek moral philosophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras. As such
   He would doubtless have commanded respect and admiration, but never the
   faith which gives birth to a religion. Paul saved Christianity from the
   fate of stagnation as a school of ethics in the universal Greek
   rationalism.

   An entirely different method of bringing Jesus to the Greeks was
   indicated by the great example of the Jewish-Alexandrine religious
   philosophy. Jesus needed but to occupy the position of Moses, as indeed
   He did later on. The Jews of Alexandria looked upon religion as a
   philosophy, with all its branches--cosmology, psychology, ethics, etc.
   But as distinguished from the Greek philosophy, they looked upon their
   own as a revealed philosophy resting upon the oracles of the Old
   Testament, to which all the wisdom of the Greeks was related either as
   borrowed or as a preparatory stage. For they either ascribed to the
   Spirit of God only the sacred writings of the Jews, in which case the
   Greeks must have stolen from them, or they allowed a certain activity
   of the divine reason in the Greek thinkers and poets, but proclaimed at
   the same time the superiority of the absolute revelation which had been
   granted to Moses.

   It is quite possible that the Alexandrine Apollos gave utterance to
   similar thoughts about Jesus in his teaching regarding the divine
   wisdom,' as his countrymen did about Moses. But such a mixture of
   religion and philosophy appeared to St. Paul pure perversity. Once more
   his own personal experience was the decisive factor in the judgment
   which he formed. There had been a time when, as teacher of the law, he
   had boasted of the wisdom of his religion, and looked proudly down upon
   the blind heathen that were ignorant as children. But the collapse of
   his zeal for the law implied at the same time the fall of his pride in
   his wisdom. The foolishness of the Cross as opposed to all the wisdom
   of the learned, be they Jews or Gentiles, that was his new motto. First
   brought low in so wonderful a manner, and then exalted as he had been,
   he seemed to see, at least when he began his work, the essence of all
   religion in the paradoxical, and rejoiced in the thought that the world
   had not recognized God through its wisdom, whilst the foolish and the
   lowly had accepted Jesus as their Redeemer, when He had been presented
   to them. This, too, was fortunate for early Christianity. Before it had
   been drawn into the philosophical evolution of the succeeding age, it
   was able to stand forth in all its sovereignty as a religion. All
   religion is a paradox. Jesus is not to be counted on the side of the
   philosophers. His religion can only be treated as an intellectual
   system, to its own loss and damage. The sole reason that arrested its
   entire decay was that, thanks to St. Paul, it came to the Greeks at the
   time of its growth as a power of life, and not as a system of
   philosophy. Jesus no lawgiver, no teacher of philosophy--that is the
   kernel of Paul's preaching, as it was in later times of the Reformers.
   Hereby alone Paul proves himself to be the foremost interpreter of
   Jesus, in spite of his deviations from the message of the twelve.

   How does Paul preach Jesus the Redeemer to the Greek world?

   As for Jesus and the twelve so also for St. Paul, the eschatological
   message stands in the forefront. The day of judgment is at hand, when
   each single individual, whether living or dead, shall have to appear
   before God's throne and give an account of all that he has done. Reward
   and punishment are meted out by God with perfect justice--to the one
   destruction and death: salvation, everlasting life in the kingdom of
   God to the other. The expressions which St. Paul uses are often
   different to those which we meet with in the message of Jesus. The
   Jewish conceptions--hell, Paradise, even the kingdom of God--recede
   into the background. Instead of judgment Paul always uses the word
   wrath'; instead of kingdom of God' he prefers salvation'; and instead
   of hell,' death.'

   The influence of Jesus is felt in the emphasis that is laid upon the
   individual, and in the entire abolition of all the privileges of
   Israel. It is individual men and women that appear before God, not
   peoples; and moral character is the only issue at stake. As before, an
   especially earnest appeal is founded upon the nearness of the
   approaching end: it is still time; soon it may be "too late." "The
   night is far spent, the day is at hand."

   The question may be raised whether St. Paul provided sanctions for his
   eschatological message to the heathen. Prophecy has at no time been
   greatly disturbed to seek for sanctions. Does it not rest upon God's
   word, upon the foretelling of His messengers?

   The approach of the final catastrophe was a certain fact both for the
   apostle and for the Jews, proved out of the Old Testament; and Paul
   might reasonably presuppose among all proselytes of the synagogues some
   knowledge of the prophecies contained in the Scriptures. Nevertheless
   he spared no trouble in trying to give reasons for the positions that
   he advanced, and met the Greeks as well as he could on their own
   ground. The conceptions of requital after death, of torments for the
   wicked, and of rewards for the righteous in the divine blessedness,
   were spread far and wide amongst the Greeks by means of Orphic sects
   and philosophical schools. When Paul announced to each individual the
   near approach of the day of the revelation of the just judgment of God,
   and prophesied tribulation and sorrow for all evildoers, and honour,
   glory and immortality to all the righteous, he was calling up long
   familiar pictures in the minds of his hearers: the only new element was
   contained in the message concerning the day on which all should appear
   before the judgment-seat of God. The apostle, however, was not content
   even with this. He proved how the beginning of the judgment was
   revealed even here and now in the moral ruin of the servants of sin.
   And in so doing he met the demand of those who required a visible
   pledge for this message of a future hope.

   Even though the announcement of the judgment thus appeared to the
   Greeks as a message that could be grasped at once--in fact, as one with
   which they were almost familiar--the preaching of the resurrection was,
   it must be admitted, a stone of stumbling to them from the very first.
   Many Corinthians looked upon his conception of the restoration of the
   earthly body as an utter absurdity. Rather than believe such nonsense
   they would abandon the thought of any resurrection whatever. St. Paul
   finds himself compelled to draw up an elaborate defence of the doctrine
   of the resurrection of the dead, which does in fact so far meet the
   objections of the Greeks that it removes the chief ground of offence,
   the quickening of the old body. In this apology he makes use of the
   conceptions of the new spiritual body, while at the same time he routs
   his adversaries that deny the resurrection by means of popular
   arguments. This is the most instructive point in the whole proceeding.
   St Paul is fighting for the old Jewish dogma of the resurrection--which
   differs entirely from the Greek hope in immortality; and while doing so
   he deprives it of that which constitutes its essence, by surrendering
   the belief in the quickening of the mortal body in order thereby to
   gain over the Greeks. Whether these concessions met with any success
   amongst the Greeks we do not know; at any rate it was only the old
   Jewish dogma of the resurrection which gained a permanent footing in
   the Churches founded by St Paul. We have, however, a striking instance
   in this explanation of an eschatological doctrine of the way in which
   the apostle showed his readiness to become a Greek unto the Greeks.
   Immediately after delivering his eschatological message St. Paul
   proceeds to paint the corrupt state of his audience, the full extent of
   which has only been realized by the near approach of the judgment day.
   Their corruption consists in idolatry and in impurity. Insisting on the
   degradation implied by these sins, he thus passes on at the same time
   to preach the faith in the one God and to awaken their consciences.

   It is especially over the worship of idols that St Paul waxes wroth. He
   shows no understanding for any religion but his own. He is just a Jew
   counting all Gentiles as fallen away from the true religion. The two
   theories which underlie his criticism are both Jewish--the image theory
   and the demon theory. Either the heathen are fools because they worship
   mere images, things of nought, dumb idols, the works of men's hands
   instead of the God that hath no form; or else they are the poor slaves
   of demons, bewitched and under a spell, driven to this worship by some
   wild and wicked impulse. Nowhere, however, do we find him criticising
   any single one of these different rites from what he has himself
   observed. He has judged idolatry en bloc before he knows what it is,
   and he does not want to know what it is.

   The explanation of the monotheistic faith which is to take the place of
   this idolatrous worship is likewise based upon Jewish presuppositions,
   nor could one have expected St. Paul to do otherwise. He could have
   found no suitable proof in the person of Jesus. At first the whole of
   nature is interpreted as a revelation of God. In His works God has
   manifested His power and His divinity to all men. But then St Paul
   proceeds to utter that hard saying about the falling away of the
   heathen from the original revelation and the uselessness of all that
   philosophy attempts to do. The Jews alone have kept God's primary
   revelation. It has been preserved and set forth in the sacred
   Scriptures. And indeed the Old Testament was the indispensable handbook
   to any monotheistic form of belief at a time when all higher knowledge
   of the Greek thinkers and poets was precluded. "The wisdom of the
   world" meant "foolishness unto God." And yet even a Paul who wishes to
   set himself in uncompromising opposition against the whole of the
   heathen world, even he cannot escape the influence of Hellenism
   entirely. The doctrine of the nous' that can behold the invisible
   essence of God in His works, the conception of truth, the definition of
   God as the Being of whom, through whom, and in whom all things are,
   prove that--albeit, of course, unconsciously--St. Paul had submitted to
   the purifying influence of Greek speculation upon Jewish thought.

   Moral degradation, impurity, was closely connected with this
   intellectual corruption--the worship of idols, heathen rites, magic
   ceremonies, and sexual excesses were all mutually interdependent. Many
   of those who listened to St. Paul, especially at Corinth, were the scum
   and offscouring of the depraved masses of the great cities where the
   apostle taught. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, abusers
   of themselves with mankind, thieves, usurers, drunkards, revilers--all
   these the apostle enumerates in order to continue "and such were some
   of you." Even the blackest pessimism did not paint the situation in too
   dark colours. We have more than sufficient documentary evidence for the
   prevalence of unnatural vices in this period. St. Paul therefore could
   say to those to whom he preached that they were a "massa perditionis"
   without meeting with much contradiction. But in order to gain a hearing
   he appeals at the same time to reason and conscience, which he does not
   believe to be quite extinct even in the most bestial of men. Even
   without any knowledge of the Old Testament they have the law written in
   their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts
   the meanwhile excusing or else accusing one another. This recognition
   of the divine in man, which goes so far as to acknowledge that there
   are uncircumcized heathen that keep the law, is all the more surprising
   by the side of the apostle's pessimistic estimate of the Gentile world
   as a whole.

   But after all, in thus appealing to the conscience St Paul is aiming
   merely at the awakening of the feeling of sin, and his optimistic
   utterances are made to serve his preaching of the judgment that is to
   come. They are of importance for us, because St. Paul is here again
   clearly borrowing from Greek rationalism through intermediate Jewish
   sources. The Jews had taken over from the Stoic popular philosophy the
   use of the words "Reason, Conscience, Nature," and at the same time
   that conception of men as beings normally endowed with moral faculties
   and standards of conduct, of which these words are the expression. All
   differences of time and place sink into comparative insignificance by
   the side of this the common property of all normally developed moral
   human beings in the civilized world. This rationalism is one of the
   most important causes of the rapid spread of Christianity, and St. Paul
   is the first to make use of it.

   The introductory stage of St. Paul's missionary work was thus formed of
   two parts--the eschatological message and the description of the
   degradation of the heathen world. We are not yet in the temple of
   Christianity itself, but only in the porch. The Jewish element still
   almost entirely dominates the preaching of St. Paul. His estimates are
   still influenced by Jewish prophecy, by the Jewish Scriptures, and by
   Jewish views of the Gentiles. But as a matter of fact lines of
   communication already lead over to the Greek world, even though they
   are mostly derived by St. Paul directly from the Jews. His eschatology
   reminds the Greeks of nearly related doctrines, and they have more that
   is akin to the monotheistic faith than the apostle is ready to believe.
   But he himself makes earnest appeals to their moral knowledge.
   Christianity and Hellenism begin to amalgamate in the preaching of the
   apostle who was in so many ways opposed to everything that was Greek.

   St. Paul's object in thus bringing the Gentile hearers face to face
   with the near approaching judgment, utterly degraded and fallen away
   from God as they were, was not to lead them to repentance in the
   earlier sense of the word, but to faith. To repent meant, with Jesus,
   to turn round and do God's will. Paul does not at all believe that his
   hearers can do that. In spite of all the power that a man possesses of
   forming moral judgments, it is perfectly useless to appeal to his
   reason as long as it is held captive by his senses--by the law of sin
   in the flesh. His own experience had shattered his faith in the
   victorious power of the will; this, however, was not the only or even
   the decisive reason for the new demand for faith. As the whole object
   of his missionary labours is to win over the Gentiles for the Christian
   Churches, Paul can never grant that any awakening of new moral power
   would be possible through man's unaided efforts apart from the Church.
   He must, on the contrary, be so entirely broken and powerless that no
   other path of safety remains open to him in the whole world but
   faith--i.e. entrance into the Christian fellowship. This is the point
   where Jesus and His apostle are furthest apart from each other. With
   Jesus, courage, joy, and feeling of strength and entire health; as He
   Himself does God's will so He bids others do it, without attaching any
   ecclesiastical limitation. In Paul's case we have the description of a
   weak and heartbroken man who can only gain the victory within the
   Church and by supernatural grace. Extreme pessimism and the dogma of
   salvation by faith alone and in the Church--"extra ecclesiam nulla
   salus"--are correlatives. Jesus knows neither the one nor the other.

   Oppressed by the burden of his sin, and trembling at the thought of the
   judgment, the convert is brought to Jesus his Redeemer--not the Jesus
   of the Gospels who promised the kingdom of God, revealed God's will,
   drove out demons and made God and man at one: this Jesus Paul himself
   never knew. He would, accordingly, have been obliged to have preached
   Him on the authority of the early apostles. But in their message He
   appeared as a prophet and a lawgiver, and that did not suit Paul's
   purpose. Jesus the crucified alone, or the crucified and risen Son of
   God, such is the Redeemer in St. Paul's preaching. He gives a short
   title to the whole of his message--the "word of the Cross." Now the
   Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not really deeds of Jesus, but
   experiences in which He played a very passive part. From an external
   point of view they are purely historical facts--paradoxes for the
   understanding, miracles and mysteries. Paul grants all this. The
   statement, Jesus the crucified is our Redeemer, is merely folly for the
   understanding; it is only through faith, that makes its way through all
   that is repulsive and paradoxical, that it becomes a power unto
   salvation.

   Christianity, says St. Paul to the Corinthians, so clearly that there
   can be no possibility of a mistake, Christianity is not a philosophy:
   it is no rational system, but it is something historical, irrational
   and paradoxical, in which faith either recognizes God's power or else
   it does not. True, the facts have their meaning. The Cross implies
   God's love, grace, and forgiveness; the Resurrection the beginning of
   the life to come; but this meaning itself exists for faith alone. It
   is, of course, in any case painful for us to observe how the rich
   contents of the life of Christ and, above all, His message--though
   this, to be sure, we do meet with later on in the apostle's
   preaching--are entirely sacrificed to these two facts. But then what
   does this loss signify when we balance it against the immense
   simplification and concentration of this preaching of salvation?
   Simplification is always the mark of great men. In the preaching of St
   Peter and the other twelve all was presented side by side: the promise,
   the commandments, the miracles, the cross and the resurrection. It
   would have been difficult, especially for Greeks, to distinguish the
   redemptive power of Jesus in all this mass of material, whereas Paul
   brought them something which was simple and great that roused their
   enthusiasm (in spite of all paradox). There must surely be something
   divine when One that was crucified was made the object of such love and
   such enthusiasm. And when, thereupon, he exclaimed at the end of his
   address, "This is the way to salvation on the judgment day--faith in
   the crucified Saviour; here is atonement, grace, peace and certain
   salvation," then his words found their way home and faith cried Amen.'

   Furthermore, this preaching, paradoxical as it was, contained elements
   that were extremely congenial to the Greek mind. The crucified Lord is
   the Son of God, who according to St. Paul descended from heaven.
   However incomprehensible the death of a heavenly being must have
   appeared to the Greeks in this statement--for the ideas of divinity and
   of death are incompatible--they were perfectly familiar with the title
   Son of God' and with the idea of the descent of such an one from
   heaven. And as in addition to this Jesus' resurrection follows on the
   third day after His death and is then in turn succeeded by the
   Ascension to heaven, the divine nature is restored to its rights and a
   portion at least of the difficulty is removed. St. Paul's christology
   appeared therefore to the Greeks simply as the revelation of a new
   myth, like those with which they were already familiar, only surpassing
   them all in grandeur and power. In spite of the apostle's firm belief
   in the parousia, the emphasis in his christology is laid so entirely on
   past historical events, that for the hearers at any rate it is not the
   expected Messiah but the Son of God who has already come down from
   heaven, that becomes the centre of their faith. But the real
   stumbling-block still remained--Christ's death. St. Paul attempted to
   familiarize the Greeks with the idea by means of the conception of
   sacrifice. However Jewish his methods might be, his arguments after all
   contained elements common to the universal religious experience of
   mankind--sacrifice, vicarious atonement, and expiation. The greater
   part of his hearers especially, belonging as they did to classes that
   were morally degraded, were only too ready to accept the atoning death
   of Jesus which promised them remission of their punishment. In spite of
   all, however, there was paradox enough to cause amazement and surprise.

   When once this first step had been taken, when faith had been aroused
   and the enthusiastic confession had fallen from the convert's
   lips--"Jesus is the Lord" (the apostle uses this title and not Messiah'
   amongst the Greeks)--St. Paul immediately proceeded to gather the
   disciples together into an organzied community. No Christian could have
   fought his way through the great dark night of idolatry and immorality
   as an isolated unit: the community--St. Paul calls it Church, using a
   Jewish word--was here the necessary condition for all permanent life.
   Here, again, many points of contact were presented by the Greek system
   of guilds and confraternities, of which the Jews had already made some
   use.

   At the present day we are scarcely in a position to decide whether Paul
   exclusively followed Jewish patterns, or whether in some points he
   modelled his organizations directly upon the Greek type. As in addition
   he was bound to take over the characteristic rites of the Jewish
   Christian Church, and many of its forms and customs, he in any case
   created something that was entirely new to the world in which he lived.
   Through this amalgamation of Jewish, Greek, and Christian elements
   arose the Christian Church of the Gentiles, which throughout its future
   history remained ever open to receive new impressions, as a direct
   consequence of its origin from different sources. Baptism in the name
   of Jesus the Crucified was the form of entrance. Then followed very
   numerous meetings, for meals partaken in common, for divine worship,
   and also for the support of the poor brethren in the different
   localities as well as at Jerusalem. They were true communities of
   brethren, closely knit together for social, ceremonial and legal
   purposes, which gave their individual members a sense of strength and
   comfort, and often stood to them in the place of the family. St. Paul
   attached an almost exaggerated importance to the value of these
   communities. They were to be nothing more or less than mediators of the
   Spirit of God or of Jesus to the individual. Though the aim and object
   of his preaching had been the conversion of the individual, he
   conceived the power of the new life to be exclusively confined to the
   Church. Here and here alone is the sphere of the Spirit's miraculous
   operations--the speaking with tongues, the healing of the sick and
   prophecy, and at the same time the renewal of the life, the power to
   start afresh. Only he who is a member of Christ's body--that is, who
   actually belongs to the Christian fellowship--experiences the
   Redeemer's influence that absorbs all that is sinful and earthly and
   implants that which is good and pure. St. Paul was sober-minded enough
   to recognize that these Christian communities were very far indeed from
   being his ideal the body of Jesus the temple of God. If in spite of
   this he clung fast hold to his belief in the power of the Church, he
   relied upon the fact that in spite of everything, many in the community
   shone like stars in the world in the midst of a wicked and perverse
   generation. For it was the beautiful time of the early spring, when the
   Church and the fellowship of them that believed entirely coincided, and
   did not, as now, stand in opposition to each other; when the influence
   of Jesus--that is, the Spirit--imparted itself so mightily to the whole
   community through the apostle, his fellow workers, and the first
   converts, that each individual was subject to it. This influence of
   Jesus did at first of course often find expression in excited behaviour
   and wildly enthusiastic actions, and it was only after repeated
   humiliations of one kind and another that it assumed a quiet and
   practically useful character. But without something of this enthusiasm,
   there had been no courage to lay the new foundation, and to separate
   from the world. The soul of Jesus, confined before within the secluded
   Jewish sects, now created for itself a second time a body, and this
   time one that was a great deal better suited to its power and glad joy.
   And that cannot be done without some stormy experiences. But the
   communities in which the Spirit finds a habitation are destined to
   alter the current of the world's history.

   Scarcely have the Gentiles become members of the Christian community
   than Paul tries to discover something for them to do. His aim is now to
   train these masses of men, who had hitherto been for the most part
   without any kind of discipline, to work for the realization of the
   Christian ideal. He who had up till now only given and promised, now
   summons them to do the will of God in the strength of that which they
   have received. Words of Jesus, texts of the Old Testament, claims of
   the conscience, rules of Christian custom and discipline, reflections
   prompted by consideration for the outside heathen world, are all to
   become one combined motive for moral regeneration.

   A very important question here arises: Did St. Paul keep faithfully to
   the ideal of Jesus, subordinating everything else to it?

   Two preliminary observations are necessary to obviate any unfairness in
   the comparison.

   1. St. Paul had to do with Gentiles, not with Jews. He cannot
   presuppose the high average of morality which Jesus merely purified,
   simplified, and set free from all impediments. A great part of his task
   consists in bringing his converts to the point where Jesus found His
   disciples from the very first. He cannot effect anything without
   lowering the standard to a certain extent. He is obliged, e.g., to
   attach greater value to outer deeds and respectability than to
   thoughts, even though he himself has exactly the same opinion as Jesus
   about the inner motive. In the next place, he is confronted with a
   whole mass of new ethical problems with which Jesus was not acquainted.
   The whole domain of social ethics, the state, the family, slavery,
   woman's position--all directly concern him, for it must now be decided
   whether these forms and institutions have any meaning for Christians.
   Whether St. Paul's solution is the right one may be doubted. At any
   rate he creates new values.

   2. Jesus' claim concerned the individual simply and solely. St. Paul
   has the Christian Churches in view. There is a Christian form of
   worship, Christian discipline, the beginnings of ecclesiastical law,
   all of them things which did not exist in Jesus' time. Thus, whilst
   Jesus detached the individual as far as possible from his surroundings
   and left him to his own resources, St. Paul looks upon the duties which
   a man owes to the fellowship as the highest. This necessarily implies
   certain ecclesiastical claims even though they be reduced to a minimum.

   Hence the simple division which was obviously sufficient for Jesus'
   demand is no longer quite suitable for St. Paul's. Jesus placed men in
   their right relation to the three realities: to themselves, their
   neighbour, and God. Everything else either completely vanished or
   receded into comparative insignificance by the side of these three
   realities. Three other problems have come to be of primary importance
   for St. Paul: the position of the Christian to the world; his duty to
   the Church; public worship. The same three realities, as in Jesus'
   case, lie at the basis of these problems, and yet there has been of
   necessity a certain shifting of interest. The comparison with Jesus is
   facilitated if from the very first we take this shifting of the
   problems into account.

   The position to the world is the first and most urgent problem. The
   Christians come forth from this world where the demons bear sway and
   idolatry and immorality prevail. What is to be avoided as heathenish
   and sinful? What is necessary for the support of life? What is left to
   the free decision of the individual conscience? Can laws for all be set
   up? And what do they embrace?

   St. Paul's solution of these difficult problems cannot but excite our
   highest admiration.

   He starts from that which is obviously wicked, from downright vices,
   which are not to be tolerated in the Church. Idolatry, immorality of
   every kind, theft, drunkenness, are not to occur amongst Christians,
   were it but for the reason that they would thereby compromise
   themselves in the eyes of the world. Under the same category come,
   furthermore, party divisions, strife and bickering. Thence he goes down
   to the roots of these vices in the sins of thought and word. Impure
   desires, low words, anger, envy and jealousy, blasphemy, lying, all
   that proceeds from the flesh and not from the Spirit, is to be torn out
   and put away. Thus far the law can be set up for all. But are the
   limits thereby laid down beyond which lies the kingdom of the good, and
   of that which is permitted?

   No, it is only when we have reached the individual conscience that we
   come to the decisive point. All that does not proceed from faith is
   sin. Whatever the conscience does not forbid is good. The conscience is
   individual, free, and only liable to give reckoning to God. But the
   matter is not settled with this proclamation of the freedom of
   conscience. Who can deny that the conscience of the masses of the
   Gentile converts is anything but degraded and darkened? How indistinct,
   in such cases, are the boundaries between conscience, bad habits, and
   caprice! The aim is the transformation and education of this conscience
   till it attains to Christian standards. The nous,' the practical reason
   itself, must be changed step by step, that it may be entirely weaned
   from its former worldly standards and may become capable of
   understanding God's will, that which is good, pleasing and perfect.
   This comes to pass through the influence of the Christian community,
   and yet only on condition that the individual himself works at the
   purifying and deepening of his moral sense. The Christian has therefore
   never attained completeness in his relation to the world, but is always
   in the midst of a process of growth and development. He knows that he
   has always a number of problems set before him which only he, the
   individual, can solve, and which no written laws can prescribe.

   The man who reached the height of these principles--higher than these
   there are none--did not only personally renounce the part of lawgiver
   in favour of free development of the Churches, but he saved
   Christianity itself from the fate of ever lasting immobility by setting
   up a code of laws. A religion like that of Islam is stereotyped for all
   time through its sacred book of laws, both from an ecclesiastical,
   social, and political point of view. Thanks to the Apostle Paul,
   Christianity is bound to no other law than that of the Christian
   conscience. To attain to this point of view, and still more, to
   maintain it, called for a courageous faith which perhaps no other man
   possessed in that age.

   But did St. Paul himself remain quite true to his own principles in the
   advice that he gave and in his exhortations? The step between the
   setting up of a principle and its application in concrete instances is
   difficult enough, especially in the early days of any movement. In
   every case we have our highest authority in the principles which the
   apostle himself has laid down, even if his exhortations in the concrete
   case are opposed to them.

   Great emphasis is laid in the epistles upon the duty of the
   renunciation of this world, and that with good reason: "Be not
   conformed to this world"; and "set your minds on the things that are
   above, for your citizenship is in heaven"; "seek the things that are
   above, not the things that are below"; "I am crucified unto the world
   and the world to me." In expressions such as these the world is
   entirely identified with the kingdom of wickedness. But the heathen
   world, with which St. Paul was most intimately acquainted, was just
   that and exactly that. One need but think for a moment of cities such
   as Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. To break with these heathen surroundings
   with their manners and customs, their superstition, with their laxity
   of public opinion, was a Christian's first and foremost duty. The very
   first act of the new life was to become completely different even in
   mere external matters to one's immediate surroundings. And as the power
   of custom was forever thwarting the new ideal, a constant struggle with
   custom--i.e. the world--was inevitable. St. Paul declares, too, in so
   many words that denial of the world means for him the struggle against
   sin. To die to sin, to be no longer the slave of sin, to crucify the
   flesh with its lusts and its desires--that was what bidding farewell to
   the world implied. Now, since the heathen religion and immorality were
   the chief representatives of sin and exercised at the same time the
   most powerful influence in public and private life was the art of that
   age much else than a public exhibition of immorality? It can easily be
   imagined that the domain into which the Christian was prohibited from
   entering was a very wide one. And, besides, there was the belief that
   it was the demons who were at work in all this wicked world, in the
   religious ceremonies and in the crimes, whereby a secret dread and
   horror were mingled with the purely moral hatred. No ultimate victory,
   no mere continuance even of early Christianity, had been possible
   without this great and powerful factor, fantastic though it was at
   times--renunciation of the world and constant struggle against it. The
   fiery winged words, especially the great battle-cry in the letter to
   the Ephesians, prove the apostle to have grasped the real position of
   affairs, and do him all honour. Wherever he could he thoroughly swept
   out all the heathen filth and dirt without listening to any terms,
   without even a thought of a compromise. It is to St. Paul that
   Christianity owes its aggressive courage, its boldness in the
   destruction of all idols. And yet it was none other than St. Paul
   himself who prevented the exaggeration of this renunciation into
   asceticism or into a dualistic speculation. "There is nothing secular
   but what is sinful"--i.e. what the Christian conscience calls sin--that
   is the limit: not a step further. In spite of all demons the old saying
   remains true: "The earth is the Lord's and all the fulness thereof."
   St. Paul did not set up the statement that all is of God as a
   speculative principle but as a practical maxim, and by it the things of
   this world are to be judged. "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus
   that nothing is unclean of itself, save that to him who accounteth
   anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean." And on this the
   apostle's great sayings are founded: "All things are yours--even the
   world," and "All things are lawful." When one reflects upon the
   situation of the first Christians, they are indeed sufficient to excite
   one's amazement. In every crisis of his missionary labours St. Paul
   adhered firmly to these principles. As against the Judaizing party he
   rescues the freedom with which Christ has set us free. Against the
   ascetics at Rome, who imagined themselves compelled by religious
   scruples to forgo meat and wine, he takes up the defence of the strong'
   brethren. It is right to use everything for which one can give God
   thanks. He rejects the doctrines of the ascetics of Colossae--"Touch
   not, taste not, handle not"--as commandments of men, and proclaims
   instead the principle of liberty. "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do
   all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father
   through Him."

   The question concerning meats offered to idols presented the greatest
   difficulty of all, since it entered more deeply than any other into the
   every day life of the converts. Every invitation to a meal, every
   purchase in the market, might bring the Christian into contact with
   this meat. The argument that by eating such meat one entered into
   communion with the demons to whom it was offered, made an impression
   albeit a transitory one--even upon St. Paul himself. But the real
   reason for abstinence is love alone, regard for the conscience of the
   weak brother. The individual is free even in this case to regulate his
   own conduct. If he can thank God for his meat, no man can condemn him.
   On one occasion a saying of the apostle's was misunderstood: he was
   supposed to have meant that a Christian was not allowed to consort any
   more with whoremongers, usurers, and idolaters. St. Paul emphatically
   protested against this misinterpretation of his words by the
   characteristic statement, "other wise you would have to leave this
   world." The Christian must take up his position in the world and remain
   therein, for God has made it, and it belongs to God. So, then, in spite
   of his call to renunciation, St. Paul represents with reference to the
   world the standpoint, not of the Pharisees but of Jesus, to which he
   merely gave a fuller application and a clearer definition.

   To describe the duties which a man owes towards himself, St. Paul is
   fond of using the word sanctification,' and, in fact, generally
   speaking, words derived from the language of ritual. Here one can trace
   the influence of St. Paul's early training in the school of the
   Scribes. Jesus makes no use whatever of the Pharisaic terminology of
   sacred and profane. The opposite of holy' is not wicked, but unclean,
   unconsecrated; and the application to the world without, instead of to
   one's own heart, is only too easily made. It is not difficult to find
   reminiscences in St. Paul's writings of the earlier Jewish
   phraseology--this, e.g., that it is especially the members, the body,
   i.e., the external, that is to be sanctified rather than the heart
   above all else. Sanctification is therefore, as in later Christian
   literature, something that is strictly limited. It consists in avoiding
   the sins of the flesh, and in repressing sensuality. If we recall the
   few facts that we know as to the past history of the Christian
   converts, e.g., at Corinth, and remember the difficult position in
   which they were placed in the world in which they lived then, we can
   easily realize that sanctification, in the narrow sense of the word,
   was bound to constitute the first task of the Christian life. A higher
   morality can only grow up where the individual has attained the mastery
   over his lower, his animal impulses. Hence the following sentence
   stands at the head of all the rest of the apostle's exhortations to the
   Thessalonians: "This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that
   ye should abstain from fornication." The first sign that one is to look
   for in the newly baptized Christian is that he no longer follows his
   lusts, but has nailed them for good to the Cross. So again in the great
   exhortation in the Epistle to the Romans: the presenting of our bodies
   as a sacrifice to God--i.e., their sanctification--is placed before
   everything else. A passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians
   shows us that this duty was by no means regarded as a matter of course.
   The Christians at Corinth must have been heard reasoning somewhat as
   follows: As complete liberty is granted in matters of food, seeing that
   the belly perishes, so sexual intercourse, too, is one of the
   adiaphora, for the whole body is doomed to corruption. The abhorrence
   which this reasoning excited in St. Paul, and the number of arguments
   which he employed against it, prove to us how serious he considered the
   danger to be. For the Greeks, religion was almost entirely a matter of
   ceremonial. The apostle's main object, therefore, was to show them that
   self-discipline in the ordinary everyday life--and especially
   chastity--was a part of religion itself, and that without the
   fulfilment of this preliminary condition they could have no share in
   redemption or in communion with God. The immense emphasis that was thus
   laid upon sanctification naturally led to a certain narrowing of the
   Christian conception of duty as a whole. That which in the teaching of
   Jesus appears merely as a part, and not even a very prominent part, of
   the Christian ideal, seems to be the one thing needful in many passages
   in St. Paul's writings. But such concentration was an absolute
   necessity. Here was the most dangerous enemy. The full impetus of the
   attack must be directed against him, and he must be completely routed,
   and then the way to the higher stages of Christian morality would be
   rendered possible. In Jewish writings of a moral character we find
   exactly the same emphasis laid upon the same duty. St. Paul is here
   working for the education of the masses. He has to raise them up out of
   the mire and filth of the world to the level of the morality of the
   Gospel. And by the side of these exhortations we read those beautiful
   words to the Philippians: "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
   things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things
   are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good
   report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
   these things." The man who sets up so exalted and comprehensive an
   ideal is far from expending all his moral force in the struggle against
   sensuality.

   As we pass on to consider St. Paul's relation to social institutions,
   it is surprising to find in what favourable terms he speaks of the
   State, and that, too, when Nero sat on the throne. The difference
   between Jesus and His apostle is very striking in this point. For Jesus
   living in Palestine, the State is naturally regarded as a foreign power
   resting upon brute force and oppression. For Paul, the Roman citizen,
   it is the great empire of peace, which enables him to exercise his
   calling as missionary without let or hindrance, and more than once
   protects him and his congregations from the Jews and the rabble. Thus
   he calls the State the great minister of God for good. It receives all
   its power from God Himself. It is none other than the State that will
   for a season restrain Antichrist, and thereby render the undisturbed
   expansion of Christianity possible. It is very probable that we have
   here the after-effects of important doctrines of the Pharisees, dating
   from a time when politics and religion were unfortunately intermingled.
   Had it not been for his own fortunate experience, however, he would not
   have given them the powerful expression which he did. But one must be
   very careful not to confuse this optimistic religious view of the State
   with anything like patriotic feeling. St. Paul sought his own
   fatherland, and that of all Christians, in heaven, and that not only
   after his imprisonment at Home. Hence, too, the duties of the Christian
   to the State are practically all included in the paying of taxes and
   the rendering of the outer marks of obedience. The Lord of the
   Christians is after all not the Caesar at Home, but Jesus in heaven,
   whose speedy return shall put an end even to the Roman empire. If we
   look at the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans carefully, there
   is no perceptible trace of political thinking, or even of political
   interest. The only matter that is of importance from the point of view
   of the world's history is that even before the great struggle between
   Church and State broke out, Christians are forbidden under all
   circumstances to engage in revolution. That is not much, but it saved
   the Church.

   St. Paul regards the organization of human society, the relation of
   master and slave, as something divinely ordained and admitting of no
   reform. There is no thought of the abolition of slavery, or of equality
   at least between Christian slaves and their masters. God calls the one
   to be a slave and the other to be a master: hence one can serve Him in
   either relation. The only result of any attempt to change this social
   order would be a state of uncertainty and danger. Hence the slave, even
   if liberated, had better make no use of his manumission. The real
   reason for this indifference to the existing order is not only the hope
   that the end of the world is near at hand--and with that, of course,
   all else will end--but also the feeling that these social differences
   neither directly further nor hinder one's development, but that they
   are beneficial or injurious according to the use which the Christian
   makes of them. And, besides, it must not be forgotten that modern
   slavery is a very different thing from ancient. The modern feelings of
   misery and wretchedness which we associate with slavery were then
   unknown. And yet St. Paul is not the man simply to leave things as he
   found them. In the passages relating to the duties of domestic life
   which are to be found in the later letters and in the Epistle to
   Philemon we have the first brief but promising attempts to Christianize
   the relationship of master and slave. If the Christian master and the
   Christian slave will ever remember their responsibility to their
   heavenly Master, then a new spirit is bound by degrees to find an
   entrance. The Christian master is to look upon his former runaway slave
   who now returns of his own free will as his "brother beloved." Instead
   of severing the existing relationships without substituting anything
   better for them, simply in order to proclaim a merely negative
   result--the freedom from bondage--the apostle endeavours to
   Christianize the social order of his day.

