t *>? The Gospel and its Witnesses SOME OF THE CHIEF FACTS IN THE LIFE OF OUR LORD AND THE AUTHORITY OF THE EVANGELICAL NARRATIVES CONSIDERED IN LECTURES CHIEFLY PREACHED AT ST. JAMES'S, WESTMINSTER BY/HENEY WAGE B.D., D.D. . PREBENDARY OF ST. PAUL'S, PREACHER OF LINCOLN'S INN, PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON, CHAPLAIN TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON AND CO. 1883 LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. Enscribci) to THE REV. JOHN EDWARD KEMPE, M.A. PREBENDABY OF ST. PAUL'S RECTOR OF ST. JAMES'S, WESTMINSTER CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN BY HIS FORMER CURATE IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS GUIDANCE AND SUPPORT DURING TWENTY YEARS PREFACE. THE following Lectures were for the most part preached at St. James's, Piccadilly, in 1881, at the invitation of the Hector, the Rev. Prebendary Kempe ; but they have been enlarged and supplemented from Sermons since preached at Lincoln's Inn, and before the University of Oxford. The design of the author was to exhibit the real character and results of modern criticism in respect to the authenticity of the Gospels, and, at the same time, to illustrate the credibility and spiritual significance of the main facts in the Evangelical narratives. Accordingly, after showing in the first two Lectures that the critical enquiries of the last fifty years have failed to establish any objections against the traditional authorship of the four Gospels, he has considered the witness of the Evangelists to the main truths respecting our Lord which are recited in the Creed, and in that summary of the Gospel which St. Peter proclaimed to Cornelius. The Lectures thus treat in succession of our Lord's birth ; of the name of Vlll PREFACE. JESUS as signifying the purpose of the Gospel ; of our Lord's Ministry of power and mercy; of His atoning Death ; of His Kesurrection ; of His Ascen- sion and future return to judgment ; and of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Within the limits determined by the nature of such a series of Lectures, the author has endeavoured to show how the various con- siderations thus reviewed confirm one another, and combine to support the faith of the Church in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. May 1883. CONTENTS. LECTUKE I. THE CHRISTIAN CREED AND ITS EVIDENCE. " The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ : (He is Lord of all :) that word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached ; how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power : who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil ; for God was with Him. And we are witnesses of all things which He did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem ; whom they slew and hanged on a tree : Him God raised up the third day, and shewed Him openly ; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead. And He commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is He which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To Him give all the prophets witness, that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins." Acts x. 36-43 p. I LECTUKE II. THE RESULTS OF MODERN CRITICISM. " Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a Sabbath day's journey. And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartho- lomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon Zelotes. and Judas the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren." Acts i. 12-14 . . . p. 23 X CONTENTS. LECTURE m. THE BIRTH OF OUR LORD. " Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise : When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost." Matthew i. 18 . p. 47 LECTUEE IV. THE NAME OF JESUS. " Thou shalt call His name JESUS, for He shall save His people from their sins." Matthew i. 21 . . . . . . p. 68 LECTUEE V. THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. " And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto Him a centurion, beseeching Him, and saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith unto him, 1 will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth ; and to another, Come, and he cometh ; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. When Jesus heard it, He marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." Matthew viii. 5-10. p. 89 CONTENTS. XI LECTURE VI. THE PASSION AND DEATH OF OUR LORD. ' Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God ; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness : that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." Rom. iii. 25, 26 . . . p. 114 LECTURE VII. THE WITNESS TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION. "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, He hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." Acts ii. 32, 33 . . .p. 147 LECTURE VIII. OUR LORD'S RETURN TO JUDGMENT. " And while they looked stedfastly towards heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel ; which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." Acts i. 10, 11 .p. 172 LECTURE IX. THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT. " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the work* that I do shall he do also; and greater works than those shall he do; because I go unto My Father." John xiv. 12 , . .p. 193 'John sent two of his disciples and said unto Jesus, "Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another ? " ' ' Jesus answered and said unto them, " Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see." ' St. Matthew xi. 3, 4. THE GOSPEL AND ITS WITNESSES LECTUKE I THE CHRISTIAN CREED AND ITS EVIDENCE " The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ : (He is Lord of all :) That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached ; How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil ; for God was with Him. And we are witnesses of .all things which He did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem ; whom they slew and hanged on a tree : Him God raised up the third day, and shewed Him openly ; Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead. And He commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is He which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To Him give all the prophets witness, that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins." Acts x. 36-43. THIS passage possesses a special interest, as the original type of Apostolic preaching to the Gentiles that is, to the world at large, to persons like ourselves, to all in fact who do not approach the Christian revelation from the peculiar point of view occupied by the Jews. It cannot but be regarded B 2 THE CHKISTIAN CREED as embodying, for our purposes, the sura and sub- stance of the Gospel, and as indicating the central points in the Christian argument. Let us observe, then, that it is a brief and simple summary of the life of our Lord, as recorded in the four Gospels, supplemented by a statement of what He com- manded His Apostles to preach after His resur- rection. In slight but vivid details, all the essential points of those narratives and of the Saviours last commands are sketched His ministry of grace and power, His miracles of mercy and of healing, His crucifixion, His resurrection and His open mani- festation to chosen witnesses, His declaration to the Apostles that it is He who was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead, and the assurance that whosoever believed in Him should receive remission of sins. In these few momentous facts lies, according to St. Peter, the whole essence of the Gosj el ; and that essence is the supernatural character of Jesus Christ, His miraculous powers, His authority to forgive sins, His commission to judge the quick and the dead. In strict harmony with this cardinal example of Apostolic preach- ing, the Christian Creed, a confession of which has from the earliest ages been the condition of baptism and of admission into the Church, has con- sisted of a summary of these same facts. One of its earliest forms, that of the primitive Roman Church, AND ITS EVIDENCE 6 ran as follows : * I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried ; on the third day he rose again from the dead ; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead; and I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the holy Church, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh.'* A Christian, accordingly, is a man who believes in these facts, past, present, and future. He is not merely a man who submits himself to the moral teaching of Christ; though that of course is involved in the belief in Him as the Juclge of quick and dead a belief which gives to that teaching an absolutely supreme authority. But, to be a Christian, a man must regard our Lord as having exerted in the past the power and influence which the Gospels record, as exercising a similar influence in the present, and as destined to exercise it with infinite majesty and might in the future. Under this belief, the Christian surrenders himself * See Gebhardt and Harnack, Apostolic Fathers, Fasc. I. part 2, Salmon in the Contemporary Iteciew for August 1878. 115, and an article by Dr. B 2 4 THE CHRISTIAN CREED to Christ for life an'l death, in sure and certain hope that, through Him, he is reconciled with God, that he will be purged by his Saviour's supernatural grace and power from the moral evil which besets him to the last, and that hereafter he will be raised in purity of soul and incorrnption of body to a life of full communion with the truth, the goodness, and the love of the Divine nature. This is the blessed creed which we contemplate in the series of the great festivals of the Christian year, and which reaches its culmination at the two festivals between which we stand those of Easter and Whitsuntide. Now, this being the case, it appears that the whole edifice of Christian faith rests upon the foundation of the historic truth of the life and ministry of our Lord, as summarized by St. Peter in this passage, and as narrated in the Gospels ; and in these da} s, when we are daily called upon to give to ourselves, if not to others, a reason of the faith that is in us, it seems of increasing importance we should clearly realize that this is the main question which is practically at issue. Great service has been done, and is still being done, by those who have vindicated the harmony of the great doctrines of Christian theology with the constitution of nature and of man, and who have brought into prominence the immense presumption in favour of our faith afforded by the course of history and by the benefi- AND ITS EVIDENCE O cent influence of Christianity on mankind. Con- siderations of such a nature are well fitted to be a stay and support to souls in many moments and moods of anxious doubt, during \vhich the answer to other difficulties is for a while obscure; and they must always form an essential part of the Christian argument. A creed which is to command our alle- giance must be in harmony with the existing facts of life, must explain them, control them, animate them. But still, when all this is done and said, we must again and again come back to the few facts we have just reviewed to the simple preaching of St. Peter to Cornelius ; to the question whether, as a matter of fact, Jesus of Nazareth was anointed by God with the Holy Ghost and with power; whether He rose from the grave, and ordered His Apostles to proclaim Him as Judge of quick and dead. This, after all, is our one message as Christian ministers. We not only urge upon you certain moral or spiritual truths,- but we bring a message to you from the man Christ Jesu?, who declared Himself also to be God, and who proved Himself to possess the authority He claimed, not only by His mar- vellous teaching, but by His visible supremacy over all the powers of nature. We call on you for this reason, as has been said, to surrender yourselves to Him, to obey Him, to trust in Him, to pray to Him to appeal to Him for daily support, guidance, chas- 6 THE CHRISTIAN CREED tisement, purification for all the grace which your moral and spiritual and intellectual and bodily nature needs, and to commend yourselves confidently in death to His merciful hands. And if you ask what are our credentials for this gracious, but wonderful and supernatural invitation, we have, and we can have, but one that the facts recited by St. Peter in the text, and the narratives in the Gospels, are faithful records of the life and deeds and words of the Person of whom we speak. Accordingly, it is natural and reasonable that, in the course of the present century, the attention of all who take a serious interest in religious truth should have more and more been concentrated on the question of the authenticity of the books of the New Testament, and on the credibility of the ac- count there preserved to us of the life and work of our Lord. The question was first seriously raised, at least in its present import, at the close of the last century; and since then it has -passed through various forms, until, in our own time, it has cul- minated in a series of attempts to give an account of our Lord's life which should be reconcilable with common experience and with the ordinary course of the laws of nature. The Christian must be justly indignant with the spirit by which some of those attempts have been marked, and by the tone of many rationalistic writers on particular points ; but AND ITS EVIDENCE 7 it would, I think, be unjust not to admit that it was not only natural, but just and proper, that questions of this nature should be raised and fairly considered, in view of the increased knowledge which has been gained during the last two centuries both of nature and of the facts of human history. The develop- ment of natural science has placed miracles in a new light ; it can hardly, I think, be denied that it has increased the wonder of them, and it has in propor- tion enhanced their primd facie improbability. At the same time the advance of criticism in other departments of history and literature has com- pelled us to reject as legendary stories, as myths or poetical fancies, many narratives respecting obscure parts of history which were formerly accepted with- out hesitation. It was impossible that serious men should not ask themselves whether it was conceiv- able that any such legendary process had con- tributed to produce the marvellous and superhuman stories in the Gospels, and whether the evidence on which we were asked to believe in violations of all ordinary experience would bear the strain. It was a natural consequence of human infirmity that in some cases these questions should be raised with undue audacity, and with an imperfect power of appreciating the moral conditions of the problem. It, as must needs be faid, German critics have been often rash, arbitrary, deficient in spiritual and his- 8 THE CHRISTIAN CREED torical penetration for on so serious a subject it is necessary to speak plainly their rashness has not less often been a perversion of a very noble quality, perhaps peculiarly characteristic of their nation of that intrepidity which marked the great hero of the Reformation, and of an impetuous effort to grasp the truth, whatever the apparent cost. The result of their errors, as of many another temporary aberration in the course of the history of theology, has been, on the whole, to bring into clearer light the old truth, and to render more un- assailable for the future the cardinal facts of the Christian revelation. But the process has been a perilous one, and has involved for the time a shaking of the foundations of faith, which has, of late years, been severely felt among ourselves. By the bril- liant French writer, M. Kenan, and by the author of a book called ' Supernatural Religion ' among our- selves, the doubts in question have of late years been given vivid expression. At the same time the main points at issue have been so thoroughly argued that it is possible to point to some definite conclu- sions; and an attempt may not be inopportune to i present, in a simple and direct form, the grounds on which we can take our stand in proclaiming, in all its wonder and all its simplicity, the old message of St. Peter respecting the life, the work, and the present power of Christ. AND ITS EVIDENCE 9 Now, there is one remark to be made at the outset which seems to d serve particular consideration. It is that, among those who have conducted this great controversy, Christian writers alone have approached the subject from an impartial point of view. A different impression no doubt prevails, and it is a common reproach against us that we enter on the dis- cussion with a special interest in favour of the old faith. Of course we do ; and it would be a shame to us if we did not. We have the same interest in believ- ing in the truth of the Christian creed that all men have for believing in the truth of any cause with which the civilization they inherit is indissolubly bound up, for which those whom they love and admire best in the world have shed their blood, and with which the deepest and purest and most elevating of their feelings are united. It would be a bitter thing no doubt, and bitter to others than Christians it would be a shock to human nature, and would shake our faith in the very trustworthiness of our faculties to have to recognize that the self-sacrifice of Christian martyrs and the devoted lives of Chris- tian saints, inseparably united as they are, in a man- ner presented by no other religion, with all that is noblest and most progressive in history, with the highest hopes of the human race even for this world to have to recognize, I say, that all this was founded upon a series of illusions. But nevertheless, none 10 THE CHRISTIAN CREED have the right to say of us, any more than they have a right to presume respecting any other men, that we are disqualified by our prejudices from recog- nizing plain facts. It is facts that we want, and nothing else. Our creed, as has already been said, is a creed of facts ; and every light that can be thrown on the evidence for them is welcome to us. On the other hand, we are justified in saying of the principal writers among our antagonists for they say it of themselves that they are so far from entering on the consideration of the sub- ject impartially, that they actually prejudge the very question in dispute. They say, and it is the cardinal and ever-recurring principle of their objec- tions, that miracles and supernatural facts cannot have happened ; and that this consideration, taken alone, renders it necessary to treat the narratives of the Gospels as legendary. As illustrations of this attitude of mind, it may be sufficient to mention three leading writers : Strauss, the notorious author of the mythical theory of the Gospels ; Baur, the distinguished leader of the Tubingen school; and lastly M. Eenan. Strauss, in his final work on this subject, reiterated that the main difficulty in ac- cepting the narratives of the Gospels as historical is that they assume the existence of a personality in our Lord, and recognize the operation of powers in the course of His life, to which we have no AND ITS EVIDENCE 1] parallel in any other history.* Of course we have not that is the very Christian contention ; but to assume that because no such personality and no such deeds are recorded in any other history, there- fore they could not have occurred in the case of our Lord, is to beg the whole question at issue it is to say that no amount of evidence to the narratives of the Gospels would be of any value. Or, as Strauss puts it in another form, 'that which cannot happen did not happen;'f and accordingly the narratives of the Gospels must be explained away by some device or other. The case is practically the same with Baur. While sympathizing with Strauss, he objected to him that he had not sufficiently investigated the authenticity and date of the Gospels. Strauss laid the stress of the argument on the inherent incredibility of the his- tory ; Baur, on the other hand, endeavoured to show that the Gospels were of very late origin, and conse- quently could not be regarded as valid testimony to the occurrence of the facts. But, after all, the decisive argument, even for him, is that the contents of the Gospels are miraculous and impossible. In his own words, 'The cardinal argument for the * Das Leben Jesu fur das Deutsche Voile bearbeitet, 3rd ed. 1876, p. 145. f See also Das Leben Jesu /.;// /V/i bearbeitet, 4th ed. 16; Criterions of what is unhistorical in the Evangelical narrative. 12 THE CHRISTIAN CEEED later origin of our Gospels remains always this that each of them for itself, and still more all of them together, relate so much in the life of Jesus in a manner in which in reality it is impossible for it to have happened.'