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 74the 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. 75Later 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 76judgment. 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. 77Hence 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 78not 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 79is 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. 80Jesus, 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 81once 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 82reform 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 83anyone 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 84trust 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 85His 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 87God. 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 88creeds 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 89the 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 91feature 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, 92and 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. 93It 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 94in 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 95their 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.