   How different, again, are the problems which Jesus. and His apostle
   respectively had to solve with regard to marriage and the family. Apart
   from the frivolous practice of divorce which He abolished, Jesus could
   reckon upon a condition of affairs that was at bottom sound. St. Paul,
   on the contrary, finds himself compelled to start from the very
   beginning, to lay the foundations on which later a healthy family life
   could be built. That he did this is sufficient of itself to prove that
   he was more than an ascetic. It would be well for us to read the
   descriptions of the apostles in the later "Acts," how they travel among
   the heathen populations making it their main object to separate man and
   wife by setting up the standard of an absolute continence.

   There was no more decided opponent of asceticism on this point than the
   author of the first letter to the Corinthians, who enjoins their
   marital duties upon husband and wife, and warns them against a
   dangerous continence. He speaks of these matters in the down right way
   of old times without any appearance of prudery, which is very different
   from our fastidious treatment of these subjects. In a world full of
   crime, uncleanness, and sordidness of every kind he recognized his
   vocation in the education of the masses to the ideals of honourable
   marriage and constant fidelity. Perhaps he demanded too little:
   obedience of the women, love of the men--more the passages in the
   letters do not contain: but then this little contained, after all, all
   that was important, and on this foundation a new and healthy life could
   be built up. He likewise commended in a few brief and wise words the
   education of their children to Christian fathers and mothers, and to
   the former the duty of obedience. Taking it all in all, we have in St.
   Paul an educator with a thoroughly healthy understanding for all that
   was necessary and wholesome.

   But, then, is there not the celebrated chapter in the First Epistle to
   the Corinthians? Here, surely, we have the words of a monk and an
   enthusiast.

   First of all, "the present distress" and the "shortness of the time"
   have to a certain extent shifted his point of view. He here strikes a
   note which reminds one of the apocalypse in St Mark xiii.: "Woe to them
   that are with child and that give suck in those days." But there are
   also echoes of thoughts of Jesus Himself. Just as Jesus uplifts His
   voice in warning against the light-heartedness with which as before, in
   the days of Noah, so once more before the end of the world--they "were
   marrying and giving in marriage," St. Paul likewise fights against the
   fettering of the soul in the presence of eternity: "they that have
   wives . . . . as though they had none." That can be understood by
   reference to the teaching of Jesus. But then, further: the unmarried
   man can care for the Lord better than the married; marriage dulls a
   man's sense to higher things. As though this aptitude for the higher
   life were especially noticeable in bachelors and unmarried women! Paul
   was not married. He had his calling as an apostle, which entirely
   engrossed him. He forgot that when, while writing these words, he
   fancied all unmarried men like himself. The principal reason, however,
   is yet to come: there is something unclean in marriage; only the
   unmarried woman can be holy both body and soul--i.e., marriage defiles.
   Hence celibacy and virginity are higher and better than marriage. Hence
   it is better to remain a widow than marry again. Marriage is a
   compromise between entire chastity and the weakness of the flesh: it is
   better than prostitution, and in comparison therewith not sinful but
   good. Thus writes the Rabbi in Paul, to whom the natural no longer
   appears clean. These sentences--the ideal in its entirety set up for
   all alike--do not stand on the level of the Gospel.

   This will occasion no surprise to anyone who knows how difficult it is
   for a man to escape entirely from the influence of his past. On the
   contrary, it is surprising how one with such ideals, and starting from
   such premises, could write so exceedingly wisely, soberly, and with
   such entire self-suppression as St Paul in 1 Cor. vii. It is in this
   very chapter that he enjoins upon husband and wife their mutual duties,
   that he approves of mixed marriages, and would allow divorce if the
   heathen husband or wife so wish it. He allows marriage to virgins and
   to widows. He recommends it, if it must be, to those that are
   spiritually betrothed. The very man who has just presupposed that
   marriage is in a sense polluting, even though he has not said so in so
   many words, declares that the heathen husband is sanctified by
   consorting with the Christian wife; for the children surely are holy.
   And nowhere else but in this passage does St. Paul subordinate his own
   word, as advice or opinion, to the word of Jesus, which is a command.
   It may, therefore, be maintained with perfect justice that St. Paul
   consistently and zealously fulfilled his task of educating the heathen
   masses, sunken as they were in unnatural vice and frivolity, to a
   healthy and faithful family life, and that in spite of his favourite
   ideas, which smacked of the Rabbi and the ascetic. The spirit of Jesus
   completely dominated, not indeed his thoughts, but his acts in his
   missionary calling.

   The apostle's prescription regarding the head-dress to be worn by women
   during divine service belongs to the reform of manners properly so
   called. The difference between St. Paul and Jesus is here again
   especially noticeable. In Jesus case we have only the three great
   realities by the side of which all details disappear. His gaze is
   directed upon eternity. St. Paul regulates a special case--woman's
   dress--insisting upon it with the greatest urgency, and marshals a
   whole array of reasons in support of the position. But the rule which
   the apostle lays down is intended to counteract woman's mistaken aim to
   be man's equal in everything; and then, in the midst of the strangest
   statements, we are surprised by the assertion of the essential equality
   of the two sexes: "Nevertheless, neither is the man without the woman,
   nor the woman without the man in the Lord. For as the woman is of the
   man (in Paradise) even so is the man also by the woman (since then),
   but all things of God." It was just the exaggerated emphasis which the
   apostle had laid upon the inferiority and subordination of woman that
   compelled him to reflect and make this correction.

   In regulating the intercourse with the unbelievers, St. Paul sets up
   the simple principles of friendliness, peacefulness, and love, even
   towards slanderers and persecutors, and so remains true to the example
   of Jesus: "Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be
   possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. As long
   as we have time let us do good to all men." He often bids his converts
   think of what their heathen neighbours will be likely to say.
   Consideration for them should be a spur to every individual to press on
   towards perfection. The only passage in which he issues a curt command
   to be entirely separate from the servants of Beliar (quoting Old
   Testament texts in support of what he says), is so entirely without
   connection with its context that its genuineness has rightly been
   called in question. All that we know else of the apostle is the very
   opposite of anxious timidity. The Christian may associate fearlessly
   with sinners as long as his conscience does not suffer hurt.

   We have thus examined the Christian's position towards the world from
   every point of view. On its progress from the little villages round
   about the Sea of Galilee, out into the great world and into the great
   cities, Christianity encountered a number of new tasks and problems,
   the solution of which tested the power of Jesus' spirit. St. Paul was
   the first great leader in this forward march. The new religion is
   indebted to him for its boldness, for its undaunted faith, for its
   energy in saving the good seed and in pulling out the weeds in every
   new ground that was sown.

   The second principal task which St. Paul had to take in hand was the
   regulation of the care of the community. Jesus had not founded any
   organized community, and had given His commandment of love of one's
   neighbour the widest possible extension by especially including one's
   enemies. The brotherhood of believers became the real sphere for the
   exercise of this love of one's neighbour, both for the first Christian
   society and for St. Paul. Thereby, no doubt, the commandment of Christ
   was narrowed. The aim of the Christian mission is, it is true, ever
   more and more to include the whole world in the community. But, as a
   matter of fact, there is a clearly defined boundary line between the
   world and the community, and this is often only too plainly visible.
   The love of one's brother no longer means the love for every human
   being, who is my brother, but love for the Christian alone. The word
   philadelphia is used amongst Christians since St. Paul's time in this
   narrower sense, but so it had already been used in the Jewish
   congregations. There is indeed an approximation on the part of the
   Christian to the Jewish communities, for in both alike, sanctification
   and love of the brethren are accounted the highest virtues. But this
   concentration was again necessary and beneficial for Christianity. If
   words and feelings were to be turned into deeds, then this vague and
   undefined love had to crystallize into love of the community--the love,
   e.g., of a Corinthian convert for all his townsmen was in any case an
   empty phrase, that for his fellow Christians might at least be genuine;
   and, besides, St. Paul was always careful to see that the duty of love
   beyond the limits of the congregation was brought home to his
   disciples.

   Every single congregation was always to consider itself a member of the
   whole body--the Church of the Christian brotherhood, and never as a
   self-existent unit. Did not the apostles, the prophets, and the
   teachers, belong to the whole Church? Jerusalem was the Mother Church
   of all these congregations. The most palpable external sign of this
   connection was the collection for the poor at Jerusalem, which St Paul
   set on foot and carried through with a truly amazing energy, in spite
   of his often strained relations with the heads of that Church. But this
   was by no means all. Either the apostle himself or his fellow-workers
   brought each congregation news of the other congregations as they
   travelled about from place to place, thus awakening feelings of shame,
   resentment, emulation, and ambition. Each congregation felt that it was
   observed, and possibly also criticised, by all other congregations
   throughout the whole world. Besides this, there was the link formed by
   united prayer for the apostle and with him for congregations in
   distress. And finally, the exercise of a generous hospitality was
   regarded as a duty towards all missionaries and brethren on their
   travels, and they in their turn again strengthened the feelings of
   union between each and all. In this manner St. Paul created an
   organization so closely pieced together that no single link could fall
   out of the chain, but that each felt that it was kept in its place by
   the united efforts of all the rest; and in so doing he afforded
   Christian love a wide and varied sphere wherein to realize itself.

   But its chief domain was after all that which lay nearest home--the
   individual congregation. Just like Jesus, St. Paul esteemed that love
   highest which did not go forth in search of distant and extraordinary
   deeds, but proved its strength in the ordinary and everyday life. A man
   might give all that he had to the poor and yet be without the right
   kind of love. It is this prosaic, everyday love--no sentimental
   enthusiasm--that St. Paul commends to the Corinthians, in the
   celebrated chapter, as the greatest thing in the world, as that which
   abideth forever when speaking with tongues, prophecy, and knowledge
   have passed away; yea, which is even greater than faith and hope. There
   is indeed nothing simpler than to exercise patience and goodness, and
   not to boast or envy, not to offend against good manners nor seek one's
   own, and not to bear a grudge; and therefore of course nothing harder.
   By all that he did and said St. Paul strove that the Christians should
   pursue this simple ideal. And yet what difficulties were placed in his
   path by this very system of separate congregations! Parties and
   factions seemed forever to be forming, and celebrated teachers to be
   founding schools. The strong looked down with contempt upon the weak,
   and these in their turn condemned the strong. There were lawsuits about
   property which brought the brethren into evil repute amongst their
   heathen neighbours. The apostle intervened in each case with a
   peremptory yet friendly admonition to live in unity and practise mutual
   concession, modesty and humility. He came in course of time to attach
   the highest value to this congregational life as the most important
   school for the training of the individual. Here frequent occasions
   occur for the individual to forget himself, to become of no reputation,
   to retain the self-mastery by concession and patient endurance, to
   allow freedom of conscience to be ruled by love, and to further a
   brother's best interests in all things. But then the consequence of
   this is that each no longer has to fight his own battle, but feels
   himself supported, comforted and strengthened by the whole community.
   St. Paul revives the old picture of the body and the members, where
   each member is of importance for the body, and gives it a new and
   magnificent application and meaning. When one member suffers all
   suffer; when one is honoured all are glad; it is a duty to rejoice with
   them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Who can complain
   any longer that love has been narrowed? Surely it is Jesus Himself who
   imparts to this brotherhood this unexampled capacity for active love?
   St. Paul merely caught up this love that issued from Jesus, assigned to
   it a narrower sphere, and then multiplied it in the congregations which
   he founded.

   St. Paul's third and last task, the regulation of public worship, is
   almost entirely a part of the second. For Jesus there was naturally no
   such thing as a Christian public worship, for the simple reason that He
   founded no Church. He taught His disciples to pray both by themselves
   and together; and it is at least the beginning of such worship that one
   liturgical prayer, the Lord's Prayer, is ascribed to Him. The necessity
   of a special separate Christian form of worship made itself felt in the
   first congregation, otherwise there had been no continuance of the
   corporate life of the Church. Its two principal component
   parts--Baptism and the Lord's Supper--are signs of this very corporate
   life, intended to mark, the one the reception of the member into the
   community, the other the public meetings of the brethren. We must be
   careful to remember this when we come to examine St Paul's regulations.

   In regard to both sacraments St. Paul is no longer a creator. He simply
   accepts the tradition. The public worship of the Church was likewise in
   all probability modelled after the pattern of the Jewish synagogues.
   This much we may safely infer from the use of Aramaic words; only the
   enthusiasm of the congregations generate, at any rate at first, a far
   greater freedom and variety of forms. When an exaggerated, and at the
   same time selfish, form of pietism availed itself at Corinth of this
   freedom, to the destruction of all decency and order, St. Paul
   introduced a liturgical form of worship, and thereby also checked the
   desire of the women for emancipation. And for the same reason he was
   compelled to turn his attention to the common meals, which at times
   degenerated into pious drinking bouts, and to issue strict regulations
   as to the right and wrong way of partaking of the Supper of the Lord.
   In both cases we see how the good order of the life of the
   congregation, the edification of all instead of merely a few, the
   participation of the poorer brethren in the meals--all of them social
   considerations--were really decisive. It is more important that all
   should profit than that one or two should be caught up into the seventh
   heaven for a few moments. His digression on love, while treating of
   ceremonial regulations, is his grandest and completest statement of
   this truth.

   So far all is simple. The Church must have its outward symbols and its
   means of edification, and these things must be so regulated that they
   really conduce to the Church's benefit. And though we have here much
   that is new and that goes beyond what Jesus taught, yet the purely
   moral character of His Gospel is left inviolate. But through St. Paul a
   new value comes to be attached to acts of worship which cannot be
   harmonized with the teaching of Christ. At Corinth Christians suffered
   themselves to be baptized a second time for their deceased relations,
   and St. Paul refers to this in his defence of the resurrection. That is
   a heathen conception of baptism which turns it into an opus operatum,'
   and as such a guarantee for blessedness. Whilst in this case St. Paul
   simply accepts the superstitious view without saying any thing, he is
   himself actually the cause of it in the case of the Lord's Supper. To
   please his Greek converts he compares it to the Greek and Jewish
   sacrificial feasts. He is the first to contrast the holy food there
   consecrated with all other that is profane, and bids us see in the
   sickness and death of many Christians the judgment upon their profane
   participation in the holy meal. Now, that was an accommodation to Greek
   superstition which led to the establishment of a religion of a lower,
   less spiritual, nature as a direct consequence. But the mere fact that
   an extraordinary value is attached to ceremonial acts is in itself
   fatal. The conception of what constitutes a Christian is here enlarged
   in a very ominous fashion.

   The apostle, however, knew full well that besides participation in acts
   of ritual there is an altogether different manner in which Christians
   can have communion with God. Like Jesus, he exhorts his hearers and
   readers to offer up prayer and thanksgiving, to place their trust in
   God, to commit all their cares to Him, to accept everything, even
   affliction and suffering, as from His hand, to fear Him and to long for
   Him. The prayer of thanksgiving is above all else the sign of a genuine
   Christian for him: he that thus prays stands in a right relation to
   God. And the true sacrifice that is well pleasing to God is not any
   participation in worship, but the devotion of body and soul to His
   service. All those superstitious statements to which allusion has been
   made are in St. Paul's hands means to an end: in the one case, that of
   baptism, to prove the Christian hope; in the other, that of the Lord's
   Supper, to secure decency and good order in the congregation. It is not
   for St. Paul himself, but for the future history of his congregation,
   that the seeds of mischief have been sown. Henceforth participation in
   divine worship takes its place side by side with trust in God, and two
   kinds of religion, of communion with God, begin to compete with each
   other.

   Let us now review once more the whole of the Christian claim, as it is
   presented by St Paul, and compare it with that made in the first
   instance by Jesus, and we shall perceive that a great forward movement
   has taken place, and on the whole, it has preserved the direction
   imparted to it by Jesus. The Christian ideal has become richer, more
   varied and comprehensive, but it has not essentially changed, and it
   has not deteriorated. This we can best realize when we read all the
   passages in which St. Paul briefly summarizes the essentials of the new
   religion. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but
   the keeping of God's commandments is every thing. In Christ neither
   circumcision nor uncircumcision avails aught, but faith working through
   love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
   goodness, faith, gentleness, purity. But now remaineth faith, love,
   hope; but love is the greatest of these.

   The man who formulates his claim under these main headings understood
   Jesus better, grasped His meaning more fully, than any other that came
   after him. And this sympathetic comprehension of that which was
   essential in Christianity, enabled him to carry the teaching of Jesus
   from the Jews to the Gentiles, retaining the human and the eternal,
   while rejecting the merely national. This brilliant definition of the
   ideal is at the same time the best criticism of all that is imperfect
   in St. Paul's work. A great man deserves to be measured by his aims
   rather than by his achievements. He who would understand St Paul aright
   should seek to find him at the height of his ideal, and then he will
   discover that he is not very far distant from Jesus. But to present the
   claim of Jesus to the Gentiles and to maintain it in its entirety was
   indeed a very great achievement on the part of St. Paul. His work was
   assailed by two great enemies, which sought to compel him to descend
   from the height of his ideal and adapt himself to the imperfections of
   the uncultured masses: they were, on the one hand, the gross vices, on
   the other the enthusiasm of his heathen converts. The sinful life that
   was so often continued after conversion, the instances of incest and
   fornication, the lawsuits, the factions all seemed to cry with one
   accord: lower your standard, at least temporarily. On the other hand,
   the ascetic aberrations of some, the spiritualistic follies of others,
   the pride of the strong,' the striving to shake off all control and to
   cease from all work, appeared to be so many indications of the
   necessity of a law to check this want of discipline and sobriety. It is
   amazing to notice with what firmness and clearness St. Paul continues
   to travel along the path indicated to him by Jesus. As a wise educator
   he took circumstances into account and remembered that "le mieux est
   souvent l'ennemi du bien." He insisted on the appointment of Christian
   judges in order to put an end to the hateful spectacle of law suits
   between Christians in heathen courts. He excommunicated the immoral
   members of the Corinthian church and summoned them to repentance in
   order to cleanse the congregations of the worst stains. When he
   enumerates the different vices, he seems to say that certain deadly
   sins exclude a man more than others from the kingdom of God. As a
   preliminary measure against the enthusiasts he appoints a definite
   order of service. These examples might be multiplied, but nowhere do we
   find a single one which does not come under the category of purely
   educational and provisional measures. As to what constitutes a
   Christian, St. Paul's answer is always that of Jesus. He recognizes no
   subordinate form of Christianity for the masses. He ever reverts--often
   immediately after making some concession--to Jesus' whole claim on
   conduct and on character; the ideal ever remains above the real and yet
   ever within reach. He that is in Christ Jesus is a new creature: the
   old is passed away; all things have become new. And in spite of all the
   danger presented by enthusiasm the Christian stands secure in the
   freedom with which Christ has made him free.

   St. Paul had begun his missionary labours with the preaching of the
   judgment. He ends as he began. The preaching of the ideal and the lofty
   Christian claim both call for this conclusion. Whether a man is
   pressing forward towards the ideal, or lagging behind, is by no means a
   matter of indifference. It is a question of life and death. The return
   of Jesus, which all Christians await, will bring with it the judgment,
   when all, apostles and congregations alike, will have to render an
   account of the result of their lives, and receive praise or blame in
   equity and truth.

   With a mighty loud voice, just as one of the old Christian prophets,
   St. Paul cries out to his converts, "Maranatha, the Lord is at hand.
   Redeem the time. Your salvation is nearer than at first. The night is
   far spent, the day is at hand. Be ye not, brethren, in the darkness,
   that that day should overtake you as a thief in the night. Let us not
   sleep, but let us be sober. Let us put away the works of darkness, and
   put on the armour of light." That is the language of Jesus Himself.
   Just as in the claim that he makes, so in this message of the judgment,
   St. Paul has suffered himself to be inspired by his Master. And this is
   yet one other proof, that in spite of the ecclesiastical transformation
   which he effected, he wished to bring to the Gentiles Jesus and His
   Gospel alone.

   For us, of course, he has left great and important questions without an
   answer. What is the meaning of faith and grace and church, if in the
   last resort it is the word of judgment that decides the faith even of
   Christians? When St. Paul invited the Gentiles to enter the Christian
   community he promised them that the road to salvation should be simple
   and easy. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
   shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead,
   thou shalt be saved." When he disputed with the Judaizing party he
   persistently maintained the position that the believer was sure of his
   salvation and safe from the wrath that was to come. The Christian's joy
   and glory consisted, he declared, in the absence of all fear, and the
   assurance of God's everlasting love. That is why the Christian knows
   himself to be called and elected from all eternity. But the preaching
   of the judgment, with its alternating notes of fear and hope, and the
   uncertainty of salvation which it causes to arise in every soul,
   contradicts the high value attached by St Paul to the Church as well as
   to the individual's faith in his election.

   At times this idea of the value of the Church seems to dominate St.
   Paul to the exclusion of every other. Even in the extreme case of
   incest at Corinth lie hopes that the man's soul will be saved in the
   day of the Lord Jesus. If God punishes the thoughtless participation in
   the Lord's Supper with sickness and with death, then this punishment is
   merely a means of chastening lest we be condemned together with the
   world. He that has built badly upon the foundation of Jesus Christ
   shall nevertheless be saved "yet so as by fire." God's faithfulness is
   so great that He must complete what He has begun. The meaning of
   statements such as these appears to be none other than that all
   Christians should be saved even though, it is true, under different
   degrees of blessedness. And this is just where St. Paul's extremely
   high estimate of the external ecclesiastical organization finds its
   expression. But passages which point in a contrary direction are not
   wanting. If Israel be the type of the people of God, and if its fate
   have any typical meaning, then it is clear that church membership does
   not confer any certainty of salvation. Is it not written that God was
   not well pleased with many of those that passed through the sea and
   they were overthrown in the wilderness? The message of the judgment,
   therefore, when it is addressed to Christians, always takes the
   possibility of their failing to obtain salvation into account. Like the
   preaching of Jesus itself, it is meant to be taken seriously.

   The contradiction in which St. Paul stands with himself is a necessary
   one, and arises from his historical position. On the one hand he has to
   gain converts for the Church, and must exalt it as the only road to
   salvation, and therefore separates mankind into those within and those
   without the Church, as the saved and the lost. On the other hand, as a
   true disciple of Jesus, he is bound to destroy all confidence in the
   Church--even the Christian Church--and place the individual in the
   presence of eternity and God's judgment before everyone that does not
   do the right. Hence this hesitation and contradiction. St. Paul is an
   ecclesiastic and a Christian with a living personal faith. All the
   later teachers of the Church who were at once apologists of the
   ecclesiastical institutions and disciples of the Gospel, have followed
   in the apostle's contradictory footsteps.

   Yet this yea' and nay' cannot be St. Paul's last word. Salvation as he
   understands it is only attained where the individual has reached the
   certainty that he is God's child personally and that nothing can
   separate him from God's love. This certainty is as far removed from
   confidence in church membership, as it is from the alternating fear and
   hope inspired by the thought of the day of judgment. It is something
   purely personal, something that the individual must experience for
   himself and that none other can give him, because it is only true for
   himself.

   It is experienced as he gazes upon the Cross, the revelation of God's
   love; as he places his trust in God's faithfulness, of which he has
   made trial in the course of his own life, and as he listens for the
   voice of God's Spirit which testifies to our spirit that we are the
   children of God. It was the final aim of all St Paul's missionary
   labours that each convert won over by him should reach the goal to
   which Jesus had brought the disciples in the Lord's Prayer, wherein
   they receive all things as from God's hand and are safe for time and
   for eternity in His fatherly love.

   St. Paul brought Jesus to the Gentiles as their Redeemer who uplifts
   them to the new life with God. He attained that which Jesus Himself
   desired, but in his own, even somewhat abnormal, manner.

   In the first place, his aim is so to bring home to his hearers their
   sinfulness and powerlessness and their liability to the judgment, that
   every road to safety by their own efforts is cut off and only the way
   of faith remains open to them. This may be called St. Paul's
   methodistic presentment of faith.

   In the next place, he does not present Jesus the Redeemer in all His
   life and suffering as the object of faith, but only the Cross and
   Resurrection of the Son of God. This is St. Paul's methodistic
   presentment of the Cross.

   The form which St. Paul's missionary preaching took was the result, in
   the first instance, of his own personal experience. He himself became a
   Christian in an altogether abnormal fashion after having been a Rabbi
   and a persecutor. But the really decisive factor was after all his
   extraordinarily powerful ecclesiastical interest which impelled him so
   to narrow the way to salvation that it led through the Church alone,
   whose mark was faith in the crucified Son of God. But though the
   methods were changed, the Gospel itself remained as yet the same. Nay,
   rather, the new machinery proved really effective in bringing Jesus to
   the heathen. In his representation of the promise, the ideal and the
   aim of redemption, St. Paul is simply Jesus' disciple, and indeed the
   profoundest and most powerful of all.

   But St. Paul is likewise the first to have entered into the forms,
   ideas, and conceptions of the Greeks at innumerable points of his
   missionary labours. He did not merely bodily transplant the Gospel from
   one place to another. He saw that the new plant took root and
   acclimatized itself. There are far more points of contact between the
   Greeks and St. Paul's practice than between them and his theology,
   which is embedded rather in Jewish ideas. But the great achievement is
   this, that the same man took up that which was Greek and that which was
   Jewish fused the two elements and then entirely subordinated them to a
   third, the Christian, in Jesus as he understood Him. For it is not the
   amalgamation of Hellenism and Judaism, but the conquest of both for
   Jesus, that assigns St. Paul his high place in the world's history.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE PAULINE THEOLOGY.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XIV.

  THE PRESUPPOSITIONS.

   THE Pauline theology is an entirely new phenomenon on the soil of
   Christianity. In the early Church at Jerusalem, isolated theological
   propositions had been set up which had arisen in the course of
   reflection about Jesus and in controversy with the Jews. They spoke of
   the Son of God and of the Messiah, of the wonderful call of Jesus and
   of His vicarious death. But nowhere do we find even the feeling of the
   necessity for any clear co-ordination of all these thoughts. The
   Jews--even the learned Jews--never felt any desire to build up systems
   of doctrine. There never existed any systematic theology of the
   synagogue. The Rabbis taught the explanation of single passages, the
   comparison with other passages, the formation of syllogisms, and also
   the allegorical method of exegesis. The expositions of St Paul in Rom.
   iv. and Gal. iii. are good instances of Jewish methods of exegesis. As
   soon, however, as St Paul leaves the ground of Scripture his methods
   are no longer rabbinical. He would not, however, really have been able
   to learn anything even from the learned Jews of Alexandria. All his
   knowledge of Greek philosophy did not make a philosopher of Philo after
   all. His business is biblical exegesis after the manner of the Rabbis,
   only from the point of view of the Greek teachers. At all events, St
   Paul was so imperfectly acquainted with Greek philosophy itself, that
   it had no influence over him, and that which he created in his theology
   is no philosophy either.

   St Paul's education at the feet of the Rabbis certainly proved to be of
   great importance for him. Here he learned to know and understand the
   Sacred Book, learned rabbinical methods of interpretation, and many
   thoughts and conceptions of contemporary Jewish theology. Henceforward
   he could command the resources of a trained jurist. His later doctrines
   as to the annulling of the law and justification by faith are proof of
   this. Here it is that he heard men speak of Adam, of the Fall, of the
   death of all men. In fact, generally speaking, his interest in sin and
   the avoidance of sin first awakens in the school of the Rabbis. It is
   probably to the same source that he owes his initiation into
   apocalyptic mysteries. One single circumstance, however, should warn us
   against forming an exaggerated estimate of this rabbinical influence;
   it is the use St Paul makes of the Septuagint. He takes no interest in
   the Hebrew text. In his arguments he uses words of the Septuagint to
   which nothing corresponds in the Hebrew. The influence of his masters
   cannot therefore have extended very far.

   The decisive factor in the genesis of St Paul's theology was his
   personal experience, his conversion on the road to Damascus.

   Henceforward his estimate of things was an entirely different one. All
   that had before seemed to him great and important, was now of little
   worth. He saw everything in a new light. His whole being was radically
   changed. Rarely, indeed, has such an entire alteration taken place in
   any man. Previous to his conversion, the law had been his chief
   delight; he had been contented with himself and vainglorious; he had
   found himself without fault, and trusted optimistically in his own
   strength. Afterwards arose the consciousness that he had been Messiah's
   enemy and persecutor of the cause of God. Hence mistrust and even
   condemnation of the whole of his previous life. Then the crucified
   Jesus had been a fanatic and a blasphemer, overtaken by a just
   punishment; now this same sufferer on the cross was the Messiah, the
   Redeemer, the Son of God. So decisive an experience, producing such an
   entire reversal of all values, was bound to become an unparalleled
   incentive to thought and inquiry. To think now meant to re-think. The
   convert's first duty, the first point that he was bound to clear up for
   himself, was that during the whole of his previous life he had been
   pursuing a wrong course, and that now he was in the right one. Paul
   changed his previous thoughts so entirely that it is lost labour
   nowadays to attempt to trace his course back to the ideas which he
   entertained before his conversion. In fact, we are completely ignorant
   as to what ideas he exactly had at that time. One thing alone is
   certain, that he abandoned those which he had and buried them out of
   sight. The apostle had one theology and one alone, and that is a
   Christian one. Each single word of his epistles flows from his
   Christian consciousness. There is no natural theology for him
   personally, no presupposition of sin, death, and the judgment which
   preceded his knowledge of Jesus. It was the knowledge of Jesus, on the
   contrary, which dictated to him the shape and fashion of all his
   presuppositions. If, in spite of this, we appear to derive a contrary
   impression from whole portions of his letters, then this is to be
   traced to the second source of his theology--his apologetic interest.

   For he that was converted in so violent a fashion is now missionary to
   the Gentiles. The judgment is near at hand: his task is to save out of
   heathenism as many as are predestined to salvation. The theology which
   is presented to us in his letters is neither that of the Jewish Rabbi
   nor yet that of the convert of Damascus reflecting on his previous and
   his present state, but it is that of the missionary. What he did was
   not merely to turn his thoughts to account for the practical aims of
   his mission, but, as far as we know them, he formed them during and for
   his mission. St Paul's line of thought may best be termed Christian
   missionary theology from an eschatological point of view. Why else
   should he have employed the Greek language and Greek forms and
   conceptions, and thrust the really rabbinical train of thought so
   completely into the background? Or why else, again, should he have
   attached so great an importance to conversion, which divides, or ought
   to divide, the life of every Christian into two halves? But if the
   Pauline theology is a missionary theology, then it is the theology of
   an apologist, the first great system of Christian apologetics--compared
   with which all the apologetic thoughts of the early Church at Jerusalem
   are but as modest preliminaries.

   In the next place, the great twofold divisions of this system of
   apologetics is the result of St Paul's peculiar position between
   Gentiles, Jews, and Judaizing Christians. It is first a theology of
   redemption the basis of his missionary preaching to the Greeks; and
   secondly, anti-Jewish apologetics--the defence of that same preaching
   against Judaizers and Jews. His theological work, however, is not
   exhausted in his tireless efforts to seek and to save the lost and to
   beat back the foes from without. He aims likewise at a theology for
   mature Christians. He seeks to penetrate to the depths of the thoughts
   about God contained in the Holy Scriptures and in the revelation of
   Christ. It is a Christian gnosis which has penetrated even into the
   world of spirits and into the divine mysteries. We must now attempt to
   present these three great facts of his system of thought separately,
   though they frequently, of course, intersect and blend with each other.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XV.

  THE PAULINE SOTERIOLOGY.

   ST PAUL understood the word salvation' in a very wide and comprehensive
   sense--not merely as liberation from evil or from sin, but as salvation
   out of this present evil world into the good world which in a sense is
   future but has now already begun. Hence the simplest division of our
   subject will be:--This present evil world and its powers; the crisis;
   Jesus the Saviour; the salvation of believers.

   This Present Evil World and its Powers.

   In his missionary preaching St Paul began with the message of the
   judgment that is to come. Under the lurid light of the day of judgment
   he revealed the entire destruction of his hearers. The theoretical
   basis of this preaching is a radically pessimistic view of the whole
   world, which takes no account of the difference between Jew and
   Gentile, a pessimism which extends to the whole human race, and even
   beyond it to nature and the supersensuous world itself.

   In the first place, the whole human race, the whole of creation, is
   doomed to death. Since Adam, death has seized upon the sovereignty and
   reigns supreme. It has found its way everywhere. There are no
   exceptions. That is not a matter of course, it is unnatural. Man's will
   is to live. Hence he feels his mortality as a hard slavery which causes
   him to sigh in deepest melancholy.

   Whence comes this doom of death, mysterious and yet certain?

   The Jew Paul answers, from sin. The wages of sin is death. Since Adam's
   sin death goes in and out amongst men like a hereditary disease; but at
   the same time it is the consequence of the sin of each individual. For
   all men have sinned and therefore all die. The universality of sin
   follows as a simple inference from the universality of death. St Paul
   is here thinking, in the first place, of individuals. They are free
   agents--freely have they sinned and so incurred the penalty of death.
   Thus far St Paul has not diverged from the teaching of the Rabbis. But
   he soon leaves that teaching behind him when he declares that it is not
   in the power of the individual's free will to accept or to reject sin.
   Sin has acquired a sovereign power over the human race since Adam.
   There is a kingdom of sin, and that is humanity itself. We all, Jews
   and Gentiles, are under sin. There is a law of sin in our members to
   which we are subject. Hereby St Paul declares the necessity of sin for
   all men, and not merely its actual universality. He gives expression to
   this thought of the necessity of sin in opposition to the rabbinical
   doctrine, led thereto perhaps by a deeper insight into the innermost
   life of the soul and the play of motives, still more perhaps by his
   apologetic. For this thought is a necessary postulate for the doctrine
   of salvation through Christ, which might appear to be superfluous as
   long as merely the universality of sin were maintained and exceptions
   were conceivable.

   But what is the origin of sin, with its all-compelling power?

   St Paul gives two answers to this question, the difference between
   which is not explained in his letters.

   1. The whole of mankind is involved in the fall of the first man.
   Through the first man, Adam, came sin, and as its consequence death,
   unto all men. That is the Jewish theory built up by the Rabbis on the
   foundation of Gen. iii. Its greatness consists in the fact that it is
   an attempt to give expression to the thought of the solidarity of the
   whole human race. The first man is made to appear before God as the
   representative of the whole race, and his fall is therefore accounted
   as the fall of the race. But the juridical and, as it were, historical
   form of this theory is unsatisfactory. Sin enters from without by
   chance, without any inner necessity, and obtains sovereign power by the
   commission of one single and accidental fault. And this fault of the
   single individual has then to be placed by the supreme judge to the
   debit account of all his descendants, as though each one of them had
   committed it himself. Such a juridical appreciation of facts harmonizes
   with Jewish modes of thought, but with no deeper sentiment. It was more
   for the sake of antithesis, too, that St Paul made use of this theory.
   He wished by means of it to establish clearly the universal
   significance of Christ.