* In other words, Baur, a man of immense learning and originality, starts on this momentous enquiry with the prejudgment that the narratives of the Gospel are impossible; and naturally he is at no loss to invent theories most of which, however, Lave since been surrendered by his suc- cessorsas to their composition. Lastly, as to M. Renan, it is only necessary to quote ore sentence from the preface to the thirteenth edi- tion of his ' Life of Jesus,' in which his work assumed its final form.t 'At the foundation,' he says, 'of every discussion of similar matters lies the question of the supernatural. If miracles and the inspiration of certain books are a reality, my method is detestable. If, on the other hand, miracles and the inspiration of books are beliefs destitute of reality, my method is a good one. But the question of the supernatural is decided for us with a complete certainty by this single reason that there is no room for believing in a thing of which the world does not offer any ex- perimental trace.' Accordingly, he too is obliged to invent a theory of his own to account for the narra- * Kritische Untersuchungen tiber die Kanoni&chen Evan- gelien, 1847 ; p. 530. t Page ix. : 15th ed. 1876. AND ITS EVIDENCE 13 lives of the Gospels, on the supposition of their being legendary. Neither of these well-known writers, in other words, approaches the subject with an open mind. The main question the question of the trustworthiness of the authors of the Gospels is settled in advance, not by reference to testimony or criticism, but by an a priori supposition: they combine in saying, with Strauss : These things cannot have happened; therefore they did not happen. The Christian writer, on the other hand, says : ' I am not prepared to say beforehand what may or may not have happened ; what is possible and what is impossible. I want simply to know what did happen ; and I am prepared to accept good evidence on the subject, however surprising the events to which it bears testimony.' In view of these facts, which are proclaimed in the very face of all the chief negative arguments on this subject, are we not justified in saying that the impartiality is on our side, the prejudice and the assumptions on the other ? Of course, if we could be sure that a miracle was inconceivable, the method of rationalistic writers would, as M. E/enan says, be justified. But whilst it can be said, in the words of Professor Huxley in his book on Hume, that * no event is too extra- ordinary to be possible, and therefore if by the term miracle we mean only extremely wonderful events, 14 THE CHRISTIAN CREED there can be no just grounds for denying the pos- sibility of their occurrence,' * no such assumption will be accepted by thoughtful men. We are not accustomed to decide these matters upon abstract theories of possibilities and impossibilities. We want simply to know what is the evidence on the subject ; and that has been, and is still, the attitude of all English theologians of distinction. It is, in short, a fact of the utmost importance for a broad estimate of the value of negative criticism respecting the authenticity of the books of the New Testament, that such criticism has throughout been thus avowedly prompted by a prejudice against the facts in dispute. To quote a legal phrase, the questions put by critics like Strauss, Baur, or Kenan have been essentially leading questions; the tone of the reply has been anticipated, and the witness has been unduly pressed to say what was expected. Of this there is a striking illustration in the perpetual tendency of such criticism to push its conclusions too far even for its own purposes, and consequently to be continually driven to recantations. It may be worth while to refer to one conspicuous instance of this tendency to prove too much, which has been afforded of late by a book to which reference has been already made, ' Supernatural Keligion.' That * Page 131. AND ITS EVIDENCE 13 work, like those of the three great critics already named, starts with an argument to show that miracles are impossible, and then, in this spirit, proceeds to examine the evidence for the early existence of the Gospels ; and an immense amount of ingenuity is expended in explaining away every evidence that they could have existed in their present form before the latter part of the second century. Now, one important part in this argument relates to the heretic Marcion, who flourished about the year 140. He was said by tradition to have formed a Gospel to suit his own views, by taking our Gospel of St. Luke, and cutting out of it parts which were not in accordance with his principles. If so, St. Luke's Gospel must have existed, and must have been a work of authority, in the first quarter of the second century. The writer of ' Supernatural Religion' accordingly has to explain this tradition away ; and he expends more than fifty pages in the effort. But in his ' complete edition,' published in 1879, although he leaves these fifty pages, as he says, 'nearly in their former shape, in order that the true nature of the problem may be better understood/ he is nevertheless obliged to confess that a work recently published by Dr. Sanday has proved that his conclusions on this point were mis- taken, that his previous hypothesis was untenable, that St. Luke's Gospel was substantially in the 16 THE CHRISTIAN CREED hands of Marcion, and that consequently it must have been composed some time before 140 A.D.* If some credit is due to the candour which makes this admission, it is difficult to know what is to be said of the singular procedure of leaving nearly unaltered a mass of argument all directed to a conclusion now acknowledged to be false ; but it will be felt that such a result damages fatally the whole process of which it is an example. A book is written, of which the object, from one end to the other, is to prove that we have no reason to believe that St. Luke's Gospel, any more than any other Gospel, existed before a very late date, and the author discovers after his sixth edition that, with respect to that Gospel at all events, the whole argument is fallacious. He had undertaken to prove too much, and in proportion to the success with which he credits himself is the damage in- flicted by a clear proof of failure in a cardinal point. In this connection it will be interesting to refer to a discovery which has of late attracted much attention among scholars. Even if it be too soon to assume that the results it has hitherto been deemed to involve are conclusively established, it none the less affords a striking example of the rashness of such criticism as we have been considering. * Vol. II. P . 138. AND ITS EVIDENCE 17 It relates to a work of the nature of a harmony of the Four Gospels, which tradition had always ascribed to Tatian, the disciple of St. Justin Martyr. Now as Justin flourished in the middle of the second century, and the author of Supernatural Religion contended that it was impracticable to find ' a single distinct trace of any of the Synoptic Gospels, with the exception of the third, during the first century and a half after the death of Jesus ' * that is to say, before the year 180 A.D. it was im- perative for him to contend that our Gospels were not used by St. Justin. But if Tatian, one of Justin's disciples, composed a kind of harmony out of our four Gospels, and out of those alone, it would be incredible that they were not known to his master, and were not recognized by him as authoritative. Accordingly this author labours iu his usual style to explain away the evidence that Tatian 's harmony or Diatessaron, as it was called was of the character hitherto generally believed. He urged that ' there is no authority for saying that Tatian's Gospel was a harmony of Four Gospels at all ;' and that the natural explanation of the various reports is to be found ' in the conclusion that Tatian did not compose any harmony at all, but simply made use of the same Gospel as his master Justin Martyr, namely, the Gospel according * Vol. II. p. 246. Completed edition, 1879. C 18 THE CHRISTIAN CREED to the Hebrews.' In short, we were told, it was ' obvious that there is no evidence of any value con- necting Tatian's Gospel with those in our Canon.' * The pleas thus advanced were met by Bishop Lightfoot, on the basis of the information then available, with sufficient conclusiveness ; f but by the recent discovery to which we have alluded, if we may trust what has hitherto seemed the unani- mous consent of scholars, at home and abroad, the author's contention has been still more completely overthrown. Through the agency of the Mechitarist Fathers at Venice a translation was published of a work preserved in the Armenian language, which has been generally recognized, by critics belong- ing to all schools of thought, as the commentary which a Syrian father of the fourth century St. Ephiaem was believed to have written on Tatian's Diatessaron. By this commentary, it is generally admitted that we have been placed in posses- sion of the Diatessaron of Tatiari, with sufficient ful- ness, at all events, to judge of its general relations to our Four Gospels. The result is that Tatian's work appears to have been a close welding together of the four Canonical Gospels. For instance, it com- mences with John i. 1-5, and proceeds to Luke i. 5. John i. 14, Luke i. 5-77, Matt. i. 18-25, and so * Supernatural Religion, Vol. II. pp. 1547. f Contemporary Review, May, 1877. AND ITS EVIDENCE 19 cm. One of the leading scholars of Germany, Dr. Harnack, who is entirely unprejudiced in favour of traditional views, says that they are so closely inter- woven, so ingeniously spun together, that nowhere, so to say, is any seam visible.* The work, indeed, \\us not a harmony in the sense of the complete text of all four Gospels being harmonized ; it seems to have been designed and used as a concise and con- venient summary of them; but it did use all of them, and used no other source. The main fact, accordingly, for which orthodox critics have con- tended on this subject is now generally acknowledged, even by rationalistic critics abroad. Tatian is ad- mitted as a decisive witness to the acceptance of our Four Gospels in the time of Justin Martyr. In other words, our Four Gospels, and only our four, are allowed to have been the recognized authorities respecting the life and ministry of our Lord at a time when their very existence is denied by the author of ' Supernatural Religion.' That book has received so much unwarranted attention in this country that it seemed worth while to notice, in passing, its proved untrustworthiness ; and in point of fact the conclusions which its author asserts with such positiveness are as much in conflict with * In an article in Brioger's Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, Vol. IV. 1881, p. 47G. c 2 20 THE CHRISTIAN CREED ft great deal of the most unsparing criticism of the present day as they are with Christian traditions. This, however, is no unusual example of the fate by which, sooner or later, negative criticism is overtaken. In the last work on the life of our Lord, written by one of the most learned of German scholars, Dr. Bernhard Weiss, occurs a striking testi- mony to this effect. Dr. Weiss, indeed, is an earnest believer in Christian truth ; but while the extent and accuracy of his learning is unquestioned, he pro- claims, at the outset of his book, that he does not regard his faith as dependent upon the authenticity of the Gospels, and he does not scruple to treat them as occasionally inaccurate. His testimony, therefore, with respect to the actual results of criticism may be accepted as impartial ; and this is what he says respecting the objections raised by criticism against the external testimonies to the fourth Gospel : ' Baur maintained that before the last quarter of the second century, no traces of the fourth Gospel could be found ; but his disciples have been compelled, step by step, to concede one after another of the testimonies against which he contended. Every new discovery since his day the Philosophumena with their rich Johannine citations out of Gnostic writings, the conclusion of the Clementines with the history of the man born blind, the Syrian Commen- tary on Tatian's Diatessaron has definitely confuted AND ITS EVIDENCE 21 contentions of criticism which had been long and obstinately upheld.'* The lesson to be drawn from such instances of the failure of one critical theory after another is sufficiently obvious. They are but the most recent examples of the general truth that no alternative theory to the traditions of the Christian Church respecting the authorship of the Gospels has ever held its ground, and that no definite fact in opposition to those traditions has ever been established, even to the general satisfaction of negative critics them- selves. In view of this result, such traditions remain in possession of the authority which is due to every witness whose statements have never varied, and in whose evidence no inconsistency or untruth has been established, even by the most prolonged cross- examination, or by further enquiry. The uniform testimony of the earliest Christian antiquity is that St. Matthew, St. Mark, Sr. Luke, and St. John were the authors of the Gospels which bear their names ; and all other explanations of the origin of those Gospels have either destroyed one another, or have been overthrown by new discoveries. This broad fact might alone be sufficient to afford us a practical foundation for our faith. But I propose in the next Lecture to examine more particularly * Das Leben Jem, 1882, Vol. I. p. 92. 22 THE CHEISTIAN CREED the results of critical enquiry respecting each of our Gospels, as illustrated by the statements of the most famous unbeliever of our day M. Eenan. With his assistance, it will be possible, without following in detail all the thorny paths of the criticism of the present century, to estimate the general value of its results. The long debate on this subject has, in fact, at last reached a point at which even simple readers may sufficiently see their way, provided they approach the subject with- out those prejudices by which, as we have seen, the arguments of negative criticism are marred. In sub- sequent Lectures, we will consider the leading facts of our Lord's ministry on earth as they are summarized by St. Peter in the text, and recited in the creeds of the Church, with reference at once to their spiritual significance and to their credibility. In pursuing such an enquiry we should be led to a profitable contemplation of our Lord's character, of His deeds and words; and we shall, I trust, be enabled to place a more implicit and unhesitating faith in those grand facts, those marvellous exhibitions of divine power, on which our faith as Christians is based. May God grant us this blessing, through Jesus Christ our Lord ! LECTUKE II THE EESULTS OF MODERN CRITICISM " Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey. And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartho- lomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren." Acts i. 12-14. IT has been shown in the previous Lecture that all the important objections to the authenticity and credibility of the Gospel narratives, as we possess them, all the critical arguments which have been prominent during the present century, have started from the assumption that anything miraculous and supernatural is incredible, and that therefore any documents which profess to contain a record of it must be, in some degree, legendary, and their accounts must need to be explained away. The consequence is that no hostile critic of the Gospel history has approached the subject impartially, and Christian writers alone are willing to estimate without pre- judice the testimony offered, and to accept as facts 24 THE EESULTS what may thus be established. Some striking in- stances were also given of the errors into which critics have been betrayed by these prejudices, and of the damage which has been inflicted on their arguments by every successive discovery in early Christian literature. In the present Lecture I pro- pose to enquire more particularly into the practical results of modern criticism respecting the Four Gospels, and to ask how far any conclusions have really been established which are adverse to our belief in the authenticity and credibility of those books. For this purpose I shall not presume to rely upon any arguments I might myself urge in answer to sceptical critics. It will be sufficient to appeal to the evidence of a witness who is familiar with the whole controversy, who is a master of all the branches of learning connected with it, and who is not only unprejudiced in favour of Christian belief, but is himself the most famous unbeliever of our day. That witness is M. Kenan. The interpretation which he places upon the evidence he feels obliged to admit, the manner in which, under the influence of his rationalistic prejudices, he explains away its natural effect, in no way affect the character and the significance of the admissions themselves. We are concerned, at present, simply with the nature of the testimony with which we have to deal. When that is substantially ascertained, we shall be justified OF MODERN CRITICISM 25 iii interpreting the evidence ourselves. What we wish to know, in the first instance, is how far modern criticism has seriously succeeded in establishing solid objections against the constant belief of the Church that we possess in the four Gospels the evidence of contemporaries and eye-witnesses. On this point M. Renan is an authority to whom sceptical critics, at all events, cannot fairly demur. If their contentions have not been established, even in the main, to his satisfaction, Christian writers, or apolo- gists if any one prefers so to call them can hardly be accused of orthodox prejudices for being of a similar opinion. Now the third Gospel offers peculiar advantages for entering upon this question. The book of the Acts of the Apostles purports to be by the same writer ; and the latter book, from the manner in which the pro- noun ' We ' is used in its later chapters in describing some of the journeys of St. Paul, affords internal evidence of unique value respecting its authorship. It is well known what has been the uniform tradition of the Church upon the subject, as well as how vehe- mently it has been attacked by the chief sceptical critics of Germany. If the book of the Acts of the Apostles was written by a friend and companion of St. Paul, the chief theories of Baur and his school at once fall to the ground, and accordingly they have directed ceaseless assaults against its authenticity. Bow far 26 THE RESULTS have they succeeded in establishing their case to the satisfaction of a scholar like M. Renan ? They have absolutely failed. After reviewing these criti- cisms, he says in the introduction to his work on the Apostles :* ' Must we be checked by these objec- tions ? I think not ; and I persist in believing that the final composition of the Acts of the Apostles is due to the disciple of St. Paul, who says " we " in the last chapters. All the difficulties, however in- soluble they may appear, ought, if not to be dis- missed, at least to be held in suspense, in presence of an argument so decisive as that which results from that word " we." ' He further considers that the tradition is correct, according to which this disciple was St. Luke, and concludes :t ' We think, therefore, that the author of the third Gospel and of the Acts is in all reality Luke, the disciple of Paul.' So again, in the introduction to his ' Life of Jesus,' he says it is evident that if the titles of the four Gospels are correct they at least carry us back to the half-century which followed the death of Jesus ; and he proceeds 4 * As to Luke doubt is scarcely possible. The Gospel of Luke is a regular composition, founded on previous documents. It is the work of a man who chooses, curtails, combines. The author of this Gospel is certainly the same as * Les Apotres 1866 p. xiv. t P- xviii. J Vie de Jesus, 1876, p. xlix. OF MODERN CRITICISM 27 the author of the Acts of the Apostles. But the author of the Acts appears to be a companion of St. Paul, a description which agrees completely with Luke.' He adds that he knows that more than one objection can be raised to this statement ; but he considers that one thing at least is beyond doubt though nothing has been more vehemently doubted in Germany namely, ' that the author of the third Gospel and of the Acts is a man of the second apostolic generation, and this suffices for our purpose ' that is for the . purpose of showing that, at the least, the Acts of the Apostles ' carries us back to the half-century which followed the death of Jesus.' But, as we have seen, in his later work on ' The Apostles/ he avows his own opinion un- shaken that the author is St. Luke. M. Reuan further assumes, from internal evidence, that the Gospel was written after the siege of Jerusalem. His reasons for this opinion might be shown to l>e very insufficient; but it is enough for our purpose that he says it was written not long after- wards that is, not long after the year 70 within the lifetime, therefore, of Apostles and contempo- raries of our Lord. According to the ordinary com- putation, our Lord was crucified in the year 80, at the age of thirty-three. Persons, therefore, who were actually contemporary with Him would have been alive at the time St. Luke wrote, and in earlier 28 THE RESULTS years he would have been in communication with numbers of such persons. We cannot but fully adopt M. Eenan's own words when he adds, ' We are here, then, upon solid ground ; for we have before us a work proceeding entirely from the same hand, and marked by the most perfect unity.' Now the vast import of this admission will be readily apparent. The intimacy between St. Paul and St. Luke was peculiarly close and prolonged. We know from St. Paul's Epistles, that St. Luke possessed his complete confidence ; and we cannot therefore but conclude that St. Luke's narrative, both in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Gospel, is supported by the knowledge and the belief of St. Paul. Nor of St. Paul only ; for St. Paul, and St. Luke with him, were in intimate association with other Apostles and Evangelists. St. Luke, for in- stance, according to the evidence afforded by those passages in the Acts of the Apostles to which reference has been made, accompanied St. Paul on his last visit to Jerusalem, and during that visit, at any rate, would have had constant opportunities for communication with the other Apostles who were living there, and probably also with relations of our Lord, including the Virgin Mary, His mother. Un- less, therefore, we disbelieve in the veracity of St. Luke which, it may be safely said, no serious per- son does we have in his Gospel a faithful report of OF MODERN CRITICISM 29 direct contemporary and Apostolic testimony re- specting the facts which he records. He tells us in his prologue that many records of that testimony already existed ; and during his companionship with St. Paul he must have been in a most favourable position for making enquiries respecting such state- ments, and obtaining supplementary information. He therefore declares in his preface the simple fact, when he says that he had been in a position to obtain a perfect understanding of all things from the very first. This, let me repeat, is not a con- tention which I am endeavouring to uphold against the general consent of critics ; it is not the argu- ment of a Christian controversialist or apologist alone ; it is the admission of the most prominent representative of disbelief in the ancient Christian creed in the present day. The result is to justify us in concluding that criticism has established nothing, at all events, against the authenticity of the Gospel of St. Luke, and to assure us that we have in it a record of the narratives and convic- tions of eye-witnesses. Now, this consideration leads us a long way back, and throws great light on the authority to be attributed to the other Gospels, and particularly to those of St. Matthew and St. Mark. Not to trouble you with the details of a critical argument, it will be more than enough to accept what M. Kenan pro- 30 THE EESULTS ceeds to allow : ' In general,' he says, ' the Gospel of St. Luke appears to be of a later date than the two first, and has the character of having been more carefully finished.' But he admits there is no doubt, from the testimony of one of the earliest Christian writers, Papias, that certain documents were written by both St. Matthew and St. Mark which corre- sponded, in their substantial character, to the two Gospels we now possess under those names. He considers that the original form of them has been added to and modified, but nevertheless, in his opinion, St. Matthew ' deserves an exceptional confi- dence ' in his report of our Lord's discourses ; and as for St. Mark's Gospel, it is 'full of minute observations, proceeding without doubt from an eye- witness ; ' and there is nothing, he adds, ' to conflict with the report of Papias, that this eye-witness, who had evidently followed Jesus, who had loved Him and watched Him closely, and had preserved a vivid image of Him, was the Apostle St. Peter himself.'