   2. Sin clings to man's bodily nature. All men are flesh, and sin dwells
   in the flesh. Man is sold under sin because he is flesh. Nothing good
   dwells in him, that is, in his flesh. So closely are the body and sin
   connected that St Paul creates the expression "body of sin." This
   theory is neither Jewish nor Greek, but an original creation of the
   apostle's. The Jewish starting-point is, it is true, clear enough: the
   opinion that the human body is weak, impotent and corruptible, keeping
   men in entire separation from God. Jewish, too, is the opposition
   between flesh and spirit, instead of between body and soul, as the
   Greeks say. But the pessimism which we read in St Paul's sentences is
   by no means Jewish. The conviction of the weakness of the flesh and of
   the existence of evil motives or of the evil heart in man never
   suffered the Jews to abandon their confidence in their own strength and
   righteousness. Side by side with the feeling of sinfulness, the most
   characteristic features of Jewish piety are self-satisfaction and
   boasting on account of good works. Words such as "I know that in me,
   i.e., in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing" must have had an altogether
   repulsive sound for Jewish ears; and Paul is very well aware how he
   tramples the optimism and self-satisfaction of his fellow-countrymen
   under foot when he uses them. And when he goes so far as to say "The
   flesh lusteth against the spirit," he appears to take the flesh as the
   principle of sin and sensuality, just as matter is the seat of evil for
   the Greeks. Here he is ranging himself on the side of the dualism of
   the later philosophy which is ultimately derived from Plato. He draws
   nearer to the Greeks, just as Philo did before. But for all that St
   Paul does not turn into a Greek. There is an effective barrier to this
   conversion--the firm hold which he has, as a Jew, of the belief in the
   creation, which surfers no second principle to exist by the side of
   God, but derives the flesh as well as everything else from the Creator
   of the universe. There is besides this a second barrier: his belief as
   a Christian that the world and all that is in it--the flesh therefore
   included--belong to God and those that are His, and that it is just the
   flesh in which the Spirit is predestined to lodge. Sin does not
   originate in the flesh--it takes up its abode therein as a visitor from
   outside, just as the Spirit is likewise to come in from without and
   dwell therein. It is evident, therefore, that this theory of St Paul's
   upon which he bases the necessity of sin is his own work. Hard personal
   struggles and sad experience of the power of the senses may very well
   have supported the theory. The decisive factor was the destruction of
   all his self-confidence, of all trust in his own natural powers through
   faith in Jesus the Redeemer. Complete pessimism as regards the body is
   the necessary converse of the optimistic trust in Christ and His
   Spirit.

   Did St Paul himself reconcile his two theories of the origin of sin?
   Not in his letters--e.g. in 1 Cor. xv. death is derived from Adam's
   fall and after wards from Adam's earthly nature, without any attempt at
   reconciling the two statements. And the same applies therefore to sin.
   But can we rest content with this conclusion? Surely we must choose
   between the two. The connection between flesh and sin is either
   antecedent or subsequent to the fall. In the first case it is cause; in
   the latter, effect.

   Here we stand face to face with the ultimate questions of theological
   speculation. The gnostics soon afterwards occupied themselves with
   these matters. In fact, we here enter upon the domain of the Pauline
   gnosis and leave the field of thought covered by his missionary
   preaching. St Paul did not shirk these ultimate questions, but he came
   to no satisfactory conclusion, and contented himself with answers which
   are contradictory.

   One can distinguish the germs of three theories.

   1. The theory of evolution.--This present earthly world is related to
   the future spiritual world as the lower stage to the higher. First the
   natural (psychical), then the spiritual (pneumatic), first Adam, that
   is, of the earth, then He that is of heaven--Christ. St Paul develops
   this theory in 1 Cor. xv. for a definite purpose. He wants to make it
   perfectly plain to his Greek converts that the resurrection body will
   not suffer from the defects of the present body. Hence he contrasts it
   as the higher and the perfect with the lower and the imperfect. In so
   doing he adopts the story of the creation of man in Gen. ii., and thus
   obtains a theory which can easily be reconciled with the belief in the
   divine creation. It is full of a magnificent optimism. Onwards and
   upwards, step by step, leads the road. When the thought of the
   education of the human race obtained a footing in the Church towards
   the end of the second century, then men were glad to invoke the
   authority of St Paul. But as sin and the flesh are outside of St Paul's
   scope altogether in these passages in First Corinthians, they can be of
   no real importance for the ultimate questions.

   2. The theory of degeneration.--Not only man but all nature is fallen
   from a state of glory into a state of corruption. The foundation is the
   story of the fall in Gen. iii. combined with the opposition between the
   spirit (before the fall) and the flesh (after the fall). Jewish legends
   (the books of Adam) and gnostic and Catholic theologians anticipate and
   continue this line of thought. In Paul himself we only find a few
   scattered indications, which all, however, converge in this direction.
   The present evil world cannot as such be ascribed to God. God created
   it, and it was very good. Did not God, according to the Bible story,
   create the world and mankind in glory as a world of free spirits? Adam
   and the whole cosmos were confined within the bounds of matter (sa'rx)
   as a punishment for the fall. True, the flesh was created by God, but
   only as a means of chastisement, and that was death which according to
   Gen. ii. 17 was to follow on the very day of man's disobedience (cf.
   Rom. vii. 11: "Sin . . . slew me"). That, again, was nakedness (2 Cor.
   v. 4), of which man became conscious immediately after the fall: he had
   lost his former tabernacle, the body of his glory. It was the coming
   short of the glory of God (Rom. iii. 23), that is, of that body of
   glory created in God's image with which man had been clothed in
   Paradise. Mortality is the punishment for the fall from the world of
   spirits through the disobedience of the first man, and the groaning and
   travailing of the whole creation betokens the longing for the lost
   Paradise. It is only this theory that harmonizes with every step of St
   Paul's argument and completely explains his position with regard to the
   flesh which is God's creation and yet was not from the very first. But
   these subjects did not enter into his preaching to his new Gentile
   converts. And thus we can readily understand that this theory is only
   incidentally mentioned in his letters.

   3. The theory of evil spirits. St Paul once mentions incidentally (2
   Cor. xi. 5) that the serpent beguiled Eve--according to the Jewish
   tradition it was to commit adultery. This passage implies that the
   devil should be regarded as the cause of the whole of the evil
   condition of the world; nor is the absence of all mention of Satan in
   the chief passages in the Epistle to the Romans any argument to the
   contrary, for the place of Satan is there taken by a kind of
   mythological figure, an abstraction, sin. St Paul's thoughts always
   cross over to the spirit-world ultimately; proof of this can be found
   in other Epistles besides those to the Colossians and Ephesians. Even
   in the Epistles to the Romans and in First Corinthians we read of
   principalities, authorities and powers in the upper regions which would
   separate us from God, and which must be abolished as God's enemies
   before the end of the world. Now, as everything proceeds from God, and
   therefore likewise the angels, there must have been a rebellion in the
   spirit world and a falling away of some. On one occasion--it is in the
   passage relating to the head-dress of women during divine service--he
   alludes to the fall of the angels mentioned in Gen. vi. when the sons
   of God sought the daughters of men in marriage. On another, when
   speaking of the lawsuits of Christians with each other, he reminds the
   Corinthians that they, the saints, shall some day sit in judgment over
   the angels. All this presupposes apocryphal Jewish traditions as to the
   occurrences in the spirit world. Thus the fall has extended even to the
   world above, and so the picture of the present evil world is completed.
   All demons are of course counted amongst these fallen spirits, and as
   the whole of the heathen world--its religion and its immorality--is
   ascribed to their agency, this gnostic theory obtains an immediate
   practical significance. Satan is the God of this world--i.e., of the
   kingdom of sin--which is manifested, especially amongst the heathen, in
   so lurid a light.

   St Paul's pessimism culminates in this last sentence concerning the God
   of this world. The view at which he finally arrives is that this
   present evil world was not originally so created by God, but has only
   become such through the fall, and that it is now governed by fallen
   angels, powers hostile to God. Various reasons led the apostle to form
   this awful opinion: contemporary Jewish thought and feeling, his own
   bitter experience, his realization of the darkness of the heathen world
   in which he worked, and of the lurid light cast by the approaching day
   of judgment. The apocalypse of Ezra shows us how strong a tendency the
   Jews had in times of national disaster to entertain such pessimistic
   views of the world's future. And yet, what a difference there is! For
   Ezra, there are still some righteous, few though they be in number,
   whereas St Paul writes, "None is righteous; no, not one," and "in me
   dwelleth no good thing." The reason for this difference is evident. St
   Paul's pessimism is intended to serve his apologetic. It is because
   Jesus alone is the Redeemer, that the world has to be presented as
   irredeemably wicked, and every other road to salvation closed to men.
   It is not the actual recognition of the greatness of sin and the
   impotence of man which is at the root of this theory, but faith in
   Christ necessitates these pessimistic postulates as presuppositions.
   There is a convincing proof of this statement. The pessimistic view of
   the world no longer holds good for the Christian, or at any rate only
   in a modified form. The Christian lives in God's world, and he is lord
   thereof. The theory of sin is an apologetic means for the awakening of
   faith; when once this end has been attained, it gives way to other
   conceptions.

   It is evident that the apostle's apologetic is very far removed from
   the preaching of Jesus. Jesus was no pessimist, and yet He surely knew
   what was in man, and knew that no one was good. Children and birds and
   flowers were His delight. He rejoiced in God's love and in the good men
   whom He met. St Paul first violently extinguished every other light in
   the world so that Jesus might then shine in it alone. This exaggeration
   of the truth in the service of apologetics was the more fatal that the
   Church soon began to turn this pessimism to good account.

   The Crisis. Jesus the Saviour.

   In the scheme of St Paul's missionary preaching the message of the
   judgment and of death is followed by that of the crucified and risen
   Son of God. Here we have the heart and centre of the Pauline theology.
   Here we can see more clearly than in many other cases into the genesis
   of his creed. It goes right back to the deep personal experience
   connected with the vision of the risen Christ. And this experience
   imparts its personal character to the theory, producing an impression
   of strength and truth. But the necessity arises for presenting it in an
   apologetic form--it is recast from a theological point of view, and it
   is only now that it assumes the outer form with which we are familiar.

   What did Paul learn of Jesus? For what was he indebted to Him?

   He did not know Jesus upon earth, and only learnt some facts of His
   life by hearsay. His personal acquaintance with Jesus was only brought
   about by means of the vision on the road to Damascus. Here he saw the
   heavenly Jesus, the risen Lord, the Spirit, and was called by Him to be
   an apostle. Hence the Resurrection of Jesus comes to be a fact of very
   far-reaching influence for him. Death's reign is at an end.
   Eternity--the spirit world--enters in triumph into the world of sense.
   The morrow of the new day has dawned. Now, as the call at Damascus is
   the starting-point for the whole of St Paul's new life, the
   resurrection has really become the foundation of his religion for him.

   A new light is forthwith shed upon the crucifixion likewise. Before
   this the Cross was the greatest stumbling-block, as it apparently
   refuted the claim of Jesus to be the Messiah. But no sooner was He
   accepted as the risen Lord than it came to appear as something divine.
   It was the means of salvation. By the sacrifice on the Cross God's
   message of love and grace was conveyed to man. These seem to us to be
   theological reflections. But the sense of pardon and blessedness which
   Paul derived from the Cross was a real personal experience. Henceforth
   it is for him the fixed centre round which all history turns, the
   source of all comfort, of all peace with God. St Paul sees the motto
   "God for us" written in great letters over the Cross.

   There can be no doubt, therefore, that this experience is the root of
   St Paul's Christology. The articles of his creed, however, are a great
   deal more than the expression of this experience. In them as they have
   now come down to us we can hear the Christian apologist speaking. One
   instance above all others will serve to make this point clear. As the
   result of his experience St Paul might have said: "As for me, it was at
   the foot of the cross that I first learnt what God's love meant." But
   instead of this we read in the letters: "No man can attain to the
   certainty of this atonement save in the cross alone." That is the
   language of the apologist. Hence the extension to all men, the proof of
   necessity, the exclusion of all other possibilities. This applies to
   al] St Paul's statements about the crucifixion and resurrection: how
   much more to the development of the doctrine concerning the Son of God,
   where there is no personal experience to build upon.

   The Cross, the Resurrection, the Son of God--these are three new great
   starting-points in the Pauline Christology. In the Cross he proclaims
   God's love, in the Resurrection the dawn of the world that is to come,
   in the Son of God the pattern for all Christians. Since St Paul wrote,
   these are the three subjects of all Christology.

   The Proof of the Love of God.

   The first portion of St Paul's apologetic had presented the Gentiles
   before the judgment-seat of God in all their sin and moral degradation.
   The wrath of God was all that they could expect. There was no means of
   escaping from this wrath by their own power or by sacrifices of their
   own. And then, when they were thus distressed and despairing, he brings
   them this surprising proof of God's love. Even before St Paul, the
   death of Jesus had become the object of theological thought. This had
   been caused, above all, by the controversy with the Jews. As the Jews
   interpreted the death of Jesus as a divine punishment, the Christians
   opposed them with an explanation of that death by which the innocence
   of Jesus was securely established. His death was, it is true, a
   punishment--thus far they acknowledged their opponents to be in the
   right--but not for His own sin, but for the guilt of the Jewish people.
   It came to be a definite article of the Christian creed that Jesus died
   for the sins of those that repent and set their hopes upon His death.

   When once Paul became a Christian, he accepted this explanation. All
   that he did was to add additional conceptions of sacrifice,
   propitiation and redemption, employing the terms of the professional
   theologians. The theory of sacrifice is repeated in countless
   variations in his letters, now in a legal, now in a ceremonial form,
   and again in both together. It was really through St Paul that the
   thought of Jesus' death, of sin, and of the atonement for sin, first
   came to be inseparably connected. St Paul's greatness is not, however,
   constituted by this rationalism--for such we must term the arithmetical
   manipulation of the death of Jesus--but by an entirely new appreciation
   of the Crucifixion.

   In the first place, he removed the death of Jesus from its narrow
   Jewish setting and placed it in the centre of the world's history. He
   attached so immense a significance to this propitiatory sacrifice that
   all petty legal categories were felt to be comparatively unimportant.
   Jesus did not die for the sins of a few Jews alone, but for all
   mankind; nay, more, even for the world of spirits. The explanation of
   this fact is that no ordinary righteous man died on the Cross, but the
   Son of God, the highest object of the divine love. What need after this
   for any other sacrifices, means of propitiation, acts of penitence--in
   fact, of any human works? The propitiatory death of Jesus occupies the
   place of all that was ever done to gain God's grace. There was nothing
   left to be done by men, or even by angels, than just to accept this
   propitiatory sacrifice. But in the next place St Paul's interpretation
   of this sacrifice started from above and not from below. It is not that
   a sacrifice is to be brought to God which is to change His wrath into
   mercy. Such had been men's thoughts before, but God is the agent, the
   sacrificer, the propitiator: and the motive of His action is love, and
   nothing but love. That was an entire reversal of the usual point of
   view, and we find it clearly and consciously employed by St Paul in all
   the chief passages of his letters: God was in Christ reconciling the
   world unto Himself. God gave His own Son for us, to show us that He
   would give us all. God shows His love for us in that while we were yet
   sinners Christ died for us. By thus proclaiming aloud the love of God
   the apostle really does away with the necessity for all legal and
   propitiatory thoughts. If the conception of sacrifice still remains, it
   is transformed into a mere symbol. It is not God who loves us that
   needs the sacrifice, but we men need the certainty that the act of
   propitiation has taken place. At bottom, the death on the Cross is not
   a means of propitiating God, but a symbol of His grace for men.

   It is true, however, that the influence of Jewish modes of thought
   again makes itself felt here in the exaggerated estimate of the single
   historical fact. As before the whole process of man's moral degradation
   was derived from Adam's fall, accompanied by sin and death, so now all
   God's grace is gathered together from the whole course of history, and
   concentrated in the death of Jesus. Paul actually denies that God ever
   pardoned before the death of Jesus; at any rate, he maintains that it
   was only now that His grace was made manifest. Had he not in his
   apologetic zeal already extinguished every other light in the world?
   This new light must now therefore illuminate the whole world and the
   whole course of history both forwards and backwards. This exaltation of
   the one historical fact was not so dangerous for Paul, who expected the
   end of the world in the near future, as for later ages, which were
   thereby nothing less than robbed of their faith in the living God. It
   must, moreover, be remembered that the historical fact can never be
   intelligible without the theological interpretation. One of two results
   is bound to follow. Either rationalism gains the upper hand, and
   defines the necessity of the death of Jesus, attaching a legal or
   ceremonial value thereto; or the paradoxical and the miraculous
   elements prevail, and then there remains nothing but faith in the
   unintelligible mystery. Both results can be traced in St Paul's
   writings. The same man boasts of the folly of the Cross, and defines
   the ways of the wisdom of God.

   Here the old and the new lie side by side. To the former belong the
   theory of sacrifice and the rationalism, which attains to its position
   of influence in the Church through none other than Paul himself, to the
   latter the paradox that God's love is manifested in the Cross. Now this
   statement, when properly understood, annuls the theory of sacrifice,
   and approximates to the thought of Jesus that even death and suffering
   come out of God's hand. But when St Paul narrows the statement,
   maintaining that God's grace is visible only in the Cross, then he
   departs from Jesus' teaching, who saw God's love poured out upon
   mankind in all that He gave them both in trouble and in joy.

   The reason of this is that St Paul, as an apologist, is obliged to
   narrow the road that leads to God's love, so that it must perforce pass
   through the Christian faith alone, and therein he sets no good example
   to the Church.

   The Dawn of the Coming World.

   The Resurrection of Jesus was an unparalleled event; the sovereignty of
   death was at an end; he that had ears could hear the first peal
   sounding for the general resurrection to usher in the world that was to
   come. From the invisible world Jesus stepped forth once more into the
   world of phenomena, and so testified still more clearly to the fact
   that the new world was close at hand.

   St Paul, who was himself vouchsafed an appearance of the risen Christ,
   grasped the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus: the old world is
   passing away, the new world is at hand. Thereby the Christian hope
   received a mighty accession of strength. Again and again we have these
   two statements coupled together. As surely as God awakened Jesus so
   surely will He awaken us. But such were the thoughts of the earliest
   Christians as well. What is new in St Paul's conception of the
   resurrection is the meaning that he discovers in it for this present
   life.

   The positive and negative elements seemed to him to be necessarily
   combined in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. The Son of God had
   come into this world only to die because of it, and to succumb to its
   evil powers. But no sooner was He awakened from the dead than His life
   began in the world beyond, the true world.

   All this seemed to Paul to be typical and symbolical, and that in very
   many ways. Did it not imply that man had bidden farewell to all the
   former world, and that the new world had already dawned? Death, sin,
   the flesh, the descent from Adam--their power was broken, their reign
   was at an end, But the new sun was fast rising, and its rays were
   already illuminating the Christian life.

   To express this in theological language was, however, rather more
   difficult. Again we have an historical fact--to be sure, it was a
   miracle--to start with. Now, was this miracle to imply the transition
   from the old world to the new? It was evident that death, sin, and the
   flesh still continued in the world. The Resurrection of Jesus did not
   put an end to all this. Nevertheless, St Paul persists in connecting
   the crisis in the world's history with this one fact.

   The end of death is, of course, one of the things to be awaited. But
   flesh and sin are to be laid aside. How can that be done, seeing that
   Paul himself still lives in the flesh, and very many Christians still
   in sin? St Paul gives two explanations, and the one contradicts the
   other.

   On the one hand, as he looks at life as it really is, he takes refuge
   in ethical theory, in the categorical imperative. Christ's death and
   resurrection ought to imply for all Christians the death of their own
   sin and selfishness, and the beginning of the new life. On all
   occasions St Paul insisted clearly and impressively on this imperative.

   On the other hand, his metaphysical pessimism impels him to accept a
   theory which brings the powers of nature on the scene, and maintains
   that flesh and sin have been overcome in the tragedy of Jesus' death.
   Seeing that men have been described by him as under the dominion of
   evil powers of nature, there is no room for a purely ethical solution.
   Somehow or other these natural powers must be vanquished and rendered
   innocuous by the death of Christ. This St Paul really did maintain, but
   never in a very convincing fashion.

   As a matter of fact these theories are concerned with the other-worldly
   character of Christianity. That beautiful passage in Colossians: "Seek
   the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of
   God . . . . your life is hid with Christ in God," tells us what is St
   Paul's object. The Christian is to have his gaze turned towards the
   future with eager longing and zeal for righteousness; he is even now to
   be a citizen of the heavenly country. Here St Paul quite coincides with
   Jesus, only that Jesus points to the kingdom of heaven that lies in
   front, while St Paul goes back to the resurrection of Jesus and bases
   his argument upon that fact. In the apostle's insistence on the
   beginning of the Christian's new life even here and now, we may find a
   further parallel to the belief which Jesus entertained--it is true,
   only for a time--in the actual commencement of the kingdom of heaven.
   And yet, even here we can trace the prejudicial influence of St Paul's
   apologetic interest. He is compelled to derive postulates from this one
   fact to which nothing corresponds in reality. It is, to be sure,
   nothing to be wondered at that he to whom the appearance was vouchsafed
   should exaggerate the value of Jesus' resurrection. Nevertheless it was
   a misfortune for the new religion, and in contradiction with the
   progressive spirit of Jesus, that the one miracle in the past thereby
   became the foundation for Christianity.

   The Son of God who came down from Heaven.

   St Paul was not acquainted with the historic Christ during His life
   here on earth. He merely heard men speak of Him. He thus became
   familiar with all manner of instances of His love, humility, and
   kindness, and apparently he told his Greek converts of them. These,
   however, did not form the basis of his theology. The most important
   element in that are the titles. The knowledge of the titles and of
   their value compensates for the lack of personal knowledge. How could
   it be otherwise? If one knows Jesus oneself, all titles are inadequate;
   if one does not, then one just extracts from the titles all that is
   capable of extraction.

   St Paul had three titles from which to choose--all three had been
   commonly used of Jesus in the earliest Christian community: Messiah,
   Son of Man, Son of God.

   The title of Messiah--the Greeks said Christ--is naturally retained by
   St Paul, were it but for the Jews' sake. He employs the word in the old
   eschatological sense, as the Lord of the kingdom of heaven that is at
   hand, and also, with but little of its original meaning, as a mere
   title of Jesus. He nowhere attaches any new signification to it. He
   himself awaits the advent of Messiah, earnestly looks forward to the
   day of Messiah, and considers all Christians to be living in
   expectation of Messiah's revelation. His idea of the Messiah is that of
   the apocalypses. He conquers Antichrist and vanquishes Beliar;
   doubtless He is surrounded by all the hosts of heaven just as He is
   represented in the apocalyptic pictures. And he likewise expects the
   judgment of Messiah when God shall grant Him to sit upon His
   judgment-seat. But this Jesus that is yet to come is of almost less
   importance for St Paul than the Jesus who has come already. Besides
   thus looking forward into the future we find him--more and more
   frequently--looking back upon the Cross and the Resurrection. Besides,
   he feels that the word Christ has a strange sound for Greek ears, and
   conveys no clear meaning. He therefore introduces two Greek titles in
   its stead: Lord and Saviour. The word Lord is introduced as an
   equivalent for Messiah into the official formulae used at baptism;
   Jesus the Lord, no longer Jesus the Christ. Such is the shortest of
   these formulas. The word Saviour, or helper, is intended to explain to
   the Christians what they are to expect in the coming Messiah: the
   eschatological sense still largely prevails. He is not yet the Saviour
   upon earth. Now, as both Lord and Saviour were attributes universally
   applied to gods and kings, both these titles introduced by St Paul came
   to be the means, contrary to his intention, of separating Jesus
   altogether from the Messianic picture and of bringing Him nearer to the
   dignity of the Godhead.

   The second title--Son of Man--St Paul abandoned, as it could only have
   denoted Jesus' human descent for the Greeks--quite contrary to the
   sense of the Hebrew word. But instead he calls Jesus the Man.' It is
   possible that he intended this as the right Greek translation of the
   oldest title. "The man from heaven" would then be the last reminiscence
   of the passage in Daniel where the "Son of man is expected from
   heaven."

   Unfortunately we cannot determine with sufficient certainty whether St
   Paul, in making use of his idea of the heavenly man or second man,
   started from the title, Son of Man, that was used in the primitive
   community. For in any case he created something new and original,
   whatever the preliminary stages may have been. The abrupt break of
   continuity with the national Christology and the conception of Jesus'
   world-wide mission are both revealed in this title. Jesus appears to be
   so great to St Paul that He can only be compared with the first man,
   the father of the human race. Where Adam fell back He goes forward, and
   He recovers what Adam lost. So Jesus is assigned His place in the
   world's history, the division of which into the period before and the
   period after Christ, dates from this magnificent conception of St
   Paul's. Nowhere else is the universality and novelty of Christianity
   expressed as simply as here. Only we must remember that it is ideas and
   not facts with which we are now concerned. It is not the historical
   Jesus who is compared with Adam, but the ideal man with the sinner.

   Besides, St Paul himself frequently varied these thoughts. In one place
   you will find the whole contrast is made to consist in the difference
   of natures: Adam earthly, Jesus heavenly. In another, in the difference
   of the act: Adam disobeyed, Jesus was obedient. The explanation is that
   on each occasion he is pursuing a different aim. In order to bring out
   clearly the sequence of the present and the future world, he contrasts
   the lower and the higher nature of the two prototypes. But when he
   wishes to guarantee the certainty of the life eternal to the
   Christians, he demonstrates that equally important consequences for
   their descendants have resulted from the deeds of these two
   progenitors.

   But how are we the descendants of Christ? There is no answer. Neither
   does the comparison of the consequences hold good. Adam's descendants
   died; Christ's followers die also. At bottom, then, no very great
   service is rendered by this comparison. It dazzles one at first, but
   cannot be carried out. It is a brilliant idea entertained by St Paul
   for a time but afterwards abandoned. The meaning of Jesus cannot be
   clearly expressed by changing and playing with such antitheses.

   There remains yet one title--the Son of God as the centre of Pauline
   theology. The word Son of God' had already been used by the earliest
   community, but in a very harmless sense. It denoted Jesus as the
   favourite of God, His confidant, knowing His ways better than anyone
   else. In the 2nd Psalm, too, the words "This day have I begotten thee
   "denote the divine election and nothing more. St Paul gives the words
   Son of God an altogether new and mythical sense; for the Greeks alas it
   was only too intelligible. The Son of God is a heavenly being who has
   been with God from before the ages. He is more than man, for He became
   man. It is not impossible that rabbinical doctrines as to intermediate
   beings supported St Paul in this thesis. It is, at any rate, very much
   like the Rabbis, when from the passage in Scripture, "God created man
   after His own image," St Paul drew the conclusion that a separate
   being, "the image of God," must therefore already have been in
   existence in heaven, and that this "image of God" was none other than
   the Son. But St Paul's experience, the vision of Christ, was the
   decisive factor. As he here saw Jesus as a heavenly being in glory, so
   he had to picture Him to himself as existing from the beginning of
   time. The faith in this Son of God that descended from heaven is a
   consequence of the vision of the Son of God in heaven. By means of his
   vision St Paul became the creator of the new Christology, which drew
   its inspiration, not from history, but from something above it--from a
   mythical being, and which won over the heathen for this very reason.

   But what is the relation of the Jesus of history to this Son of God? St
   Paul's thesis is an exceedingly surprising one, but it bears the stamp
   of a man of genius. "The Son of God became a man such as we are, that
   we men might become sons of God as He is." Thus the leading theme had
   been furnished for the whole long history of Christology.

   St Paul used the words "man such as we are" in a very strict sense
   indeed. Jesus had been born of a woman. He had taken upon Himself our
   physical nature. He died on the Cross and was buried. He even died of
   weakness and to pay the debt of sin. Had the Docetae then existed they
   would have found no more determined opponent than the apostle himself.
   For the death on the Cross, which was their chief rock of offence, was
   the apostle's glory. If he occasionally uses the equivocal expression,
   homoioma,' picture or likeness, then he would merely say that the Son
   of God, who is originally of a different nature, now became such as we
   are. Neither, however, does the later doctrine of the twofold
   nature--the opinion that in Christ Jesus a heavenly being was united to
   a human find any support in St Paul. Jesus, while upon earth, was for
   him a man, not a man and Son of God, first flesh then spirit, not both
   together. One thing only separates Jesus from all other men, His
   sinlessness, which has of necessity to be postulated for the theory of
   sacrifice. With this one exception nothing separates Him from
   ourselves. However often He may be set up as our pattern, nothing is
   ever said of a special spiritual organization, or of a second nature.

   Doubtless this whole point of view is a myth from beginning to end, and
   cannot be termed anything else. It was as a myth, as a story of a God
   who had descended from heaven, that the Greeks immediately accepted it.
   And yet the form of the myth is, it must be granted, Jewish. God is in
   no wise drawn down into the world of sensible human phenomena; the
   thought of an incarnation of the Deity would be pure blasphemy for St
   Paul. It is not God but the Son of God alone who thus descends into
   this world. But the personal life of the historical Jesus does not
   exist for this theory.

   The way in which St Paul, however, imparts an ethical meaning to his
   myth is very admirable. The coming down of the Son of man to a life of
   service and obedience forms the pattern of our humility and sacrifice.
   The whole of the great Christological passage in the letters to the
   Philippians has an ethical and practical purpose. But how much more
   simply did Jesus teach His disciples the lesson of humility by the
   example of His life upon earth without any mythological background! As
   everywhere, St Paul finally reaches the thought of Jesus, but here in
   so dangerous and roundabout a fashion that the Jesus of history is
   completely smothered up by the myth of the heavenly Son of God.

   Paul and Jesus.

   The Cross, the Resurrection, the Son of God who descended from
   heaven--these are the three great innovations of the Pauline
   Christology. In the Gospel of Jesus they are almost entirely wanting,
   yet St Paul's object is to express evangelical thoughts by means of
   them. The comparison between the Master and the disciple is especially
   instructive:--

   1. Jesus.--God is our Father, and has been always and everywhere. He
   showers down His love upon us by the gifts of food and raiment, by
   abundant pardon, by deliverance from the evil, by the promise of the
   kingdom that is to come. All that Jesus does and says is meant to
   confirm man's faith in the love of God the Father.

   Paul.--In the Cross of Jesus God gives the whole world a proof of His
   pardon and His love. Without that there is no certainty of the
   atonement. Only he that believes in the Cross has the true God.

   So speaks the ecclesiastical apologist according to the principle that
   outside of the Church--that is, the community of those that believe in
   the Cross--there is no salvation.

   2. Jesus.--The kingdom of God is at hand. It is to be the aim of the
   disciples' longing, and is to give them strength for a new life in
   righteousness. Jesus leads His disciples onwards till they can walk in
   the light of eternity.

   Paul.--The Resurrection of Jesus is the proof that the world to come is
   already beginning. Even now the Christian is risen with Jesus and has
   entered into life eternal.

   So speaks the apologist, who is bound to give palpable proofs for the
   promised realities, and thereby confuses facts and postulates.

   3. Jesus.--Through His teaching and His example He redeems men, so that
   they become the children of God, and lifts them up to a life of love
   and humility.

   Paul.--The Son of man came down from heaven upon earth so that we might
   have a pattern in His self-humiliation, and through Him become the
   children of God.

   So speaks the apologist, who himself knew not Jesus, for whom therefore
   the mythical picture had to effect that which the impression made by
   Jesus wrought in the earlier disciples.

   The consequences of the great innovation were boundless. Jesus was
   presented to the Greeks in the shape of a mythical drama. Once again
   they had a new myth, and that, too, derived from the immediate present.
   And this conquered the world. The simple teaching of Jesus of Nazareth
   had never been able thus to win its way to victory, for the world was
   not yet ripe to receive the impression of a great personality by
   itself. That which was great and redemptive in Jesus had to suffer
   itself to be wrapped up in the heavy coverings of dogma; even in St
   Paul it lives and works mightily therein. In spite of all, it must be
   deemed fortunate that Jesus was preached to the world by St Paul. After
   all, side by side with the thoughts about Him came the Master Himself.

   The Salvation of the Faithful.

   After preaching the crucified and risen Son of God, St Paul's next step
   in the course of his missionary labours was to gather the faithful into
   communities, to purify their life in common, and so to regulate it that
   it might become a haven for the individual and the means of his
   salvation. Passing now to theory, we find the doctrine of the salvation
   of the faithful built up upon these facts. Here, too, the foundation is
   formed by St Paul's experience both of his own nature, and especially
   of his missionary communities; but it is only after revision in the
   interests of Church defence that the theory is completed as we now have
   it.

   St Paul had himself been converted by the appearance of the risen Lord.
   He had felt an entire breach of continuity with the past, the death of
   his former life, a changed estimate of all values, of all frames of
   mind. But at the same time he felt the growth of a new life within
   himself since that meeting with Christ. Powers burst forth into being,
   of the existence of which he had had no previous knowledge. He himself
   began to speak with tongues, to behold visions, to catch glimpses of
   the world beyond. So powerfully did he feel the nearness of God that he
   was compelled to fall upon his knees and to cry out "Abba, Father."
   Peace and joy, blessedness, freedom from all anxious care, took up
   their abode within him. The contest against all the powers of evil
   seemed no longer so terrible. Victory was at hand. He felt himself to
   be more than human--a giant, a hero: "I can do all things through Him
   that strengtheneth me." All this called for an explanation, and Paul,
   in accordance with the whole of his psychology, could only find it in
   the Spirit' which had miraculously been imparted to him.

   The experience he had gathered in the course of his missionary work
   seemed to him to point in the same direction. Here he saw the servants
   of sin, the scum and offscouring of mankind, carried away by a passion
   ate religious enthusiasm from the very moment that he began to preach,
   and often even strengthened so as to overcome their sins. Many were the
   miracles that he witnessed among his converts--manifestations of power,
   such as the healing of diseases, the speaking with tongues, prophecies,
   but also miracles of conversion. All this could proceed from nothing
   but the Spirit, especially because of the frequent ecstatic
   accompaniments. But here the value of the communities was far more
   evident than in St Paul's own case, who had become a Christian without
   any ecclesiastical instrumentality. Permanent converts were to be found
   only within the communities. Like stars in the world, so these
   Christian congregations shone along the shores of the Mediterranean.
   Here was a visible and palpable proof that the coming world was very
   near at hand.

   Both these factors, the personal experience as well as the results of
   the missionary journeys, must be remembered if one would understand the
   doctrine of redemption. But the third factor--the apologetic motive is
   not long in making its influence felt. The results of experience are
   universalized and completed. The ecclesiastical interest acquires clear
   expression for the first time in a theory concerning the value of the
   Church as an organized body. The word ekklesia' is of course but little
   mentioned as yet, but all the more is said of Faith, of the Spirit, of
   Baptism, which together constitute the Church. But at the same time
   even the most determined apologist cannot shut his eyes to the
   imperfection of the communities and of the redemption by means of them.
   The patch work character of the whole of this earnest of the world to
   come is only too evident. Hence the theory concerning the postulates
   for the future world succeeds the theory concerning the experiences in
   the present; the doctrine of salvation by the Church is followed by
   eschatology.

   The Theory of the Experiences.

   St Paul recognizes as the root of the Christian's new life a single
   definite force: the Spirit of God or of Christ. This force does not
   work directly, but only through the means of grace. The inner means is
   faith; the outer are the Word, the Church and the Sacraments. Now,
   though the Spirit works upon men through these media an entire change
   of the inner and outer man is seldom effected: there are. obstacles in
   the way. Such obstacles are the flesh, the sin that still remains,
   suffering and death. The Christian's duty is to endeavour to overcome
   these obstacles. He actually does this partly through faith and moral
   effort, partly through hope in the coming perfection. Thus the theory
   of the experiences leads on quite naturally to the theory of the
   postulates for the future world. Such, then, is the arrangement of the
   following section.

   i.