* It will probably be felt to be more satisfactory, for the purposes of our present argument, to adopt these admissions from a witness hostile to the belief of the Church, than to urge on our own part the arguments which might be adduced in favour of still more definite conclusions. There seems a vague Vie de J&us, pp. ]., Ixxxi., Ixxxiii. OF MODERN CRITICISM 31 feeling abroad a feeling based, probably, on re- iterated assertion rather than on careful reading that there is a general consent of unbiassed criticism against the early date of the Gospel nar- ratives, and consequently against our possessing in them the reports of eye-witnesses and of friends of eye-witnesses. It seems, therefore, of the highest importance it should be well understood that, in the deliberate and matured opinion of a person like M. Renan, there is no such critical presumption against the general authority of the Gospels; but that, on the contrary, although he thinks the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark have been in some degree altered from their original form, the records of our Lord's discourses in the one Gospel may be received with peculiar confidence, and the re- ports of His actions in the Second Gospel bear the mark of proceeding from an eye-witness, who most probably was St. Peter himself. No wonder that he adds, * In conclusion, I admit the four canonical Gospels as serious documents. They go back to the age which followed the death of Jesus.'* A broad result of this kind is clearly worth a great deal more than any qualifications with which, to meet his own ideas of what is possible or impossible, a critic may accompany it. For all purposes of ordinary historic evidence and for our present argument it * Vie de Jesus, Ixxxi. 32 THE RESULTS is unnecessary to push, the admission further it will, we think, be felt that if St. Matthew may be specially trusted respecting our Lord's words, and St. Mark gives the report of an eye-witness respecting his deeds, and St. Luke affords a connected review of both, according to the evidence of Apostles and con- temporaries, the record of His ministry which results from the combined evidence of the first three Gospels may be accepted in all its main outlines as supported by the most direct evidence. There is no such material difference between the records of our Lord's deeds in St. Matthew and St. Mark as to make the variations on which M. Renan afterwards dwells of any considerable importance. The story in each Gospel is substantially the same ; and if one of the three Gospels proceeded from an eye-witness, or was the record of an eye-witness's report, there is no reason why the other two should not have pro- ceeded from a similar authority. The great fact which remains, at the close of the long critical debate of the last two generations, is that in the Gospels we do possess accounts of our Lord's life and ministry written either by Apostles themselves, or by companions of Apostles by persons, that is, who had either themselves witnessed our Lord's deeds and heard His words, or who were in inti- mate association with those who had. The admission just quoted from M. Renan OF MODERN CRITICISM 33 applies, it will be observed, to the Gospel of St. John, as well as to the first three Gospels; but the position of criticism on this latter point is so remarkable as to deserve especial attention. M. Kenan's opinion is perhaps the most extraordinary of all which have been expressed. It has fluc- tuated in a very singular manner ; but on one point it has not altered. In the first edition of his * Life of Jesus,' and in the sixth volume of his 'Origins of Christianity,' he confesses himself greatly struck by the incidental indications of authenticity pre- sented by the fourth Gospel. He notices the * slight traces of precision ;' the ' freshness of its remi- niscences,' ' like those of old age ;' the little touches of detail, ' It was the sixth hour ;' 'It was night ;' ' The man's name was Malchus ;' ' They had made a fire of coals, for it was cold,' and the like. But, on the other hand, he cannot endure the discourses which are attributed to our Lord in that Gospel. He calls them ' prolix,' ' arid,' ' interminable,' * full of abstruse metaphysics and personal allega- tions.' He is thus divided between the conviction, on the one hand, of the authenticity of the Gospel which is forced on him by the narrative portions of it, and the doubts of its authenticity, on the other hand, which arise from his inability to appreciate the discourses of our Saviour. Between these opposing influences he has oscillated, now regarding the Gospel 34 THE RESULTS as substantially the work of St. John, although edited and retouched by his disciples, and again supposing that it was not the work of St. John, but of one of his disciples, the discourses being factitious, but the narrative parts, including precious traditions, being due to St. John. His final conclusion, in his sixth volume, embodies these contradictions in their most remarkable form. 'The fourth Gospel,' we are told, 'though a writing of no value for the purpose of knowing how Jesus spoke, is superior to the other three in respect to matters of fact.'* Could there be a more extraordinary phenomenon than this a work which possesses in the highest degree the value of an eye-witness's report on the deeds of the person of whom it speaks, but which is of no value at all in respect to his words ? But, again, what I am mainly concerned to point out is the broad fact that even hostile criticism is compelled to make these admissions ; and it is par- ticularly interesting to observe that the Gospel of St. John has baffled continually even the most reck- less critics by its vivid internal marks of genuine- ness. There is a candour about German criticism which often redeems some of its worst faults ; and the history of its opinions on this subject betrays a vacillation not less remarkable than that L'Eglise Chre'tienne, 1879, M. Godet in the Revue Chre- pp. 58, 50. Cf. an article by tienne for 1880, p. 129. OF MODERN CRITICISM 35 of M. Kenan. The most remarkable illustration of all, perhaps, is furnished by Strauss himself. He started from the assumption of the unauthenticity of St. John's Gospel ; and in point of fact, his whole attempt to resolve the Gospel history into a myth would have been condemned beforehand, if that Gospel were really the work of an Apostle. Never- theless, in the preface to the third edition of his ' Life of Jesus,' he makes the confession that, under a renewed study of the Fourth Gospel, his early doubts of its authenticity and credibility had themselves become doubtful to him. At that point in his career, after writing his notorious book on the supposition of the Gospel of St. John not being authentic, he begins to think it may be, after all ; but he returns at length to his old mind, and doubts once more the doubts he had entertained of his original doubts.* So, again, one of the ablest and most candid, as well as most learned, of Church historians in Ger- many, whose manual on the Life of our Lord has been a text-book in that country for fifty yean*, Dr. Karl Hase, after maintaining all his life the authenticity of the Gospel, surrenders it in a larger work on the same subject published in 1875, but adds that after all he does not feel sure, and thinks it very possible that the old opinion will again pre- * See a very interesting ac- i schichte Jesu, 1876, pp. 26-.*);) count of the controversy on this ! especially p. 32. subject in Dr. Karl Base's Ge- D 2 36 THE RESULTS vail.* The practical conclusion to be drawn from all this fluctuation seems not sufficiently attended to. That conclusion is, that it is a pure illusion to suppose that there is any general agreement of critical authority against the authenticity of the four documents on which the faith of the Church respecting the life and work of our Lord reposes. On the contrary, the assault has from first to last been a wavering one, even under the most daring leaders ; and the main positions for which a Chris- tian writer cares to contend are now practically sur- rendered by the most prominent of our antagonists. In view of these considerations, we seem to be justified in dismissing once for all any doubts as to the fact that the Gospels may be substantially ac- cepted for what they profess to be, and for what the Church has hitherto regarded them memoirs of our Lord's life and ministry, written by men who either were eye-witnesses, or who, like St. Luke, had had perfect understanding of all things from the very first. The only question which remains, therefore, is that of the credibility of these eye-witnesses and contemporary writers. Can we rely on their accounts of the events which they had seen and heard, as being truthful, and uncoloured by superstitious imaginations ? Now, I do not suppose that any serious enquirer doubts the truthfulness in point of * Geschichte Jesu, p. 52. OF MODERN CRITICISM 37 intention of the writers of the four Gospels. It is enough to say on that point that they were disciples in the greatest school of Truth the world has ever seen. Whatever else may be thought of them, there is no question that they record, in page after page, moral teaching which brings the fiercest light of Divine truthfulness to bear on the very springs and recesses of the heart. The discourses of our Lord recorded by them correspond' pre-eminently to that description of the Word of God, that it is ' quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a dis- cerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.' Men who wrote with the consciousness of that fiery sword suspended, as it were, over their heads, cannot but have been incapable of any conscious untruthfulness. The force of this consideration receives a striking illustration in some remarks by M. Renan, in his final review of the problem presented by the Gospel of St. John, in the appendix to the ultimate edition of his ' Life ' of our Lord. His tact and candour in dealing with purely historical difficulties are often in striking contrast to his treatment of moral problems, and nowhere is this contrast more re- markable than in his summary, in the passage referred to, of the evidence respecting the author- ship of the fourth Gospel. But the point to which 38 THE RESULTS 1 would specially call attention for our present pur- pose is the following : M. Eenan fully admits that we have to choose between acknowledging that this Gospel was really written by St. John, and alleging that it was a deliberate fraud. We must choose, he says, between two alternatives 'either the author of the fourth Gospel is a disciple of Jesus, an inti- mate disciple, and attached to him from the earliest moment ; or else the author has employed, for the purpose of giving himself authority, an artifice which has been followed from the beginning of the book to the end, and which was designed to make it believed that he was a witness in the best position possible for reporting the truth of the events.' ' Who,' asks M. Eenan, ' is the disciple of whose authority the author thus designs to avail himself? The title tells us : it is "John." There is not the slightest reason to suppose that this title was added contrary to the intentions of the real author. . . . We must therefore choose between two hypotheses : either to recognize John, the son of Zebedee, as the author of the fourth Gospel, or to regard this Gospel as an apocryphal writing composed by some one who wished to pass it off as the work of John, the son of Zebedee. In a word, this is not a question of legends, the work of the multitude, for which no one in particular is responsible. A man who, in order to give credence to what he narrates, deceives OF MODERN CRITICISM 39 the public not only with respect to his name, but still more with respect to the value of his witness, is not a writer of legends ; he is a forger . . . This falsification, moreover, is not the only one which the author would on this supposition have committed. We have three Epistles, which likewise bear the name of John. If there is anything probable in criticism it is that the first at least of these Epistles is by the same author as the fourth Gospel. One might almost call it a chapter detached from the Gospel. . . . The author of this Epistle, like the author of the Gospel, offers himself as an eye- witness (1 John i. 1 sq.; iv. 14) of the evangelical history. He presents himself as a man well known, and enjoying high con- sideration in the Church.' M. Renan himself con- cludes : ' At the first view, it seems that the most natural hypothesis is to admit that all these writings are really the work of John, the son of Zebedee.' * The most natural hypothesis ! An appeal may confidently be made to common sense and common feeling whether, on the basis of the facts thus stated by M. Renan, any other hypothesis would not be in the highest degree unnatural and intolerable. Un- less the fourth Gospel and the First Epistle of John were really written by the Apostle who bore that name, then whoever wrote them was a forger and a liar ! These to repeat an observation already made * Vie de J&us, 15th edition, pp. 537-9. 40 THE RESULTS are not my words. They are the admissions, and the very expressions of the most famous sceptic of our day. But can any conceivable difficulties of criticism, any contrast, for instance, between the literary style of the Apocalypse and of the fourth Gospel, be compared to the moral difficulty which is here stated with such candour and force ? To those, perhaps, who can persuade themselves with M. Renan that the discourses of our Lord in the fourth Gospel are * dry,' ' metaphysical,' ' flat and impossible,' such a difficulty may not appear so enormous. But as long as, by the wisdom of our reformers, those discourses are read and re-read, year by year, in the ears of English Christians, any such judgment on them will but serve to disable fatally the moral apprehension of the critic by whom it is pronounced. You know that there are no portions of the Scrip- tures which go more directly to your hearts, which appeal with such combined tenderness, truth, and force, to your innermost sympathies and your truest convictions. There may be much in them which is above your comprehension ; but you are none the less sensible that, when listening to them, you are breathing an atmosphere of the purest simplicity and veracity, and you are forced to pay homage to the claim, of the speaker when He says ' I am the truth.' But, at any rate, there can surely be no difference of opinion respecting the spirit which OF MODERN CRITICISM 41 animates the First Epistle of St. John. ' This is the message which we have heard of Him and de- clare unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth.' 'He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.' Is it morally conceivable that the man who wrote such sentences as these was capable of the deliberate and elaborate fraud of writing a Gospel, implying ' I knew Him ' on every page, when the whole work was a forgery and the suggestion a lie ? If there are any writings in the world which bear the stamp of the intense truthful- ness of the author, they are the First Epistle of St. John and the fourth Gospel ; and when a critic like M. Eenan is forced to admit that they must either be the work of the Apostle or the work of a forger, our moral sense may well be revolted at being asked to choose between such alternatives. But allowing that the authors of our Four Gospels were incapable of untruth, were they capable of hallucination? That, no doubt, is a possibility which it is necessary to take into ac- count. But here, again, the answer may well be similar to that offered to the last objection. Not only were these men disciples in the greatest school of truthfuhiess the world has ever seen ; they were 42 THE RESULTS disciples not less in the school of the sternest realities the -world has ever seen. At the risk, and in many cases at the actual cost, of a death like that of their Master, a death of torture and of ignominy, they declared themselves to be in posses- sion of the secret of salvation for the world, of truths by which mankind might be regenerated ; and they proclaimed themselves the servants of a Lord who was destined to rule the hearts of men. If any beliefs would have seemed more like hallu- cination than any other to the men of that day, it would have been these cardinal elements in the belief of the Evangelists and Apostles. St. Paul's message was equal foolishness in the eye of a Jew and of a Greek. To a Jew it seemed incredible that the Gentiles should become heirs of all the spiritual education of his forefathers ; to the Greek or Roman it seemed a ridiculous conception that he should submit his wisdom, his art, and his power to the authority of a crucified Jew. These, as I have said, might have seemed hallucinations, if you will. But these very beliefs, the most incredible of all at that time, we know to have been founded in truth, and we see the verification of them before our eyes. The two Apostles in whose daily company St. Luke and St. Mark lived, and the other two Evangelists, St. Matthew and St. John, have laid down the moral principles on which the whole fabric of the highest OF MODERN CRITICISM 43 civilized society now reposes, and in which every thoughtful man sees the germs and the guarantee of the future progress of our race. Now consider to what this amounts. It shows that wherever we are able to put to the proof, not merely the truthfulness, but the sobriety, the practical in- sight, the moral and spiritual penetration, of the Evangelists and Apostles, their possession of these qualities is vindicated by experience on the largest possible scale. In these Gospels and Epistles a sun suddenly appeared in the spiritual heaven of man- kind, which eclipsed, by the intensity of its illumi- nation, all lesser lights in the moral firmament. This is the phenomenon which places the testimony of the Evangelists and Apostles on so different a footing from that of any other evidence to events at all similar in character. To quote instances of legends attaching to the origin of other religions is beside the mark, until an instance can be pro- duced of such legends being associated as in this with supreme truth, wisdom, purity, and good- ness. Putting out of sight for the moment the question of miracles, there appears a general agree- ment of the most thoughtful men of all schools that there is not one sentiment, or even one word, for which the Evangelists or their Master are responsible which do(!s not harmonize with the highest conceiv- able ideals of all that is good and true. Now, would 44 THE RESULTS not such uniform and ideal perfection be itself a miracle of the most perplexing and distressing kind, if it were combined with the hallucination which is at- tributed to the Evangelists by rationalistic criticism ? Let it be acknowledged, by all means, that we do need evidence of the most overwhelming and irrefragable character to establish the credibility of the Gospel records ; as, for instance, of those narra- tives of the birth of our Lord to which in the next Lecture I will make some special reference. They are indeed stupendous events, out of the range of all known experience by no means indeed inconceiv- able, for one of the objections against them is that the human mind has conceived and imagined such occurrences again and again but not to be cre- dited without the highest possible moral evidence. Hume's famous test seems by no means nn unfair one for such cases. To establish a miracle, the testimony should be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. At all events, we need not as Christians shrink from the application of that test. To sup- pose that writers who declared with the utmost sim- plicity, clearness, and force the profoundest truths of our moral nature, and who staked their lives on the fulfilment, against all likelihood, and by the mere operation of moral and spiritual forces, of the mightiest of all revolutions in human history, OF MODERN CEITICISM 45 whose declarations are true wherever we have been able to test them to suppose that men who, if I may so express it, had stood at the very centre of the human universe, who saw the law of gravita- tion of the whole spiritual system, and determined, centuries beforehand, the orbits in which its chief planets would roll that such men should have been visionaries and enthusiasts, capable of hal- lucinations about occurrences which were indissolu- bly bound up with the truths they proclaimed this would be worse than miraculous ; it would be monstrous. Accordingly, when all is said, the question of the credibility of the Gospels will be found to turn, in the main, upon internal evidence. They are their own best witnesses. It is the conspicuous and in- tense veracity of their authors which has chiefly maintained their authority through the controversies of eighteen centuries, and which maintains them still. It is this which gives them so firm a hold upon the hearts