   The power that effects the believer's salvation is the Spirit. Although
   St Paul occasionally speaks of the Spirit as though it were
   matter--e.g., the outpouring of the Spirit--yet he regards it usually
   as distinctly a force. As such it is included under the strict law of
   natural causation, only that it is a cause of a higher order. Like all
   forces, it can only be described by its effects.

   The effects of the Spirit are exceedingly manifold, and range from the
   extraordinary to the normal, from the miracle to ordinary virtue.

   First of all come the physical effects--the forces' in the general
   sense of the word. According to the popular conception there is not
   merely one Spirit, but as many Spirits as there are manifestations of
   force. One Spirit causes the speaking with tongues, another the
   interpretation thereof, another prophecy, another healing. St Paul
   himself writes of the Spirits in three passages of the first letter to
   the Corinthians. He there speaks of the Corinthians as "eagerly seeking
   for spirits," each desiring to gain as many as possible for himself. We
   should to-day speak of these phenomena as the elementary effects of the
   religious impulse in the psychical and physical domain. St Paul himself
   was a master in glossolaly, more than all the Corinthians. No wonder
   that many caught fire at his enthusiasm. Such experiences are
   contagious. But little was wanting to make the whole of the Christian
   Church resemble a company of madmen. The apostle now, however,
   proceeded to allay the excitement, and that by summary measures. First
   of all he gathered all these different spirits under one heading: they
   are the various manifestations of the one Spirit of God. His object in
   so doing was to put an end to all jealousy and envy. The same Spirit
   gives to each one severally as He will. In the next place he sternly
   represses the wildest and least intelligible expression of this
   enthusiasm--the speaking with tongues--compares it with prophecy, and
   assigns a higher place to the latter because the understanding has a
   share in it and the whole Church is thereby benefited. That was a
   reversion of the order of precedence in the community. The undue
   exaltation of an egoistic mysticism was thereby effectually prevented.
   But finally, he places even prophecy itself far beneath love, "the more
   excellent way," which is alone eternal: the doing of the simplest
   Christian duties is of greater value, in his sight, than the most
   exceptional gifts of insight and foresight. For all that, he allows a
   certain value to all those manifestations of the Spirit--they, too, are
   divine. At Thessalonica he went so far as to take up arms in defence of
   prophecy against mockers and doubters. His object is just this, that
   the Christians should learn to find their way out of enthusiasm and the
   extraordinary into plain and sober everyday life. And this object is
   best served by his insertion of 1 Cor. xiii. in the midst of his
   dissertation on spiritual gifts.

   To quench this exaggerated spiritual exaltation St Paul places the
   exact opposite of speaking with tongues at the head of the gifts of the
   Spirit, viz., the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge. As he is
   speaking of nothing but extraordinary things, he must, in the first
   place, mean a speaking of God and the Divine which appears suddenly and
   unexpectedly, like a revelation, and surprises all that listen. The
   lightning thought of wisdom reveals the presence of the Spirit. But
   that is not all. St Paul teaches that the whole body of Christian
   knowledge, all those thoughts the possession of which constitutes the
   preeminence of Christians over Jews and Gentiles, can be traced to the
   Spirit. Every Christian teacher may boldly step forth with the claim
   that he is bringing an inspired message, and every layman who calls
   Jesus Lord speaks under the impulse of the Spirit. This is the point
   from which the representation of the Pauline gnosis will have to start.
   Two things are especially important in this derivation of knowledge
   from the Spirit. In the first place, the chasm between the supernatural
   and the natural has been bridged. Not only the welling forth of
   revelation, but the permanent spiritual outfit which should belong to
   every Christian, are to be ascribed to the working of the Spirit. At
   the same time, however, Christian is contrasted with all non-Christian
   knowledge as some thing wonderful and higher. Here we have the origin
   of the sharp division in later times between the knowledge of the
   natural man and the faith of the Church. The same man who rejects
   miracles in the popular sense of the word proclaims the miraculous
   character of the new theology all the more loudly.

   St Paul sounds the deepest depths when he brings the life of prayer
   into connection with the Spirit. Prayer as he describes it in Rom.
   viii. is still very closely related to the talking with tongues. The
   understanding can go no further. Because we know not how we ought to
   pray all the more does the Spirit work. He comes to our aid, with
   sighings that cannot be uttered. But God, that reads the hearts of men,
   knows what the Spirit means. St Paul is here thinking of no ordinary
   prayer--no Lord's Prayer even. He is thinking of moments of deepest
   emotion, such as came over him and others, prostrating them and casting
   them into a state of blessedness either of silence or finding utterance
   in sighs. Those are the moments when the immediate contact of the
   soul's inmost being with the ultimate source of all things is
   experienced. That which he here calls Spirit is the mysterious
   background of our personality, inaccessible to all our science, working
   beyond our consciousness. But St Paul does not confine the Spirit's
   activity to these rare moments of exaltation. Every prayer that a
   Christian utters beginning with the name of Father proceeds from the
   Spirit. In every real prayer there is a communion of the human soul
   with God. Then the Spirit of God testifies to our spirit that we are
   the children of God. Then the love of God is poured forth in our hearts
   through the Holy Spirit. Then are we driven,' that is, we feel a higher
   power coming over us, and then we experience a feeling of joyful
   gladness, surest token of God's presence. All these sentences have an
   enthusiastic ring about them; they betray their origin in a great time
   of storm and stress. Yet some of this enthusiasm every Christian in
   every age is bound to carry with him into his every-day life. Without
   that certainty which the Spirit gives us that we are God's children, it
   is impossible to ascend the steep and rugged road that leads from this
   world to the next.

   The most important sphere, however, of the Spirit's operations has yet
   to be mentioned. St Paul conquered the whole of life for the Spirit and
   thence derived all moral action and every virtue in our possession. The
   extraordinary is once more the starting-point. A charism--a gift of
   grace--is in reality the altogether exceptional privilege of quite
   extraordinary persons. Just as there are only certain people who can
   prophesy or teach, so there are others who alone understand the
   difficult task of serving, of presiding, of ministering to the poor,
   because they have been specially endowed by the Spirit with these
   gifts. This or that individual Christian can be joyful, or patient, or
   chaste in especially difficult circumstances where perhaps every other
   would have given up the struggle. The reason of that must be that the
   Spirit gave him the power and the endurance. Originally, as in the
   previous instance, it was the different spirits of joy, patience, etc.
   In every case heroic and extraordinary states of thought and feeling
   are originally conceived to be the surest signs of the Spirit's
   presence. But from this somewhat narrow starting-point St Paul draws
   wider and wider circles which gradually extend over the whole of life:
   1 Cor. xiii., Rom. xii., Gal. v., are proofs of this. At first only
   heroic manifestations of love were conceived of as the workings of the
   Spirit. St Paul leads his Corinthian converts to look upon love as that
   power in life which is intended to dominate and transform all that is
   common and every-day. At first gifts were only ascribed to abnormal
   persons. St Paul leads the Romans to conceive of all Christian feelings
   and acts, be they great or small, as the effects of grace. It is not
   the excitation of this or that feeling which is to originate from the
   Spirit, but the inspiration of the whole life. So radical and complete
   is the change that owing to St Paul the words in the Spirit' or through
   the Spirit,' which originally denoted an ecstatic condition, came to
   mean the same thing as the Christian life. Here the Spirit is naturally
   no longer conceived of as a force that comes and goes, but as a
   Christian's permanent and abiding possession. And yet how we are
   reminded again all at once of the previous popular stages of the
   conception! St Paul's gifts' are simply a theological word for the
   spirits of the earlier age, only they are no longer external beings,
   but faculties and talents immanent in the soul. The strictly causal
   conception of the Spirit, leading to determinism, is likewise retained
   from the earlier form of the belief. When the Spirit works there is no
   room for the free agency of man. St Paul never suffered this
   determinism to have any practical consequences, though there was no
   escape from the logical results of the whole theory.

   But who can fail to recognize that the entire theory of the effects of
   the Spirit, which, starting from miraculous forces, derives from one
   and the same source all knowledge, the life of prayer and moral action,
   is nothing but the description of the Christian ideal drawn by an
   enthusiastic apostle? The actual state of things, the condition of the
   congregations, corresponded here and there with this ideal, but
   contradicted it in the vast majority of cases. A theory of the
   Christian life as it should be universally is here built up upon
   isolated great experiences. So Paul spoke to the Gentiles that he might
   sing the praises of Christianity, and to the Christians in order that
   they might be urged on to the attainment of the ideal by the
   description thereof. This apologetic character of the doctrine of the
   Spirit is rendered still plainer by all that follows.

   St Paul terms the Spirit, Spirit of God or Spirit of Christ, and both
   phrases mean the same thing. The identification is by no means a matter
   of course. It is the apostle's doing, and his object is the
   subordination of mysticism, under the influence of the Jesus of
   history.

   The phrase Spirit of God' is certainly a very obscure expression; its
   meaning depends entirely upon the conception of God held by the man
   that uses it. He who represents God to himself as the impersonal first
   cause of the world, or as the negation of the world, will conceive the
   Spirit of God as the mysterious forces of nature which proceed from
   this first cause. This conception of God and His Spirit is the cradle
   of all the later history of mysticism. The phrase Spirit of Christ,' on
   the other hand, is perfectly intelligible, and derives its meaning from
   the Jesus of history. Rightly understood, it is bound to render the
   evanescence of religion into mysticism utterly impossible.

   St Paul's universal experience in founding his congregations was that
   they became the scenes of a wild enthusiasm which was certainly
   connected with faith in Jesus, but had in reality nothing whatever to
   do with Jesus Himself. The breach with their former heathen life, the
   concentration of their thoughts on the after world that was so near at
   hand, their renunciation of this world, the feeling that they were safe
   in port, all combined to drive many Christians into a whirlpool of
   religious sensations. The religious life had been aroused, and
   dominated them exclusively. Plain civic duties and ordinary everyday
   work were neglected. Idleness, ascetic tours de force, selfish
   fanaticism, an exaggerated zeal for certain spiritual gifts, were on
   the increase. St Paul cut off all that was unhealthy and dangerous. Yet
   he still allowed enough and to spare of that enthusiasm to continue,
   which originated, not from the influence of Jesus, but from the
   untrammelled religious impulse. It is very significant that in speaking
   about these gifts of the Spirit--e.g., talking with tongues, healing,
   etc.,---St Paul never uses the words Spirit of Christ;' just as,
   conversely, when he does use them, he never has such manifestations in
   view. Without denying the divine element in them, he suggests
   indirectly that these phenomena are in no wise specifically Christian.
   Indeed, they almost belong more to the universal history of religion
   than to the history of the religion of Jesus.

   On the other hand, St Paul spares no effort in his endeavour to bring
   the Spirit under the influence of Jesus. This he does, firstly, by
   forming the expressions Spirit of Christ,' Spirit of the Son of God,'
   and next, and in a still higher degree, by placing Christ and the
   Spirit side by side with each other, and even identifying them with
   regard to their influence upon Christians. This last he effects by a
   threefold series of propositions: Christ lives in the believer; the
   believer lives in Christ; the believer died and rose again with Christ.
   In stating the second of these propositions, even the grammatical
   expression which St Paul employed--in Christ'--is exactly parallel to
   the words in the Spirit,' which were used in other cases. Now by this
   means the whole doctrine of redemption is apparently doubled. We have a
   theory of the Spirit and a theory of Christ, the aim of which is, after
   all, exactly the same--the renewal of life. Therefore the Spirit and
   Christ must be identical, as indeed we should infer from the very
   expression Spirit of Christ,' which connects the two conceptions. What,
   then, is the meaning of this identity? It is by no means a dilution of
   the idea of Christ into any thing impersonal or abstract: this is the
   last thing of which the man who had seen Christ would think. On the
   contrary, it is the Christianization of the Spirit, who is thereby
   transformed from an impersonal force of nature into the historical
   influence of the person of Jesus. This is St Paul's great reform. He
   firmly established the connection between the Redeemer and the
   redemption of believers. These were two separate things for the earlier
   Christians. On the one hand was the picture of Jesus, such as it passed
   over into the Gospels, and on the other were wonderful phenomena,
   tongues, etc., as effects of the Spirit. Between the two there is no
   connection, nor can there possibly be any as long as the sphere of the
   Spirit's operation is merely the abnormal. St Paul teaches Christians
   to recognize the working of the Spirit above all else in the renewal of
   their lives, but this is the effect of the teaching of Jesus; Christ
   and the Spirit are therefore immediately seen to be one--or, to express
   the same thing more concisely, Paul will acknowledge no other power in
   the lives of Christians, by the side of the influence of Jesus. The
   logical consequence of his reasoning would have been to abandon the
   conception of Spirit' altogether in favour of the personal influence of
   the historic Christ. It would have been better so for all future time,
   for under the title Spirit of God,' all that was alien to the Spirit of
   Jesus crept into the new religion. That which hindered St Paul from
   drawing this conclusion was at bottom merely the general atmosphere of
   thought of the ancient world. Like all the rest of his contemporaries,
   the apostle was bound to recognize an immediate divine influence in
   these wonders and manifestations of power.

   But it was Paul the apologist who completed this subordination of the
   Spirit to Christ. The Jews spoke of the Spirit of God, and the Greeks
   might also have used the same words. But the Spirit of Christ is
   naturally the peculiar possession of Christians. For what purpose
   should Christ have come into the world, if it turned out later that
   there was another road to salvation apart from Him? On one single
   occasion (in Gal. iv.) St Paul speaks of the sending of the Spirit as
   of something separate by the side of the sending of the Son; but no, it
   is the Spirit of the Son of God Himself. The salvation of believers can
   only be effected by the Saviour. St Paul cannot admit any other way.
   Without this nexus of conceptions the whole edifice of his apologetic
   would be undermined. The doctrine, however, was. it must be admitted,
   attended by a peculiar difficulty. We, to day, can speak of the Spirit
   of Jesus because we know Jesus from the Gospels. Now St Paul does not
   know Him; he only saw the heavenly Jesus, and that for a moment. Where
   was the guarantee that he understood the Spirit of Jesus? It is just
   here that the continuity with the Jesus of history seems to be broken.
   But facts prove that St Paul knew Jesus in spite of all--yes, knew Him
   better than all his predecessors. What he brought to the Greeks was no
   mere product of his imagination, but the real Jesus with His promise,
   His claim and His redemption. When Paul writes, "He that hath not the
   Spirit of Christ is none of His," "He that is in Christ Jesus is a new
   creature," he is filled with a profound and genuine impression of the
   person of Christ, and though it was only as apologist that he gave the
   final form to his doctrines, yet in this point he was right. Whatever
   of genuine Christian life was lived in the times to come, has its
   source exclusively in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, or as St Paul
   writes, in the Spirit of Christ.

   The means of grace.

   The Spirit of Christ does not enter when and where it will. It is bound
   to certain outer and inner media. The most important of the latter is
   faith. St Paul became a Christian without the help of any
   ecclesiastical organization, but not without faith in Christ. He had to
   bring that to the vision of Christ which the others had to bring to the
   preaching of Jesus. The parallel with the miracles of Jesus here
   strikes one's attention. Just as want of faith prevented Jesus from
   performing miracles, so the Spirit, in spite of all the forces at its
   command, cannot take up its abode with any unbeliever. In neither case
   is faith the final cause but solely the condition.

   What is faith in this connection? Not primarily that which it came to
   be later--the acceptation of a number of formula? as true; just as
   little as this was the faith which Jesus demanded. Faith can best here
   be defined as readiness and receptivity for the work of redemption.
   When Paul begins his preaching of death and judgment, of the Cross and
   Resurrection, as God's great acts of redemption, these all depend upon
   whether or not his hearer recognizes something divine therein,
   something that has to do with his own redemption. He needs not to
   understand the connection of the propositions. As soon as it dawns upon
   him, "this Jesus concerns me and my salvation," then faith has been
   awakened in him. Consciousness of a divine power unto salvation in the
   mighty drama of Jesus that, and nothing but that, is faith. Forthwith,
   peace with God, the love of God, and the certainty of atonement, make
   their entry into the hearts of men. This St Paul himself experienced
   and perceived in countless other instances.

   If we ask in the next place whether this faith is a free act on the
   part of man, or whether it is God working in him, then it is very hard
   to say what answer St Paul would have given. The different parts of his
   doctrine of salvation are as a matter of fact so closely connected
   together that there is very little room for the exercise of man's free
   will; in man there dwells no good thing--but yet there is the longing
   for salvation. The doctrines of grace and of predestination appear to
   exclude any co-operation on the part of man in the work of redemption.
   If God determines who is to belong to the saved and to the lost, then
   faith as a condition of salvation must be reckoned as a part of that
   which God decrees.

   But for another reason determinism cannot be said to be St Paul's final
   answer. St Paul is a missionary and an apologist. As such, he is bound
   to count upon the freedom of his hearers. He would lose his missionary
   zeal, the fire of his eloquence and the ardour of his love, if he did
   not hope to attain his end thereby amongst men free to choose. He must
   often have exclaimed--like a Methodist preacher--"Now is the acceptable
   time, now is the day of salvation; be ye reconciled with God. Let not
   God's grace be offered you in vain." He who thus appeals to the
   feelings of his hearers does not believe that the season of grace for
   each individual amongst them has passed long ago. And so we find St
   Paul in the Epistle to the Romans counting it a fault in the Jews that
   they shut up their hearts against the faith in their false zeal for
   righteousness. Even thus it is as yet not active co-operation that is
   called for, but something purely passive--readiness to receive God's
   gift. Afterwards, it is true, St Paul leaves this, his first position,
   far behind him, when he makes salvation depend upon the acceptance of
   certain definite formulae; on the faith that Jesus is the Lord and that
   God raised Him from the dead, or on faith in His death. Consciously or
   unconsciously the ecclesiastical creed has here been forced upon the
   apologist, in the place of the mere receptivity of former times. And
   the creed at any rate is a human piece of work. Nay, more, for
   apologetic purposes this conception of faith is the only one that is
   practical. The preaching of the Church necessitates the ecclesiastical
   creed. The way of salvation is through the Church. Since then, this
   great word faith' has been used many thousand times to describe the
   entrance into the Church for those that stand without and to exhort
   them thereto.

   Of the external means through which the Spirit of God works upon them
   that draw nigh, the word of God is the most essential. Faith is
   awakened when the word is preached. In St Paul's own case, of course,
   this does not apply. But not every one is called by a vision from
   heaven. St Paul's opinion of the importance and power of the word or
   Gospel was exceedingly high. In it God's power unto salvation is
   brought near to men. Therefore it is God's word and not man's. Here
   indeed the apostle is in entire agreement with his Master, whose
   employment of parables is a testimony to the importance He attached to
   the word. The flood-tides of every religion have always coincided with
   the supremacy of the free word and with its exaltation high above all
   liturgies, sacraments, and the like. For it is only in the clear word
   that both the spiritual and the intelligible elements in a religion
   find expression, and behind the word stands the personality of the
   apostles. It is just owing to the high estimate which he had of the
   word that St Paul looked upon himself and the apostles as means of
   salvation. God's message of atonement is only completed through the
   apostles, who carry it forth and publish it abroad. It is only where
   apostles have been bringing the word of God with them, that faith can
   arise and the Spirit enter.

   We pass next to that which is really the most important of all the
   means of salvation, the Church, i.e., the whole Christian organism. The
   demand for faith--i.e., for entrance into the Church--proves that the
   Spirit is bound to the Church, and this is further indirectly proved by
   the fact that the Spirit nowhere has an abiding place outside of
   Christianity. But St Paul also adopted the most appropriate metaphor to
   express this theory, the Church as the body of Christ. Therefore Christ
   is the Spirit of the Church. Thereby he unites Christ and the Church so
   firmly to each other as only the Catholic system has done besides. For
   as yet no need had arisen for the division of the Church into visible
   and invisible. This need only arose when it became evident that the sad
   experience which even St Paul had had, was not transitory but belonged
   to the essence of the Church here on earth. St Paul did not as yet
   believe this. He looked at the good and bright sides in his
   congregations, and trusted that the bad, however often it appeared,
   would meet with a determined resistance and be bound to disappear. The
   high esteem in which he did, as a matter of fact, hold his
   congregations, here combined with his apologetic thesis that the Spirit
   could work upon Christians within the Church alone. The power and the
   truth of his apologetic depends upon the former, the actual fact.
   Later, when Church and community diverged, it appeared to be a mockery
   that the Church should be a mediator of the Spirit of Jesus. Had it not
   become the home of all these elements which had gradually grown up in
   opposition to the real Jesus? How entirely different was the situation
   which St Paul partly already found and partly himself created. There
   was a rivalry of love in the Churches, a readiness of sacrifice,
   fearless renunciation of the world, a strict morality, mutual
   co-operation, a glowing hope for the future, an enthusiastic eagerness
   to suffer for Jesus. In spite of much that was disappointing, it must
   have been a delight then to strike a blow in defence of the Church.
   There was a great element of truth in the proposition, "The Church is
   the channel of the Spirit of Christ."

   St Paul made a very free use of the metaphors in tended to express the
   relationship between Christ and the Church. Now it is body and spirit,
   now body and head, and again man and wife. At times he pursues the
   image into minute details without much taste, after the manner of
   contemporary allegories. But the very change of metaphor proves the
   indissolubility of the quantities compared. Christ and the Church form
   a unity for St Paul which nothing can put asunder. Now, however new
   this relation may be, the value attached to the Church in itself is old
   and Jewish. Paul destroyed the Jewish Church for Christians, opposing
   the community of believers to the legal organization. These are great
   reforms. But the conception of Church itself remained, and to a certain
   extent even the way of looking at religion as a constitution. The
   thesis, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," had hitherto only been
   maintained by the Jewish theology. Through St Paul it obtained a firm
   footing in the Christian communities. Here the apostle of liberty paves
   the way for the Catholicism of later times.

   The same remark applies to the remaining means of salvation, baptism
   and the Lord's Supper. Hitherto they had been valued as signs of
   membership, baptism as a condition of redemption besides. But it was
   Paul who first created the conception of a sacrament. Any external
   acts--here bathing, eating, and drinking--are turned into sacraments as
   soon as they are esteemed to be means of salvation. They are thereby
   stamped as something different from what they really are: the element
   of mystery and the miraculous takes possession of them, they come to be
   the instruments of divine power. This result St Paul achieved in the
   case of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Baptism was not of supreme
   importance for himself personally. It conferred no new gift upon the
   man who had been vouchsafed the vision of Christ. As missionary, too,
   he had not regarded baptizing as his office. God had not sent him forth
   for that. Even the great idea of dying and rising again with Christ
   appears in the Epistle to the Galatians without any mention of baptism.
   It is only in the Epistle to the Romans that St Paul makes use of it to
   elucidate this idea. But here, it is true, he employs altogether
   sacramental language of baptism, and parallel passages can be found in
   other letters. He would have baptism regarded as a miracle and a
   mystery. The baptized convert should believe that he steps forth from
   the water a different person to what he was when he entered it. In like
   manner he taught of the Lord's Supper, that it was a meal at which one
   eats no ordinary bread and drinks no ordinary wine, but partakes of the
   body and blood of Christ. It was a spiritual food and a spiritual
   drink--i.e., a channel for the conveyance of the powers of salvation.
   It is hard to understand how St Paul, who elsewhere always connects
   redemption with the Spirit of Christ, here all at once attaches a value
   to the body and blood, i.e., to that which was after all perishable in
   Jesus. The reason probably is that he found here an institution already
   existing which could only obtain a place in his spiritual doctrine of
   salvation with extreme difficulty. But he did find a place for it, and
   thereby made it a sacrament. He had to educate his heathen converts,
   and with this end in view it appeared to him to be important that they
   should clearly realize their redemption in certain ceremonial actions.
   As a matter of fact he only confused them thereby, dragging them down
   from the spiritual sphere into that of natural magic. It appears to us
   at the present day exceedingly strange that the hero of the Word should
   at the same time have become the creator of the sacrament. He
   himself--every one who knows anything about St Paul knows that--needed
   no ceremonial magic, as the Spirit within him testified to him of God's
   love, and Jesus had set him free from the ceremonies of the law. But
   through the reception of the sacraments into his doctrine of
   redemption, he has himself a share in the origin of that Catholicism
   which made him a saint while at the same time it stamped out his
   spirit.

   Obstacles to Salvation, and the way to overcome them.

   Salvation as St Paul conceives of it, is in its essence the imparting
   of a divine power. Men cannot save themselves--they are sick,
   powerless, and prisoners. Then there comes to their help the power that
   has its origin in the world beyond, the Spirit. He takes over the
   guidance into his hands as effective cause. We ourselves are passive
   instruments driven by the Spirit. The aim of salvation is that the
   power from beyond should permeate everywhere and dominate all,
   absorbing entirely everything that is fleshly and sinful. Then shall
   the next world, the new heaven and the new earth, have come unto us.

   But do we even attain to a complete salvation here in this world--when
   everything that is old hath passed away and all things have become new?
   No; salvation by the Spirit is thwarted by certain obstacles which stop
   its progress. Death is still with us, and announces its approach by
   sufferings which ever remind us of our perishable nature and drag us
   down from the heights of enthusiasm. The flesh is by no means dead or
   absorbed. The Christian feels his lusts and passions only too keenly.
   And sin? St Paul met with it at every step among his converts. At
   Corinth alone incest, fornication, lawsuits about property, party
   strife. And had it really departed even out of his own life? "Not that
   I have already obtained or am already made perfect." The apostle had by
   nature a passionate and irritable temperament, temptations from within
   and from without, and at the same time a keen and highly sensitive
   conscience. It is inconceivable that he imagined himself free from sin.

   Paul was no fanatic to shut his eyes to any unpleasant facts. Whenever
   he came across a sin he called it by its name. To hush things up or
   decently to throw a veil over them was never his way. He remained
   unaffected by the flowers of Greek rhetoric. It would be truer to say
   that he occasionally formed too gloomy a picture of the state of the
   whole community because of the sins or failings of a few. But he never
   lost courage. He clings firmly to his. apologetic theory of the ideal
   of redemption without admitting any limitations, and he sets to work to
   look the obstacles that lie in the way straight in the face and to
   overcome them.

   First comes the summons to fight against the flesh, sin and the devil,
   to fight with all the power of one's will. For it has been proved that
   the Spirit alone cannot do it. Man--i.e., his will--is to help the
   Spirit to victory by taming the lusts and passions, by hard work and
   strict self-discipline. Now here the categorical imperative and the
   thought of the end to be achieved reinforce the Spirit working
   according to laws of natural causation. Whether this is theoretically
   conceivable or not is a matter of indifference. Whenever St Paul
   expounds the theory of salvation he ends by this call to duty. And
   thereby he rendered experience her due. If we live in the Spirit let us
   also walk in the Spirit. We are debtors not to the flesh, but should
   through the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body. "Mortify, therefore,
   the members that are upon earth." The apostle's deep earnestness is
   well brought out by the severely ascetic form of these exhortations. He
   was able, at any rate, to say of himself that he mortified his own body
   and brought it into subjection, lest while he preached to others he
   himself should become a castaway. When he actually saw any sin in the
   course of his labours he forthwith exclaimed "away with it." For this,
   in his opinion, was to constitute the difference between the redeemed
   and the unredeemed: that the former should at all times be able to
   fight a victorious fight. Through the Spirit he has been raised from
   his state of impotence and has become strong and bold. He should have
   no lack of courage and faith in victory; the ardent exhortations of the
   apostle will furnish him with an ever fresh supply breathing the same
   confidence in the power of the good as did the summons of Jesus.

   If, however, in spite of all, the believer should have stumbled, then
   faith raises itself up again by the Cross of Jesus. For surely God's
   love does not cease at our baptism. Why, that is when it really begins
   for us. As Christians we are under grace, and have the certainty of
   salvation from the wrath that is to come. It is not, of course, from
   ourselves that we derive any absolute guarantee of the abiding love of
   God. Even though the Spirit may impart to us in our hearts the
   certainty of the Sonship, who shall tell us exactly where the Spirit
   ceases and one's own wish begins? The moments of ecstatic communion
   with God are succeeded, alas, often so swiftly, by hellish states of
   depression. The Christian only stands immovably fast in the love of God
   when he is not thrown upon his own resources, but can lay hold of what
   God Himself has done. It is only when he gazes upon God's love as shown
   in the Cross that that comfort is vouchsafed him which is proof against
   every trial. Nowhere do we penetrate further into the depths of St
   Paul's thoughts, nowhere recognize more clearly his sober sanity, his
   distrust of his own feelings, his need of an objective proof besides.
   Clearest of all is the following passage in the Galatians: first the
   triumphant exclamation:--"It is. no longer I that live, but Christ
   liveth in me: . . . ." there is all the joy of the new redeemed life.
   This, however, is immediately succeeded by the chastening reflection:
   "And that life which I now live in the flesh"; the old is after all not
   laid aside, I feel its presence only too often'; but then follows the
   brave consolation: "I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of
   God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me." It is not the Christ
   within us but solely the Christ without us, who leads us through all
   our anxiety to peace at the last. And from this fact every Christian
   may derive the certainty of forgiveness. Accordingly, St Paul
   everywhere recommends forgiveness, and himself forgives. As far as we
   know, he may have received even the incestuous person into communion
   again, when he saw that distress and sorrow were driving him to
   despair. Paul was no Tertullian whose rigid sense of justice placed
   insuperable obstacles in the path of pardoning love. So he leads his
   converts on to the glad faith, that in spite of the sin that doth yet
   beset him, the Christian can still remain a child of God, and can look
   forward joyfully to the day of judgment.

   Our self-discipline and faith in God's love do not, however, fully
   remove the obstacles in the way of salvation. Again and again the
   Christian finds himself entangled in this present evil world. Only one
   thing helps him in every difficulty, and that is hope. Hope alone
   permits the Christian to look at the world as it is, and to escape
   depression without wrapping himself up in any fictitious optimism. We
   walk by faith, not by sight. We are, it is true, saved, yet by hope.
   Here we see in a mirror darkly, and all our knowledge is fragmentary.
   We ourselves, though we have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan
   within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of
   the body. The Spirit is an earnest of our future state, and not that
   state itself. Never did any man realize the imperfection of our present
   state more sincerely or truly. That is why no one can call him an idle
   enthusiast. This recognition, however, of the defects of our present
   state is but the necessary negative condition attaching to the positive
   hope in which St Paul's message centres. This present world passeth
   away, and the salvation which has here been begun will soon be
   completed.

   This leads us on of itself to the theory of the postulates for the
   future. The decisive factor here, however, is not the picture of his
   fancy, but the power of the yearning which draws its comfort thence.
   For this yearning Paul found words--think of the song of creation's
   earnest expectation--which still to-day fill us, "ripae ulterioris
   amore"! For the details of eschatology are always more or less the
   product of this or that particular age, and therefore negligible for
   later ages. But the yearning itself, with all its consequences for the
   life of the apostle, courage, consolation, joy and patience, is that
   which speaks to men in all ages. The concluding verses of the 8th
   chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, in which trust in God is
   expressed as nowhere else in the New Testament, follow immediately
   after the song of the earnest expectation; and were it not for this
   confident hope in the future, they would lack all sound foundation.

   By thus striving to overcome the obstacles on the road to redemption
   through work, faith, and hope, the Christian at length attains to the
   certainty of salvation, so that he can stand on the everlasting
   foundations even now, in the midst of tribulation and distress. The
   assurance of salvation is explained by the theory of election--Paul
   starts from the following proposition: That which is eternal cannot
   have arisen in time. If the Christian, therefore, is certain of his
   eternal salvation, then this must have been determined upon by God
   before all time. God chose certain individual men and women before the
   creation of the world, even those who possess this certainty, and
   foreordained that they should become brothers of Christ and children of
   God. In consequence of this election by God, all that happens to them
   for their salvation follows in an inevitable succession. Every
   imaginable evil may befall such chosen children of God--it matters not,
   their lives are marked out for them, they must reach the goal. All
   works for their good and brings them nearer to the goal. Even were a
   devil to get possession of them, he would have to work God's will and
   bring them forward on the road to salvation. So St Paul thought of
   himself: God separated me from my mother's womb: so each true Christian
   may think, and from this standpoint count his whole past with all its
   guilt as a part of God's plan.

   St Paul thought that all Christians should attain to this consciousness
   of election. He did not, however, transmit his belief to the Church.
   Experience showed only too plainly that being baptized and being saved
   are too different things. The individual is to attain to salvation in
   the Church but not through the Church. St Paul prescribed no particular
   method for the acquisition of the assurance of salvation. As tokens he
   mentions now the love felt for God, now the faith in the Cross, and now
   the voice of the Spirit. In the end it is found to be a personal
   experience. No man can tell his brother what it is; he must discover it
   himself. God is faithful, and He will complete the good work which He
   has begun; so St Paul would reassure those of a wavering and doubting
   temperament. Here, however, there is a gap in the apostle's apologetic
   system. Strict consistency demanded that entrance into the Church
   should guarantee salvation. St Paul meets this demand half-way when he
   connects salvation with faith. But he does not pursue this line of
   reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. In the end salvation is a matter
   which the individual has to settle with his God. Hereby we see that St
   Paul was more than an apologist for the Church: he was a disciple of
   Jesus.

   The Theory of the Postulates for the Future.

   Here, too, the needs of the apostle's apologetic system unite with his
   personal hopes. The vast edifice of the doctrine of salvation is as yet
   unfinished. To complete the structure St Paul will have to look beyond
   this present world, so experience teaches him. But the Christian does
   not grope about in an uncertain and imaginary future which can be
   depicted according to individual fancy. The nature of the future world
   can, on the contrary, be safely predicted from our knowledge of the
   present. There are two facts which cast a bright light on this future
   world: the Resurrection of Christ and the possession of the Spirit.
   From the resurrection of Christ we may infer that our own resurrection
   will exalt us into a higher state. We shall be transformed, and our
   bodies will be like that of Christ. From the possession of the Spirit,
   it follows that we shall have a spiritual body, one in which the Spirit
   shall no longer dwell as a strange guest. But besides this--here St
   Paul is employing the methods of Jewish apologetics--we may learn a
   great deal as to the nature of the end of human history from the
   description of its beginning in the first chapters of Genesis, for all
   things revert to their origin.

   From these data we can derive a clear picture of the Pauline
   eschatology in its principal features, distinguishing its negative from
   its positive elements. All that is hostile to God throughout the whole
   sphere of salvation must be conquered, destroyed, or at least subdued.
   Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. They are taken up
   into something higher. All the hostile angelic powers are cast down and
   subjected to the dominion of Christ. Finally, the last enemy, death, is
   vanquished. And, on the other hand, the dead rise up, they enter into
   everlasting life, into the spiritual world, as it was in the beginning
   of all things. All Nature lays aside once more its garments of
   corruption and stands, instead, clothed in glory in the presence of
   God. And Christians now have spiritual and heavenly bodies, they are
   clothed in the bright robes of Paradise, they are fashioned like unto
   the image of Christ and stand around Him like brothers round the first
   born. Now all creation is once more good, and God is all in all, as He
   was before the creation of the world.

   These are the principal features of the eschatology;. they are
   perfectly clear and in this form peculiar to St Paul. There are several
   features of the Jewish apologetic which point in the same
   direction--e.g., the idea of a transformation of the body, but nowhere
   so simple and consistent a system. St Paul, it is true, completes this
   system by the addition of many traditional details derived from Jewish
   apologetics. To the principal features he added: the Antichrist, the
   arrival of Messiah, the restoration of Israel, the day of judgment, the
   millennium, Paradise and others. The process of transformation is also
   conceived in a thoroughly Jewish fashion with many wonders and
   catastrophes, and as of old, this earth is to be the scene of the
   kingdom of God. But all this is relatively of little importance
   compared with that which alone really matters--the immense progress in
   the spiritualization of the eschatology. We enter into a new world, a
   spiritual kingdom. The earthly joys of Jesus' promise, the glad eating
   and drinking at His table, have gone. Paul retains, however, what Jesus
   desired above all else--communion with God in a higher, an eternal
   state of existence. Taking this, therefore, as the essential, he leaves
   all the phenomenal apparatus on one side and so completes the spiritual
   process which Jesus had begun. God and eternity--that is the real issue
   at stake. The Christian is to strike out of his hope all that is of the
   earth, phenomenal and individual; it belongs to flesh and blood, not to
   the Spirit.