of believers, and by which all the difficulties raised by criticism are ultimately shat- tered. Such evidence as we have been dwelling on may not, indeed, be formally demonstrative. In that respect it shares the character of almost all historical and literary evidence. But it will ever be convincing to those who recognize the supreme moral and spiritual force inherent in our Lord's 46 RESULTS OF MODERN CRITICISM words, and in the records of the Evangelists. As we have seen, the objections raised against the au- thenticity of a Gospel like that of St. John depend, in the ultimate resort, on the question whether the discourses of our Lord in that Gospel are pregnant with moral and spiritual truth, or are arid and meta- physical. A man whose moral sense is closed to their force cannot be convinced by any amount of evidence that the Gospel, as a whole, is the work of an Apostle. But in proportion as those words enter your hearts and pierce them like a two-edged sword, in proportion as the moral force of the Gospels overpowers your whole nature, will you be prepared to give due weight to the other elements in their testimony, and will you be disposed to think that the most incredible of all things would be that they should not be literally true. ( 47 ) LECTURE III " Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise : When as His mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost." Matthew i. 18. IT has now been shown that we stand on firm ground in accepting the narratives of the Four Gospels as faithful records of the life and ministry of our Lord ; that they contain, at least in all substantial points, the direct testimony of two eye-witnesses, and the reports of two other persons who were in direct and intimate communication with eye-witnesses. We have further seen how immense is the presumption in favour alike of the truthfulness of the Evangelists and of their soundness of judgment, afforded on the one hand by the profound love of truth which they display, and on the other hand by the verification which experience has afforded of their insight into the great realities of man's moral nature and of the course of history. When they thus command our confidence on all the more central and weighty matters of their testimony, it is natural to conclude that they must equally deserve it in details ; and we shall at least be prepared to hold our judgment 48 THE BIETH in suspense in respect to minor difficulties in their narratives. These considerations must be carefully borne in mind in passing to-day to consider in their order the cardinal facts in our Lord's ministry, as enumerated in St. Peter's address to Cornelius and in the Creed of the Church. But we must needs commence by observing that, from the point of view we have gained, we are enabled, or rather compelled, to put aside at once the principal speculations of late years respecting our Lord's method and purpose. For all those speculations proceed on the re-arrangement, according to the views of the particular writer, of the records of the Gospels; one part being taken out and another left, and the whole being readjusted to meet the author's comprehension of the case. One writer proposes to discuss our Lord's object and scheme without reference to His theology, as though the deepest and most characteristic of His motives could possibly be excluded from His work. Another endeavours to exclude His miracles altogether from consideration, and a third resolves them into a half- conscious, half-unconscious illusion. M. Eenan, who, as we have seen, accepts the four Gospels as ' serious documents,' providing for us, to a great extent, the evidence of eye-witnesses, nevertheless constructs a story of our Lord's life in flagrant contradiction with the main order of events as OF OUR LORD 49 uniformly narrated by these witnesses. The Gospels place the commencement of our Lord's ministry at His baptism by John, and exhibit Him from that time forward as preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and working miracles in accordance with it. But M. Kenan imagines out of his own mind a kind of idyllic period in Galilee before our Lord's communication with John, during which He was wholly occupied with what that writer is pleased to consider the purely moral instruction of the Sermon on the Mount. It seems enough to say that any method which deals in this arbitrary manner with the unanimous testimony of serious witnesses is self- condemned. It must be added that there is a presumption very difficult to comprehend in the tone of mind which assumes a capacity for sitting in judgment, as it were, on the work of our Lord, and measuring His aims by its own standard. On any supposition, His moral and spiritual power has been, and still remains, superior to the conceptions and ideals of all other men. It is only reasonable to suppose, therefore, that it must in numerous points be wholly above and beyond our comprehension. So far as we have definite statements preserved to us*, such as we believe we possess in the Gospel?, we may hope in some measure to apprehend it. But if we cannot trust the order of their narration, wo E 50 THE BIRTH are simply in presence of a mysterious manifestation of superhuman wisdom, goodness, and power, which \ve cannot hope to explain. It is not surprising, therefore, that every writer on this subject who departs from the records of the Gospel and the faith of the Church, develops some new scheme inconsistent with those of his predecessors. The Church alone has been consistent from the first in its acceptance, and in its general interpretation, of the story in the Gospels ; and the fact that this uniform impression should have been produced by the four Gospels upon all who have submitted themselves simply to their instruction, must alone raise a great presumption in favour of its harmony with the real truth of the case. Now these are the considerations from which we have to start in considering the credibility of such a passage in the Gospel history as that of the miraculous birth of our Lord, with the angelic messages which accompanied it. The information could of course only be derived from one source, namely, from the Mother of our Lord herself; and as to the possibility of Apostles and Apostolic men receiving this information, it is enough to know that, after the Ascension as St. Luke states, the Apostles ' continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren.' We OF OUR LORD 51 know nothing of Mary's life after this; but our Lord on the Cross commended her to the care of St. John, and the solemn charge was doubtless ful- filled. It follows, therefore, that for a whole gene- ration after the compilation of the first three Gospels according to the admissions already quoted that very Apostle was still living who was better able than any other man to know whether the accounts of our Lord's birth given by St. Luke and St. Mat- thew were in accord with Mary's testimony. The objectors to the truth of the record have most strangely laid stress on the fact that the narrative is not repeated by St. John. This is but an extreme instance of a most unreasonable assumption con- stantly employed by rationalistic critics namely, that because an Evangelist does not mention some important fact, he was ignorant of it, or disbelieved it. In this case St. John, by the supposition, was writing at least thirty years after the narrative had been placed on record by St. Matthew and St. Luke. His Gospel is throughout, to a large extent, sup- plementary to theirs, omitting many things which they had reported, and adding many which they did not report. In accordance with this general characteristic, it is perfectly natural that he should not mention occurrences which were suffi- ciently narrated already, and were accepted by the whole. Christian Church of his day. The really E 2 52 THE BIRTH significant fact is that, knowing, as it is admitted he must have known, that such a narrative was in circulation, he says not one word to deprecate belief in it; but, on the contrary, insists on the central truth of which it was the outward form and expres- sion that 'the Word was made flesh.' Mary herself comes before us, throughout the New Testa- ment narrative, as a singularly quiet, thoughtful, humble, retiring figure, pondering things in her heart and silently treasuring them, free from all excitement and eagerness. John is the very Apostle if a distinction may be made between them of light and truth : his message was, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all ; and that if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. It is impossible to suppose that anything approaching to a pious frau 1 would have found countenance from two such simple natures; and we seem therefore to possess, on the critical suppositions already assumed, a singularly direct personal testimony to the truth of the narra- tives in question. In the time available for these Lectures, it would be impracticable to enter into all the difficulties which have been raised respecting details in the two narratives of St. Matthew and St. Luke. I shall venture to say summarily, that the historical diffi- culties connected with such matters as the Census OF OUR LORD 53 of Cyrenius have been more than sufficiently met, an'i to refer for that part of the argu- ment to the 'Speaker's Commentary.' I do not say that in every detail the variations in the accounts have been completely harmonized. In some few points there is room for a difference of opinion respecting the true explanation. But it is quite unreasonable to expect that in such brief narratives the sequence of events should always be perspicuous ; and it may be . added, as a general principle, that while the Evangelists are always in harmony in the main points of any narrative, there are slight differences between them, which prove that their narrations were in great measure inde- pendent ; that their records, in fact, are marked by the same minor variations which are generally to be observed in accounts of the same event given by independent witnesses variations which, in other matters, are always held to be an additional guarantee of trustworthiness, so long as they stop short of being contradictions. The title on the Cross is a familiar instance of this variation ; but an example perhaps still more instructive may be found in the narrative of the feeding of the five thousand, contained in the 14th chapter of St. Matthew, the 6th of St. Mark, the 9th of St. Luke, and the Oth of St. John. This is the only miracle of which an account is preserved to us by all four Evangelists ; 54 THE BIRTH and a comparison of the narratives will show that, while perfectly consistent in the essential facts, there are details peculiar to each. For example, in the first three Gospels, our Lord says to His disciples in general, ' Give ye them to eat ; ' while in St. John He addresses an enquiry especially to Philip: 'Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?' But notwithstanding this, the main facts of the story are narrated by the four Evan- gelists in almost the same words. While, however, thus deprecating the demand for an absolutely identical narrative, it may be well to observe that there is no point in the Gospel history on which the narratives are more com- pletely harmonious in respect to the essential facts of the case than in regard to our Lord's birth. Thus, it may seem, at first sight, a formidable objection against the occurrence of the marvellous events attending the Saviour's birth, that they seem to have been unknown at Nazareth; that in the subsequent history there is no indication that the neighbours of Joseph and Mary were at all aware of there having been anything unusual in the time and other circumstances of their Child's birth ; and again, that the visit of the wise men and the incidents connected with it seem to have been so entirely forgotten. Now, if the birth had occurred at Nazareth, and if no break had interrupted the OP OUR LOED 55 course of the life of Joseph and Mary and of our Lord, between the time when all Jerusalem was disturbed at the reported birth of a king of the Jews, and the days when our Lord began to be about thirty years of age, ' being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph,' these objections might have some weight. But, in point of fact, St. Matthew tells us of events which afford a perfectly simple and natural explanation of everything. We are told that our Lord was born, not at Nazareth, but at Bethlehem ; and that after His birth, before the return of His parents to the former city, there intervened the slaughter of the children at Bethlehem, and the flight into Egypt. There did thus exist the very break which is requisite to explain the ignorance of the people of Nazareth respecting the circumstances in question. In all other respects, the alleged supernatural birth must be admitted to be at least in harmony with other unquestioned facts. It seemed fairer and more simple, for the purpose of these Lectures, to treat first the subject which presented itself earliest in chronological order, and in the recital of the Creed. But w r e should have been pursuing a course in some respects more natural in itself, and more in harmony with our Lord's own method, if we had deferred the consideration of this subject until we were prepared to estimate its probability 56 THE BIRTH iti the light thrown upon it by our Lord's sub- sequent life and work. It has often been asked Avhy, if our Lord could have referred to this super- natural origin, if His mother could have borne witness to it, if He were really the Son of David born under miraculous circumstances at Bethlehem, He should have allowed, as He more than once did in the course of the history, objections to remain unanswered, which would at once have been removed by an establishment of these facts ? The answer may well be that the facts, from their essentially private and delicate character, could never have been established to the satisfaction of persons who were not predisposed to believe them by the conviction, based on other grounds, of our Lord's divine, or at least superhuman, character. The calumnies afterwards circulated on the subject are alone sufficient justification of the reticence which our Lord observed on this subject in the presence of hostile or unbelieving crowds. On such a topic the principle is eminently applicable : ' If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.' If men rejected His moral and spiritual claims, He refused to show them signs from heaven ; and still more sacred considerations must have debarred Him from appealing to His mother to answer their cavils. Similar reasons may account for the absence of the OF OUR LORD 57 narrative from St. Mark, if that be, as there is good reason to think, the earliest Gospel. At all events, it would be natural that the miraculous birth of our Lord should not be put in the fore-front of the first proclamation of the Gospel. It would most fitly be taught, as it is narrated by St. Luke, to those who were already believers, ' that they might know the certainty of those things wherein they had been in- structed,' but it would be protected by reserve from the misapprehensions of unbelievers. To a great extent, the case is the same in the present day. The full force of the reasons for accepting the narratives of our Lord's birth can only be perceived by arguing back from the resurrection. It at least seems a conclusive answer to objections on the mere score of the miraculous character of the birth, to say that if our Lord was not like other men in His death, it is probable, rather than otherwise, that He was unlike them in the commencement of His life. But without assuming this point, it may be sufficient to call attention to another considera- tion. It is to be borne in mind that in His character, at all events, our Lord so surpassed all other men who have ever appeared on earth as to be distinguished from them, not only in degree, but in His very nature. There is something absolutely unique in His whole character, and if this fact be unquestionable, what more natural 58 THE BIRTH than that there should be something unique in His origin ? There is perhaps no point of our Christian Creed on which it is more important to dwell at the present day. It is indeed the primary truth of that Creed at all times, but there are circumstances characteristic of our own day which give it an ex- ceptional prominence. It is, perhaps, the principle on which the Gospel is most directly at issue with the ideas which have been acquiring increasing in- fluence throughout this century. In different ways, both at home and abroad, the minds of men have become penetrated with the conception of develop- ment or of evolution, until it has become peculiarly unwelcome to them to accept in any form the notion of a break, or a new commencement, in human life, whether in the past, or in the present. The history of this growth of thought reaches back to the beginning of the century, to the German philosophy which then became prominent that of Hegel; and the doctrine of physical evo- lution, which has of late years attracted such adherence among ourselves, is but one application of this idea. It was applied in Germany to human nature, before it was worked out in reference to physical nature in this country, and its disastrous consequences have been felt in numerous directions throughout the whole field of theology and criti- OF OUR LORD 59 cisni. Its cardinal principle is that all history is but the development of ideas and tendencies inherent in human nature human nature in the strict sense of the word, a nature not influenced nor disturbed in ils regular evolution by any alien or supernatural forces. Whatever manifestation of human thought or belief is recorded in history must be traced, according to this philosophy, to antecedents in human nature itself, to causes which we can discover and follow out, just as we can trace all physical effects to physical causes. Christi- anity therefore must be accounted for by the natural working of the influences which had preceded it. There must be evidence that it was produced by the natural development of religious impulses which had been maturing among the Jews, combined after a while with similar influences of Greek philosophy and Koman life. The Origins of Christianity to use the phrase which the eminent French sceptic has adopted and made familiar must thus be perceptible in the ordinary workings of the human heart, amidst the circumstances by which men were surrounded in the first century, just as the rise of Buddhism and Mahometanism can be explained by a know- ledge of the social and religious conditions of the people among whom they were first proclaimed. But it soon became obvious that this was not sufficient. If Christianity was thus to be explained 60 THE BIRTH as a mere natural development, the product of the influences of its day, a further step, however momentous, was inevitable. Christ Himself must be thus explained. If He was a supernatural Being, bringing a new creative force into the world, the whole of this theory of the Origins of Christianity fell to the ground ; and accordingly those who applied this philosophy in Germany were in a very short time driven by their principles to the most desperate efforts to explain the whole Gospel history on natural grounds and by natural causes. The very idea of miracles was antagonistic to the central thought of such a philosophy, and the miraculous occurrences narrated in the Gospels had thus by some means to be explained away. Above all was this the case with the primary miracle, that of the Incarnation. Men disguised the momentous conclusion from themselves for a while ; but there was no escape from it, and the Germans, with their characteristic audacity, faced it fifty years ago. All ordinary rationalistic explanations failed, one after another ; and at last Strauss, the boldest of the German critics, declared the whole Gospel History to be mythical, and the mere embodiment in the form of myths of the ideas of the age. This was carried one step further, and a similar attack was made on the Apostolic Histories by Baur and his followers. Thus one of the leading authorities of our day on OF OUR LORD 61 philosophical questions in Germany, originally a di:eiple of Hegel, says that ' the Hegelian philosophy was not only in harmony with Baur's interpretation of history, but exerted an influence on it through the idea of the development of humanity, as deter- mined by an inner necessity, proceeding by an immanent dialectic, and manifesting in accordance with a fixed law all the elements which are included in the nature of Spirit.' * This, it cannot be too clearly boine in mind, is the key to the whole critical assault of this century on the authority and credibility of the Scripture History, whether of the Old or of the New Testa- ment. It has not, in any instance, been prompted by an impartial and independent study of the facts for themselves. The critical difficulties did not make the philosophy. The philosophy has made the critical difficulties. Men have allowed their minds, in the Apostle's language, to be made spoil of by a vain philosophy, which assumed that no in- fluence had ever operated on human nature above human nature itself; and then, when they were con- fronted with the momentous facts of the Christian Creed and the Christian Scriptures, they set them- selves with desperate efforts to expla ; n away their credibility, to transform th ir records, and to find * Quoted in Ueberweg's ' 00- i ed., Bulin, 1880; part iii. j. flii'-htn . 62 THE BIRTH excuses of whatever kind for evading their evidence. After being applied to the Gospel History and the Apostolic records, an attempt is now being made to apply this philosophy to the Old Testament, and to represent the faith of the Jews, not as the result of a supernatural education by the miraculous inter- position of God, but as the mere natural development of Semitic tendencies. The attempt has failed with respect to the New Testament, and has resulted in the critical defeat of each successive school in Germany ; and a similar defeat may safely be pre- dicted for this new application of the philosophy of the century. It was, however, it will be seen, a true instinct which urged those who were possessed by these views to make so determined an assault on the great facts and records of the Gospel; for those facts establish in the sphere of human history and human life a truth which is in diametrical anta- gonism with any such conception of human develop- ment. Certainly, a place is found in the revelation of the Gospel and in tlie Christian Creed for the facts of life which are exaggerated in this philo- sophy. The Scripture fully recognizes and teaches that there has been a development in human affairs, a gradual evolution, if any one prefers to use the word, of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life. Our Saviour is declared to have come in the fulness of OF OUR LORD 63 time, when the Divine education of Jew and Greek alike had been brought to the point at which they were fitted to receive a new revelation, and to be subject to a new creative influence. The long centuries of Jewish and heathen history had been working, under the Divine hand, towards that critical moment, and the ground had been laboriously prepared to receive the seed. But allowing for this, that which the Scriptures declare is that there was in fact, a seed that a new germ of life was sown in the field of human nature, and that when the ful- of time was come, God sent forth His Son to be tli'- source of a new creation. The creative process was similar to that which is described in the book of Genesis. God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. It may be, for all that directly concerns the Christian faith, that the dust of the ground has been gradually i-ipi'd through successive forms of animal life, until a frame has been evolved capable of becoming th (i instrument of the human spirit; but the frame did not evolve that spirit. It was necessary for God t" lnvathe into it the breath of life by a new creative act. It will be understood that I am not here ring on the general question of the truth of the ,:iar dnctrine o f evolution as applied to physical nature. Such considerations asha\e passed before us 54 THE BIRTH may, indeed, well raise a presumption in our minds on that subject. But all we are now concerned to observe is that human nature is exempted from that principle in the experiences, the history, the hopes, which are the most precious to it. The Gospel, in its proclamation of the Incarnation of our Lord, in the history of His ministry, and in its application to oureelves, reveals a principle entirely independent of natural human development. A new creation arises when our Lord was born. A second Adam, the Lord from heaven, descended into the midst of the old creation, and began to regenerate it by a new spiritual and Divine influence. A spiritual and real regene- ration commenced ; human souls were privileged to be born again, ' not of corruptible seed but of incor- ruptible, by the word of God which liveth and abideth for ever.' The Christian church is not a product of human nature ; it is the construction of the Spirit of God, working upon human nature from above, and renewing it after the image of the Creator. These are the momentous and precious realities which are indissolubly bound up with the mysterious truth of our Lord's Incarnation. As has just been implied, they are not less momentous to our own spiritual life than to our view of the great truths of the Christian Creed. The general tendency of which I have spoken is liable to exert a very dangerous influence over our OF OUR LOED 05 personal life. It tends of necessity to obscure to our minds the blessed truth of our being ourselves the subjects of this regenerating and transforming influence capable, as St. Paul says, of being ' re- newed in the spirit of our mind ' (Eph. iv. 23). One of the most important of all the questions we can put to ourselves respecting our own moral and spiritual life is, whether we, in our own souls, are the mere subjects of a process of development and evolution. Arc we intended to be, do we allow ourselves to be, the mere product of the various forces, good or bud, which are brought to bear upon us in the visible world of our fellows, whether by our family associa- tions or by our age, and are we conformed to this world around us ? or do we recognize that we have within us a divine spiritual power, by means of which \\e may be 'transformed by the renewing of our mind ' ? Here again, as in the larger view of the subject, there is ample scope for the legitimate recognition of the natural education to which we are subjected by the circumstances amidst which we live. The growth of each individual soul is governed by the hand of God in a similar manner to that in which He guided the education of the world before our Lord came. The circumstances of our lives, the various influences which His providence has brought to bear upon us, are all directed to plough and prepare the soil of our F 66 THE BIRTH hearts for His word to take root in us ; and it behoves us to cherish with the utmost care every gracious providence of this kind. The Gospel, in proclaiming the presence and operation of miracu- lous influences, never disregards or disparages those which are natural. Every miracle is practically accom- panied by the command, ' Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.' No man is justified in depend- ing on divine aid if he neglects those fragments of opportunity, aiforded him by the natural providence of God. But none the less it is our supreme bless- ing to be assured that we are not dependent solely on such natural influences, and on our natural power to turn them to account. The Spirit of God is bestowed upon us, to regenerate our weak and cor- rupt natures, to give to our own efforts a power they could not have exerted of themselves, and gradually to create us afresh in the image of the Saviour. Nothing less could be an adequate satisfaction to any human spirit which is conscious of its in- tense imperfection and corruption. Which of us could bear to look forward to an eternity in which we should be surrounded by our present infirmities ? Or who that has struggled with earnestness against his besetting sins but must feel his need of some regenerating grace ? The promise of such grace is our great blessing for the present, and our supreme hope for the future. It is the privilege of the OF OUR LORD 07 Christian that, in proportion to his faithful efforts and prayers, a new man is gradually formed within him, which brings his old nature into ever increasing sub- jection, and which will hereafter completely trans- form him. To this hope he looks forward amidst the decay of his natural frame. ' If our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.' The Saviour's supernatural birth, no less than His resurrection, is a pledge to him of this possibility ; and thus he is taught by the Church to pray : ' Almighty God, who hast given us Thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be bora of a pure Virgin ; Grant that we being regenerate, and made Thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by Thy Holy Spirit ; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ.' F 'J LECTURE IV THE NAME OF JESUS " Thou shalt call His name JESUS, for He shall save His people from their sins." Matt. i. 21. THESE words seem to embody the very substance of the work and office of our Lord, as it appeared to the eye of the inhabitants of heaven. Angels were His heralds when He came into the world, and on each occasion when these voices from heaven were heard, they were directed to this one point. When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, he said, ' Thou shalt bring forth a son, and shalt call His name Jesus.' When the angel appeared to Joseph, he announced the same name, and gave the assurance of the text; and after our Lord's birth, when the angels appeared to the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, the celestial proclamation was, ' Fear not : for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.' To the wondering gaze of heaven, the one grand fact THE NAME OF JESUS 69 to be realized, in the event they were announcing and celebrating, was that a Saviour had come into the world, one so called because He should save His people from their sins. This thought overpowers all others, and sums up in itself the whole glorious announcement which Heaven desired to proclaim to earth. We may therefore meditate upon this text as one which conveys the whole message of the Gospel. We have in our Bibles the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Gospel according to St. Mark, the Gospel according to St. Luke, and the Gospel according to St. John ; that is to say, we have the one Gospel of Jesus Christ, expressed in the four various forms in which those Evangelists delivered it. Similarly, the message of the text may be regarded as the Gospel, and the whole Gospel, according to those angelic messengers who were commissioned to announce it to earth. We may be sure, therefore, that these short and simple words express the cardinal truth of the Christian dispen- sation, and that we ought to make them the centre of our whole view of life, and of the revelation vouchsafed to us in the Gospel. At a time like the present, when the busy and anxious speculations of the day are discussing the problems of life and of Christianity from such varying points of view, and when such ever-shifting solutions of those problems 70 THE NAME are offered to us, it is more than ever desirable that we should concentrate our thoughts on the truth thus unmistakably pointed out to us as the key to the whole mystery. Heaven surveys with, clear and serene vision this confused and struggling scene, and its voice strikes home, in a single sen- tence, to the heart of the great drama of life. If we are to appreciate the moral probability and verisimilitude of the records in the four Gospels, it is necessary for us to realize the facts of human nature as they are presented by the sacred writers ; and a due apprehension of the significance of the name of ' Jesus ' is thus essential to any argument in defence or elucidation of the Gospels. Consider, then, in the first place, what was the one great fact in the actual condition of mankind on which the eye of Heaven was fixed. It was that men need salvation, and that that from which they need to be saved is from their sins. The whole sum and substance of human needs, all that men crave to be delivered from, is thus represented to us as involved in the one word, sin. All else is passed over. Even the consequences of sin are not specifi- cally mentioned, as though the consideration of them were subordinate to our apprehension of the main purpose of the Divine salvation which is announced. Sin, and sin alone, is what men need to be delivered from. OF JESUS 71 Let us ask ourselves how far our minds are in harmony with this conception of our condition. It is a conception which it proved impossible to bring home to the mass of men at the time of our Lord; and among ourselves, even when it is nominally admitted, there is reason to fear it is still most imperfectly apprehended. Men in our own day look around the world as the Jews did, and are sensible of the sufferings, the oppressions, the injustices, the confusions, which meet their view, and they crave and yearn, as they have ever done, for some salvation for themselves and their fellows. Just as the Jews were craving for some Messiah to arise, and deliver them from the hand of their enemies, by some sudden stroke of force or policy, so if we cast our eye over the Christian world at this time, we behold a very similar spectacle. We see men's attention occupied and distracted by con- flicting social, political, and philosophical schemes one philosophy after another, one political dream after another, absorbing their interests, and holding out to them, as they fondly believe, the promise of a li.-tter future. Some of these philosophical and social schemes may have their place and function in the development of thought and of society ; and so far as they can be kept in their place, they are not to be disparaged. But they are all imperfect, when considered from the point of view on which the text 72 THE NAME insists. They fail to recognize that the essential weakness of human nature lies where it is indicated by the angelic message. They all begin with some- thing else besides men's sins, with some circum- stances more or less external to the secret life of their moral nature it may be with their political or social condition, or even with their physical constitution. They do not recognize, like the Gospel, and like the Bible from first to last, that moral evil is the one central source of all evil, and that towards over- coming this the main efforts of a Saviour of mankind ought to be concentrated. We may appreciate this the more clearly if we briefly call to mind the state of the world at the time these words were uttered, for we shall find our own position but little altered in its essential characteristics. This angelic message certainly offered a strange contrast to the predominant thoughts and feelings of the world at that day. The wonderful empire of Rome, which was destined to supply some of the most important elements of all future civilization, was gradually consolidating its strength ; it was crushing independent nationali- ties like that of the Jews, dazzling and overawing men by its splendour and force. It seemed the one great fact with which men had to deal. It evidently absorbed the attention of the Jews themselves, and before long they aroused themselves to a deadly OF JESUS 73 grapple with it. At that moment, and amidst this wonderful development of organized force and law, a voice from heaven is heard, and a Divine message announces the advent of the King and Saviour of mankind. And to what does it address itself ? It passes by all the external interests with which the Jews were busying and perplexing themselves ; it leaves them all, as it were, to take care of them- selves, and it proclaims that the coming Saviour has but one thing to do to save His people from their sins. All the rest could be left to follow naturally from this one deliverance ; but here was the point of vital interest in the whole strange and painful scene. It was a marvellous contrast between human and Divine judgment. But if the same voice were now heard from Heaven, would the contrast be less startling ? We know too well with what excitements, what passions, what political struggles, what wars and revolutions, what domestic difficulties and sufferings, the thoughts of the world, and our own thoughts, are from day to day distracted and oppressed. Amidst it all, the Christian Church proclaims its message ; and Sunday after Sunday it recalls the old voice from Heaven, which summons men above all things to repent, and to seek salvation from their sins. But how far is it realized how far, let us ask ourselves, do we realize that this is the interest which predominates over all others, 74 THE NAME which determines the result of every other effort of human nature, which not only decides the fate of individuals, but which exalts or abases nations, and that here alone is to be found that wisdom, by which, in the ultimate resort, kings reign and princes decree justice ? In meditating, indeed, on these words, we should do ill to forget the intimate connection which, with the Jews to whom they were first spoken, as with our- selves, unites their private, their national, and their worldwide significance. There is no reason to think that the craving of the Jews for their temporal de- liverance from subjugation to a heathen power was in itself wrong or unworthy. The King of the Jews, who had led His people out of bondage in former times by His glorious arm, cannot be supposed to have been indifferent to the new bondage into which they had fallen. The feelings of His heart must still have been expressed by His own words in the Psalm, ' that my people had hearkened unto me, for if Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon have put down their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries.' It is equally impossible to suppose Him indifferent to the temporal needs, sufferings, and problems which engage the attention of statesmen and philosophers in the present day. He, far more than any one among ourselves, must, in the language of the OF JESUS 75 Scriptures, be ' grieved to the heart,' by the wars and rumours of wars, the social disorder and misery, under which so great a part of the world groans, and of which large classes among ourselves have so sad a share. But what He would have us remember, as \ve labour to deliver ourselves and others from these evils, is that no mere social and political arrangements, no bravery and no wisdom, if it be only the wisdom of this world, will free us and other nations from these terrible scourges. The only Saviour of mankind is He who saves them from their sins, and we shall carry out His work effectually, in proportion as we follow His method. In maladies of the body, when the whole frame is shaken by some violent fever or convulsion, the real source of the mischief may be known by the physician to consist in the derangement of the minutest cells of the brain, or of the most elementary functions of the constitution. It is precisely the same with the body politic, and with the world at large. It is by disbelief in the elementary truths of religion, by unfaithfulness to the elementary dictates of morality, that the reason and the will are corrupted, and life is disorganized ; and if we would solve the problems which distract us, and discern our way amidst the per- plexities of life, our only sure method is to quicken our belief in these elementary truths, and to invi- gorate our practice of these elementary moral duties. 76 THE NAME What a tremendous task do not these considera- tions set before us ! But, for our encouragement, let us remember what a desperate task, to all human calculations, it must have appeared at the time this blessed assurance was uttered : the whole world, witli one small exception, given over to idolatry, and philosophers and moralists conscious of their in- ability to cope with the vices inseparably entwined with the popular superstitions. We contemplate at the present day a vaster world ; but the pro- blems before us are not more tremendous than those which presented themselves to the eye of an early Christian. Most of us, indeed, have reason enough to be appalled, as we reflect on the evil of our own hearts, and the consequences of our own past lives. There is surely no thoughtful man who, in his serious moments, can contrast what he is with what he ought to have been, without remorse, if not dismay. Some more and some less, but all undeniably, we are conscious that the true life of our souls has been marred, that the flesh lusts against the spirit, and that we cannot do the things that we would ; that sin of one kind or another is bound up in our very frame, absorbed, as it were, into the very fibres of our brain, and perpetually reasserting itself in imperious habits. To all serious souls the Church's daily Confession, with its keen self-abasement, and in their most solemn OF JESUS 77 moments the still deeper coufession of the Com- munion Service, embodies their bitter experience. We struggle and we gain ground ; but to the last we must be impressed with an intense sense of im- perfection, if not of wilful sin, and never in this world is onr deliverance from sin complete. If we were left to contemplate men as left to themselves, and to the play of natural laws and forces, the problem presented to us by considerations such as these would surpass in its darkness and oppressive- ness all others. Whole races, we know, have been oppressed through long generations by the experi- ence and contemplation of the visible sufferings of mankind, and by the physical and temporal evils which weigh on them. But what are these, in comparison of the injury and ruin presented by our moral nature ? It is always difficult it was difficult in the days of Socrates and Plato, and is not less diffi- cult now to induce men to contemplate the state of their souls with the same keenness of perception which they bestow on that of their bodies. Is it not, to say the least, too rare, for men and women to shudder and shrink from a moral defilement with the same instinctive horror with which they recoil from a loathsome disease ? And are there not sins and among them some which inflict the deepest wounds on the moral nature 78 THE NAME are there not blasphemies against God, and offences against one another, which are too frequently discussed, if not committed, with lightness ? But the course of modern discoveries renders us more than ever justified in regarding the moral condition of mankind as analogous to their physical ; and the imperfection, the disease, the weakness, and the death, which affect our physical frame, afford a visible, though but an imperfect, picture of the moral and spiritual ruin of which our souls are capable, and from which, to a fearful extent, they actually suffer. Moral maladies, moreover, are far more general than physical, and far more subtle. They may take the form even of virtues, and pervert the judgment of whole masses of men. Even virtue itself has its dangers, and persons who escape de- grading forms of vice may be overtaken by vanity or self-righteousness vices which may become, as was shown in the case of the Pharisees, not less in- jurious than grosser sins to the health of the moral nature. To this must be added the unquestionable fact, that vast numbers of men and women are born in circumstances which renders some form of moral disease almost a part of their nature, and that most persons inherit some special evil tendency. Con- templating such a picture of the moral condition of human nature, what an appalling problem does it not present to us ! How natural nay, from a mere OF JESUS 79 worldly point of view, how reasonable would it not be to despair if we were left to ourselves ! How justifiable would be that pessimism, in which, from time to time, the bitter experience of human nature finds its sad expression ! There seems, indeed, one school of thought now among us which can contemplate the spectacle with philosophical complacency watching simply, as it supposes, the gradual evolution of moral life on the whole, and not concerning itself with individual failures. But those failures, with all they involve, are the very miseries from which we crave