   With these brief indications he has left us a number of unsolved
   problems. (1) Is the resurrection and transformation of the body one
   event, or are they two separate occurrences which succeed each other
   rapidly? On one occasion, St Paul says plainly, the dead shall rise
   incorruptible; on another he speaks of the awakening of the mortal
   body, when he explains to the Corinthians that the body belongs to the
   Lord and not to fornication; and founds his explanation on the message
   of the resurrection. He appears to presuppose that this mortal body
   will in the first instance rise again. Is it not contained in the very
   conception of resurrection and transformation that the old body will
   first of all arise from the grave and only afterwards be changed? (2)
   Does Paul expect a resurrection of all men, or only of Christians? In
   the most important chapter he only mentions the resurrection of
   Christians, but in the course of his missionary preaching he brings all
   the just and the unjust before the judgment throne of God. But even if
   the unbelievers participate in the resurrection, the spiritual body
   cannot surely be granted them. We do not find any definite mention of
   hell--the word itself does not even occur. Is it possible that he
   conceived of ordinary death as a final punishment? (3) When does the
   judgment take place? Does it coincide with the second coming of the
   Messiah? or is it postponed till the end of Messiah's reign, or does it
   take place progressively in the gradual victory over the enemies of
   God? The conception of the single day of judgment seems to be the
   prevailing one. But then can the new body in this case be said to exist
   before the final judgment has been pronounced? All these are questions
   which admit of no clear answer--for us, but not for St Paul. Probably
   St Paul pictured the occurrences in the after-world somewhat after the
   manner of the Apocalypse of Baruch. First, all men arise with their
   mortal bodies, and thus appear on the day of judgment immediately after
   the parousia. Not till then does God deliver His judgment, allotting
   death to one man, and to another the transfiguration of the body and
   everlasting life. If these suppositions are correct, then St Paul's
   position is much more nearly that of the popular hope of the
   resurrection than certain phrases in 1 Cor. xv. allowed us to suppose;
   in this chapter, however, he is trying to meet the Greeks as far as
   possible.

   But is it true that all men are condemned either to life or to death?
   Isolated texts in St Paul's Epistles appear to give expression to the
   bold thought that all men shall be saved. "As in Adam all die, so also
   in Christ shall all be made alive." "As through one trespass the
   judgment came unto all men to condemnation, even so through one act of
   righteousness the free gift came unto all men to justification of
   life." "God hath shut up all unto disobedience that He might have mercy
   upon all." On these passages later theologians have based their hope of
   a universal restoration. But on insufficient grounds. As soon as the
   texts are read in connection with the context it is evident that St
   Paul is only thinking of Christians. In his enthusiasm his expressions
   are somewhat rhetorical. Surely the great apologist of the Church did
   not build up his whole doctrine of salvation, closely connecting each
   part with the other, in order finally to cast it on one side. And if in
   the whole course of his missionary preaching he starts from the
   presupposition that there are lost and saved, two sharply divided
   classes, then he does not think of rendering his presuppositions on
   which the whole of his work rests illusory in the end. For
   clear-thinking ethical natures such of those of Jesus and St Paul, it
   is a downright necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as
   possible. It is only ethically worthless speculations that have always
   tried to minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our own
   times of how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the
   conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad
   becomes all-important to them.

   Other passages in the letters have given rise to the opinion that in
   the course of his life St Paul gradually receded more and more from the
   Jewish hope of the resurrection and approximated to the Greek hope of
   immortality in the after-world. We hear of the apostle's wish to enter
   into the eternal house of God in heaven as soon as his earthly
   tabernacle is dissolved, or of his longing to depart and be with
   Christ. That appears to point to something different to the old hope of
   the resurrection. But it is only appearance. The man who composed the
   great chapter on the resurrection in First Corinthians had not yet
   acquired the chameleon-like qualities of a modern theologian. The hope
   which he there expresses is certain truth for which he will live and
   die. Even from the imprisonment in Rome he writes: "If by any means I
   may attain unto the resurrection from the dead." The resurrection, the
   transformation of the body, and the judgment--those are the absolutely
   fixed points in the Pauline eschatology, and it is at our peril that we
   try to meddle with them. The longing to die and be with Christ is for
   him identical with the hope in the resurrection. This longing spans the
   chasm that lies between death and the resurrection, and proceeds
   straight to the desired goal, to the meeting with Jesus. So likewise
   the martyr Ignatius hopes by death to come straight into the presence
   of God, passing across the abyss between death and the resurrection, of
   which he often makes mention. For the religious hope, death,
   resurrection, and the coming into the presence of God are one and the
   same thing, always and everywhere, not in St Paul's case alone. And in
   like manner the passage as to the dissolution of the earthly tabernacle
   and the being clothed upon with the heavenly habitation, refers to the
   change at the time of the resurrection and to nothing else. The apostle
   would not then be found naked before God--i.e., in his mortal
   body--which appears to him to be nakedness (Gen. iii.) compared with
   the heavenly body, but he would be clothed immediately in the robes of
   glory. At bottom it is a matter of complete indifference to him what
   happens to his body before the resurrection. For he has found abiding
   comfort in this thought: "Whether we live we live unto the Lord, and
   whether we die we die unto the Lord; whether we live, therefore, or die
   we are the Lord's." A man possessing this sure comfort need invent no
   new hope for the after-world, but can content himself completely with
   the traditional Jewish representations. Beyond the dark passage which
   he shall have to traverse he knows that he shall be with Jesus, and
   that he shall enjoy the vision of God--that is the goal.

   The Pauline eschatology was too exalted for the later Christians, too
   poor in the concrete pictures of the imagination. It was not the
   letters of St Paul but the Apocalypse that became the handbook for the
   doctrine of the last things. Since, however, they drew the longing for
   eternity from these letters and suffered his courage, his consolation
   and his joy to influence their lives, St Paul's labours in their midst
   were not altogether fruitless.

   St Paul was the first to build up a great theory of salvation. Before
   him salvation had been a matter of experience. No one had described it.
   Jesus made children of God of His disciples without uttering one word
   about salvation. Through Him they had become established in hope, and
   victorious in the pursuit of the good; the anguish of sin no longer
   beset them, the cares of this world no longer troubled them; death
   itself had lost its terrors. They were God's children, living together
   with God as with their father. Upon the basis of this experience--his
   own as well as that of others--St Paul built up his soteriology. He
   called the power which produced all these single effects the Spirit of
   God, and united it with the historic Christ and the Gospel. The Spirit
   is nothing but the influence of the personality of Jesus in history.

   But St Paul likewise built up this whole theory of redemption as an
   apologist in the service of the Church. The Spirit was attached to the
   Church and its institutions. He made out all men outside of the Church
   to be as bad as possible, he set up the Christ of the Church as the
   only Saviour, and praised the Christian ideal, as it is possessed by
   the Church, as the greatest thing in the world. Thereby his soteriology
   obtained that definite ecclesiastical character with which it shortly
   afterwards passed over into Catholicism.

   By constructing this theory of redemption St Paul united the Gospel of
   Jesus with a cosmology and a theology which in spite of many Jewish
   conceptions was bound to be welcomed by the decaying ancient world on
   account of its pessimism, its new myths, its ideal, its doctrine of
   hope. Jesus, His influence and His Church, were here introduced into
   the drama of the great world. All that was merely Jewish and national
   was weeded out; there remained the story of the fall and of the
   redemption of creation. And conversely, all the hopes and longings, the
   thoughts and imaginations of the ancient world came to crystallize
   round the person of Jesus, and so acquired consistency and the sense of
   reality. Thus, then, the background had been found for Jesus, and the
   centre for the philosophy of the world and of salvation. That was the
   work of St Paul.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XVI.

  THE ANTI-JEWISH APOLOGETIC.

   THE contrasts between this world and the next, between Adam and Christ,
   the flesh and the Spirit, death and life, are the subjects of the great
   theology of salvation. No mention is made of Israel, of its law, of its
   peculiar position. These matters do not concern the Greeks. But the
   struggle against Jews and Judaizers compelled St Paul to undertake a
   learned exposition of his teaching as compared with Judaism. This
   struggle had of course to be fought out in the first instance in the
   sphere of actual fact. The connection with the synagogue had to be cut
   off in all places where St Paul preached, and the Old Testament had to
   be brought to the Gentile Christians without the official Jewish
   explanation. Then St Paul had stubbornly to defy the whole congregation
   at Jerusalem, and at Antioch to withstand St Peter to the
   face--fighting, in the first instance, for the freedom of the Gentile
   Christians, and in the second for their equality of rights with the
   Jewish Christians. More important here than all his learning was the
   resolute attitude of his personality. Finally he had to beat back the
   attacks of the Judaistic emissaries upon the newly founded Churches,
   and to see to it (in spite of all abuse and denunciation) that none of
   the newly acquired territory should be lost again. In this struggle
   against the Judaizers--it was at the same time the struggle for his
   apostleship--St Paul stands revealed to us under his sternest and most
   rugged aspect. It is there that he breaks forth into abuse of the false
   apostles and messengers of Satan; it is there that he utters the curse
   against every one that should preach another gospel, even were it an
   angel from heaven. The fact is, that he knows that the very existence
   of Christianity is at stake. When finally the most impetuous attack had
   been repulsed, there was still no rest for him. For in the meantime,
   his other great enemy the Jews remained as powerful as ever. They
   denounced him as an apostate and a blasphemer to the Christians at
   Rome; they imprisoned him, and all but killed him at Jerusalem; during
   his captivity they stirred up all the strife they could in his
   churches--e.g., at Philippi. He had to ward off the attacks of these
   Jews till the time of his death. Now this struggle against Jews and
   Judaizers in actual life naturally led him to engage in a theoretical
   campaign, both of attack and defence. His aim and object is ever the
   same: the justification of the mission to the Gentiles free from the
   bondage of the law. In the explanation of his doctrine, three points
   come up for consideration: the criticism and setting aside of the law,
   the defence of the reception of the Gentiles on the basis of faith, and
   the problem of the prerogatives of Israel. St Paul of course speaks
   everywhere from the standpoint of a Christian apologist.

   The Law Annulled.

   It was a memorable hour when St Paul met St Peter at Antioch, and
   fairly placed the alternative before him: Christ or the law. Either the
   one or the other. A little while before, at the council at Jerusalem,
   he had only proclaimed the freedom of his Gentile converts without
   criticising the observance of the law by the Jewish Christians. But now
   the law and Christ stood opposed to each other. Paul put the following
   question to Peter: Where have we ourselves found our salvation, and
   where not? No sooner was the question put in this antithetical form
   than the law was annulled. It now took its place amongst those hostile
   powers from which Christ has set us free. Henceforth St Paul's motto
   was: to die unto the law, in order to be able to live unto God.

   Thereby St Paul destroyed the idea that true religion was the legal
   system of the Jewish race. His object now was to establish this on a
   theoretical basis.

   There were many ways in which he might achieve this result. The divine
   origin of the law might be questioned. Or secondly, the eternal and the
   temporal elements in the law might be separated by means of internal
   criticism. There was a third road, which led to freedom from the
   law--allegorical interpretation. Finally it could be pointed out that
   the law was not the way of salvation, and had been annulled by a new
   divine dispensation.

   The first method--the denial of the divine origin--was that, e.g.,
   pursued later by Marcion, the apostle's zealous follower, but St Paul
   himself resisted the temptation. A temptation it was for him in the
   heat of the fray with the Judaists, when he wrote the letter to the
   Galatians and the second to the Corinthians. At that time he laid great
   weight upon the fact that the law had been ordained through angels, by
   the hand of a mediator; it did not, therefore, originate immediately
   from the hand of God. Nor did he shrink from counting it among the weak
   and beggarly elements which, as heathens, they served in times gone by.
   Or else he spoke of the teaching of the law as of a "ministration of
   death," and said of the letter that it killeth, words which surely
   would only be applied otherwise to powers hostile to God. Nevertheless
   he clings firmly to the fact that God gave the law. The law is not sin,
   but holy; the commandment is holy, righteous and good--and herein lay
   the real source of the difficulty of the problem. Had it not been for
   his tenacious belief in the divine inspiration of every word in the law
   he would never have needed to take all this trouble to prove that it
   would have to be annulled.

   The second method was pursued by Catholic and gnostic teachers of the
   second century, who distinguished the eternal law of nature from the
   transitory law of ritual. Even the conversation of Jesus with the
   Scribe as to the supreme commandment seemed to point in this direction.
   But for St Paul the nomos' admits of no such division--it is something
   whole and entire. It is possible indeed to be uncertain of which part
   of the law he is thinking on this or that particular occasion: e.g., in
   Rom. ii. and Rom. vii. he has the moral law in his mind; in Gal. iv.
   the law of ritual. But he has never expressed this distinction in so
   many words, nor does he anywhere treat of one part of the law more
   favourably than another. The essence of the law is for him the
   categorical imperative, and all its constituent portions bear this
   character in like manner.

   The allegorical interpretation had been a means even for the
   Alexandrian Jews (Philo and others) of liberating themselves, at least
   theoretically, from the literal meaning of the law. It was practised in
   Palestine also, and Paul knew of it. He made use occasionally of Old
   Testament stories in an allegorical fashion: e.g., of the story of
   Isaac and Ishmael. And in like manner he interpreted isolated
   commandments which seemed to him unsuitable to God if taken literally;
   as, e.g., the prohibition to muzzle the mouth of the oxen when the corn
   is trodden out. Could not the whole of the ritual law be thus
   interpreted? Would not this turn out to be the road to freedom?

   There are indeed certain indications which appear to point in this
   direction. The circumcision of the heart in the spirit is contrasted
   with the circumcision of the flesh as that which alone has value in the
   sight of God. Or we hear of the circumcision not made with hands--i.e.,
   the putting off of the body of the flesh at baptism. If the law is
   spiritual, does it not then rightly need a spiritual--i.e.,
   allegorical--interpretation of those portions which are of less value?
   Does not the celebrated antithesis of letter and spirit (2 Cor. iii. 6)
   lead us to the same conclusion? St Paul's opinion is the exact opposite
   of this. By the letter and the spirit he sets up in opposition to each
   other two covenants of different contexts--the one demands as a right,
   the other grants freely. The difference between Paul and Philo strikes
   one more forcibly from this passage than from any other. For reasons of
   his own St Paul could not find freedom in allegory: the law even when
   interpreted allegorically represented a demand for him.

   St Paul's theology pursues an entirely independent course of its own.
   His criticism establishes two propositions hitherto unheard of: the law
   cannot be the way of salvation; Christ by His death has freed us from
   the law.

   1. The law cannot be the way of salvation, because it only demands, it
   does not give. It presupposes God as lawgiver and judge: man has to
   perform a task, God rewards or punishes. St Paul never wearies of
   describing this relationship of wages without toning down any of the
   difficulties. "Now to him that worketh, the reward is not reckoned as
   of grace but as of debt." Thereby, however, the result of the law is
   merely a negative one. The law brings the full knowledge of sin: by its
   continual injunctions and prohibitions it actually stimulates
   transgression and drives a man to sin. So it works wrath and has death
   as its doom. Despair is the result of the service of the law.

   The picture which St Paul thereby presents to us of later Judaism is a
   very strange one. He characterizes it as a religion of wage service and
   of fear, a slave's religion suitable for bondsmen only. To be a sincere
   adherent of Judaism is tantamount to despairing of one's salvation. For
   God is the stern Judge before whom even the most pious Jew cannot
   stand. In the Epistle to the Romans St Paul proves this point from
   Scripture, quoting passages from the Psalms and the prophets. "None is
   righteous; no, not one." In the Epistle to the Galatians he argues from
   the law itself: "Cursed is every one which continueth not in all things
   that are written in the book of the law," and hence he draws the
   conclusion that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God.

   Now, is St Paul's criticism of later Judaism just? What would a Jewish
   Rabbi think of this representation of his faith? He would say: this is
   a caricature of our religion. The Jewish Church is law and grace. The
   law presupposes grace. To be a Jew, a child of Abraham and a member of
   the chosen people, is already a mark of grace. Circumcision is a symbol
   of God's covenant grace. The whole Jewish Church is an organization for
   the attainment of salvation. It has sacrifices, repentance, the great
   day of atonement, the good works of the fathers, personal merits, the
   forgiveness of God in answer to prayer. He who has fear in the presence
   of the law may take refuge in the grace of God. For Israel has a God
   who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, a faithful God.

   How was it that St Paul thus entirely ignored the grace that was in the
   Jewish Church and the justification that was already within reach?
   There is a double reason--one personal, one apologetic.

   St Paul saw to the bottom of contemporary Judaism. It was really in the
   main a service for wages and a slavish form of piety. A man could not
   breathe freely in God's love, could not feel himself free as a child of
   God. Jesus could retain complete personal freedom because the law did
   not stand between God and Himself. But wherever legalism thus formed a
   wall of separation, it fostered an artificial and slavish form of
   piety. The Church and the Sacraments do not give the one thing that is
   needful: the trust of the individual soul in the grace of God and the
   certainty of His love. The question as to the personal assurance of
   salvation still remained unanswered: it was only the day of judgment
   that was to clear up all that was now doubtful. An unbiassed
   examination must allow St Paul to have been justified in his criticism.

   But now, of course, St Paul's apologetic and ecclesiastical interests
   came into play. Besides the grace in Christ he could not possibly allow
   any Jewish means of grace to have any efficacy. The despair which the
   law produced in pious souls was welcome to him, because it was the only
   way to get them to accept Jesus as their Redeemer. The whole of St
   Paul's criticism of the law, instead of being based on Jewish premises,
   always presupposes the Christian salvation that has already been won.
   As a Christian St Paul had become so entirely estranged from the law
   and the Jewish Church that he could never again judge it objectively.
   He was obliged, therefore, in writing Rom. vii. to learn to understand
   it again. Hence a Jew could never have written as St Paul did. Christ
   and His Church stand everywhere between the apostle and the law.

   2. The despair to which legalism leads has been clearly set forth. The
   law is not the way of salvation, but as it is nevertheless divine, how
   can we escape our obligation to it? Christ was sent by God to set men
   free from the law. Christ is the end of the law.

   Christ sets us free from the law in a twofold manner, in both instances
   by suffering vicariously for us. In the first place, Christ's whole
   life upon earth was a free and vicarious service of the law. He was
   made under law to them that are under law. For the Son of God who
   descended from heaven was, as such, free from the law. If He subjected
   Himself to the law He did it for our sakes that we might become the
   free children of God.

   But above all the death of Christ was a vicarious suffering endured to
   set us free. St Paul's line of argument is a masterpiece after the true
   rabbinical fashion. One passage in the law pronounces every
   transgressor to be accursed; another says that every one that is hanged
   is accursed of God. Therefore he that is hanged is accounted a
   transgressor in the eyes of the law. Now, Christ hung upon the tree,
   but naturally without being a transgressor or accursed. Therefore, He
   became a curse for us, and our transgression has received its due
   punishment in His death. Thereby we have been set free from the law.

   The passage in which he employs the argument from the marriage law
   describes exactly the same thing. From a legal point of view death puts
   an end to marriage and sets the surviving partner free. In a similar
   manner our obligation to the law would be ended by our death. Christ
   died in our stead; that is as much as to say that the connection
   between us and the law had been severed. We are dead to the law. That
   is to say, we are free men.

   It is clear of course that all these arguments deal with legal
   abstractions and have nothing whatever to do with the Jesus of history.
   The question, does Jesus set us free from the law or not, could surely
   only be answered from the point of view of His position in history.
   This St Paul, however, absolutely refuses to take. The Jesus of history
   is for him a servant of the law just like every other Jew, but as Son
   of God voluntarily and vicariously. Now, without going any further, St
   Paul is at fault in his premises, and so the whole of this theory is an
   ingenious conjuring with ideas and nothing more. All this strikes us as
   so unnatural that many have found it hard before now to take St Paul
   seriously here. But for all that he was in serious earnest, and the
   idea that he had in his mind was a great one. He rightly understood
   Jesus when he conceived of Him as our Redeemer from the law. He
   revealed the contradiction between the respect which Jesus paid to the
   law and His actual relation to legalism. He drew that inference from
   the Gospel of Jesus, which His disciples neither had the courage nor
   the perspicacity to draw for themselves. Jesus was in very deed the end
   of the law; with Him began a new mediatorship and a new religious
   relation. The struggle against Scribes and Pharisees reached its
   rightful conclusion only when their legalism--the system which stood
   behind their persons--was annulled. That St Paul based this true under
   standing of Jesus on a very lame theory which disregarded facts, we
   have to take into the bargain. And, besides, St Paul's mistake must be
   put down to the account of those who had been acquainted with Jesus,
   but had not recognized Him as free.

   Of course, if we confine ourselves to the Jewish point of view we can
   easily understand the wrath and the indignation of St Paul's
   adversaries when he came forward with proofs such as these. For there
   was no single word in his theory that carried conviction with it. The
   very method, the attempt to prove the annulling of the law from the law
   itself, implied reasoning in a circle. There was, to be sure, a good
   dose of the characteristic cleverness of the Jewish Rabbi in it: and
   that made it seem all the more obnoxious to them. This kind of
   apologetic was bound to repel every thinking Jew. Christ was the end of
   the law for the believer--i.e., for the man who had from the very first
   embraced the Christian point of view.

   Justification by Faith and Freedom in the Spirit.

   The positive converse to the negative criticism of the law is the proof
   of the superiority of the Christian religion over Judaism. St Paul's
   object is to show that Christians who have abandoned the law but who
   believe in Christ as their liberator from the law, far from losing,
   have been greatly the gainers by the exchange. Once again these
   theories are based upon experiences quite peculiar to St Paul, out of
   which, however, he constructs the defence of his practice as missionary
   and of the gospel which he preaches.

   By the vision of Christ on the road to Damascus the religious
   relationship had been reversed for St Paul. Before, it was he who
   performed and God who rewarded. Now, God comes to meet him with the
   free gift of love. He is the giver, St Paul the child, the recipient of
   the gift. That is what St Paul means by the word grace. It is the
   return to true religion from an imaginary faith of one's own
   fabrication. God first--man last: that alone is the true religious
   relation. Thence rest and peace and thankfulness enter into the heart.
   And faith is nothing else than receptivity for God's love, the
   suffering oneself to receive the gift, the being seized by God.
   Grace--God is the Father; faith--I am His child: these two belong
   together. St Paul has expressed this more clearly than anywhere else in
   Rom. iv. Once more we hear the music of the 103rd Psalm, and there is
   added to it a note which no Jew could possibly strike, a strain of
   personal assurance. For in the death of Christ God's love has spoken to
   him.

   By this same miracle of his conversion St Paul became a new man
   morally. When he found God and experienced His love, the good became
   the untrammelled motive power of his life, proceeding from his inmost
   being. He felt himself free, and the good conquered, without any kind
   of external compulsion, without either threats or prohibitions, without
   the taskmaster: nay, rather, from pure delight and love. That, in St
   Paul's language, is the Spirit. When the storms in his inmost being had
   subsided, external attractions lost their hold upon him. Instead of
   being something foreign to him, the good became his true home. He felt
   light-hearted and glad in the midst of all his labours.

   By means of these experiences St Paul was able to look into the depths
   of religion as no previous thinker had done. In so far as his
   propositions merely reproduce this experience, they are the foundation
   stones of every theory of religion. Once again St Paul has reached
   Jesus, and once again he has gone a long way round to do it. For no man
   possessed in like manner as Jesus the power of living the life of a
   child of God or of acting from the inner motive. That which St Paul
   only learnt through the shipwreck of his old life, Jesus possessed from
   the very first as an original endowment. Hence Jesus had no need of St
   Paul's antithesis.

   When it was therefore necessary to defend the reception of the Gentiles
   against the attacks of Jews and Judaizers, without exacting the
   observance of the law, and simply on the ground of their faith, then
   naturally St Paul found his personal experience very valuable. All that
   is genuine and profound in the doctrines of justification and of
   Christian liberty can be traced back to the experiences of St Paul. But
   his apologetic interests have here injured the expression of his
   thoughts to an even greater extent than in other points of his
   theology. They compelled him to accommodate himself to the difficulties
   and to the conceptions of his opponents, and to the employment of like
   conceptions in setting up antitheses against their theses. A great
   subject of a distinctly non-Jewish nature was thereby pressed into a
   perverted Jewish form. This remark applies to the doctrine of
   justification, which defends the entrance of the Gentiles on the ground
   of faith, even more than to the doctrine of Christian liberty. Jews and
   Judaizers alike declared that without circumcision and the fulfilment
   of the law no one could prepare for the judgment, or hope for
   justification on the day of judgment. In opposition to this St Paul set
   up his doctrine of justification by faith.

   What, then, is the meaning of justification? What is the position of
   God, what is the position of man?

   The word justify,' like its opposite, to declare guilty,' is a forensic
   term and is thence applied to the act of the Supreme Judge--God. In
   later Judaism men pictured God to themselves as keeping account in
   heaven of the deeds of men upon earth. Every man had his own particular
   page in the heavenly book, in which the good deeds were written on one
   side and the bad on the other. Now the Judge passes sentence in every
   moment when He decides to write the deed on the good or the bad side.
   But He can only pass the final sentence when He sums up the total of
   the good and the bad deeds. There is accordingly a twofold act both of
   justification and of condemnation--one that is going on continuously as
   each deed is done, and a final one on the day of judgment. Under the
   first head would be included, e.g., the justification of the publican
   on the strength of his prayer in the temple, or of Abraham because of
   his faith in God's promise. Under the second St Paul himself includes
   the justification of the doers of the law on the day of judgment, of
   which he holds out the prospect in Rom. ii. Naturally the ground
   covered by these two kinds of sentence differs considerably. In the
   first instance it is the praise of a good deed; in the second, entrance
   into the everlasting blessedness, salvation.

   The question now arises, which kind of sentence St Paul had in view in
   his doctrine of justification: for he was acquainted with both from the
   very first, just as his teachers the Rabbis were acquainted with them.
   Under the justification for which he contends he understands the single
   final sentence of God, the sentence which decides upon life and death.
   But now comes the innovation which he introduced. In the first place,
   instead of awaiting God's final verdict on a future day of judgment, he
   transfers it to the very beginning, to the entrance of the convert into
   the Christian community, so that every Christian, being already
   justified, can go forward in confident joy; secondly, he attaches a new
   meaning to justification, inasmuch as not the righteous but sinners are
   justified; henceforth it is simply equivalent to
   forgiveness--forgiveness for time and for eternity. Whereas the Jew
   anxiously awaits the uncertain award of God in the hope that he will
   stand the test of the day of the Lord because of his good works, the
   Christian has the full assurance, from the very day of his entrance
   into the community, of having received a full pardon in spite of all
   his sins. Both innovations--participation in salvation here and now and
   the reception of grace instead of one's just due--completely transform
   the idea of justification. All that is left are the juridical terms and
   the forensic appearance. "I am justified," no longer means, now I have
   acted rightly in the sight of God, but I have received forgiveness and
   am assured of His grace.

   What, then, is the position of God in justification? Here we clearly
   realize the contradiction between the new meaning and the old form. God
   must be conceived of as judge in accordance with the forensic
   expressions. As such He gives His award on the ground of the deeds of
   men that are brought before Him for judgment. So it appears to be, as
   long as we look merely at the form. But the meaning points in a
   contrary direction. The God who declares sinners to be righteous,
   ceases to be a judge. He is the God of grace, and not of justice. Would
   that the old order, first man, then God, had not been retained even
   when the old doctrine received its new setting!

   In the Jewish doctrine of justification God is the judge who punishes
   or rewards. St Paul, revising this doctrine, substitutes the God of
   mercy who forgives sinners on the ground of their faith. But St Paul's
   ultimate object was to establish the new order: first God, then man.
   This he does in the Epistle to the Galatians by emphasizing the
   promise, and by uniting promise and faith in one conception. The God
   that promises is the God that prevents'; man's faith only comes second.
   In the Epistle to the Romans the doctrine of the revelation of the
   "righteousness of God" in the death of Jesus is intended to express the
   same thought. In the doctrine of justification as a connected whole,
   righteousness' must be the substantive to the verb to set forth as
   righteous,' i.e. to justify, and means justification.' The only reason
   why St Paul did not employ the ordinary Greek word for justification is
   that the Old Testament provided him with an expression established by
   long usage, "The righteousness of God" (cp. Isa. li. 5, 6, 8; Ps.
   xcvii. 2). St Paul, as we have seen, altered the signification of the
   idea! It now means simply forgiveness, grace, love. This grace of God
   has been manifested, he says, in the death of Jesus: here is the
   objective fact to which the sinner seeking for forgiveness can cling.
   God's love, therefore, according to St Paul, does not follow the act of
   faith but anticipates it. That is the great reversal in the religious
   relationship which Paul himself experienced. But he did not succeed in
   giving clear expression to his new thoughts. The old form of the
   doctrine of justification was still too powerful. In his controversy
   with the Jews St Paul did not manage to find the simple words "God is
   our Father."

   But the old forensic system exercises its most baneful effect upon the
   position of man in the doctrine of justification. Faith in Jesus Christ
   comes to be the condition for justification. Now for Paul himself this
   faith was nothing but the feeling of God's love in the death of Jesus,
   the passive reception of God's gift, the exact opposite of any kind of
   performance of works. But in the course of his controversy with the
   Judaizers, he sets up, in opposition to their thesis, justification by
   the works of the law, his antithesis, justification by faith; thus
   putting faith instead of the ceremonies of the law as the work of man
   that is acceptable to God. That is, of course, not his intention: he
   emphatically declares faith and works to be opposites, but the power of
   his adversaries' formula is stronger than his will. And what is the
   faith after all which secures justification? It is the faith in Jesus
   as the Messiah, in His death and resurrection--in a word, it is the
   creed of the Church. And thus in fact a new work--the Church's
   creed--has stepped into the place of circumcision, ordinances as to
   food, the Sabbath, etc., and even now the apologist is not afraid of
   uttering the fatal proposition: "The creed of the Church will save a
   man in the day of judgment, and will secure eternal blessedness for
   him." The subject of controversy with Jews and Judaizers was the
   question whether entrance into the Christian fellowship might be
   considered a substitute for the Jewish ceremonies or not. But how
   widely removed is this question from St Paul's deep personal
   experiences.

   One further argument, however, was indispensable. If St Paul wished to
   refute Judaism, he must prove "justification by faith" from the Old
   Testament. It was a critical undertaking. How could he expect to find
   again in the Old Testament the great new creation which he had
   experienced in Jesus? But apologetic methods smooth away most
   difficulties by taking merely words into account. By chance the
   decisive words faith' and righteousness' were found in the Old
   Testament (Gen. xv.) "Abraham believed . . . . and it was reckoned unto
   him for righteousness" (Hab. ii.). "The righteous shall live by faith."
   So the proof was furnished both from the law and the prophets. By Gen.
   xv. St Paul even secured Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people,
   for his doctrine. This was an immense advantage, for now he had the
   start of the law by 450 years. Clearly, then, it was proved to be
   altogether secondary. Even circumcision was now proved to have come in
   after faith. The institution of the rite is described two chapters
   after Gen. xv. It was therefore likewise something secondary and not
   the main condition. The appeal to antiquity had resulted in St Paul's
   favour; he had vanquished his opponents, for the old, according to the
   belief of that age, was everywhere the more venerable and holy. With
   what one must almost call a refinement of cleverness, St Paul managed
   to extract a proof of justification by faith even from a passage which
   actually praised the law. It was the passage Deut. xxx. 11 seq., "This
   commandment which I command thee this day, it is not concealed from
   thee, neither is it far off . . . . for it is the word that is very
   nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart that thou mayest do it."
   The clever man simply omitted the first words "The commandment," etc.,
   and the conclusion "That thou mayest do it," and lo and behold he had
   interpreted the word as his gospel, and mouth' and heart' as faith' and
   confession.' To a Rabbi this exegesis could appear as nothing else than
   deceitful. And doubtless St Paul heard the epithet applied to his
   procedure. Thereupon he answered that when the Old Testament was read
   the "veil of Moses" was over the hearts of the Jews, so that the true
   meaning of the law remained concealed from them; or, in a more succinct
   and emphatic form, that the devil had blinded them. This, then, was the
   conclusion of the controversy concerning the proof from Scripture
   between St Paul and his opponents.

   But for us there is still another point in this matter which is very
   instructive. Through the use that St Paul makes of Abraham in his
   apologetic he renders the theory of salvation vulnerable. Before this
   we always used to hear that the whole of mankind was a massa
   perditionis,' that the light of salvation only began to shine in the
   world when Christ came on earth. And now, all at once, long before
   Christ's advent, there is the golden age of Abraham in the midst of
   this wicked world. The contradiction is due to the fact that two
   separate systems of apologetic, the one for Greeks and the other for
   Jews, intersect at this point. The consequence of this is that the Old
   Testament and its God are saved; the God of Jesus Christ is also the
   God of Abraham. In a later age the whole assault of the gnostics beat
   in vain against this rock of apologetics. And thus, even this
   artificial proof from Scripture turned out to be a piece of good
   fortune for the Church.

   Whoever examines St Paul's doctrine of justification, laying aside all
   Protestant prejudices, is bound to reckon it one of his most disastrous
   creations. The word justify,' with the new meaning attached to it, is
   ambiguous; the position of God who as judge declares the sinner to be
   righteous, is confusing; the value attached to the creed of the Church
   as the decisive factor in the judgment is fraught with evil
   consequences, and the proof from the Old Testament is arbitrary and
   artificial. St Paul fought for the universalism of Christianity and the
   substitution of the religion of love for that of legalism: what he
   really attained was the establishment of the Christian Church with the
   new legalism of faith and the creed, with the return of all the Jewish
   sins of narrowness, fanaticism, and the restricted conception of God. A
   great and profound thought, however, lies hidden, in spite of all,
   beneath the defective outer form. God is our Father, who freely gives
   to us whether we deserve it or not, and we men, just as we are, His
   children, living by His love. This thought is at once strengthened and
   realized by the fact of the historical manifestation of Christ. To the
   kernel though not to the husk we Protestants certainly owe the deepest
   reverence.

   The second reproach, however, which his Jewish adversaries cast in his
   teeth still remained unanswered. The annulling of the law was
   equivalent, they said, to an invitation to unchecked sin. The reception
   of the Gentiles without the law merely paved the way for the entrance
   of immorality into the Christian Churches. St Paul's answer to this was
   the doctrine of Christian freedom.

   He attaches a sharply defined meaning to the word freedom': it is
   freedom from the Jewish law, which, like a giant, holds men in bondage.
   The children of the house are free, therefore freedom from the law
   means at the same time the sonship of God. And that, according to St
   Paul, was Christ's great achievement, that out of the slaves of
   legalism He made us to be the free children of God.

   But there is no danger in this freedom from the law, because the
   Christian's new life proceeds from within. In the Spirit which God has
   given him, the Christian has a complete substitute for the law. Whilst
   the law, as a foreign and extraneous power, demanded of us that which
   was incapable of fulfilment, and was unable to break the inner law of
   sin in our members, the Spirit grants the Christian the power for a new
   life from within, and all that proceeds from the Spirit is not contrary
   to the law but fulfils it. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
   patience, chastity; and along with the gift of love is given the
   fulfilment of the whole law, for the command of love to one's neighbour
   is the sum of the whole law. So, then, the freedom of the Christian
   from the law is no freedom to commit sin, for from the Spirit there
   proceeds only the victory over sin and obedience to the will of God.