to be delivered, and delivered nosv. It is these which are denounced and lamented in the too true confessions of pessi- mist philosophers. They are justly the most sensi- tive point in the Christian conscience ; they consti- tute the ever-present burden of individual hearts. The question which must ever recur to us is that which thank God ! is answered in the text. "What is to bestow upon ourselves and upon our fellows the spiritual and moral health for which we each of us crave ? Where is the remedy to be found which can penetrate the whole moral and spiritual world ? And how are we each and all to be lifted out of our natural condition of utter imperfection and sin? A philosophy or a religion which fails to answer that question, for the relief of every individual soul, leaves unsolved the grand problem of humanity ; 80 THE NAME and with the exception of the Gospel, every religion and every philosophy has, by its own confession, thus failed above all, that agnostic philosophy which now asserts itself so loudly among us. I have said, however, that the question is an- swered in the text ; and just in proportion as we realize the overwhelming oppression just described, shall we appreciate its blessed assurance. It pro- claims that there is One who will save His people from their sins. It is necessary to apprehend distinctly the definite character of that announce- ment. It directs us to a person who, by His own work and act, will save His people. The pronoun is emphatic auro denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead ; whereof we are witnesses. And His name through faith in His name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know ; yea, the faith which is by Him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all.' When summoned before the Council, St. Peter's reply is of precisely the same character : ' We ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, 152 THE WITNESS whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are His witnesses of these things ; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him.' It was in this sense that, with great power, the Apostles gave witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, ' and great grace was upon them all ; ' ' and many wonders and signs were done by the Apostles.' Similarly the culminating point of St. Stephen's testimony was that he saw the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. So also the appearance of our Lord to St. Paul is the revela- tion to him of a living Christ risen, not only in the sense of having been raised from the grave, but of being present, and exercising supernatural powers. In all cases, it is from actual present facts ' that the proclamation of the Resurrection starts from the amazing fact of the descent of the Holy Ghost ; from the evidence of the power exercised by the name of Christ over the bodies and souls of men ; or from actual manifestations of the risen Lord. In a word, it is not to a past, but to a present fact, that the testimony of the Apostles is born ; its object is to interpret present realities, and to bring men into the enjoyment of new powers. Now this is a consideration which appears to throw TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 153 light upon the nature of the evidence for the Resur- rection on the one hand, and upon our present relation to that great truth on the other. It will be seen, in the first place, that the witness of the Apostles did not rest simply upon their assertions respecting what they alone had seen ; it was not simply that they, and they only, had found the grave empty, and that our Lord had appeared to them, and had subsequently ascended to heaven, Had that been all they had to say, it might not have been difficult for the enemies of our Lord to have either described them as mere enthusiasts, or to have charged them with deception, as in the story, which St. Matthew tells us was set on foot, of the disciples having stolen away our Lord's body while the soldiers slept. The testimony of twelve unlearned and ignorant men, despised as the followers of a crucified master, would scarcely, if it had stood alone and unsupported, have found credence for so great a miracle. At all events, the Apostles did not proclaim this testimony as long as it stood alone. When they proclaim it, they are able to appeal to a present fact, to a number of successive facts, which verify it. They are suddenly endued with new spiritual powers ; in the name of the Lord Jesus they work miracles on the bodies of men, and convert thousands to repentance and to a holy life ; and it is with the support of these facts and in order to explain them, -54 THE WITNESS that they declare what they had seen and heard of our Lord after His resurrection. They thus offer a practical attestation of their message of the strongest possible kind. They proclaim to the Jews that Christ is living ; and here, they say, is the proof of it, that the Holy Spirit is bestowed on us, that miracles are wrought in His name; that He actually gives power, both spiritual and bodily, to those who believe on Him. This it was, and not mere testimony to the past, which produced so great an effect in Jerusalem, and which so alarmed the Jewish rulers. The Apostles, in a word, spoke of a present reality ; that reality was verified by present experience, and they thus established a most weighty claim to be believed on their explanation of it. If the name of Jesus, through faith in Him, had, as a matter of fact, made men whole in soul and body, then there was every reason to believe the witnesses who appealed to that name, and who stated facts which would explain the power it exerted. This consideration, perhaps, will help to explain one point in the Evangelical narratives of the Eesur- rection which might otherwise seem a little sur- prising. I mean their comparative brevity, and the lack of the circumstantial character which marks some other portions of the sacred narrative. There can be no doubt that the Resurrection occupies the most prominent place in the preaching of the TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 155 Apostles, both at the outset and throughout the Epistles. The grand message of the Acts of the Apostles is that of a risen Christ, whether it be in the inouth of St. Peter or St. Paul. But, neverthe- less, the circumstances of the Passion are narrated by the Evangelists with far more particularity than those of the Eesurrection. The narratives of the Passion occupy a very considerable space, but those of the Eesurrection occupy in St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke only one chapter, and in the two former but very brief ones. In St. John two chapters are devoted to the subject ; but one of them is mainly the account of a special incident in our Lord's inter- course with His disciples after the Resurrection ; and the account of the Resurrection itself is of the same brief character as that in the other Evangelists. This feature in the narratives has been made a ground of objection to the belief they proclaim, and it is urged that we ought to have been furnished with more detailed and circumstantial relations of an event of such supreme importance. But this objection springs from the supposition a supposi- tion unconsciously admitted too often by Christians themselves that the actual rising from the grave, the mere fact of our Lord not having seen corrup- tion, is the main fact to be substantiated. Sceptical writers, in dealing with the subject, fasten attention exclusively on this feature in it; they make it an 156 THE WITNESS objection that no eye-witness had borne testimony to the resurrection itself that no one actually saw our Saviour rise. They argue, in short, as if it were simply a past fact and an isolated one, with which we have to deal ; and they complain that the Apostles and other disciples took no sufficient pains to afford satisfaction to the legitimate and necessary enquiries, which the report of so extra- ordinary an occurrence must occasion. But the Evangelists, it will now be seen, approached the question from a very different point of view. The mere fact of our Saviour having left the grave was but a part, and comparatively a small part, in their view of the Resurrection. The essential part of the Resurrection was our Lord's re-appearance to His disciples in glorious form, and the fact that He was still living, as a Prince and Saviour to them. But of this great fact believers were assured, not only by the Apostles' report of His appearance to them, but by the daily evidences they had of His living power and grace. The fact of his having risen was in great measure substantiated to them by the most con- spicuous records of early Christian life, and by their own experience. The events narrated in the Acts of the Apostles proved that the Lord was with His Church, and this fact was to them the most certain of all realities. The Evangelists did not write, there- fore, to prove the Resurrection. They wrote under TO OUR LORD S RESURRECTION 157 the living conviction of the Resurrection being true ; and they were only concerned to give such details of it as might suit their particular purpose. With respect to the differences in their narration, some interesting observations have been made in a valuable book on the resurrection of Our Lord, recently published by Dr. Milligan, the Professor of Divinity in the University of Aberdeen.* He ob- serves that the different Evangelists seem to present the Resurrection of Our Lord in a light correspond- ing to that in which they had treated His whole previous life. Thus he points out that St. Matthew, having been occupied with the Galilean ministry, as that in which he beheld the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, and having, throughout the whole of his Gospel, set forth Jesus as the bringer in of a true righteousness, as the great lawgiver of the New Testament economy, seems to have these thoughts mainly in his mind when he comes to the Resurrection. He is chiefly occupied with the ap- pearances in Galilee ; and the idea of the lawgiver, the author of the Sermon on the Mount, may be traced in those words of the risen Lord which St. Matthew alone has preserved, ' Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, teaching them to observe * Tlie Resurrection of our Lord. I5y William Milligan, D.D., Pro- fessor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism in the University of Aberdeen. London, 1881, pp. 53-G1. 158 THE WITNESS all things whatsoever I have commanded you.' Thus it is that in the closing verses of St. Mark's Gospel we find particulars and words of the risen Lord which at once recall to us that mighty march of His power, with which we have been made familiar by the Gospel as a whole. Thus it is that St. Luke, who had especially set forth the human Saviour, and the universality of His mission of forgive- ness, seizes on those circumstances in connection with His Eesurrection which illustrate the same points. The story of the disciples at Emmaus brings Him before us vividly as what He had always been, the human friend ; and St. Luke alone speaks not as St. Matthew, of teaching all the nations but of repent- ance and remission of sins to be preached to all ; and he alone tells us of the consolatory blessing with which, lifting up His hands, the Lord blessed His disciples when He ascended to Heaven. Finally, it is thus that St. John, who has been occupied throughout his Gospel with the manifestation of Our Lord's glory, fixes on particular circumstances respecting the risen Lord which illustrate the same truth. The manifestations of which he speaks are related less for the purpose of convincing us that the Lord had risen, than for the sake of illustrating the nature of His risen state, and the manner in which one of the loftiest confessions of the Gospel was drawn forth by it ' my Lord and my God.' TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 159 From this point of view, it will be seen how unreasonable is the stress which has been laid on the fact of the absence from one or two old manuscripts of the last verses of St. Mark's Gospel.* It must be observed that, independently of those verses, St. Mark bears emphatic witness to the Eesurrection, for that testimony is borne in the first eight verses of his last chapter, which are not doubted. But even if it were the case that the last verses did not belong to the Gospel and they are defended by scholars of very diverse views it would still be inconceivable that their absence should affect, in the slightest degree, the evidence for the Eesurrection. The belief of the Church in that event dates from a few days, or, we might say, hours, after the crucifixion, and St. Peter, at whose instance, and by whose guidance, St. Mark wrote, would certainly have been the first to insist on the great fact. If, therefore, any conclusion were to be drawn from the absence of these verses in certain manuscripts, it could not, with any reason, be that the main circumstances narrated in them were doubt- ful, but, on the contrary, that they were so certain, that no special attention was paid to the narrative which contained them. * For practical purposes, from writing of the Scribe of the only one ; for this leaf of the Vatican MS. See Tischendorf, Sinaitic MS. is in the hand- i Nov. Test. Vatic, p. xxii. 160 THE WITNESS But however this may be, the one point on which the other Gospels are agreed in insisting is that our Lord, after rising from the dead, claimed absolute power in heaven and in earth. ' All power,' He says in St. Matthew, 'is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- manded you : and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.' So in St. Luke 'Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day : and that repen- tance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations.' So St. John, ' These things are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have life through His name.' In view of this great fact, that the Lord was actually living, and that they were in communion with Him, the details of the occurrences which attended his Resurrection were of secondary importance. ' Why seek ye the living among the dead?' said the angels, 'He is not here, but is risen ;' and accordingly the thoughts of the Evangelists turn at once from the tomb and from all the minor details on which modern curiosity would dwell, and pass at once to our Lord's risen and glorious life. Enough is told by each Evangelist to TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 161 afford a general conception of the character of the event, and to illustrate the particular purpose with which he writes; but we pass rapidly from the crucified to the glorified Lord. We are made to feel that the point of importance consists in the fact that He is now in glory and power, not in the mere incidents by which He passed from humiliation to glory. The details of His Passion were of infinite importance as a solemn act of the past, done once for all. But the important point respecting His Resurrection was not that He once rose, but that He was now risen, and alive for evermore ; and upon this, in accordance with their usual reserve on points of secondary detail, the Evangelists are con- tent mainly to insist. There is, in fact, a great deficiency, or even fallacy, in a fine image which has been used on this subject. It has been said that the church of Christ was built over an empty tomb. But it is not, and never was, the empty grave upon which the faith of the Apostles, and the life of the church, was founded. It was the existence of our Saviour in glory, and, more than that, His actual energy and life-giving power, through His Spirit, which gave the Church its foundation, and built up its members as living stones into a holy temple. It is here, accordingly, that the real controversy lies at the present day with respect to the events we have been considering. 162 THE WITNESS Modern controversy has led to two remarkable ad- missions on the part of the most determined oppo- nents of the Christian creed one that there is no doubt the grave of our Lord was empty on the resurrection morning; the other, that the disciples of our Lord were thoroughly and honestly convinced that their Master had risen from the dead. What is alleged is that, however the removal of our Lord's body may be accounted for, the belief in His resur- rection may be explained by the theory of visions and phantasms. But all these evasions are shattered against the solid facts to which this day bears witness. The disciples, we have seen, did not yield to the impulse, to which mere visions would have led them, to proclaim simply our Lord's deliverance from the grave. They waited quietly for ten days after His last disappearance from them, and then they appealed to the patent fact of His exercising a new and living power. As an historic event, the deliverance of our Lord from the grave would have been, no doubt, of profound and momentous significance ; but it would not have been the reality upon which Christians lived. It was not merely, in a word, belief in the resurrection, but belief in a risen and living Christ which was, and is, the corner stone of the Christian edifice. For instance, Baur says that ' the question as to the nature and the reality of the resurrection lies TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 163 outside the sphere of historical enquiry. For the purposes of historical considerations we must be content with the simple fact that in the faith of the disciples, the Eesurrection of Jesus came to be re- garded as a solid and irrefragable certainty. It was in this faith that Christianity acquired a firm basis for its historic development. What history re- quires, as the necessary antecedent of all that is to follow, is not so much the fact of the Resurrec- tion of Jesus, but rather the belief that it was a fact.'* This view of Baur, so far as Christianity is concerned, is accepted by Strauss, though he cannot similarly restrain himself from enquiring into the origin of the belief. But not only is it necessary to enquire into the origin of the belief ; it is necessary to consider how the belief came to be something far more than Baur thus represents. ^ as it the case, or was it not, that, as St. Peter declared on the day of Pentecost, new powers, new spiritual and moral forces, were introduced into the world, and that the lives of those who believed in Christ \vrn> transformed ? Baur rejects the authenticity of the Acts of the Apostles ; but, as was shown in the second lecture of this course, he is not followed in this even by some of his own disciples ; and M. Kenan pronounces unquestionably in favour of the authen- * Das Christetdhum u,id die Jahrhtutdertt : Tubingen, Christliclte Kin-he dtrdrci erttcn p. 39. H 2 164 THE WITNESS ticity of the Acts. But if they are true, then, as we have urged, the facts of the day of Pentecost are to be accounted for as much as the open grave ; and St. Peter's account of them is the only one which meets the case. But with respect to this whole theory of the excitement and visionary tendencies of the Apostles and of the early Church, I will ask you to follow me for a few moments in contemplating a picture of that Church, and of the apostolic mind which guided it, drawn by the hand, as cannot reasonably be doubted, of the very Apostle upon whose utterances on the day of Pentecost we have been meditating. The first Epistle of St. Peter is brought before us by the Church in the services of the recent season, and it presents a striking picture of the tone of Christian life, and of the relation of that life to the great events we have been considering. It starts from a descrip- tion of the manifold trials which the Christians had to endure, passing through a fire of tribulation, and supported by the lively hope of a future salvation through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their faith, thus tried by fire, would be found unto praise and honour and glory at His appearing. On Him their hopes and thoughts were centred, ' "Whom, having not. seen, they loved ; in Whom, though now they saw Him not, yet believing, they rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory, receiving the end TO OUK LORD'S RESURRECTION 165 of their faith, even the salvation of 'their souls.' Their spiritual life was being daily deepened and developed, and as living stones they were being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ. Here, as in the similar picture drawn by St. James, there is no excitement, none of that extreme enthu- siasm to which the phenomena of the early Christian Church have been often ascribed. On the contrary, the Apostle bids his readers to pass the time of their sojourning here in fear, remembering at how vast a price their spiritual blessings had been bought, that they were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from their vain conversation received by tradition from their fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ. Their lively hope of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for them, is not to exalt them or excite them, but, on the contrary, to impress them with a solemn and awful apprehen- sion of the great trust conferred upon them, and of the terrible consequences of their faithlessness to it. They must gird up the loins of their minds, In- sober, obedient, guileless, abstaining from fleshly lusts, submitting themselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake ; as free, but not as using their liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as th-- servants of God; honouring all men, loving tin- 166 THE WITNESS brotherhood, fearing God, and honouring the King. They are to be ready to give an answer to every man who asks them a reason of the hope that is in them, in meekness and fear. The meekness of Christ is to be ever in their thoughts ; and forasmuch as He had suffered for them in the flesh, they are to arm themselves likewise with the same mind. The whole epistle, in short, is but an expansion of the exhortation, ' Be sober and watch unto prayer, and above all things have fervent charity among yourselves.' Such was the spirit, and such the whole energy of the early Church, wherever it was undisturbed by controversy, and its thoughts could be concentrated upon the growth of the spiritual life. Whether as an incidental evidence for the truth of the New Testament history, or for the purposes of our practical instruction, there is scarcely anything more remarkable than the juxtaposition of ideas thus presented to us. The Ascension of Christ was the culminating point of our Saviour's manifested glory. His Resurrection had been a glorious mani- festation of His greatness. He was declared, says St. Paul, to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness,by the Resurrection from the dead. After His Resurrection He was surrounded by an atmosphere of majesty and mysterious power. He was visibly superior to the ordinary conditions TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 167 and limitations of human life, and there was that about Him which inspired the Apostles with an abiding sense of awe in His presence. But his Ascension, interpreted to them by angelic messen- gers, was at once recognized by them as bespeaking His assumption of inconceivable glory. It would be doing great injustice to the noble conceptions with which the minds of Jews like the Apostles were familiar, to suppose that by the heaven, into which they understood Him to have ascended, they meant no more than the mere physical firmament. When He said to Nicodemus ' No man hath ascended up to heaven but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven,' He was at once understood to be speaking of that secret place, that holy of holies, which God Himself inhabited. ' Go to my brethren,' He had said, ' and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, unto my God and your God.' 