   It is as though one stepped out of the dark night into the bright light
   of day, when one comes to these marvellous and simple sentences after
   leaving the laboured arguments of the doctrine of justification. They
   are eloquent with the glad rejoicing of a man who has become a child
   again after having been an aged pedant, and at the same time with an
   enthusiasm for the victory of the good in all his friends which is
   peculiar to the period of creative activity. Nowhere else has the
   superiority of the new religion over the old found so brilliant an
   expression. But on a closer examination we observe that it is not a
   picture of things as they really are, but a coloured apologetic
   representation that we have here before us. St Paul himself was the
   first to be aware that the Spirit produced very various effects, e.g.
   at Corinth, and amongst them some which threatened to implant in the
   lives of the converts the tendency to an unbridled and morally
   dangerous enthusiasm. One need but compare the fruits of the Spirit
   which the apologist enumerates in the Epistle to the Galatians with
   those which are noted in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. And
   apart from this St Paul knew very well that the work of the Spirit
   cannot be compared to natural causation, so that the moral life could
   be deduced from it by purely logical methods. That which he describes
   as apologist was the ideal and not the real in his congregation. Read,
   e.g., the statement: "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh,
   with the passions and the lusts thereof." Taken literally it would not
   be true to fact: but St Paul is setting up the ideal, the aim and goal
   of effort. The same remark applies to the idea of the new birth--St
   Paul prefers the word resurrection--which he sets forth in the Epistle
   to the Romans as a parallel to the theory of the Spirit. He had once
   more been reproached with the taunt that his doctrine of free grace led
   to immorality. St Paul answers, referring to baptism, that sin for
   Christians is an impossibility, because they had died to it once and
   for all at their conversion, and through dying to it with Christ had
   been freed from all relation to it. It has rightly been pointed out
   that great moral changes sometimes take place from the very moment of
   conversion in the missionary field. But to generalize from such cases
   is surely only the work of the apologist who takes the ideal for the
   real.

   St Paul felt that himself, and therefore added in the Epistles to the
   Galatians and Romans the command in the imperative mood to the
   description in the indicative. We may perhaps even go still further and
   say that the description of the ideal was written by him in the shape
   of a command to his readers to attain to it. Both in the doctrine of
   the Spirit and in the doctrine of the new birth the Christian is to
   read his obligation to understand his Christian freedom as obedience to
   God's will. His freedom is to consist in becoming the servant of
   righteousness, in the rendering of services to the brethren, and in a
   freedom from sin. To this St Paul firmly adheres. There is no word
   about the law. Christians are not under the law but under grace. But
   the place of the external law is taken by the inner sense of
   obligation, the simple content of which is love to God and the
   brethren. This inner obligation is to rule their hearts and minds in
   the place of the law. His controversy with the Jews, the impossibility
   of understanding anything but the Jewish law under the word nomos,'
   prevented St Paul from using the phrase, the inner law of duty. And
   finally, his doctrine of the Spirit presented an obstacle, for he
   always conceives of the spirit as of some strange power entering in
   from without. It never comes to be equivalent to the conception of a
   will which has become good. But under this husk--Antinomianism and the
   theory of supernatural spirit--the kernel--the idea of duty and of a
   good-will--gradually emerge an earnest for the future. Only thus can we
   explain the fact that the man who annulled the law had at the same time
   the most profound conception of the ethical character of Christianity.
   In St Paul's controversies with Jews and Judaizers the great ideas of
   moral liberty and of Sonship to God are striving for a clear utterance.
   They fail to find an outer form such as to ensure their victory;
   nevertheless it was fortunate for the whole future history of
   Christianity that they were connected so closely with its origin.

   The net result of all these theories as to law, justification, freedom,
   is the annulling of the mistaken Jewish idea. True religion is not the
   Torah of the holy people, just as God is not a mere tribal Jewish God.
   He that would become God's child must first escape from the purely
   national Jewish customs. Thus St Paul takes up that standpoint which
   alone corresponds to the Gospel of Jesus. He draws his conclusion from
   Jesus' message and consciously raises Christianity into the position of
   a world-religion. This or that theory which he employed in so doing may
   not meet with our approval, but they all served to make a deed possible
   which has a world-historic significance.

   There is a reverse side, however, to the apostle's undertaking. The
   destruction of Jewish legalism furthered the development of the
   Christian Church. But the Church has also its legal system--first of
   all spiritually expressed in faith and the confession of Jesus, and
   soon afterwards in the new ceremonies which find a footing in the
   Sacraments. However strange it may sound, the man that destroyed the
   Jewish idea of the Church is in reality the theoretical creator of the
   new ecclesiastical system. It is indebted to no one more than to him
   who said, "He that believes will be saved."

   But St Paul's standpoint, which was on the whole still purely
   spiritual, was far too high for the succeeding age. It could not remain
   content with the mere annulling of the Jewish law. Even the education
   of the Gentiles called for a new Christian law. This was formed, as the
   Torah had been before, by the gradual collection of ecclesiastical
   customs, legal forms, regulations for public worship, dogmas, etc.,
   which were ultimately sanctioned officially. The origin of Catholicism
   is the gradual transformation of the Church built upon faith into an
   institution of dogmas, laws, and ceremonies. That is of course a very
   great decline from St Paul's high ideal, but it is a decline in the
   direction of that idea of the Church which St Paul himself had created.

   The fate of the Jewish people.

   The results of St Paul's missionary labours were immense. Christianity
   became the religion of the Greeks and Romans, of the Mediterranean
   peoples as a whole, instead of being as before the religion of the
   Jews. It was quite evident that God had abandoned His ancient people
   and had entered upon a new course.

   The whole people of Israel seemed all at once to have no lot or part in
   the divine plan of salvation.

   This was of course likewise a result of the message of Jesus. Jesus had
   found greater faith in the centurion of Capernaum and in the woman of
   Canaan than in Israel. In unmistakable language He had set aside the
   privileges of Israel. The men of Nineveh and the Queen of Sheba should
   fare better on the day of judgment than this people. St Paul merely
   completes the great process of levelling which Jesus had begun. The
   second and third chapters of the Epistle to the Romans are our chief
   evidence in support of this statement. There the apostle proclaims the
   equality of Jews and Gentiles before God--God is no respecter of
   persons. The mere possession of the written law is of no value, for the
   Gentiles have the law written in their hearts. It is the working of
   good that decides on the day of judgment. Nor does literal circumcision
   carry any privilege with it. The uncircumcised that do God's will shall
   judge the circumcised that transgress the law. Indeed, both Jews and
   Gentiles alike are under the dominion of sin, only the Jews with the
   greater responsibility. Let them lay aside, therefore, all national
   pride and all boasting on the ground of their belonging to the holy
   people. The very words of their own Scriptures stop the mouth of the
   Jews and prove all men without distinction to be worthy of punishment
   in God's sight. Only a disciple of Jesus could speak thus.

   The answer to such rebukes was naturally that of apostasy. The report
   must have been spread, especially at Rome--even among Christians--that
   Paul had denied his nationality and blasphemed his people, his God and
   the law. The reproach was comprehensible enough, but it was not just.
   St Paul could in all truth call God to witness that he would rather
   himself be anathema from Christ for the sake of his brethren, his
   kinsmen according to the flesh. Their salvation was the fervent wish of
   his heart and the object of his supplications to God. But it was just
   in the presence of accusations such as these that the problems almost
   drove him to distraction. How can the present unbelief of the Jews be
   reconciled with God's promise to them, with the glorious part of God's
   chosen people? Can the people of God be lost? The answer to this
   question is the last great chapter of the apologetic. And on this
   occasion it concerns his own heart as well as his kinsmen.

   First of all, the privileges of Israel over all other peoples are
   solemnly set forth, in striking opposition to other passages in the
   same epistle. Theirs is the adoption and the glory and the covenants
   and the giving of the law and the service of God and the promises, and
   the fathers and Christ as concerning the flesh. So speaks the Jew in St
   Paul, who suddenly bethinks himself of his origin. But then there
   begins a mighty wrestling to attain to clearness as to God's purposes
   with this highly privileged people. There are three separate stages.

   1. Has God's word become of none effect? No; the Bible itself speaks of
   election amongst the children of Abraham, and of God's free choice
   everywhere. If God blesses only one portion of Israel and rejects
   another, and saves the Gentiles in its place, then all this is in
   accordance with Scripture. The God of the Bible has revealed Himself as
   the God of arbitrary power. All that He does is right. Man, a weak
   thing of nought, should bow down in all humility before the sovereign
   decrees of God that have been revealed to him in the Old Testament, the
   God that blesses one and pours out His wrath upon another.

   2. But how is the salvation of the Gentiles, that seek not after
   righteousness, consonant with the rejection of Israel, that is jealous
   for the law? It is just Israel's religiousness and perverted zeal for
   works that are the cause of their having hardened their hearts against
   God's new ways. The Gentiles are ready to receive the new message and
   to behold the works of God, whereas Israel's pious zeal renders them
   unreceptive. God gives Himself to such as are willing to receive the
   gift.

   8. But is the election of Israel set aside forever? No. A part of
   Israel hardened their hearts, but the purpose of this was simply to
   draw the Gentiles on to their salvation. But when the fulness of the
   Gentiles has entered in, then Israel's heart shall no longer be
   hardened and all Israel shall be saved. This must come to pass, because
   of the promises to the fathers. For the mercies and the election of God
   are sure.

   These three stages are not directly contradictory. They are rather to
   be regarded as so many steps up which the apostle's thought had to
   ascend in due order. The sequence of these stages affords us an insight
   into the very centre of the apostle's method of investigation. The
   first command resulting from the enquiry is: submit thyself to the
   inscrutable but supreme will of God; reverence God's ways whether thou
   understandest them or not. So speaks the Semite, who sinks before Allah
   in the dust even if He tread him underfoot as a worm. It is only when
   due submission has thus been paid to God by us that we may humbly
   enquire as to the sin of man that perchance moved God to this action.
   Indeed, in view of man's littleness there is but one main sin:
   self-reliance, resistance to God's new ways. Here St Paul writes as a
   Christian and from the deepest experience. It is the fault of every
   orthodoxy to apply its own system cut and dried to God's free thoughts
   about the future. But our examination must go beyond the human
   relationship: God last as well as first. The enquiry as to the purpose
   of God alone leads us to the complete answer--the aim of God's purpose
   must be the realization of His promises. It is by looking into the
   future that the darkness of the present is chased away. Here, finally,
   the Jew speaks yet once more: at the end of all things, God and Israel
   belong indissolubly together. The examination begins, therefore, with
   the awful mystery, then seeks for illumination in reflection as to the
   possible motives of God, and finally finds comfort and peace in the
   comprehension of His purposes for the future.

   And yet what a fluctuating medley of thought about God! First, the God
   of mere arbitrary power; then the ethical God who accepts those who
   turn their hearts to Him; and finally the God of the nation, who keeps
   His faith with His favourites. And this last God is the mightiest for
   St Paul, with the one proviso that the breadth and freedom of the
   Gospel are untouched.

   Jesus had passed a clear and definite sentence of condemnation upon
   Israel, because He had come to recognize in the course of His activity
   that God's ways were about to turn aside from Israel, and because He
   submitted to this result of His experience. St Paul did not submit,
   though God had definitely entered upon new paths--the fact was
   accomplished, but the apostle set the authority of the old scripture
   still higher. The contrast is a characteristic one--both for Jesus and
   for St Paul--here reverence for facts, there for the Bible. At the same
   time, we observe once more how the Jesus of history is simply
   nonexistent for St Paul when he treats apologetic problems of this
   nature. No mention whatever is made of Him in the three chapters of the
   Romans which treat of Israel's fate. The literal text of the Septuagint
   seems to be the only decisive authority, and that is so sacred and so
   almighty, that whenever it comes into collision with the human
   conscience, the latter is silenced when the voice of revelation speaks.
   This is, of course, only apparent--we have had sufficient reason to
   know that St Paul could on other occasions manipulate the Old Testament
   text as he liked. The really decisive factor was after all his
   patriotism, which he did not get rid of even as a Christian.

   But notwithstanding its reverence for the apostle, the Christian Church
   soon laid aside the Jewish patriotism of St Paul, who rested upon God's
   promises in the Old Testament in spite of facts. In the year 70 A.D.
   came the awful end of the Jewish state and sanctuary. That was looked
   upon as a divine judgment. Henceforth there could be no doubt as to
   God's new ways.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XVII.

  THE PAULINE GNOSIS.

   ST PAUL developed his soteriology as well as his anti-Jewish apologetic
   in the midst of his missionary labours and for purely practical
   purposes. In order to win over the Gentiles, Jesus had to be presented
   to them in a wider, more comprehensive, and intelligible system; and
   furthermore, this system had to be defended against the attack of the
   Jews and Jewish Christians. It may even be safely maintained that St
   Paul scarcely ever speculated in the interests of pure knowledge and
   abstract truth. All his propositions--even the most abstruse--served
   the practical purposes of missionary life, and were never put forward
   without reference to them. But for all that it is a fact that through
   St Paul speculative thought and knowledge became a power in
   Christianity. The relation of Jesus to the problem of knowledge was a
   totally different one. The whole of His teaching is marked by the
   entire absence of every kind of speculation and an emphasis on the
   all-importance of action. If He boasts of the knowledge of God He means
   the understanding of the divine will in opposition to the science of
   the Rabbis, and this is so simple that it is within the reach of every
   child and unlearned person. The first step in the development of a
   Christian theology is marked by the appearance of teachers in the
   Church at Jerusalem. But it was St Paul who first really created the
   science of the Church. Through him a very high degree of importance
   comes to be assigned to knowledge and science in Christianity. Great
   systems, albeit at first of an apologetic nature, are built up. We have
   lines of argument often of the most complex form. It comes to be an
   integral portion of the Christian ideal that a Christian should be rich
   in the word of God and in knowledge of every kind. Thereby the way is
   paved for an immense change in the nature of Christianity. It takes its
   first timid and tentative steps on the bridge that leads over to
   philosophy--i.e. ecclesiastical philosophy, of course. The reason for
   this change is certainly to be found in great measure in the previous
   theological training of St Paul, but we cannot forget either the great
   alteration that has taken place in the historical position. As soon as
   Christianity is definitely separated from Judaism and faces Judaism and
   heathenism alike in an independent position, an entirely new task is
   incumbent upon it, viz. the enlightenment of Jews and Gentiles. In St
   Paul we are still in that stage where Greek philosophy is almost
   totally ignored, that is, as a power of culture which might be a
   possible rival. The science that is developed by him is still
   essentially Jewish Old Testament science.

   What is the meaning of gnosis' in St Paul's case? It has three
   characteristic features. (1) It is something higher than pistis,'
   faith, which is always presupposed as a necessary first step to
   knowledge, but is surpassed by it. The clearest statement of this fact
   is to be found in the opening chapters of the First Epistle to the
   Corinthians. First the folly of the Cross, the preaching of faith, then
   the divine wisdom of gnosis, which teaches us to understand folly
   itself as wisdom. (2) It is the possession of a few and not of all. The
   "word of wisdom" and the "word of knowledge" are counted by St Paul as
   especial gifts of the Spirit which are granted to single individuals.
   "Not all men have knowledge." True, the ultimate goal is that all
   Christians should come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of
   the Son of God, but now for the present the difference between them
   that have knowledge and the ignorant exists. (3) It proceeds from the
   Spirit. St Paul sets this forth especially in 1 Cor. ii. Through the
   Spirit God has revealed wisdom to us. We have received the Spirit which
   is of God in order therewith to understand what God has granted to us.
   The last of these three characteristic features is the most important.
   It sets up a sharp dividing line between human science and knowledge in
   the sense which St Paul attaches to the word. The origin of the two is
   entirely distinct. The source of the one is to be sought in the reason;
   it is a result of human activity; it is therefore weak and faulty. The
   latter is the result of divine revelation, and is therefore stamped as
   true from the very first. The very forms of expression of the two
   sciences--the human and the divine--are different. The one speaks in
   the words of human wisdom current in the schools, the other in
   spiritual words as of spiritual things. But not only do they differ in
   the manner of communication; difference of origin implies, furthermore,
   that the earthly philosophy does not--nay, cannot--understand the
   spiritual wisdom; for this gnosis' is unfathomable save by the Spirit;
   while, on the other hand, he that is spiritually-wise is able to
   understand everything, although he himself is not understood by anyone.

   In these sentences, pregnant with such important consequences, the
   difference between ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical science is for
   the first time definitely established. They are related as reason to
   revelation, as the human to the divine. But what is the Spirit of which
   St Paul speaks? It is simply the Spirit of the Church or the sect, the
   sum of the impressions, words, feelings, impulses and thoughts which
   are produced in the Church, and which prevail in it as being both holy
   and necessary. In a word, it is the Christian consciousness as it grew
   up from the seed sown by Jesus, and as it was further transmitted in
   His sect. That which would be counted divine must pass muster before it
   as the final court of appeal. Whatever in anywise contradicted it would
   not be counted as revealed truth. But the Christian consciousness
   itself is placed beyond the bounds of discussion: it is perfectly sure
   of itself; it is ultimate and supreme. A proud and even justifiable
   Christian self-esteem developed this theory, but created therein a kind
   of supernatural coat-of-mail for itself which was at last bound to
   exercise a chilling and be-numbing reflex action. This theory preserves
   the peculiarity and sovereignty of the Christian religion--that is its
   everlasting merit--but it does this by passing a fanatical verdict of
   condemnation upon the whole remaining world of thought and feeling. It
   would appear that St Paul formed it in controversy with the Jews about
   the Old Testament, or, rather, that he indirectly borrowed it from the
   Jews. But even in this controversy the disastrous consequences are
   revealed which have since been indissolubly attached to this theory.

   Now what is the object of the Pauline gnosis?

   It is itself again the Spirit--i.e., the revelation of God. Gnosis is
   the revealed understanding of the divine revelation, the re-discovery,
   by means of the Spirit, of the Spirit that is hidden from all other
   men.

   All the oracles of the Christian prophets would be included under the
   conception of revelation, especially the revelation by means of Jesus.
   There is, in fact, an especial art of interpreting the words of the
   prophets, which is inspired by the Spirit, the judging or discerning of
   spirits. But this is not called gnosis by St Paul. Nor, again, is
   Christ the revealer of God's word for him, as it is the Cross and
   Resurrection, and not His sayings, that are the divine acts of
   salvation in St Paul's meaning of the word. So, then, there remains
   finally only one great object for the Pauline gnosis--the Sacred
   Scriptures of the Jews.

   St Paul introduced the Old Testament in all his Churches as the sacred
   canon, the only divinely inspired book. This was an event of the very
   greatest importance in the history of Christianity. The Jewish national
   literature is declared to be divine, and is to become the sacred book
   of the Greek and Roman converts to Christianity, whilst at the same
   time it is the sacred book of the Jews, the bitter opponents of the new
   religion. How is this possible? The Pauline gnosis furnishes the
   answer. Great portions of the Old Testament were, to be sure,
   accessible to the heathen Christians, and inestimably precious to them
   as it was. Here was a text-book of monotheism, of morality, of hope,
   which excelled almost every other. Now, by means of the gnosis, even
   the national Jewish portions can be read as Christian, and, generally
   speaking, Christianity can be discovered everywhere in the old book. It
   becomes the means, partly even before St Paul, of the Christianization
   of the Old Testament.

   The divinely inspired character of the Old Testament in every one of
   its parts is a firmly established fact. There is no dispute between
   Jews and Christians as to this point. St Paul accepts the teaching of
   the Rabbis, that the whole of the Old Testament is a collection of
   divine oracles, and that every text, even apart from its context, is a
   word of God. He personifies Scripture, speaking of it as of a divine
   being: "the scripture foresaw," "the scripture hath shut up all
   things." He does not indeed speak of the Spirit that inspired the Old
   Testament, perhaps because he considered the Spirit to be a gift of the
   last days. On the other hand, he appears in certain passages to have
   arrived at the conclusion that Christ is the inspirer and revealer in
   the Old Testament. Here he abandons his Jewish standpoint altogether,
   and his action is attended with important consequences. If Christ spoke
   in the Old Testament, then it is certainly a Christian book.

   But the inspired book demands an inspired exegesis. For this purpose
   the Jews had the order of the Rabbis, who were especially endowed by
   God with gifts of the Spirit, in order to interpret the Scriptures.
   Here is the source of the Pauline theory of knowledge. He denies the
   spiritual endowment of the Rabbis, and proclaims himself and the
   Christian teachers to be inspired. It is evident that one of the two
   parties must be in the wrong: the former prove from the Old Testament
   that Jesus was a criminal, the other that He is the Messiah. The
   Christians must be in the right, because, generally speaking, the
   Spirit is poured out amongst them in richest measure. For the endowment
   with the gnosis is only one amongst many gifts of the Spirit. The
   Christian interpretation therefore of the Old Testament is the only one
   that has any authority. Yes, the Old Testament must be interpreted
   according to the spirit of the Christians. The Jews--even the
   Rabbis--understand nothing about it. The veil of Moses is upon their
   hearts when they read it. They are natural,' not spiritual.' Satan hath
   blinded their minds.

   It is therefore proved that the canon of the Old Testament is to be
   interpreted by the canon of the Christian conscience. And so the task
   set to the interpreters of Scripture is endless. By reason of its
   divine origin, every word in the Bible is written for all eternity. In
   each a divine meaning is contained, often more than one. Being intended
   for all time, each word has likewise an application for the age of the
   interpreter. Here, in this present age, it has to accomplish its direct
   purpose. Thus, e.g., the chastisements of the patriarchs in the
   wilderness were written for our warning, upon whom the ends of the ages
   are come. In fact, everything that was written aforetime was written
   for our learning. St Paul's exegetical methods are naturally simply
   those of the Jews as Philo and the Rabbis employed them. This applies
   to the proof by prophecy, the use of types and allegory, and the
   practical application. The only new feature is the use of the Christian
   consciousness, the Spirit, as the canon of all exegesis. But the very
   circumstance that Jews and Christians alike used the same methods,
   combined with the fact that St Paul stands under the influence of the
   tradition of the Rabbis for his matter, as well as for his style,
   contradicts the apostle's artificial separation between the Spirit and
   human knowledge.

   The exegesis of the passage concerning the oxen whose mouth is not to
   be muzzled is the best example of the Pauline gnosis made to serve the
   practical needs of the missionary. The canon of exegesis, which the
   Rabbis likewise accepted, runs: Nothing unworthy is to be ascribed to
   God. The Christian spirit forthwith discovers that the passage can be
   applied suitably to the missionaries. But for the most part the
   apostle's gnosis serves the purposes of his anti-Jewish apologetic. It
   was only necessity that caused the Christians to invent the proof from
   prophecy properly so-called. As the patriotic prophecies of a Messiah
   applied to Jesus in a very small number of instances, the Christian
   gnosis had now to discover in the Old Testament new proofs for the
   Messiahship of Jesus. Few excelled St Paul in the art of finding such
   passages. He did not hesitate to undertake the proof that all the
   promises of God were yea' in Jesus--i.e., had been fulfilled in Him.
   How great a skill in exegesis that presupposes! It is a trifle indeed
   for such an interpreter to prove from the use of the singular instead
   of the plural in the passage, "To thee (Abraham) and thy seed" that the
   words are intended to apply to Christ. We have already pointed out how
   the annulling of the law, justification by faith, and the rejection of
   Israel, were proved out of the Old Testament. At bottom, the whole of
   this apologetic gnosis is of course a mere theological fabrication
   whereby we are transplanted into an artificial kind of world. If
   anywhere it would be in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah that a real
   starting-point for the Gospel would have been found. But it was just
   the great prophecy of the earliest age that was entirely unknown to the
   Rabbis. However, St Paul as well as the other Christian teachers had
   one valid excuse. They acted under the compulsion of necessity and from
   genuine conviction. And the lucky find which St Paul made, while
   conducting this enquiry, is, after all, the mark of a man of
   genius:--the law is a later addition: the great age of the religion of
   Israel preceded the origin of the law. In like manner he successfully
   brings to light again many passages in the Old Testament of a
   universalist tendency which had been hidden away by the Rabbis.

   Of greater importance, however, than either of these results was the
   fact that, thanks to this Old Testament gnosis, the Christian and the
   Jewish Church were continually placed side by side. The history of
   Israel is interpreted in a Christian spirit. Even the Christian
   Sacraments, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, are discovered in the
   pillar of cloud, in the Red Sea, in the water from the rock, in the
   manna. And on the other hand, the Christian Church is conceived of in a
   Jewish fashion as the Israel of God unto whom are all the promises. The
   effect of the gnosis in thus strengthening the Jewish idea of the
   Church came to be of the greatest importance. In this case it was the
   attributes that were transferred from the old Israel to the new; later
   it was the forms and institutions.

   The apologetic exposition of the Old Testament for the purpose of
   confuting the Jews by no means, however, exhausted the Pauline gnosis.
   It produced, besides, bold speculations of its own, which only clearly
   come to light in the letters of the captivity, but date from a much
   earlier time: the chief subjects were the angel world and Christ.

   In the 110th Psalm mention is made of the enemies whom God will subject
   to the Messianic King, the reference being to the neighbouring peoples,
   the Moabites and others. Paul applies the passage to the dominions,
   principalities, and powers of the spirit world. In Isa. xlv. 23 we read
   that every knee shall bow unto God--the heathen of course being meant;
   but Paul adds--of things in heaven and things on earth and things under
   the earth. In Dan. vii. 22 it is prophesied that judgment will be given
   to the saints, i.e., Israel, and we naturally infer that it is the
   great empires upon earth that will be judged: but Paul concludes that
   therefore the saints (or Christians) shall judge the angels. We may
   gather from these passages that St Paul generally applied Old Testament
   words which referred to states upon earth to the angel hierarchies. It
   is merely an application of this principle to the political
   circumstances of his own time when he considers not the Romans but the
   princes of this world, i.e., the demons, to be the murderers of Christ.
   By means of this equation, "the heathen kingdoms = angels," a huge
   fabric of angelology could be constructed out of the Old Testament.
   Assyria and Babylon and Egypt were intended to mean all the thrones,
   dominions, principalities and powers, the world-rulers of this
   darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness; and the perpetual wars of
   Israel with its neighbours were but the type of the invisible battles
   fought in the spirit world. Anticipations of this conception are to be
   met with in later Judaism also, when angel princes appear as the
   leaders of the neighbouring peoples. But the systematic transformation
   of earthly politics into heavenly is St Paul's work.

   The gnostic speculations as to Christ were of much greater importance.
   Jesus is the Lord' (= Kyrios). The subject of the whole of the Old
   Testament is the Lord (= name of God). Consequently St Paul can set
   down the equation Jesus = the Lord in the Old Testament. Proofs for
   this abound. Expressions like "the understanding of the Lord," "the
   Table of the Lord," "the Glory of the Lord," "the name of the Lord,"
   "to tempt the Lord," "to return to the Lord," are all applied to Jesus.
   Jesus, e.g., was the God of revelation in the wilderness; there He
   baptized (the water from the rock), and celebrated the Eucharist (the
   manna). True, the letter to the Philippians says that it was only after
   the resurrection that the name above all other names was given Him
   (i.e., the sacred tetragrammaton equivalent to the Greek Kyrios, Lord),
   but other passages contradict this statement, and nothing therefore can
   be concluded from it. And besides the word Lord, the name of God is but
   one of the designations of Jesus in the Old Testament. He is also the
   image of God after which God created man, and as such mediator at the
   creation. All things were created through Him, and He is the head of
   every man.

   Now when once this gnostic Christology reached such giddy heights as
   these, then the most extravagant speculations of the later letters can
   no longer strike us as strange. When once Jesus has become the God of
   Revelation of the Old Testament, and the mediator in the creation, then
   He is also the head and the centre of the world of angels. And if His
   propitiatory death has power for all men without distinction, why
   should not the rebellious angels like wise experience His power? In all
   this reasoning there is no missing link between the possible and the
   impossible. The humanity' of Christ has been laid aside a long time ago
   by the earlier speculations. Can we be astonished if the fulness of the
   Godhead now dwells in Him bodily? If there is anything that surprises
   us, the reason is that we do not know the Old Testament passages which
   St Paul uses as the basis for his gnosis in the letter to the
   Colossians. The occasion for his treating of this subject was the rise
   of false teachers at Colossae who appealed to the authority of angels.
   To meet this heresy St Paul considers it advisable to remind his
   readers that all angels derive their being from Christ alone, and
   through Him alone they continue to exist.

   The Pauline gnosis claimed to be a revealed exegesis of the Old
   Testament. But this Christology cannot possibly have been obtained by
   exegesis of the Old Testament, seeing that it had been wrongly inserted
   into every text. Whence, then, did St Paul derive it? It cannot
   originate from the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, since Christ always
   appears in this as a definite eschatological quantity. Philo's doctrine
   of the Logos is too remote to come under consideration. But there were
   angelological speculations amongst the Jews, doctrines of divine
   intermediate beings regarded as instruments in the creation and
   government of the people of God. The archangel Michael was assigned a
   prominent position above all others in the history of salvation; he was
   almost a subordinate god, to whom God had committed the care of His
   people in His own stead. Besides this, the distinction between the two
   divine names, Jahve and Adonai, had struck, not only Philo, but the
   Palestinian Rabbis, and had led them to set up distinctions in the
   divine being. St Paul may well have heard of such speculations; they
   facilitated the discovery of Christ in the whole compass of the Old
   Testament for him, as all that he needed to do was to identify Christ
   with the highest of these intermediate beings.

   This adaptation of previous isolated speculations cannot, however, be
   considered to be an explanation of the Pauline Christology. Its real
   origin is to be sought elsewhere. St Paul's object was to make Christ
   the centre of his cosmology. However strange its outer form may appear
   to us, the whole of this gnosis is after all the first great Christian
   interpretation of the universe. It is not without reason that it is
   just in the Epistle to the Colossians that the words occur, "Christ is
   all and in all." No sphere of the world, neither of the natural nor of
   the spiritual, is henceforth to be accounted profane and under its own
   government. Christ is the Sun of all worlds. What remains if this
   theory be set on one side? Angelological speculations, myths, etc., and
   side by side with these, the person of Jesus as of equal value with the
   others. The practical consequence was that at Colossae they sought for
   communion with God of a supra-Christian character. But now the apostle
   declares Christ to be the head of all things, and there is therefore no
   other means of mediation, save through Him alone. Thereby, too, a step
   forward has been taken in comparison with the doctrine of salvation.
   The significance of Christ was limited in that doctrine to His helping
   us out of this present evil world. Here in the gnosis He is the
   mediator of the whole world. A positive relation to the cosmos has
   taken the place of one that was negative. Hence follows the practical
   conclusion, which we find already in the hortatory portion of the
   Epistle to the Colossians, with its Christian regulations of marriage,
   of education, of the relations of master and servant, and the command
   that whatever is done must be done in the name of the Lord. Thereby
   Christ is secularized and the world is Christianized. It is only the
   Pauline gnosis that completely explains to us the firm stand thus taken
   with Jesus on the vantage ground of this world--of His world.

   But what a circuitous route he travels. How simple and untheological is
   the gospel faith in Providence by the side of this. Compare the reasons
   given for the "be not anxious" in St Matt. vi. with the first chapter
   of the Epistle to the Colossians. The Pauline gnosis here starts from a
   very living feeling of that which is Christian and at the same time
   from an entirely dead conception of God. Even in its origin the dogma
   of the divinity of Christ is a proof of the weakness of the faith in
   God. Jesus would not j have answered the false teachers at Colossae:
   "The angels, whose intercourse you are seeking, only exist through Me
   and have even been reconciled to God by Me." He would simply have said:
   "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him alone shalt thou serve."

   But St Paul knows another gnosis of a completely different nature
   besides this of which we have been speaking. It is theocentric, and it
   belongs to the close of his system. It is a bold undertaking to
   penetrate with the Spirit into the deep things of God and to explain
   the whole of the world and history from the standpoint of God as the
   realization of divine purposes. The starting-point of this gnosis is
   his own experience, his own certainty of salvation. As the Christian
   regards the whole of his former life in spite of all its sin and all
   its evil fortune as the divinely appointed path for his own redemption,
   so he may with equal right look upon the whole course of the world's
   history, of which his own life forms an infinitesimal portion, as the
   necessary way of the Lord unto salvation. Only then the goal is so
   infinitely greater. The simplest formula of this philosophy of history
   is: All things are from God, through God, and to God. God is the first
   cause of the whole world and of all history. He has created them. Now
   even though the world should fall away from God and sink down step by
   step into even deeper sin and corruption, then that is but an apparent
   infraction of the divine plan and government.


   "Deep in unfathomable mines

   Of never failing skill

   He treasures up His bright designs

   And works His sovereign will."

   God Himself willed the Fall and sin. He has given over to sin and
   disobedience all alike, that to all alike He may at last show mercy.
   Yes, the law was only given to man in order to make the offence
   greater. But the greater the sin the wider God's mercy. No statement is
   too bold for St Paul to make, for the thought never occurs to him that
   sin could thereby lose the character of guilt on the part of man. Sin
   is guilt in any case, but then God is God even over sin. And then the
   world is gradually led back to obedience to God by the incarnation and
   sacrifice of the Son of God. Now that is the manifestation of God's
   grace which is so inexpressibly great, so much greater than sin. Step
   by step the process of redemption proceeds. Christ, the Church, the
   Gentiles, Israel, the angel world, are one after another embraced by
   the love of God and return to Him from whom they took their origin. In
   the end God will be all in all. All things have reverted--not to
   physical absorption in God, but to worship and subjection to the honour
   of God the Father. The fall and sin had one great and important
   consequence. The story of the parable was lived in real life--the story
   of the children who only learned to love their home when they were in a
   strange country.

   The end of this gnosis in a man like St Paul could only be a prayer of
   glad thanksgiving. "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
   the knowledge of God; how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways
   past tracing out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath
   been His counsellor? Or who hath first given to Him and it shall be
   recompensed unto him again? For of Him, and through Him, and unto Him,
   are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen." The passage is
   especially beautiful because of the modesty of this gnostic, who in
   spite of his great presentiments ever reminds himself that God is too
   high for him. However far he may penetrate, there remains in God an
   element of mystery. But for all that, his prevailing mood is one of
   thanksgiving and of joy. From his own stand point, in the bright light
   of certain conviction, he can confidently scan the dark riddles and
   unsolved problems of existence. He knows that all is light for God and
   will one day be light for him. And he knows the love of God as the end
   and goal of all that happens in the world. That is Christian gnosis
   which interprets the world from the experience of faith or of Jesus. In
   fact, whether he formulates it with Christ or with God as the centre,
   the whole of his knowledge is one of the great effects which his
   experience on the road to Damascus produced in him.

   We have arrived at the end of St Paul's theology. It has been shown
   that its roots are to be found in the experience of the vision of
   Christ and in his apologetic as missionary. In the building of the
   edifice Jewish material has been used to a very large extent, nor has
   the Greek been entirely rejected. But the final result is something
   entirely new and independent compared with all that has gone before. It
   is an original Christian creation. St Paul's great achievement is that
   from these two starting-points, Jesus and His Church, everything has
   been thought out entirely anew, so that scarcely in one single point
   does the earlier knowledge remain the same, or in the same connection.
   If the Jesus of the Christians is the Redeemer, then (1) All men must
   be miserable, lost sinners for whom there is no other atonement but in
   Christ's death, and no salvation but that through the Spirit of Christ
   in the Church, with the hope of the glory that is to come, the earnest
   of which we have in Christ's Resurrection--such are the postulates of
   the doctrine of salvation; and (2) the law can be no road to
   salvation--it has been annulled by Christ, whilst faith and the Spirit
   are a complete substitute for the law in the Church of Christ. Such are
   the demands of the anti-Jewish apologetic; and (3) the whole of the Old
   Testament must be a Christian book, and the whole world must be
   interpreted from the standpoint of Jesus. Such is the postulate of the
   Christian gnosis. Even the preaching of monotheism receives a Christian
   content, for the one God is the God and Father of Jesus Christ. It is
   only the doctrine of the final salvation of the whole of Israel that
   stands outside of this Christocentric system.