'The heaven is my throne,' saith the Lord, ' and the earth is my footstool.' Ac- cordingly, the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of our ' great High Priest that hath passed into the heavens,' ' made higher than the heavens ; ' and St. Paul says that 'He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens.' In short, the word heaven has various meanings in Scripture. But judged by all the associations of the word when applied to our Lord's Ascension, it is evident that 168 THE WITNESS the Apostles, from the first, gave it the very loftiest signification. Whatever heaven was higher than all the rest, whatever sanctuary was holier than all which are called holies, whatever place was deemed of the greatest dignity in the courts above, there and unto that presence did they believe our Saviour to have entered. Thenceforth, as this Epistle of St. Peter bears witness, their whole thoughts and affec- tions were centred upon Him in His glory. They looked to Him for all grace and favour, and they waited patiently for His full revelation hereafter. But now let us observe by what means and in what circumstances they conceived that they were main- taining communion with Him and sharing His glory. With such magnificent conceptions of His greatness, it would not have seemed unnatural if they had beeD absorbed in some ecstatic visions, and had been carried away by spiritual excitement. The visible glory of the Ascension, the angelic message, the occasional gifts of miraculous power, the descent of the Holy Ghost, and the spiritual endowments conferred upon them, might all have tended to produce in them such a mood of exaltation. But the effect is precisely the reverse. That which is aroused in them is the deepest humility, patience, simplicity, and submission to trials and temptations. There were moments when some Apostles, like St. Paul, might be caught up into the third heaven, and TO OUR LORDS RESURRECTION 160 hear unspeakable words, not lawful for a man to utter. But, for the most part, Apostles and ordinary Christians alike found in the Saviour's Ascension, and in the visions of glory which it opened to them, only a stimulus and support in the humblest and most modest duties. This result is perhaps mainly due to the con- sideration of the complete continuity which existed between the Saviour's life on earth and His existence in heaven. 'This same Jesus,' said the angels, ' which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so corne in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven ;' and similarly their thoughts were always carried back to that same Jesus as He had lived and died among them. They could not see Him now, as St. Peter says ; but they had seen Him, and had companied with Him during His ministry. They had seen and had heard all His humiliation, His meekness and His patience, and they recurred to this as to an experience in which they could be sure of being one with Him and sharing His real glory. The Jesus who was exalted was the suffering Jesus, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and it was the truth and patience of His life \vhi.-h they contemplated as now exalted. His human life w;is not, so to speak, an accident of His exist- ence, which had been laid aside, as a thing to be forgotten, after His exaltation. It had remain* d. 170 THE WITNESS and must always remain, an essential part of His experience, an indispensable element in His nature. Hereafter they hoped to share the glory upon which He had entered ; but for the present, while upon earth, as He had been, they could chiefly be one with Him in those humble graces of which He had been so perfect an exemplar. It is thus impossible to separate any one part of the mind of the Apostles from the rest. He that ascended is the same also that descended, and the very depths of earth are thus united to the loftiest heights of heaven. Thus it is that one part of the New Testament supports the others, that the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles combine to produce one harmonious result. Consider them separately, and they may be difficult of comprehension; but read them united, and the story they tell of the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the spiritual life of the Church after the gift of the Holy Spirit, exhibits a complete unity. These considerations enable us to close this lecture with some thoughts which may help us to rise above controversy, and which may be a support to us in many a difficulty of faith. We have seen that St Peter's faith in the Resurrec- tion was not simply faith in a past event, but was faith in the living Lord who had risen and ascended, and who now bestows all grace upon His people. TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 171 His appeal to the Jews was built alike on the past and on the present, and the present was as important an element in it as the past. It may be the same to ourselves. Of course, if the historic reality of the events narrated in the Gospels could be disproved, we should have to reconsider our position altogether ; and it is hard to see what would remain of the beliefs and convictions which so many generations of Christians have held dear. But there is no such disproof; and on the other hand we possess every Christian should possess in his own experience a conviction, not less clear than that to which St. Peter appealed, of the living power and life of our risen and ascended Lord. After all, there is this per- manent evidence to the truth of our Lord's Resur- rection, and to His present glory and power, that all Christians, and the Church at large, can approach Him by prayer, and receive from Him a grace and power, of which they may be as assured as of any other fact in their experience, to enable them con- tinually to realize in increasing degree the graces of the spiritual life. In proportion as we realize this privilege, will our path be untroubled by the shadows of doubt, and shall we be enabled to bear witness to others of the power of the Lord's Resur- rection. ( 172 ) LECTURE VIII OUK LOED'S EETUEN TO JUDGMENT " And while they looked stedfastly towards heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel ; which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." Acts i. 10, 11. IT must at least confirm our faith in those angelic manifestations which are narrated in the New Testa- ment to observe how profound is the significance on each occasion of the utterances of the heavenly messengers. The name of Jesus, with the assurance that 'He shall save His people from their sins,' has, from the moment it was uttered till the present day, embodied the sum and substance of the Gospel. The song of "the multitude of the heavenly host near Bethlehem, ' Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men,' has been similarly felt, at all times, to express the essential glory of the Christian dispensation. The clear and calm gaze of heaven seems to penetrate to the heart of the great mystery it contemplates, and the central truth is presented to our meditation in one pregnant phrase. The same characteristic marks the utterance OUR LORD'S RETURN TO JUDGMENT 173 of the angels to the Apostles on the occasion of the Ascension. There is something intensely natural and vivid in the description of the Apostles looking sted- fastly towards heaven as He went up all their hearts and minds yearning after their Lord, lately restored to them from the grave, with whom they had lived in sacred communion for forty days, and now suddenly vanishing from them into those mysterious depths. At that moment angelic voices recall them to earth and to the realities around them, and tell them what is the chief significance, for the prac- tical purposes of life, of the event they were witnessing. That which it was of supreme impor- tance for them to realize and keep in mind wu-\ that the Lord who had thus left them would return, the same in nature, in character, and iu power ' This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.' All their life was to be controlled by this belief; their thoughts were ever to look forward to that great day. He had ascended into heaven and had assumed His seat of power and judgment at the right hand of the Father, and He would hereafter return to execute that judgment visibly, in human form, and with tin- human as well as divine authority with which they were familiar. Thus, at the very moment of tin- Ascension* the thoughts of the disciples 174 OUR LORD'S RETURN directed by heavenly guidance to the future return of our Lord to establish his kingdom finally, and to execute judgment; and in accordance with this direction, the creed of the Church has ever com- bined the two truths in intimate connection. ' He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty : from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.' That the last angelic words uttered respecting our Lord's work and office, at the moment of His departure, should thus point us forward to His future return to judge the world, is a fact of deep and manifold significance ; and it merits our attention the more at the present day, by reason of the vivid light it casts upon some of the most conspicuous of our perplexities and controversies. For its due appreciation it is important to bear in mind how exactly this final angelic message corresponds with the whole tenour of our Lord's ministry and teaching. We are told that His preaching was from the first summed up in the message, * Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ;' and, although that proclamation has a double aspect of salvation no less than of judgment the aspect of judgment would seem to be the primary one. Such, certainly, was its meaning in the mouth of John the Baptist. He explained his proclamation to mean that One was coming after him whose fan was in His hand, TO JUDGMENT 175 \vho would throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner, but who would burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. That this mean- ing, indeed, was prominent in our Lord's proclama- tion of the kingdom of heaven is forcibly illustrated by the Sermon on the Mount. To regard that Sermon as simply a collection of maxims of morality is to miss its most distinctive characteristic that characteristic which aroused the astonishment of those to whom it was spoken its tone of authority. It not only proclaims moral duties ; but it proclaims the sanction for them. It speaks, throughout, of men being brought under the operation of the laws of the kingdom of heaven laws more severe than any of which they had hitherto been conscious, and of all their actions being done under the eve of a Father in heaven, who will reward or punish them in accordance with their most secret conduct. More particularly, it concludes by a clear declaration that an appointed day will come when this judgment will be executed, and that our Lord Himself will preside over its execution. ' Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? and in Thy name have cast out devils? and in Thy name done many wonderful works ? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you : depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' ' Therefore,' He adds, < whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine, 176 OUR LORD'S RETURN and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man ;' and ' Every one that heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man.' In view of this conspicuous illustration of our Lord's preaching, taken from one of His most fami- liar and, as some have thought, least dogmatic utter- ances one, moreover, which is placed by the Evan- gelist in the forefront of his account of the Gospel- it can hardly be necessary to dwell on the numerous other passages in which our Lord announces more specifically and solemnly His future return in glory to execute judgment. It may serve to confirm their force, however, to observe how frequently, as in the instance just mentioned, they occur, so to say. inci- dentally, to support some other truth or declaration ; as though the great and awful fact were ever pre- sent to our Lord's mind, and He desired it to be similarly present to the mind of His disciples, as giving to all He says the supreme sanction of His power and His will to put it into execution. It is not only that there will be a judgment, but that He will Himself execute it. What we are told by the Evangelist, again and again, is that the Son of Man will come in His glory, and will sit on the throne of His glory, and will gather together all His elect from the four winds, and all nations shall be gathered befcre Him, and He shall separate them TO JUDGMENT 177 as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats, and that He will reward every man according to his works. It was upon this declaration of His future return in power and judgment, that He was finally condemned by the Jewish Council. In reply to the adjuration of the High-priest, ' Art thou the Christ the Son of the Blessed?' Jesus said, 'I am; and hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' 'Then the high-priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy; what think ye? And they all condemned Him to be guilty of death/* Now, the first observation which may be made upon a review of these awful declarations is, that they are a conclusive proof of the manner in which our Lord's claims as a moral teacher are indissolubly associated with His superhuman and divine nature. In these repeated and solemn assertions we are able to rest on broad grounds, independent of critical or philosophical disputes. Our Lord's assertions ol' His power and right to judge mankind, and of His future coming for that purpose, are common to all the Evangelists, and are at least as strong in St. Matthew as in St. John. The latter Evangelist, indeed, records some sayings which throw a light upon the relation in which our Lord stands to God * St. Mark xiv. 01-01. 178 OUR LORD'S RETURN the Father, in His office as Judge. ' The Father,' we are told, 'judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son ; that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; and hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.' The power of judging all men must lie in the hands of God alone, and any person who exercises that power must be endued with the omnipotence and omniscience of God Himself. St. John thus reveals the necessary condition in our Lord's relation to the Father for His exercising the office of Judge. But the decla- ration that He will exercise that office, and will exercise it with the whole authority and power of the Godhead, is made or implied throughout His teaching, and catnot be eliminated from any of the Gospels without such an entire annihilation of their historical character as would prevent our placing any reliance on their account of our Lord's words. To take but one instance, consider what a tre- mendous claim is involved in the familiar parable of the division between the sheep and the goats. There are some persons who would use that parable, like many other portions of the Gospels, as though it were simply a touching and forcible exhortation TO JUDGMENT 179 to beneficence. But it must be apparent upon reflec- tion how much more is involved in it. The blessing and the curse in that last awful scene are bestowed, not simply upon works of benevolence or unkind- ness as such, but upon works of benevolence or unkindness considered as in effect done to our Lord Himself. The parable depicts all mankind as stand- ing in a vital relation to Christ, and as blessed or cursed according as they have served either Him or those whom He adopts as His own. Eecall the final sentence of the scene, ' Then shall He answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment.' Had the speaker been only one of the sons of men, what a tremendous presumption would have been involved in such a juxtaposition of words ! ' Ye did it not to Me : and these shall go away into everlasting punishment.' The whole fate of mankind depending on their relation to Him ! To be the Judge of every human soul, the supreme arbiter of every act, and thought, and word this is the character in which our Lord presents Himself to us throughout the Gospels, in some of His sim- plest utterances as well as in His most mysterious ; and in this claim alone He reveals Himself to us as our Lord and our God. Our Lord's office as Judge is, in fact, one of the N 2 ]80 OUR LORD'S RETURN first great practical realities which are at stake in that long battle which has raged around the Church, and sometimes within it, from the earliest times to the present hour, respecting the nature of our Lord. We may sometimes hear that question discussed as if it were to a large extent a speculative one. That is the manner in which it was represented by Arian writers in the time of St. Athanasius ; and the first ages of the Church, and the very lifetime of the Apostles, were at least as rife as the present day with attempts to create some other image of our Lord than that which is furnished by the records of His miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, of His eternal Godhead in St. John, and of His Ascension to sit on the right hand of the Father in the Acts of the Apostles. ]f He were only a teacher, such attempts might not vitally conflict with His authority. But He claims to be much more than a teacher. In the very first place He claims to be a judge; and thus a debate respecting His nature involves a debate respecting His jurisdiction. He asserts a preroga- tive and power to which it would be blasphemy, as the High-priest declared, for a mere man to aspire, and He has indissolubly united this claim with His whole moral and spiritual teaching. That is the character in which, at the very outset as at the end of His ministry, He came before the Jews ; that is the character in which His angels revealed Him as TO JUDGMENT 181 He departed from earth ; that is the character in which He comes before us now. It must, moreover, be observed that the acknowledgment or rejection of Him in that character is declared by Him to be a point on which His judgment at the last day will be pronounced with special solemnity. It was in connection with His claim to be the Christ of God, divine amidst all His humiliation, that He uttered the solemn warning, ' Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His Father's, and of the holy angels.' Accordingly we find that this principle occu- pies as prominent a place in the preaching of the Apostles as in that of our Lord Himself. In the crucial example of St. Paul's preaching to the Gentiles his speech at Athens we observe that he employs this truth as the very lever with which he would move the world. ' The times of this ignorance God winked at ; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent; because He hath ap- pointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath or- dained ; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.' In writing to the Komans, the Apostle's argument at the outset speaks of the day in which God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according 182 OUR LORD'S RETURN to his Gospel. The day of the Lord Jesus is ever prominent in his thoughts. He reiterates that we must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ ; and he looked forward to that day for the crown of righteousness of which, at the close of his life, he could indulge a confident hope. But the Apocalypse shows us most conclusively how vast a space this truth occupied in Apostolic thought and teaching. The New Testament may almost be regarded as summed up in this vision of our Lord's return to judgment, and in His revelation as Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. In fact, the prominence which this belief occupies in Apostolic thought is so evident, that it has even been made a ground of objection to the Apostles' authority, that they lived in an expectation, which proved to be unfounded, of our Lord's immediate re- turn. It is probable, indeed, if we take the most natural interpretation of some of their expressions, that they were mistaken on this point. But it is the very point on which our Lord expressly said that they would be left in ignorance, and therefore liable to be mistaken ; and it would seem that the particular time at which He would return to judg- ment in no way affects, as respects individuals, the supreme import of the fact itself. If it be a fact, it is equally important to us all, whether it be near or far off ; and even if the Apostles had not been in TO JUDGMENT 183 the error supposed in point of time and date, the intensity with which their thoughts were preoccu- pied with the subject would have been none the less justifiable and inevitable ; and we ought ourselves to enter into their feelings and share them to