   Now it is of course true that the Jesus of St Paul is no longer merely
   the Jesus of the Church of Jerusalem. The Son of God, the Cross and the
   Resurrection, are here so explained that, as distinguished from the
   earlier hope in a coming Messiah, the foundation is laid for the later
   Christological dogma. For the subject of this dogma is not the coming
   Messiah, but the Son of God who has already come. Moreover, St Paul
   himself has removed the Son of God very far from humanity, and brought
   Him very near to God as mediator of the creation and revelation. It is
   perfectly incredible within how short a time the Jesus of history had
   to undergo this radical transformation. In spite of this, however, it
   is just the Jesus of history that St Paul grasped with a deep and clear
   insight, as the Redeemer who leads us away from the false Jewish idea
   to the Fatherhood of God and to moral freedom, and who, besides setting
   the high ideal before us, inspires us at the same time with strength
   and courage for its realization. It is for this living and loving Jesus
   that the apostle's high Christology paves a way into the world.

   In the next place, the Church, which dominates the Pauline theology
   second to Christ alone, is for him still identical with the communities
   which in spite of all imperfections were real instruments of salvation
   and channels for the influence of Jesus. Hence the practical value of
   St Paul's ecclesiastical apologetic. Nevertheless it was he who
   likewise created the Christian idea of the Church in its fanatical
   narrowness, by pronouncing as he did all who were outside the fold, as
   a sinful mass of corruption doomed to death, and in many passages at
   any rate, attaching everlasting blessedness to belief in the
   ecclesiastical creed. Thereby the same man who led Jesus out into the
   free world confined Him within a narrow form which does not harmonize
   with the freedom and the seriousness of the sayings and parables of
   Jesus.

   But in spite of all this, Christianity only became a great spiritual
   power in the world through the theology of St Paul. For through him it
   obtained a cosmology as a foundation, which enabled it to compete with
   Greek philosophies and Oriental myths. Through him the Jewish idea was
   annulled and so Christianity was set free to enter the world. Yes, and
   at the same time its spiritual character is assured for all eternity.
   Ceremonies have no value as means of salvation. St Paul grasped the
   world-historic greatness of Jesus, and compared Him with the first man.
   The Messianic element is forced into the background; with Jesus a new
   humanity begins. Paul placed the two great ideas of the Fatherhood of
   God and the freedom of the Spirit in the centre, as the Christian ideal
   in religion, and has thereby laid down the safest canon of criticism
   for every form of religion.

   Finally he placed love and practical results higher than enthusiasm and
   theology, and thereby found the eternal in the transitory. As one
   surveys the whole of what he achieved, one stands in silent amazement
   at his greatness as a thinker.
     __________________________________________________________________

RELIGIOUS LIFE OF THE CHURCHES.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XVIII.

  ST PAUL'S PERSONAL RELIGION.

   WE can recognize the effect of Jesus upon His disciples directly from
   the Gospels. Here we see all that was great and new in Jesus that
   seemed worth recording. It was this at the same time that struck root
   and further developed. The effect of St Paul, on the other hand, we can
   only discern quite indirectly. We can gather what it was, partly from
   his letters, and partly from those documents of the succeeding age
   which were clearly influenced by him. Even though these conclusions are
   mostly hypothetical, we cannot entirely disregard them. Our present
   object, then, is to discover the characteristics of the earliest
   Christianity in heathen countries.

   Wherever the Christians are gathered together in fully organized
   communities, there they feel that they are sharply divided not only
   from the popular religion of their heathen neighbours, but also from
   the Jewish synagogue. Both constitute for them that world to which they
   have bidden farewell. Indeed it is contrast with the world that
   determines the signification of the term Christian. In the first place
   comes the difference of faith and hope. As compared with the heathen,
   the Christian confesses the unity of God the Creator, and denies that
   the gods of the heathens are such to whom worship is due. The great
   text-book of monotheism is the Old Testament. As compared with the
   Jews, the Christian confesses that Jesus is the Lord; nay, more, the
   Son of God who came down from heaven in order to die for our sins, and
   to guarantee our hope through His Resurrection. This same Jesus shall
   come again in the near future, as the Saviour of those that believe on
   Him. Of Him, too, the whole of the Old Testament prophesies. He is now
   sitting on the right hand of God, and nearest to God, greater than all
   angels. Besides this, the Christian believes that the Spirit of God or
   of Christ, called also the Holy Spirit, is given to all believers in
   the Christian Church. These are the dogmatic propositions which St Paul
   securely established in all his Churches. He often summarized them as
   the essence of the faith upon which all depends. As yet the Spirit
   occupies the least prominent position in the creed, which is natural
   while he is still an object of experience. There is no need as yet to
   believe in him first. St Paul himself, however, employs expressions
   from time to time, in which the threefold formula Father, Son, and Holy
   Spirit already occurs.

   The important point to notice here is the theoretical character of the
   faith, which is guaranteed by the contents. Neither mystical nor
   ethical elements are contained therein. It consists in assent to the
   propositions of the preaching. In this assent a certain amount of trust
   is contained as well. But the question already arises, whether this act
   of trust was considered as important by the Greeks as it is by us. They
   believed in the facts of the Gospel, in the fulfilment of the
   prophecies, in the unity of God, all purely, theoretical objects of
   belief in the first place. "The devils also believe, and tremble," we
   read in a later document. We may much rather add in our thoughts hope
   to the word faith, for faith in Jesus for the purpose of salvation is
   as much as hope. Thereby it receives a very great accession of value.
   He that believes may hope to be saved in the approaching day of
   judgment. "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou and thy house shall be
   saved," says the Paul of the Acts. Faith saves, justifies,
   blesses,--expressions such as these obtained currency wherever St Paul
   had been. Often they were turned into harmful party cries, against the
   use of which later leaders had emphatically to protest. They went so
   far as to consider all that were without--the unbelievers--as such, for
   lost, whatever their works and their character might be.

   Other characteristics of the Christian in opposition to the world may
   be noticed in addition to this the first; e.g., participation in the
   holy rites of the Church. This would appeal especially to the Greeks,
   to whom the Christians were, above all else, the saints, i.e., the
   congregation participating in the true worship. The later Sacraments,'
   Baptism and the Lord's Supper, were in very early times valued by the
   Greeks as mysterious rites connected with the world beyond. In baptism,
   the new birth is symbolized by a dying and a rising again. An
   implanting in Christ takes place whilst the convert passes through the
   water. The baptized convert is now a citizen of the world that is
   above: he has a certain claim upon that which is to come. The Lord's
   Supper then leads him to an even closer and more intimate communion
   with Christ. But the Spirit of God descends even in the ordinary
   meetings for divine service, and testifies to His presence by
   mysterious and miraculous manifestations. St Paul never failed to
   subject these workings of the Spirit to ethical principles, but his
   Churches did not always follow his example. The Spirit and the
   miraculous continued to be interchangeable conceptions for them; only
   the theological mysteries were counted to be just as certain
   revelations of the Spirit as ecstasy. Thus the apostle's rich
   inheritance was at once considerably impoverished. Of all the manifold
   manifestations of the Spirit two only were in reality preserved, and
   those the most opposed to each other--ecstasy and theology--both
   unpractical and morally indifferent.

   The way is paved for a radical transformation from this point onwards.
   The greatness of the earliest form of Christianity was essentially
   constituted by two historical realities--Jesus and the community which
   attached itself to Him. All that deserves the name of salvation is the
   effect of these two realities. They were also the two main factors in
   St Paul's missionary work--the incarnation of the grace of God. But in
   the Pauline Churches the place of the person of Jesus is occupied by
   statements concerning the Son of God, the Cross and the Resurrection,
   which are accepted in faith. Where Jesus stood before, there now stands
   the dogma of Christ. The social element finds its expression in the
   Sacraments in which it is believed the present activity of Jesus is
   experienced. Dogmas and sacraments therefore have ousted Jesus and His
   community. Now the dogmatic statements were from the first
   incomprehensible for the most part; the interpretation, the gnosis, was
   only a later addition. As for religious ceremonies, incomprehensibility
   is of their very essence. Hence forth, almost immediately after St
   Paul's death, salvation is experienced in the acceptation of mysterious
   propositions and in participation in mysterious rites. It was only
   after the laying of this foundation that the second step was
   reached--the Christianity of those that have the full know ledge. It
   might then be said: Christianity exists either as a superstition or as
   a philosophy. But we are as yet a long way from having reached this
   stage. The early and marked prominence, however, attached to dogma and
   sacrament instead of to the actual and historical realities--Jesus and
   the community--was the beginning of Catholic Christianity. This was far
   indeed from ever having been St Paul's object, but he did not check the
   tendency. The Christianity of the earliest Church had been guarded
   against this perversion.

   There was, however, yet one other characteristic which distinguished
   the Christian from the world, and this constitutes the splendour of the
   early days of the faith: it was the earnest endeavour to develop the
   new life of the individual. Conversion was no empty word for great
   numbers of Christians, but an actual breach with an earlier life which
   had frequently been stained by vice. The watchful care of the brethren,
   the compulsion exercised by ecclesiastical discipline, the preaching of
   the ideal, the expectation of the day of judgment, were all means to
   perfect that which had been begun. The standard was furnished by some
   few sayings of Jesus, rather more numerous texts from the Old
   Testament, and the preaching and the letters of the apostle. And so the
   brethren began to reorganize the social life of the community in every
   direction. The worship of idols and immorality were laid aside,
   marriage was sanctified, attention was paid to the education of
   children, honesty and truthfulness were encouraged, temperance
   advocated, vengeance and strife suppressed. There was an increasing
   eagerness to serve, a growing joy in making sacrifices, in forgiveness
   and patient endurance, and a striving to yield wherever possible and to
   give a good example to their heathen neighbours. In a word, the
   foundation was laid for the regeneration of a society that was for the
   most part diseased and degenerate. Some Churches--that at Philippi,
   e.g.,--must have been especially bright and shining lights in the midst
   of their dark surroundings. Paul was a stern judge, but he distributed
   praise liberally and frequently. And now add to all that has been said
   the courage and the glad joyfulness of these Churches in supporting
   petty vexations and trials of every kind, the fervour of their life of
   prayer, the constancy of their hope--Christians are men that hope,
   whereas heathen have no hope--and we shall still have but a very weak
   and imperfect idea of the bright side of this first missionary life
   which filled the apostle with the fulness of joy.

   The dark side to this picture was, of course, not wanting. Even in this
   first age the forerunners of future decadence can be noticed. We may
   call them extra Christianity' and average Christianity.' Either
   separation from the world is exaggerated till it becomes fanaticism and
   asceticism, or the old world is carried over into the new Church. The
   very certainty of the hope in the approaching end of the world often
   disturbed the quiet course of a normal development of character. Still
   more often the disgust which a man felt when he thought of his own
   filthy past, drove him into an opposite extreme. One of the strangest
   features of the age are those Christian betrothals which the First
   Epistle to the Corinthians mentions without blame when a maiden
   entrusted herself to the protection of an older man. Thus far
   everything had gone on well, but it was a dangerous precipice whereon
   to walk. There are other instances of ascetic tendencies at Corinth. St
   Paul was officially asked whether a Christian was bound to practise
   complete continence in marriage. In Rome, on the contrary, total
   abstinence and vegetarianism were the favourite practices, only, it is
   true, amongst the weaker brethren. St Paul had to write more than one
   letter to Thessalonica in order to urge the people not to abandon their
   daily work. Generally speaking, it will be found that he treated these
   ascetic tendencies too leniently, out of sympathy with these
   Christians, who at least had the merit of entire sincerity in their
   striving after perfection. Later on, the ascetic ideal of chastity was
   set up in certain churches, not as a commandment but as an
   extraordinary virtue. The enthusiasm of those who sought for spiritual
   gifts at Corinth was surely a great deal less dangerous. It quickly
   evaporated. At Thessalonica there were even some who despised
   prophesyings. But for all that the opinion remained firmly rooted that
   the Spirit of God was to be recognized by abnormal manifestations, and
   that such belong to the Christian perfection.

   St Paul's attitude to average Christianity was one of uncompromising
   hostility. He still hoped that it would be rooted out. But in vain. It
   had been present from the very first in the life of the Christian
   congregations, in the lives of those members who believed that they
   themselves were converted because of the conversion of others. It had
   not crept in, therefore, as a consequence of decay. Each congregation
   had no doubt a heavy task in combating the most formidable vice of the
   great cities, sexual excesses; and in the East, resistance was doubly
   difficult. Then came the specially Greek sins, dishonesty and trickery
   in the lower classes, litigiousness and wrangling in the upper. And
   then finally all that the Christian calls superstition, participation
   in secret, mostly immoral rites, magic books, amulets, incantations.
   All this existed from the very first in the Christian congregations
   themselves. The establishment of ecclesiastical discipline always
   involved a certain amount of loss alongside of the indubitable gain. By
   the suppression of the coarser elements, room was secured for the
   development of the finer. But the benefit thus secured was speedily
   counter balanced by the substitution of fixed rules and rigid customs
   for the free exercise of the apostle's judgment.

   This imperfect state of affairs was not without influence upon the
   feelings of those individuals who had conceived of the task of the new
   life in the meaning which St Paul had attached to it.

   Was there any certainty of salvation, and upon what did it depend? Paul
   urged his converts to place all their trust in the doctrine of
   election. Whoever did that placed his reliance upon Christ and upon
   faith. This could be done either with or without moral earnestness. And
   there were instances of both these courses, just as there are to-day.
   Whoever, on the contrary, was more impressed by the fact that
   Christians fell into sin and were lost, practically abandoned the
   certainty of salvation, and of such there were very soon a great
   number. Contrary conclusions were, however, in turn drawn from this
   fact again. Some would work out their salvation with fear and
   trembling, and ensure salvation through entire consecration of life.
   Others suffered things to take their course, and thought it would be
   time enough in the last hour. Even the Pauline Epistles themselves
   refer to all these different possibilities, and we also meet with them
   later on in close connection. A clear distinction between St Paul and
   Jesus now manifests itself as regards the effects of their labours:
   both bound up indissolubly--religion, the life as God's child in God's
   love--and the claims of morality; but the emphasis was a very different
   one. Jesus gives prominence to the moral claim, to the true will of God
   instead of the false. Hence the danger which threatened His community
   was legalism. Whereas St Paul, building upon grace and the atonement,
   had almost from the first to guard against the danger of moral
   corruption. True he struggles against it with all his might and main,
   especially in Rom. vi., but that is just a proof of the reality of the
   presence of the danger. Whereas in the earliest Church at Jerusalem one
   looked down upon the corrupt righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees
   from the vantage ground of that righteousness which exceeded theirs, in
   the Pauline communities they who were now reconciled with God as His
   children regarded the lost heathen with a patronising compassion
   although they were no better than their neighbours in many points. It
   must be admitted, however, that St Paul himself gave no excuse for such
   an attitude. Through his letters he did all that he possibly could to
   remove every misunderstanding, and to sweep away this idle faith.

   We can, after all, best arrive at a correct standard of judgment by
   contrasting the later with the earlier condition of these Pauline
   communities. Regarded from this point of view, they always appear again
   in a favourable light. It was a great step to take, and one attended by
   no little risk, to find a home for the Gospel, the child of Judaism, in
   the new world, which was in reality so ill-prepared for it. There was
   scarcely anyone less able to understand Jesus than these Greeks, whose
   sole surviving art was that of long-winded disputation. And to attempt
   to bring Jesus actually to such a city as Corinth, was simply an
   immense undertaking. But it succeeded. The result of the labours of St
   Paul and his companions, was that round about the Ægean sea the
   Christian colonies grew up and developed a new, sound, and healthy
   life. Demons of vice were turned into respectable citizens, thieves and
   brawlers became useful workmen, and anxious and distressed souls found
   peace in the love of God. There was a thorough weeding out of all that
   was foul and corrupt, while the germs of love, patience, chastity, and
   humility were planted in the soil. True, the clearance was seldom
   thorough enough; the old roots remained, and were destined soon to put
   forth new shoots.

   Yet we will never forget that our own Christianity was a consequence of
   St Paul's missionary labours. Perfection is not to be found in this
   world. The question was put to the Greeks: Will you have Jesus, or will
   you not? They answered: We will have His teaching if we may have it as
   Greeks. And so they obtained it as Greeks, and corrupted it to the best
   of their ability. We, no doubt, would have done exactly the same. But
   the great result was, that Jesus held His ground, never suffered
   Himself to be utterly degraded, and ever again uplifted humanity.

   No obscurity rests upon St Paul's own personal religion, because he
   possessed that highest of all gifts, the art of speaking about himself
   and his own inner life. He understood how to describe the unutterable
   and indefinable moods of his own soul in such a way that they continued
   to work on in others. It was just the tenderness of his temperament,
   that often almost morbidly sensitive basis of his soul with its
   tendency to the ecstatic, that made of him one of the greatest
   revealers of the inmost recesses of personal religion. There it lies
   open for all to behold in his letters, and we can speak of a personal
   impression that St Paul makes upon us, and even of his redemptive work,
   as though of Jesus Himself.

   The change at his conversion was all-decisive. It imparted to his
   personal religion the character of strong contrasts which have to be
   reconciled, and these merely form the transition to new contrasts. The
   contrasts of sin and grace, of strength and weakness, are placed by St
   Paul in the very core and centre of religion.

   Although Paul could boast before his conversion of a blameless life as
   touching the righteousness concerning the law, he had some bitter
   experiences even then. He must have sounded the misery of sin, and the
   torture of a divided mind, down to the very depths. The recollection of
   it still quivers almost convulsively in the concluding verses of Rom.
   vii.: "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of
   this sin?" All the greater is the feeling of pardon in the present, of
   peace with God combined with the consciousness of deliverance from
   torture, and the confirmation of the good within him. St Paul, as well
   as every other Christian who was converted, could indicate the hour of
   the change, and the recollection of this sudden regeneration gave his
   religion strength and weight. The old is past; lo! it became new! Being
   justified through faith we have peace with God. God's love is poured
   into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Through St Paul that personal
   religion was for the first time firmly established amongst Christians,
   which starts from the basis of the contrast between sin and grace. But
   this contrast extends far beyond the feelings to the will. Consolation
   for sin, and at the same time deliverance from the power of sin, are
   its chief aim. For sin and grace are to succeed each other, and not to
   co-exist side by side.

   But is this contrast absolute? Is the breach with the past at Damascus
   so complete that no consequences of his previous condition can be
   traced in the present? Even as a Christian St Paul had moments of
   depression. How could it be otherwise? New temptations perpetually
   arose from his own nature and from his surroundings. The reconciliation
   between these moments of depression and the feeling of grace is brought
   about by faith--i.e., the constant abiding in the love of God which has
   once for all been manifested in Christ. "That life which I now live in
   the flesh I live in faith, the faith in the Son of God who loved me."
   "Because Christ hath loved us, no power on earth shall be able to
   separate us from God." Thus St Paul was enabled to perpetuate his
   single experience through faith. It is all repetition, says
   Kierkegaard. It is no new experience, but constant trust in the old
   one. Here, too, St Paul is the forerunner of many who lived in later
   ages.

   The other contrast is between strength and weakness. It is of no less
   importance for him than the former. Through his conversion St Paul was
   caught up and swept away by the enthusiasm of the earliest Christian
   Church and learnt to taste of the powers of the great Beyond--a
   wonderful experience. He fell into ecstasies and saw visions. He was
   vouchsafed revelations. He saw the Lord. He was caught up into
   Paradise. He heard heavenly words. Then he was so strong that he felt
   himself more than man--he was already a spirit. We are not in the
   flesh--"the life eternal hath begun." But then, on the other hand, came
   moments of terrible depression, when an angel of the adversary was sent
   to smite him, when he passed through the "valley of the shadow of
   death," when he was filled with fear and trembling, and felt powerless
   to cope with the tasks of the moment. Hence the alternations of
   communion with God and the sense of abandonment by God in the apostle's
   personal religion--Paul becomes the type of the mystics.

   To attain the mastery over these fits of depression is above all the
   task of that longing and yearning which is nothing but the expression
   of a heightened feeling of contrast. Out of this longing expectancy St
   Paul extracts the most wonderful notes in all his letters. The Spirit
   itself is in bondage to the weakness of creation, so that he prays
   unconsciously in groanings that cannot be uttered, which God, however,
   hears. That is the prayer of longing, the groaning and the crying for
   the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Imprisoned in our
   earthly tabernacle, in a strange country, we long for our home which is
   with God. "I have the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that
   were far better." Once again it is St Paul who was the first to
   proclaim this feeling of man's deep, wild longing for his eternal home.

   But longing is the constant reminder of one's necessities, and
   perpetually awakens one's consciousness of them. Then St Paul finds the
   highest comfort of all in a moment of prayer. "My grace is sufficient
   for thee, for strength is made perfect in weakness. When I am weak then
   I am strong." He has found peace in perfect trust in God; that, too, is
   faith. Thereby he can do all things, and boasts even of his
   necessities. Ecstasy, longing, faith: these are the steps in this
   religion.

   The personal religion which has been sketched thus far is essentially
   one of moods and feelings. For the alternation as well as the
   harmonizing of contrasts falls under the sphere of the emotional life.
   This is one of the reasons why St Paul's place in the history of
   religion is so important. He transferred the real life of religion to
   the feelings, discovered it in the feelings. Religion, according to St
   Paul, is fear and hope, possessing and seeking, rejoicing and longing,
   joy in communion with God, and yearning for God; and by surrendering
   ourselves to the divine influence which comes over us, we are
   saved--i.e., uplifted out of this world into God's presence. Hence an
   unbroken apostolic succession through St Augustine and St Bernard to
   Schleiermacher. Paul was the first clearly to experience and express
   for all time the two sets of feelings: sin and grace, strength and
   weakness; and thereby the inner meaning and depth of religion were
   immensely increased. The holy of holies is no longer placed in outer
   effects and consequences, but transferred to communion with God in the
   innermost heart. For this emotional life the significance of historical
   events is exceedingly limited. They are simply considered as means to
   create moods and to excite feelings. This is just what the Cross and
   Resurrection of Jesus were for St Paul. By this means the historical
   tradition and the unbroken continuity with the past are indeed
   preserved, but the true life of religion is in the present; it is the
   soul's communion with the living God. Knowledge of the historical fact
   is but the kindling spark.

   The peculiar danger of this emotional form of religion has always
   consisted in its tendency to allow the field of the active life to lie
   fallow. Paul escaped this danger, thanks to his calling. As the
   consciousness of his apostolic calling was fully developed in him, and
   never for one moment forsook him, it imparted a zeal and a restless
   energy to him, which made every kind of luxuriating in dreams and
   visions and every form of idleness a physical impossibility. In this
   respect Paul became a hero of ethical self-discipline, and of entirely
   unselfish service to the brethren. He conceived of his especial calling
   as being at the same time typical. Hence the servile labour to which he
   compelled his hands, hence the bodily discipline carried to the verge
   of asceticism, hence his strict temperance and entire sincerity. Paul
   overcame all obstacles, especially those originating in his own
   temperament, in a wonderful manner, or used them as stepping-stones. He
   withstood, too, every temptation to pride, and every tendency to a
   domineering bearing. But above all he perfected love and self-sacrifice
   in his calling. He could endure and forgive; he sympathised in every
   man's afflictions, he collected money for his enemies. In certain cases
   he sacrificed the freedom of his conscience to his love. For the Jews'
   sake he was ready to be severed from the Christ. In his old age he took
   an unselfish delight in the progress of the Gospel in spite of the envy
   and the wrangling of his associates. Notwithstanding his longing for
   heaven, he preferred to remain on earth, so as to work and to suffer
   for the brethren. Each one of his letters to them is a proof of his
   love. Thus he strove with all his might so that in his own life the
   panegyric of love passed from words into deeds; this he likewise
   demanded of every Christian as the visible proof of his belonging to
   Christ.

   The peculiarity of St Paul's personal religion becomes still more
   manifest when it is contrasted with the essentially different form of
   Jesus religion. This is the exact opposite of a religion of emotion. It
   may be objected that the relative insignificance of the subjective
   element in the case of Jesus, is due to the impossibility of extracting
   the true Jesus from His reporters. But to this we may reply: Had Jesus
   been a mystic, or in any other way pre-eminently a man of feeling, then
   this would have found expression in His words in spite of all additions
   or omissions of these reporters. But it is just a peculiarity of His
   that the inner life of His soul is rarely, or never, reflected in what
   He says, and that no value of its own is attached to the emotional
   life. His personal religion is altogether practical. He went about
   doing good, helping others, struggling for the right--a life
   concentrated in present tasks and aims, a religion that looked forward
   to ideals that were to be realized. All Jesus' actions are indeed
   prompted by feelings--i.e., by the childlike certainty of the love of
   God and by the deep seriousness with which the great future inspires
   Him. But these feelings do not constitute separate domains of their
   own, from which the road to action has subsequently to be discovered.
   On the contrary, whether consciously or unconsciously, they are the
   ever present substratum of all that He does. There is an entire absence
   here of the alternation between the sense of sin and of grace, as well
   as of that between strength and weakness, at any rate in that degree
   with which St Paul is acquainted. True there are days in Jesus' life
   when He ascends to the mountain-heights of enthusiasm, and also there
   are others when He walks in the valley of disappointment and failure.
   But how entirely this change of mood recedes into the background behind
   the total impression left us by a life of constant and conscious
   progress! We can notice this even in the great moderation with which He
   judges men. He never considers them as either entirely beyond the reach
   of sin or as inextricably involved therein. Besides, the style of the
   sayings of Jesus is the expression of an altogether practical and
   temperate nature.

   Both forms of personal religion are justifiable if they have but really
   been experienced. It is a consequence of the predominance of St Paul's
   theology, that his personal religion has likewise come to be regarded
   as the normal type, though, it is true, only after the excision of the
   really mystical element. But the deterioration of morality has been the
   regular and inevitable consequence of an exclusive emphasis of the
   emotional life. Our task to-day is again to bring into the foreground
   Jesus' own personal religion, and to hold this up as a word of warning
   to our age.

   Paul has left a deeper impression upon history than any other of Jesus'
   disciples. He transplanted the young religion into the great world of
   civilization, created its first profound system of thought, and
   developed a new form of personal religion. In so doing he was the first
   to introduce Christianity into the world's history. The whole future
   development of the Gospel is determined by the form imparted to it by
   St Paul. The measure of his worth lies in the fact that he came to be
   the greatest minister of the Gospel, and as such has often occupied its
   place. In more than one instance his work was of a transitory nature:
   but he himself, the man Paul, is one of the most inspiring and
   comforting characters in all history, one of those who are an unfailing
   source of courage and of joy to us a smaller breed of men.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE APOCALYPSE.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XIX.

  THE PROPHET.

   THE Apocalypse of St John no longer belongs to the first period of
   early Christianity, that is, if we consider the exact date of its
   composition. The book cannot have been written earlier than the reign
   of Domitian; the destruction of Jerusalem has taken place long ago, and
   the outbreak of the great persecutions on the part of the State is
   anticipated. But as the solitary surviving memorial of early Christian
   prophecy, and as the product of enthusiasm, it still represents the
   hopes and thoughts of the earliest age before the development of the
   ecclesiastical constitution. No living prophet, it is true, here speaks
   to us: it is a book; but the book is one which claims with its very
   first words to be prophetic inspiration. Whatever its ultimate origin
   from Christian and Jewish sources, the book itself emphatically claims
   to be considered as a whole, and as the expression of Christian
   prophecy.

   The author at once expresses the profoundest consciousness of his call
   in his opening sentences. God wanted to make known to His servants the
   prophets a revelation of the things which must shortly come to pass.
   For this purpose the angel was sent to the servant of God, John, in
   order that he might hand on the message to others. His words are the
   words of the prophecy. Happy he that reads, and he that lays them to
   heart. God Himself speaks through the book.

   Thereupon the heavenly calling of the prophet is related to us in the
   vision. When he was upon the island of Patmos, to deliver the message
   of God and the testimony about Jesus, he found himself in a trance on
   the Lord's day and was charged by Jesus Himself to write to the seven
   Churches of Asia Minor what he saw, that which is and that which shall
   be hereafter.

   The seven Epistles which are now dictated to him may be regarded from a
   twofold point of view. They are messages of the heavenly Messiah to the
   heavenly leaders of the seven Churches made known to men upon earth by
   the prophet John. But at the same time they are the oracles of the
   Spirit; so the close of every letter reminds us, the Spirit is speaking
   to the Churches. The prophet wishes therefore to be regarded purely as
   a medium, both in what he promises and threatens as well as in his
   revelations and exhortations. The difference between St Paul and the
   author of this book is very striking. St Paul, too, censured various
   evil practices after a similar manner--e.g., in First
   Corinthians--employing both promises and threats. But he always speaks
   as a human being and never as the interpreter of the Spirit.

   Next follows the long series of apocalyptic visions, which continues to
   the end of the book. However constantly the scene changes, the author
   never forgets to play the part of the prophet. He sees and hears all
   that goes on in heaven. He is removed from one place to another; he is
   so intensely affected by what he sees that he bursts into tears. When
   he has swallowed the little book, at the angel's command, he describes
   its effect: "It was bitter to my stomach." He speaks with one of the
   twenty-four elders in heaven. The conversations with angels are of
   especially frequent occurrence. From time to time the description of
   the visions is interrupted by short utterances of the Spirit, which
   then produce an impression of immediate inspiration in contrast with
   their context: under this category falls the impressive blessing
   pronounced upon the future martyrs. But then, on the other hand, one is
   struck by the threefold asseveration of the truth of the inspiration.
   "These words are faithful and true." Is that the true prophet's
   language? The conclusion of the book consists of nothing but
   attestations concerning the divine authorship. First the angel speaks,
   then Jesus, finally the seer himself. His inspired book, which now
   possesses divine and legal authority, ends with terrible threats and
   extravagant promises.

   A comparison with some of the products of the Jewish apocalyptic
   literature, which bear a very striking similarity, e.g., the books of
   Baruch and Ezra, which were written about the same time, reveals to us
   the fact that the prophetic consciousness is a great deal more
   prominent in the case of John. In the former case the pseudonymous
   author speaks for the most part in his own person, and clearly
   distinguishes his human words from the divine communications. But in
   this case everything claims to be revelation from beginning to end. The
   faithfulness and truth of the divine word is thrice emphasized, and
   finally the angel, Jesus, and the seer, testify to the divinity of the
   revelation. The human element and the author's independent position
   recede entirely into the background.

   But is the whole book to be really ascribed to prophetic revelation? On
   the contrary, every page of the book confirms our belief that we are
   here dealing with fiction. The mythological contents of the visions,
   the form of revelation by means of angels, the conscious employment of
   literary art in the construction of the book, the similarity of the
   style with that of all Jewish apocalypses, are all proofs against the
   genuineness of the prophecy. Very probably, too, the name of John is
   intended to denote the celebrated disciple of Jesus, and then the book
   is pseudonymous, like all similar compositions. It is a literary
   production from beginning to end. Even the seven Epistles are not real
   letters which were ever despatched; one does not write to angels.

   How are we then to explain the contradiction between the prophetic
   claims and the employment of fiction in the composition of the book?

   The author possessed prophetic gifts and powers. The seven letters and
   many short oracles of the Spirit scattered here and there throughout
   the book, can be traced back to a state of inspired enthusiasm as their
   original source. He may even have had visions, at least one vision
   which impelled him to write. Above all, he feels himself called to be a
   prophet because of the terribly critical nature of the times in which
   he is living. It is an inner compulsion that causes him to sound the
   battle-cry for the last struggle of the people of God against Rome. He
   himself has been aroused from his sleep by the storm and stress of the
   times. Now his office is to act as watchman over the Churches of Asia
   Minor, to threaten, to exhort, to comfort, that everyone may be ready
   for the last battle. Thus the Christian prophets of old conceived of
   their task. The inner moral constraint which bade them speak, whether
   they would or no, appeared to them then as the Spirit or word of God.
   But side by side with this the same man is also a writer of
   apocalypses, a literary prophet. He lives on the learned results of
   past ages, he has studied books and digested books. He has drawn his
   great eschatological system from them. He does not hesitate to
   incorporate fragments of older writers in his own work as though they
   were his own revelations. This very human wisdom, which is not even his
   own, he produces as though it were God's word, and he tries to conceal
   from himself his own insight into the real origin of the book by making
   as loud assertions of its divine origin as possible.

   Thereby his work becomes a memorial of the decay of prophecy. We can
   learn from him that there were once Christian prophets who possessed
   God's word and claimed the highest authority. Their enthusiasm, their
   courage, their holy zeal, speak from every good word in this book. But
   its author is scarcely himself to be accounted any longer one of them.
   He would cover his Jewish scholasticism with the mantle of their
   authority. And in so doing he finally takes refuge in asseverations and
   attestations, whereby his fiction loses its harmlessness. It is
   therefore often a hard matter to take pleasure in much that is
   undoubtedly magnificent in his work.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XX.

  THE PROMISE.

   As the prophet that he claims to be, the author of the Apocalypse has
   above all to foretell the future. Indeed, his whole book consists of
   such prediction. The vast agglomeration of his promises admit, after
   all, of a very simple division into three parts: (1) The Christian hope
   in the parousia; (2) political prophecy; (3) conceptions borrowed from
   the storehouse of Jewish apocalyptical tradition.

   The coming of Jesus, the Son of man, down from heaven, stands in the
   front of the prophecy, that is its Christian element. The old
   expectation of the earliest Church continues in undiminished strength.
   The nearness of His coming is, as before, the chief point in connection
   with it. As the book begins, "For the time is at hand; behold He
   cometh"--so it ends: "Yea, I come quickly. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" He
   will come suddenly as a thief, as a judge, as a Saviour of them that
   are His. The last great tribulation precedes His coming. There will be
   a sifting of the saints, then it will be decided who shall stand and
   who shall fall. Such had ever been the hopes of the early Christians,
   and lapse of time has not effected any change in them. Even the
   language is almost that of the earliest Church. Since Jesus' departure
   His second advent has come to be the main factor in the kingdom of God,
   to such an extent that it has usurped its place in ordinary
   conversation.

   And yet this hope has experienced a great transformation through the
   changes wrought by the course of contemporary history. It comes to be
   political, because the Roman State has assumed an attitude of hostility
   to the Christians. One persecution has already taken place in which the
   blood of martyrs has been shed, and now the last great persecution is
   close at hand. The thirteenth and seventeenth to nineteenth chapters
   deal with this especially. The enemy is Rome, the great city Babylon,
   which has the dominion over the kings of the earth. Already it is
   drunken with the blood of the saints, and of the witnesses of Jesus. It
   is the great harlot, the mother of the harlots and of the abominations
   of the earth. The demoniac power appears in chap. xiii. under the
   picture of the two beasts, who come up, the first out of the sea, and
   the second out of the earth. The dragon has equipped the first with his
   own authority, so that he wars against the saints, and is able to
   vanquish them: that is the Roman Empire. The second beast is subject to
   the first. It is the false prophet who deceives men so that they
   worship the image of the first beast and bear its mark: that is, the
   priesthood of the Roman emperor-worship. The demand that was made to
   worship the emperor, and the persecution of those who refused to obey,
   is the occasion for the publication of our apocalypse. It was the
   measures taken by Domitian and Trajan which compelled the Christian
   eschatology to take this political turn. The same position had occurred
   long ago for the Jews, when Caligula ordered his image to be erected in
   the temple. The author of our apocalypse takes over these old Jewish
   feelings of irritability and resentment against the imperial cultus
   into the Christian Church, and builds up his eschatology on this basis.
   For him the mark of the times is the struggle between God and the
   Caesar whom Satan has set upon the throne. Now it is just this struggle
   which at present ends in the defeat of the Christians that the future
   is to decide by bringing about the defeat of Rome. And this
   decision--the victory of the Christians in the contest which is at once
   political and demoniac--is brought about by the coming of the Messiah.
   It is here treated as an entirely political occurrence. The Messiah
   descends from heaven upon a white horse, in the full equipment of
   battle, surrounded by the heavenly hosts. The beast, the kings of the
   earth, and their enemies are gathered together to make war against Him.
   The result is, of course, their entire annihilation. The beast and the
   false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, whilst their followers
   perish by the sword. Hereupon begins the reign of Messiah and of His
   martyrs, the heroes that fell in battle. This future victory of Christ
   over Rome is the core and centre of the promise of our book.

   In the midst of the political chaos which the prophet predicts, the
   Emperor Nero appears upon the scene. The belief in Nero's return from
   the grave had already assumed different shapes. An older form, that he
   would wage war against Rome in league with the Parthian kings, has now
   been susperseded by a later, that he was to fight against the Lamb, and
   be overcome by Him. The celebrated number 666 is supposed to refer to
   the Emperor Nero. One can scarcely conceive of anything more fantastic
   than these politics which deal with men and spirits, with devils and
   angels.

   No small danger arose for Christianity from this political coloring of
   its hope. St Paul had declared that every power in the State, even the
   Emperor Nero, had been appointed by God and was to be regarded as the
   servant of God. And now in consequence of the entirely new position of
   affairs the emperor has come to be for the Christians the servant of
   Satan, and it is from him that he draws all his power. Is the
   Christian, then, bound to render him obedience any longer? Is rebellion
   not his duty? But nothing lies further from our author's intentions
   than any idea of rebellion. His one demand is patience. He would never
   allow any other form of resistance but that of passive endurance. God
   alone brings us the victory, not men. On the other hand, the prophet's
   visions in chaps. xviii. xix. are nothing less than orgies of
   vengeance. To revel in these affords some little comfort for the misery
   of the present. The malignant joy, the song of triumph, at the fall of
   the great harlot, and the description of the destruction of the enemy:
   "Gather together, ye birds, and come to the great feast of God, to eat
   the flesh of kings, the flesh of commanders, the flesh of mighty men,
   the flesh of horses and their riders, the flesh alike of free men and
   of slaves, and of high and low"--all this confers no distinction upon
   Christianity. Along with the changed political situation it has
   forthwith taken over all the thoughts of vengeance, hatred and
   fanaticism, which were the marks of Judaism. This fact is certain: it
   matters not whether Jewish or Christian materials are the ultimate
   source. He that takes delight in such fancies is no whit better than he
   that first invented them. It is the thirst for vengeance of tortured
   slaves, who imagine still worse tortures for their masters.

   But the Christian hope in the parousia and the political prediction
   against Rome, after all, only occupy a small portion of the big book.
   The main body of the prophecies is nothing but old material taken from
   the storehouse of Jewish apocalytic traditions. If the prophet' wished
   to write an apocalypse, then he had above all else to be careful that
   the old tradition as to the mysteries at the end of the world should
   not be lost in his hands. Rather take too much of it than too little.
   Contradictions do not matter. Put into your book all that you can lay
   hold of: do not bother about probabilities. As a matter of fact this
   writer has tied together a whole bundle of eschatologies, often without
   any mutual connection.

   The greatest space is occupied by the description of the preliminary
   signs and the tribulation. The seven seals, the seven trumpets, the
   seven bowls, are only variations of similar signs of the last days
   which occur in all apocalypses. Of these the seven bowls and the seven
   trumpets are so nearly related, that they are best explained as a
   twofold copy of the same original. First of all, in each case the earth
   is smitten--then the sea, then the rivers, then the stars, then the air
   (true, in a very different manner), then come the Parthians, finally
   hail, thunder, and lightning. In his descriptions of the preliminary
   signs and plagues, our author relies mostly on Old Testament
   material--the vision of the steeds in Zechariah, the conjunction of
   sword, plague and hunger in Jeremiah, above all, the Egyptian plagues,
   a regular mine for the apocalyptic; and besides this, on later Jewish
   uncanonical material. The whole of Nature is introduced into the final
   drama, and at the same time the political position (the Parthians and
   Nero redivivus) furnishes favourable subjects. In the fifth seal a
   Jewish idea, that the number of the righteous must be completed before
   the end, is changed into a Christian, the martyrs taking the place of
   the righteous.

   But the prophet is very far from exhausting all his store of
   preliminary signs of the end in this threefold use of the number seven
   (seals, trumpets and bowls). He has to find room for the rest in the
   insertions which he introduces between the three sevens. To these
   belong: The sealing of the 144,000 out of the twelve tribes of Israel
   (without Dan, the tribe of the Antichrist), to whom afterwards the
   great multitude which no man could number out of all nations and
   peoples is added. Here the writer has almost certainly introduced an
   original Jewish fragment into his book.

   The desolation of the holy city by the Gentiles. This section dates
   from some time previous to 70 A.D., and originally predicted the
   exemption of the temple from desecration.

   The sending of the two witnesses--according to an old tradition, Elijah
   and Enoch--as preachers of repentance to the holy city. They are killed
   by the beast, but are immediately raised from the dead and ascend up
   into heaven. All these three insertions are based not merely upon
   Jewish traditions, but upon written fragments.

   The supernatural commencement of salvation is really only described
   when we reach chap. xii.: the birth of the Messiah from the woman whose
   robe was the sun, the effort of the dragon to destroy him, his
   translation to God. Thereupon follows the assault of heaven by the
   dragon, which ends with his defeat by Michael and his being cast down
   from heaven. Then the dragon persecutes the other seed of the
   woman--i.e., here the Church of Jesus. For this purpose he hands over
   his power to has been snatched up to God descends as king from heaven
   and destroys him.

   All this material is of mythological origin, and is no invention of the
   Christian author's. It can even be traced back right through Hebrew
   literature to Babylonian myths, but it has been transmitted by Jewish
   writers. Our author was the first to impress upon it a Christian
   interpretation. The all-important element in it for him is this: the
   victory of the Christian has already been decided in heaven, the dragon
   has been cast out. Hence the certainty of the approaching deliverance.

   The final act of the drama is described by him in two stages, and
   offers a combination of different eschatologies. First of all, after
   the battle of the Messiah, there is the thousand years' reign of Christ
   and of the martyrs (the first resurrection), whilst the dragon in the
   meanwhile is bound in the abyss. This state of things comes to an end
   with the liberation of the dragon and his renewed assault with Gog and
   Magog upon the holy city. In the decisive moment fire falls from heaven
   and consumes the enemies of God. Satan is cast forever into the lake of
   fire. Hereupon follows the general resurrection of the dead, and the
   judgment of the world according to each man's works: all sinners fall
   into hell, the second death. Now comes the transformation of the world
   into the new heaven and the new earth (where there is no sea). The new
   Jerusalem descends from heaven. God dwells among men. There will be no
   more grief. The old order has passed away.

   This is, indeed, the official Jewish eschatology, but it is presented
   in such a form that every Christian can easily adopt it. The case is
   different with the great final picture. Here we are transported, not
   into the new heaven and the new earth, but into that which is entirely
   of this earth, into the coarsely phenomenal and Jewish from a narrow
   national point of view. Our author has again incorporated a Jewish
   fragment. The new Jerusalem is brought before us in the form of a cube
   with golden streets, high walls, and twelve gates made of precious
   stones. There is no temple in it, neither does it need sun or moon. God
   Himself is there and illuminates the city. The Gentiles are still in
   their position of subjection; they may bring their treasures as tribute
   into the holy city, and be healed by the fruit of the tree of life. The
   main thing is, of course, the presence of God in person--and, adds the
   Christian, of the Lamb. Now here we have the most entire reversion
   conceivable to the old familiar national Jewish language. The Christian
   people takes the place of the Jewish, and takes over its contempt for
   the Gentiles. The new Israel at the head of the nations, in the holy
   land and in the holy city--that is the Christian battle-cry. For such
   Christians the whole transformation which Jesus effected of the
   conception of the kingdom of God has been in vain.

   Throughout the whole of the Apocalypse, however, the picture of the
   Christian hope is set before us with many beautiful features of great
   poetic worth and emotional effect. The Christian joy and blessedness
   are expressed in many sayings, just as simply as in the beatitudes of
   Jesus. And then again by the side of these, the creations of the
   wildest fancy, even in the best portions of the book, the letters to
   the seven Churches: "To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the
   hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon his stone a
   new name written which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it." "And
   he that overcometh, and he that keepeth my words unto the end, to him
   will I give authority over the nations: and he shall rule them with a
   rod of iron, as the vessels of the potter are broken to shivers, as I
   also have received of my Father: and I will give him the morning star."
   It is Jesus who utters such abstruse, essentially unchristian words in
   these letters. In fact, taking the prophecy of the book as a whole, the
   name of Jesus has been applied in a manner altogether unsuitable to the
   Jesus of history. The very role He did not want to play--that of Jewish
   Messiah in a Jewish kingdom of God--has here been allotted to Him.

   What then, after all , is there that is Christian in this prophecy? Set
   it for a moment side by side with the apocalypse of Ezra, and the
   answer is not far to seek. There is resignation often akin to despair;
   here the exultant confidence of victory. With the glad exultant longing
   and splendid certainty of victory, the little handful of Christians
   faced their long and arduous struggle against almighty Rome. "The
   kingdom will still be ours." That was the power which Jesus gave.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XXI.

  THE CLAIM.

   HE is a prophet who can say what God will do and what men are to do.
   The claim which our author makes is determined by the great outer and
   inner dangers of his Churches. Persecutions threaten from without, an
   increasing worldliness from within. The Jews stir up persecutions
   against the Christians, and bring false charges against them; the
   Romans, as judges, do the will of the Jews. In such a time, patience,
   endurance and fidelity are the most needed virtues. Above all else, the
   test of a man's Christianity is to be found in his refusal to
   participate in the imperial cultus. Only he who refuses to worship the
   beast and to bear his mark is a Christian. There must be no
   revolutionary resistance. Whosoever shall kill with the sword shall
   with the sword inevitably be killed. Here the patience and faithfulness
   of the saints can alone be of any avail.

   Be thou faithful unto death! Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord
   from henceforth. Every Christian is to be prepared for martyrdom; i.e.,
   here the "keeping of the testimony of Jesus." The prophet has clearly
   recognized that the great struggle with Rome is now about to begin, and
   that this struggle presents a temptation for Christians, which all
   cowardly and weak souls cannot withstand. Hence the powerful glowing
   language of his call to be up and doing. It is the call to be prepared
   for death. No wonder that the Church of the martyrs highly esteemed
   this book and accepted it as canonical. The prophet has only one
   brother- combatant worthy of his mettle, the author of the concluding
   verses of Romans viii. "If God is for us, who can be against us?" may
   be taken as the motto of the book.

   But if God is to be for us, things must first of all be changed in the
   Churches themselves. Worldliness has already begun to creep in. Ephesus
   has lost its first love. Sardis, decayed from its former estate, is
   spiritually dead. Laodicea is neither cold nor warm, boasts, indeed, of
   its riches, and is yet so miserable. Here we can see the condition of
   the Pauline Churches not so very long after the death of their founder.
   The worldliness is increased through heretical teachers, false apostles
   and prophetesses, who declare fornication and the eating of meat
   offered to idols to be allowed, deluding the Christians with the idea
   that only then the depths of Satan's wiles can be sounded. It is
   ordinary heathen libertinism which is disseminated by these
   Nicolaitans, Christian messengers and prophets. Besides this, the
   catalogue of crimes at the end of the book shows us what kind of people
   called themselves Christian here and there.

   The danger from within appears, according to the letters to the
   Churches, to be almost greater than that from without. It is especially
   to guard against it that the prophet cries: "Away with the false
   teachers; back to the first love." The judgment of Christ will be
   without pity even upon those that are His. It is works alone that save,
   deeds of love, of fortitude, of fidelity. There is one thing that can
   surely save Christians lost in sin and the world, and that is
   martyrdom. For the first time a longing look is here cast back to the
   golden age, to the first days of Christianity. "Back to the first
   beginning" is the watchword.

   Taking it all in all, it is an entirely untheological practical kind of
   Christianity. Fidelity in persecution, resistance to worldliness,
   clinging to the first love, such is the claim that the seer makes. He
   is still animated by the genuine enthusiasm of the first great age. We
   can trace this, even externally, by the fact that there is as yet no
   set form for repentance, no ecclesiastical law; as long as the judgment
   is yet to come, so long there is time for repentance. However strict
   the separation which is demanded from the world, there is as yet no
   legalism within, because the voice of the Spirit is still heard. But
   now that the struggle with the Roman empire has begun we can scarcely
   any longer speak of the Christians as a sect. The former sect takes its
   place in the history of the world, resolved for the present just to
   remain true to itself and to look upon world and devil as one.

   There is no trace of any opposition to St Paul, however much his
   formulae may be disregarded. We misconceive St Paul altogether as long
   as we do not recognize that he would have made exactly the same demands
   in this position.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER XXII.

  A LAYMAN'S THEOLOGY.

   BEYOND his promise and his claim the author of the Apocalypse pursues
   no ulterior aim. He feels no need for theological thought and has no
   time to spare for it. This does not preclude his possessing very
   definite--though in no wise original--conceptions about God and the
   things of God. Even though he is layman, he is, after all, a learned
   layman, who has both read and heard a great deal. Like all laymen, he
   accepts the most obvious contradictions and does not strive after any
   inner harmony. His thoughts are never abstractions: they are all
   fancies calculated for the eye and the ear. It will not be without
   value to examine the conceptions of a man such as this. For he
   represents the average Christian, both in his thoughts and in his
   hopes.

   We saw above how pessimistic was his estimate of the political position
   of the age. Satan is the present ruler of this world. He has given the
   beast power over all the kings of the earth. As in the letter to the
   Ephesians, so here: we Christians fight not against flesh and blood,
   but against the demoniac rulers of the world. One would expect as a
   consequence of this a strictly dualistic system. The contrary is our
   author's opinion. God is to him above all the Creator and Lord of this
   present world. Jubilant psalms sing His praises for His acts of
   creation: "Great and marvellous are thy works, O Lord our God, the
   Almighty. Righteous and true are Thy ways, thou King of the nations."
   It is one of the prophet's fundamental doctrines, as to which he never
   for one moment entertains any doubt, that this world is God's world. He
   insists upon this almost more than does St Paul. All alike, Nature and
   history, have come forth from God. Such is his opinion, in agreement
   with the prayer of the Jewish apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra. It will
   be just in the signs of the last days that God will prove His power
   over Nature; then every eye shall see that all these natural forces are
   at His command to do His will. In heaven God's praises are sung without
   ceasing, and in like manner the author of this book never wearies in
   giving vent to his feelings of thanksgiving. No tribulation can cause
   that stream to cease flowing. On this point his conviction is not to be
   shaken.


   "A safe stronghold our God is still,

   A trusty shield and weapon;

   He'll help us clear from all the ill

   That in our days shall happen."

   This fundamental faith in a present living God is the basis upon which
   all the optimistic hope for the future rests.

   But how, then, can the power of the dragon and of the Gentiles be
   explained? The author gives no answer to this, because he has no
   interest in untying knotty problems. He leaves that to Ezra and his
   friends. He is content with the fact that the Gentiles are the enemies
   of God's people and that Satan has given them their great power. But
   the near future will see the end of this state of things, which is
   hateful in God's eyes. He who knows that, knows quite enough. That is
   just a layman's theology, quite unsystematic but full of strength and
   energy.

   God Himself is, it is true, a very distant mysterious Being. It is
   significant that He is described for the most part in accordance with
   Ezekiel's vision. In His immediate neighbourhood stand the elders of
   Isa. xxiv., now twenty-four in number, the original twelve tribes
   having been doubled since the entrance of the Gentiles into the Church.
   Thunder and lightning proceed from God's throne without ceasing. Before
   it are seven lamps which are the seven Spirits (archangels), and still
   nearer Ezekiel's four living creatures. The picture which all this
   leaves in our mind is neither very clear nor very consistent. Indeed
   there is only one impression which we plainly derive from it, and that
   is, that God is unapproachable. Nor do the concluding chapters of the
   book enable us satisfactorily to unite in one picture the conception of
   the unapproachable God surrounded by His court of angels and His
   dwelling upon earth among men. Next, and as a consequence of this
   inaccessibility, God is described as one to be feared. He is no being
   in whom one can feel any confidence. He is never called by the name of
   Father. It is fear and trembling that we feel in the main in the
   presence of this God.

   No wonder, then, that His behests are so exclusively carried out by
   means of angels. God does nothing Himself. It is angels that bring all
   the plagues and all the signs, that vanquish Satan in heaven and bind
   him in the abyss. All God's revelations to men are likewise conveyed by
   the mediation of angels and explained by angels. From this fact alone
   one might infer that for many of our author's co-religionists living
   religion consisted in communion with angels rather than with God. In
   fact, he twice energetically protests against the worship of angels. It
   is very significant that this is necessary. Things have already come to
   such a pass that Christianity has to defend itself against the Jewish
   and heathen worship of angels. The prophet is of course far removed
   from anything like polytheism: the angels are no independent beings,
   but the servants of God. His monotheism, however, would be lifeless
   were it not for the assumption of these intermediate agencies.

   Christ appears as the chief of this great host of intermediate beings,
   and Christ is everything to our writer, therefore possessed of all
   titles also, only not God. This distinct subordination beneath God is
   maintained throughout the whole book. Twice in the letters to the
   Churches Jesus Himself is made to speak of His God. The visions in
   chaps. iv. and v. clearly distinguish Jesus and God. The Lamb there
   appears by the side of God between the throne and the four living
   creatures and the twenty-four elders. In the concluding chapters the
   Lamb is never God. He only stands near Him. All our prophet's practical
   interests are here centred upon this subordination, for only if Jesus
   is not God can He be conceived of as a pattern for the struggling and
   victorious Christians--the martyrs. And everything depends upon this
   for him. "He that overcometh I will give to him to sit down with me in
   my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my Father in His
   throne." That is the Christology of adoption--Jesus has His merits, and
   in consequence of that His dignity is assigned to Him.

   But then, how very little our author feels himself bound by these, his
   own words. All the divine predicates are again heaped upon Jesus almost
   immediately afterwards, and He is placed high above the angels, and
   that from the beginning, not only after His exaltation. He is the
   beginning of the creation of God, the first and the last and the living
   one, the A and the O, the beginning and the end. He is the Redeemer,
   and will also be the judge over Christian and Gentile. It is especially
   in the letters to the Churches that one can see that our author has
   discovered in Christ, to his great comfort, a substitute for the dread
   and inaccessible God. That, again, is a sign of the layman's theology.
   God is too far distant, too high for him: one cannot hold intercourse
   with Him after a friendly fashion. Christ, on the other hand, is known,
   and can be brought quite near to one. The name for Christ which occurs
   most frequently in the book is "The Lamb" (taken from Isa. liii.). As a
   lamb that was slain Jesus has been one of us. If this Lamb sits at
   God's right hand, then we have a trusty advocate in the highest court
   of appeal. The want of taste in the figure which he here employs did
   not trouble him in the least. And after all, "The Lamb" is merely a
   name for Jesus, just as Babylon is for Rome. Such playing with secret
   names is a mark of the apocalyptic literature.

   What has Jesus done, then, upon earth? As answer to this we are merely
   told He died and His blood has redeemed us. Thereby we have been
   legally delivered from the bondage of the heathen and of the devil, and
   have become members of the people of God. This does not preclude the
   writer having many other thoughts besides as to Jews' work. But this is
   practically the most important to him, because he always has to picture
   the Christians to himself as a people.

   He did not know Jesus, and so he cannot start from any personal
   impression. But he is now in the midst of the struggle with the Roman
   people, and then Jesus must be the king, the leader in this struggle,
   who has redeemed us for His host. The victory is ours because our King
   possesses such divine power high above all angels. The future will
   bring us the terrible and bloody victory, and the reward for those that
   have died the hero's death. Judaism--the Old Testament and Paul
   too--have furnished their attributes of Jesus. The author has taken
   these various heterogeneous elements, and has just placed them side by
   side. They are only harmonized by his temperament.

   It is interesting to see how this layman's book agrees with St Paul's
   Epistle to the Colossians in the highest attributes of the Christology.
   The Epistle to the Colossians is directed against heretical teachers
   who preached the worship of angels. The Apocalypse likewise rejects
   angelolatry. In both cases Jesus is exalted high above all angels.
   First of all, Jesus was compared with the Scribes and the prophet John,
   and set above them as Messiah. Now He is measured with the Spirits and
   placed at their head. Soon afterwards follows the comparison with the
   gods of the heathen, and contrasted with them Jesus appears as the
   higher God. That is the beginning of the great apologetic of later
   times. The development of the Church keeps pace therewith: the inner
   Jewish sect, a religion competing with Judaism, a world religion by the
   side of the heathen religions.

   But what now is the origin of all this Christianity of the Apocalypse?
   Can it be traced back to Jesus Himself, or to the first apostles, or to
   Judaists, or to St Paul and his companions, or to what other source?

   Every direct development from the primitive Palestinian form of the
   Gospel is excluded. Nothing reminds us of Jesus and His disciples.
   Scarcely ever do we meet with even a faint echo of any saying of Jesus,
   the gospel faith in the Fatherhood of God is entirely wanting. There is
   not even a single instance of the use of the phrase kingdom of God.
   Whoever knew Jesus Himself or even only His words, could never have
   suffered these wild fancies of vengeance to hold dominion over him.

   On the other hand, Paulinism is certainly the presupposition of this
   form of Christianity. St Paul's universalism, his entire annulling of
   the law, his strict separation from the Jewish synagogue, are all taken
   for granted in this book. The Christology, however, best shows the
   dependence upon Pauline formulas: Jesus is the Son of God who has
   descended from heaven. He is highly exalted above all angels, the
   beginning of the creation of God. He only descended for our redemption
   and afterwards ascended, and because of His obedience He was highly
   exalted and shall come again as judge. Such is the unchanging outline
   of the Pauline Christology. It cannot possibly have originated twice
   over in different persons, unless indeed there were two appearances on
   the road to Damascus.

   The Christianity of the Apocalypse is a development of that form of
   Christianity which St Paul presented to the Gentiles.

   An entirely different element was, however, added to it, viz., Judaism
   with its apocalyptic literature and all the belief in God, angels and
   demons and the cosmology which this implies. It is still an open
   question in what form the Christian prophet appropriated this Judaism,
   whether he edited an already completed Jewish writing, just inserting a
   few Christian additions, or whether he independently combined all
   manner of literary and oral Jewish traditions from the standpoint of
   his Christian faith. But this question is of secondary importance. In
   any case he has completed digested Judaism and made it his own before
   he has uttered his prophecies. It is not improbable that he was himself
   of Jewish extraction; his style, and especially his knowledge of the
   Hebrew Old Testament, almost seems to prove this. He then, according to
   our supposition, would have entered one of the Pauline Churches, and
   would have assimilated the new world of thought as far as it suited
   him. Be that as it may, his Christianity presents a complete fusion of
   the most heterogeneous materials (we cannot call them hostile: cf. 2
   Thess.)--Pauline Christianity and Jewish apocalyptic theory.

   But out of these materials he created something that was his own. He
   saw the struggle between State and Church on the point of breaking out;
   he saw it in the light of an illumination from above: it was the
   struggle of spirits, and as a Christian he foresaw the victory of his
   faith under all circumstances. This lifted him high up above his fellow
   churchmen into the ranks of the prophets. From this prophetic height he
   issued his instructions for the struggle that was about to begin, like
   a practised general, who, above all, pays attention to the weak points
   in his own troops. That which he thus places in the forefront is
   neither Pauline nor Jewish, but simple Christian commands for the
   period of persecution. This now succeeds to the missionary period
   properly so-called, but this change involves a corresponding one in the
   Christian line of defence and attack.

   One evil legacy he did indeed bequeath to us: Christianity was drowned
   in a sea of Jewish fancies and feelings. That was a misfortune from
   which the new religion was destined to suffer grievously.

   CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS.

   Christianity is the result of the labours of men. John is the
   forerunner as prophet. Jesus comes next, with a consciousness more than
   human as Son of God. The apostles transmit His message. Prophets and
   teachers join their fellowship. Paul--stamped as it were out of the
   ground--brings about the great transition from the Jews to the Greeks
   under the sense of a divine calling. Finally, on the outbreak of the
   struggle with Rome, the Christian prophet writes his wild book as the
   word of God. All of these men live in the firm conviction that God
   imparts Himself through them, and acts through them. Jesus occupies the
   first place as leader; His Spirit is to control all the others.

   All have one and the same message--it is eschatology transformed into a
   practical demand. It is the message of the judgment and the coming of
   the kingdom of God in the immediate future. That is the aim of their
   cry--"Repent ye"; "Watch ye." Be ye saved from the coming judgment.
   Upon this earth there is nothing left that abideth forever. The Jewish
   Church is tottering to its fall. The Roman empire is doomed to decay.
   There is no thought of any new great world-organization. Hence the
   minimum of ecclesiastical forms.

   And if, after all, there is even in this present world something new
   and that endureth--then it is the life of the disciples of Jesus. Their
   Church is but miserable to look at; their theology setting aside St
   Paul's alone--is a wretched jumble of Jewish words and conceptions and
   Christian insertions and additions. But the new life in these
   communities is of surpassing greatness: to be a disciple of Jesus means
   to be a redeemed man--one who exercises self-control, who loves the
   brethren, and clings to God above all else. It was Jesus who gave them
   this new life, and therefore they were ready to stand up for Jesus, and
   if need be to die for Him. Paul alone speculated about the redemption.
   But even with him possession is the really important matter. "He that
   hath not the Spirit of Christ is none of His."

   These three points, the presence of men of God, the longing to leave
   this present world, the new life of the children of God, are the signs
   of this first creative period. When they are present no emphasis is
   laid upon the Church. Is not the spirit in the leaders, the spirit that
   creates and destroys forms; and does not the longing for heaven imply
   the longing to quit the Church on earth, and is not the new life of
   more importance than church membership?

   And what did this enthusiasm produce? It separated Christianity from
   Judaism, and started it on its independent course. It began the
   evangelization of the whole world. It took up the struggle with Rome's
   world-power. And so within. It produced the first great theology,
   formed a new kind of literature--the Gospels--created the Apocalpyse;
   at bottom, all of them unfixed undogmatic creations. How often Paul
   produces new formulas, and alters the outlines of the whole of his
   theology.

   But at the same time the first beginnings of the Church are developed
   out of this same enthusiasm: there is the organization of the
   communities, fixed forms of worship, discipline, church officers,
   creed, moral regulations; more important than all, St Paul's great
   theory: no salvation outside of the faith. But all is still
   provisory--means to the great end. Every Christian wished from the
   bottom of his heart that his Church might perish, and the kingdom of
   God begin.
     __________________________________________________________________

    PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Genesis

   [1]2:1-25   [2]2:17   [3]3:1-24   [4]3:1-24   [5]3:7-10   [6]6
   [7]15   [8]15:6   [9]15:6

   Deuteronomy

   [10]30:11-14

   Psalms

   [11]2:5   [12]2:7   [13]97:2   [14]103:1-22   [15]110:1-7

   Song of Solomon

   [16]17:1

   Isaiah

   [17]24:1-23   [18]45:23   [19]51:5-6   [20]51:8   [21]53:1-12
   [22]53:7

   Daniel

   [23]7:13   [24]7:22

   Habakkuk

   [25]2:1-20

   Matthew

   [26]6:1-34   [27]18:17

   Mark

   [28]13:1-37   [29]13:1-37   [30]13:17

   Luke

   [31]16:1-31   [32]17:20

   John

   [33]3:8

   Acts

   [34]15:1-41

   Romans

   [35]1:15   [36]2:1-29   [37]2:1-29   [38]3:23   [39]4:1-25
   [40]4:1-25   [41]6:1-23   [42]7   [43]7:1-25   [44]7:1-25   [45]7:11
   [46]8:1-39   [47]8:31   [48]11:1-36   [49]12:1-21   [50]13:1-14

   1 Corinthians

   [51]2:1-16   [52]4:9-15   [53]7:1-40   [54]12:1-11   [55]13:1-13
   [56]13:1-13   [57]14:1-33   [58]15:1-58   [59]15:1-58   [60]15:1-58
   [61]15:1-58

   2 Corinthians

   [62]3:4-6   [63]3:6   [64]4:6   [65]5:1-21   [66]5:4   [67]5:18-20
   [68]6:1-18   [69]11:1-33   [70]11:5

   Galatians

   [71]2:1-21   [72]3:1-29   [73]4   [74]4:6   [75]5:1-26

   Philippians

   [76]2:1-30

   1 Thessalonians

   [77]2:1-20   [78]2:1-20   [79]4:1-18

   2 Thessalonians

   [80]2:1-17

   Revelation

   [81]4:1-11   [82]5:1-14   [83]13:1-18   [84]18:1-24   [85]19:1-21
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Latin Words and Phrases

     * Benedictus: [86]1
     * Magnificat: [87]1
     * Qui vivra verra: [88]1
     * bona fide: [89]1
     * extra ecclesiam nulla salus: [90]1 [91]2
     * homo: [92]1
     * homo redivivus: [93]1
     * ipso facto: [94]1 [95]2
     * massa perditionis: [96]1 [97]2
     * opus operatum: [98]1
     * ripae ulterioris amore: [99]1
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [100]iv  [101]v  [102]vi  [103]vii  [104]viii  [105]ix  [106]x
   [107]xi  [108]xii  [109]xiii  [110]2  [111]3  [112]4  [113]5  [114]6
   [115]7  [116]8  [117]9  [118]10  [119]11  [120]12  [121]13  [122]14
   [123]15  [124]16  [125]17  [126]18  [127]19  [128]20  [129]21  [130]22
   [131]23  [132]24  [133]25  [134]26  [135]27  [136]28  [137]29  [138]30
   [139]31  [140]32  [141]33  [142]34  [143]35  [144]36  [145]37  [146]38
   [147]39  [148]40  [149]41  [150]42  [151]43  [152]44  [153]45  [154]46
   [155]47  [156]48  [157]49  [158]50  [159]51  [160]52  [161]53  [162]54
   [163]55  [164]56  [165]57  [166]58  [167]59  [168]60  [169]61  [170]62
   [171]63  [172]64  [173]65  [174]66  [175]67  [176]68  [177]69  [178]70
   [179]71  [180]72  [181]73  [182]74  [183]75  [184]76  [185]77  [186]78
   [187]79  [188]80  [189]81  [190]82  [191]83  [192]84  [193]85  [194]86
   [195]87  [196]88  [197]89  [198]90  [199]91  [200]92  [201]93  [202]94
   [203]95  [204]96  [205]97  [206]98  [207]99  [208]100  [209]101
   [210]102  [211]103  [212]104  [213]105  [214]106  [215]107  [216]108
   [217]109  [218]110  [219]111  [220]112  [221]113  [222]114  [223]115
   [224]116  [225]117  [226]118  [227]119  [228]120  [229]121  [230]122
   [231]123  [232]124  [233]125  [234]126  [235]127  [236]128  [237]129
   [238]130  [239]131  [240]132  [241]133  [242]134  [243]135  [244]136
   [245]137  [246]138  [247]139  [248]140  [249]141  [250]142  [251]143
   [252]144  [253]145  [254]146  [255]147  [256]148  [257]149  [258]150
   [259]151  [260]152  [261]153  [262]154  [263]155  [264]156  [265]157
   [266]158  [267]159  [268]160  [269]161  [270]162  [271]163  [272]164
   [273]165  [274]166  [275]167  [276]168  [277]169  [278]170  [279]171
   [280]172  [281]173  [282]174  [283]175  [284]176  [285]177  [286]178
   [287]179  [288]180  [289]181  [290]182  [291]183  [292]184  [293]185
   [294]186  [295]187  [296]188  [297]189  [298]190  [299]191  [300]192
   [301]193  [302]194  [303]195  [304]196  [305]197  [306]198  [307]199
   [308]200  [309]201  [310]202  [311]203  [312]204  [313]205  [314]206
   [315]207  [316]208  [317]209  [318]210  [319]211  [320]212  [321]213
   [322]214  [323]215  [324]216  [325]217  [326]219  [327]220  [328]221
   [329]222  [330]223  [331]224  [332]225  [333]226  [334]227  [335]228
   [336]229  [337]230  [338]231  [339]232  [340]233  [341]234  [342]235
   [343]236  [344]237  [345]238  [346]239  [347]240  [348]241  [349]242
   [350]243  [351]244  [352]245  [353]246  [354]247  [355]248  [356]249
   [357]250  [358]251  [359]252  [360]253  [361]254  [362]255  [363]256
   [364]257  [365]258  [366]259  [367]260  [368]261  [369]262  [370]263
   [371]264  [372]265  [373]266  [374]267  [375]268  [376]269  [377]270
   [378]271  [379]272  [380]273  [381]274  [382]275  [383]276  [384]277
   [385]278  [386]279  [387]280  [388]281  [389]282  [390]283  [391]284
   [392]285  [393]286  [394]287  [395]288  [396]289  [397]290  [398]291
   [399]292  [400]293  [401]294  [402]295  [403]296  [404]297  [405]298
   [406]299  [407]300  [408]301  [409]302  [410]303  [411]304  [412]305
   [413]306  [414]307  [415]308  [416]309  [417]310  [418]311  [419]312
   [420]313  [421]314  [422]315  [423]316  [424]317  [425]318  [426]319
   [427]320  [428]321  [429]322  [430]323  [431]324  [432]325  [433]326
   [434]327  [435]328  [436]329  [437]330  [438]331  [439]332  [440]333
   [441]334  [442]335  [443]336  [444]337  [445]338  [446]339  [447]340
   [448]341  [449]342  [450]343  [451]344  [452]345  [453]346  [454]347
   [455]348  [456]349  [457]350  [458]351  [459]352  [460]353  [461]354
   [462]355  [463]356  [464]357  [465]358  [466]359  [467]360  [468]361
   [469]362  [470]363  [471]364  [472]365  [473]366  [474]367  [475]368
   [476]369  [477]370  [478]371  [479]372  [480]373  [481]374  [482]375
   [483]376  [484]377  [485]378  [486]379  [487]380  [488]381  [489]382
   [490]383  [491]384  [492]385  [493]386  [494]387  [495]388  [496]389
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

References

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  32. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Luke&scrCh=17&scrV=20#iii.ii.ii-p11.1
  33. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=3&scrV=8#iii.i.i-p5.1
  34. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Acts&scrCh=15&scrV=1#iii.iii.ii-p7.1
  35. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=15#iii.iv.i-p7.3
  36. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=2&scrV=1#iii.v.iii-p7.1
  37. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=2&scrV=1#iii.v.iii-p30.1
  38. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=23#iii.v.ii-p15.6
  39. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=4&scrV=1#iii.v.i-p1.1
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  54. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=12&scrV=1#iii.i.i-p9.1
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  56. file:///ccel/w/wernle_paul/beginnings01/cache/beginnings01.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=13&scrV=1#iii.v.ii-p81.1
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