the full. The truth that the consummation of all things will involve a moral judgment upon every human being, and that this judgment will be pronounced by our Lord, and in accordance with His revealed will and word, is one which, wherever it is accepted, must needs overpower all other considerations. It esta- blishes once for all a fixed and central point for human life and for each individual soul. We may reflect with advantage upon the bearing of the principle in this respect upon the circumstances in which it was first proclaimed. The world to which the Apostles were commissioned to preach was dis- tracted by the most various views of the object of life, the good of life, and the rule of life. As Horace describes himself, men fluctuated backwards and forwards between one philosophy and another, as thought, or fancy, or pleasure led them. The end of life was as obscure as its origin ; and amidst all this doubt and vague speculation, moral energy and resolution were continually growing feebler. In this state of thought and feeling, the Apostles were able to proclaim an absolute certainty to every soul ; and a certainty of the most clear and vivid cha- 184 OUR LORD'S RETURN racter. They proclaimed, not merely in general terms, a judgment to come a belief which all the most thoughtful heathen had anticipated but a judgment by a particular Person, whose character and will they were able to describe, and whose claim to submission was accompanied by the most gracious assurances. All else would pass away ; it would pass away to the individual, and it would come to an end in itself. But our Lord had declared that those who believed in Him, and strove to obey Him, were building their houses on an eternal rock, and that He would return to give them everlasting life, and honour, and blessing. What wonder that, in pro- portion as this assurance was accepted, and believed as a certainty, it absorbed the souls of men, and over- bore all other influences ? It gave to Christian life at once its peculiar moral character, and its special vigour and confidence. The principle of duty, of following right because of right, can never, indeed, in any decay of society, lose its hold over the more noble souls. But as the world is constituted, such a principle cannot, standing by itself, exert the same inspiring influence as when invigorated by the per- sonal assurances of our Lord, and sustained by the conviction that He will certainly vindicate it and reward obedience to it. Alike in the old world and in the present day, in the absence of Christian faith, too many men can only do their duty in sadness of TO JUDGMENT 185 heart, and with little to comfort them under the dis- appointments which life must often bring them ; and they are necessarily destitute of the expansion, the sympathy, and the energy of soul by which alone their own nature can be fully developed, and by which they exert their best influence upon others. But when it was proclaimed to men that the Lord Jesus Christ, in all His combined mercy and justice, would hereafter bring every work into judgment, and that His gracious and holy will was the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega of human life, all hesitation, and irresolution, and melancholy, were at once swept away. Men could know in Whom they believed. They could study His character ; they could obtain the guidance of His Spirit by prayer; they could be sure of His assistance in growing more and more like Him ; and life became, for all practical purposes, clear, and hopeful, and full of peace. What does it matter to such a belief whether, as the early Christians sup- posed, our Lord was soon to return, or whether centuries were to elapse before His reappearance? The one important fact was that He would return, to execute judgment, to save and bless His own ; and this great reality was supreme. It solved at once the main problems of existence, it settled life on an eternal basis, opened up its true sources, and enabled 186 OUR LORD'S RETURN every one to devote himself to the lawful work of his calling in a spirit of perfect truth, freedom, and fearlessness. For, let it be observed, the fact that this judg- ment of our Lord gives supreme importance to the moral and spiritual character of our actions is so far from placing it out of harmony with the busi- ness of life, that this is the only condition on which it could control all the work of life without exception. The one quality which is supreme in all work, of whatever kind, is the moral quality. Other qualities must needs vary indefinitely. The physical and intellectual powers present an endless diversity both in degree and in kind. But truth in work, and faithfulness to the domestic or social relations in which we are placed these conditions are the same in every occupation, and in proportion as they are fulfilled, is the utmost amount of intel- lectual or physical power developed, and does work of all kinds prosper. The moral duties, for our dis- charge of which we shall be judged, are the hinges on which the whole world turns. Let those be duly per- formed, and everything else will follow, in accord- ance with the various laws which God has impressed upon our nature. We have but to seek first the king- dom of God and His righteousness, and all secondary things shall be added unto us. The whole of life, TO JUDGMENT 187 therefore, without any exception, was illuminated and revivified by this revelation of our Lord as the Judge of quick and dead. In proportion as we grasp the same principle, and make it the starting-point of all our thought, shall we be sensible of a similar illumination and a similar vigour. We need to maintain that grasp in two respects alike with reference to those general discussions respecting the conduct and the organiza- tion of life, which are forced upon our attention by the literature and thought of the time, and in respect to our private lives. In regard to the former, it cannot but be the duty of a Christian to adopt a more decided tone than that to which, from feelings of mistaken kindness, and, perhaps, of mis- placed modesty, we are often inclined. From the point of view of the great truth we have been con- sidering, nothing, surely, can be more lamentable, than that such a vast amount of time and energy should be consumed in the constant discussion of moral and religious problems on other than Christian principles. On those principles, no philosophy can reach a true result, no moral system can lead to sound conclusions, no system of education, whether private or national, whether at home, or in schools, or in Universities, can be trusted, which is not based upon the recognition of our Lord as the centre of all God's purposes, and as the Judge of all mankind. 188 OUR LORD'S RETURN He claims to have declared the moral principles by which all mankind will be judged, by which every act and word and thought will be measured, and con- sequently to have determined the eternal standard and rule of moral action. It is indeed the glory of the Gospel, or rather it is our Lord's glory, that every truth, of what- ever kind, belongs to Him is a part of His wisdom and His will ; and just as the greatest Christian Fathers regarded the philosophy of Greece as sharing in some degree with the Law of Moses the office of being a schoolmaster to the world to bring it unto Christ, so whatever moral truths may be established by independent speculation must needs be so many additional steps on the road towards Him who is the Truth. But this does not alter the fact that it is alike our privilege and our duty, in the present day, to start on every subject from the central truth that our Saviour is the Lord and Judge of all men, to estimate every moral and religious argument or opinion by the standard of His words, and to depend wholly on the promised aid of His Spirit to guide us aright. We cannot allow less than this to a principle of so absolute and supreme a character as that which we have been contemplat- ing. It may be pressed too far, or injudiciously applied, as it was in the Middle Ages, when physical questions were determined by doubtful inferences TO JUDGMENT 189 from theological premises. But we have of late been certainly tending towards the other extreme, and such reflections as these may well suggest to us a reconsideration of our position and our duty in the matter. There is one moral and religious question which must take precedence of all others, and that is the old one, 'What think ye of Christ?' Do you accept His claim to be the Judge of quick and dead, and the Lord of life alike iu this world and in the next ? He comes forward with that claim, and there is no similar claim in competition with it. If a man unhappily reject it, he can only fall back on the comparatively dim light of nature and of con- science, and feel his way in the twilight as best he may. But it is a claim which may be said to be in possession of the ground. During the last eighteen centuries it has guided the civilization which is now the hope of the world, and there is an enormous presumption in its favour. But if it be accepted, it decides at one trenchant stroke many of the con- troversies by which the world is distracted ; it sets aside many a futile debate; and it affords a firm basis for the edifice of moral and social life. But, to turn for a moment from this more general view of the principle in question to its relation to our private lives, we must acknowledge at once how profound and how elevating would be its influence if it were always present to our minds in full force. 190 OUR LORD'S RETURN To believe that everything we do, or say, or think, is under the eye of the Lord Jesus Christ, and will hereafter be revealed at His tribunal, and judged by Him this would seem, without controversy, the mightiest moral influence that can be brought to bear upon a man. It was said of late, by a distin- guished writer who was not a Christian, that our Lord's character was so perfect that a man could hardly adopt a better rule for his guidance than that of acting in such a manner that Christ, if He saw his actions, would approve them. But what is this to the positive belief that Christ does see them, and will approve or condemn them in proportion as they are in accordance with His will ? There was always something vague and uncertain, both among Jews and heathen, in the belief of a future judgment. It was, perhaps, something too vast, too intangible, too much beyond our standard and measure, to be realized, and to produce its due influence upon the mind. But to be judged by the Man Christ Jesus, whose words we read in the Gospels, whose voice penetrates into our hearts, Who is portrayed so vividly that we can almost see and hear Him to believe that this same Jesus will so return in like manner as He was seen to go into heaven to be brought into His presence, to feel His eye and His judgment upon us, and to await His censure or His approval this is a prospect which we can realize TO JUDGMENT 191 only too keenly, and which is fitted to touch the very depths of our souls. Indeed, the thought of that penetrating judgment would be unsupportable unless it were accompanied by the assurance that this Judge is also our Saviour, alike now and here- after. We may be assured that He will display towards us the mercy as well as the severity which marked His words and acts when He was upon earth, and we cannot doubt the love and tenderness of One who laid down His life for us. The blessing, accordingly, of this revelation is as great for the present as for the future. Were we left alone, even with the guidance which the Gospels and the Epistles afford us, to work out our own salvation, to train and discipline ourselves in harmony with the Saviour's holy will, we should be appalled at the con- sciousness of our weakness and our ignorance. But the Lord, who requires us to grow like Him, and who has established His will as the final standard of our lives, is ever present with us, to guide us by His Spirit into all truth, alike of thought and of action. If we trust Him, and strive continually to obey Him, His final judgment will prove but the last act of the gracious discipline by which He has all our lives been bringing us into ever-increasing harmony with Himself. He does not ask us, \\ith all our sins and imperfections, to bring ourselves into harmony with Him. He asks us only to submit ourselves to Him 192 OUE LOED'S RETURN TO JUDGMENT in trust, in prayer, and in faithful study of His word, and He Himself will bring us into that harmony. Our whole thoughts in meditating on this subject may be thus summed up in the prayer of the Te Deum : ' Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of the Father. We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge. We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood.' ( 193 ) LECTURE IX THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto My Father." John xiv. 12. THE Ascension of our Lord must be regarded, for its due appreciation, in reference to the manifesta- tions which had preceded it on the one hand, and to those which followed it on the other. It is not an event which stands by itself, but it is part of a continuous manifestation of the Saviour's life and power. It is, in the first place, only the final and more solemn assumption of a condition of glory into which He had entered at His rising from the grave. The significance of our Lord's Resurrection is nowhere presented in the New Testament as consisting in the mere fact of His having risen from the sepulchre, like those whom He had Himself raised from the dead. It is not to that bare fact that the Apostles bear testimony, but to the fact of His having risen in glory and power. As has been observed in a previous Lecture, they clo not even proclaim the IU-HM-. <- o 194 THE GIFT tion until they are able to point to the miraculous powers over men's bodies and souls which had been exerted through them, as proofs that their Lord was exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour. It is in harmony with this, that all accounts of our Saviour's appearances to the disciples, after the Kesurrection, represent Him, not merely as having been raised from corruption, but as endued with powers and qualities superior to those He exercised before, and essentially different from those which other men have enjoyed. Everywhere He appears, not merely as the risen, but as the glorified, Lord. His body, indeed, no less than His soul, retains what we may venture to call its identity. It retains the mark of the wound in the side and the print of the nails ; it is recognized instinctively, by voice as well as by sight, except when He purposely throws a veil around Himself. The eyes of those whom He visits may be holden for a time, that they should not know Him, but some sudden touch reveals Him, and then they recall many indications that it is the same Lord with whom they had lived. But He is never- theless freed from some of the most conspicuous limitations which are attached to our own bodies, and to which He had Himself submitted during His pre- vious life. He appears suddenly in the midst of His disciples, although the doors are shut ; He vanishes as suddenly out of the sight of the two disciples at OF THE SPIRIT l|i." Einmaus ; He would seem to manifest His presence whenever and wherever He would, and appears superior to all ordinary bodily necessities. His Ascension into the heavens, exhibiting a supremacy over the ordinary laws of matter, is but the last and most conspicuous of these numerous evidences of His having entered by His Resurrection, in body as well as in spirit, into a new and glorified condition. \Vhatever manifestations, in short, are recorded of Him, exhibit Him as having assumed an entirely new state of bodily and spiritual existence an ex- istence one indeed with His former state of humilia- tion, but completely freed from its restrictions. He appears to transcend the limitations of the flesh, no less than to have burst the bonds of the grave ; and from the time of His Resurrection, while remaining man, He possessed a life, and exerted a power, in- finitely above those of our present humanity.* It would seem, in fact, that we have an exact and vivid description of the change which had thus passed over the body of our Lord in St. Paul's grand description of the resurrection body of Christians. The appearances of our Lord after His Resurrection, and the fact of the Ascension itself, are visible illustrations of the Apostle's argument, that ' all flesh is not the same flesh,' but that, as there is one kind * See Dr. Milligan on The Resurrection of our Lord, Lect. I. 196 THE GIFT of flesh of men and another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds ; as there are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another ; so also, is the resurrection of the dead. 'It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incor- ruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power ; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul ; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.' In those words the Apostle presents our Lord, in His glorified state, as being as distinctly a type of the spiritual body, animated by the quickening spirit, as Adam was of the earthly body, animated by the living soul. A spiritual influence, infinitely superior to that which is exhibited in our present earthly frame, will here- after animate those who rise in Christ, and will transform them ; ' and as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.' That image was actually seen in our Lord, in the complete transformation which His body underwent, though remaining one with that body which suffered and was buried. He rose and ascended, as our Article states, quoting His own words, ' with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining OF THE SPIRIT 197 to the perfection of man's nature ' ' Handle Me and see,' He said, ' for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have ' but all these elements of man's nature perfected, glorified, placed in new relations, and endued with a new life. There is thus no essentially greater wonder in the Ascension than in our Lord's various appearances before it. It was His last solemn farewell to His disciples; it marked the moment when He assumed the full exercise of that power which He had won by death, and it was thus distinguished by circumstances equally striking in themselves and symbolical of His exaltation. But it is an event substantially one in character with those which had preceded it since the Eesurrection ; it is indissolubly united with them, and rests on tin- same evidence. But this manifestation of the Saviour's glory in respect to His bodily nature is accompanied by a similar assumption of power in the moral and spiritual sphere. He himself, indeed, needed no glorification in this respect. His previous humilia- tion had affected His bodily state only, and His spiritual and moral glory was as great before His Eesurrection as after it. Even while the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us in the ordinary con- ditions of human flesh and blood, those who had pure hearts beheld His glory, the glory as of tin- only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 198 THE GIFT But that moral and spiritual power which He did not need for Himself He did need for others. It is clearly revealed in the Gospels, alike by the evi- dence of experience and by express statements, that His power to influence the hearts of men, and to quicken them into true moral life by spiritual in- fluences, was exercised under limitations and restric- tions during the period of His ministry and before His death and resurrection. St. John expressly tells us, in reference to one of His great promises, ' This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive ; for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified.' The same truth is repeatedly urged by our Lord Himself in His last discourses to His disciples. 'It is expedient for you,' He says, ' that I go away : for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you.' This truth, it may be observed, affords perhaps the most striking of all illustrations of the immense efficacy and supreme necessity of the atoning work of our Lord in His death on the Cross. It was indispensable for the manifestation of God's justice that the natural consequences of man's sin should be allowed to work themselves out, as they did by the rejection and crucifixion of our Lord, and that He should take upon Himself those consequences, before God could interpose, as He had from the first OF THE SPIRIT 199 purposed, to deliver mankind by the supernatural operation of His Spirit from the ruin which they had brought upon themselves by their revolt from Him. It was necessary that Christ should be ' set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare the righteousness of God for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God ; to declare,' the Apostle insists, 'at this time His righteousness ; that He might be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.' When this had been done, and when our Lord could pass in His glorified humanity into the presence of the Father, there plead- ing His sufferings, of which His body still bore the marks, as a sufficient penalty and atonement for human evil, then was it possible for God, through Him, to set free that gracious influence of His Spirit from which the sins of men had hitherto debarred them. Christ, by His perfect obedience and Atone- ment, had won that gift ; and the Spirit was henre- forth, if we may so speak, placed in His hands as the reward of His work, to be by Him bestowed upon all who submitted themselves to Him in faith. In this respect the Saviour was glorified at the Ascension in His moral and spiritual no less than in His bodily nature. He possesses a power which he coull not xert before ; He is able to give the Comforter to His disci pies, and that Spirit henceforth pro. from the Father and the Son, to exercise over tlie 200 THE GIFT spirits and souls, and ultimately over the bodies, of Christians His transforming and transfiguring influences. These considerations, it will be found, bring light and unity into the various sayings of our Lord which are recorded between His Eesurrection and Ascen- sion. The burden of His repeated sayings to His disciples is that He bestows on them henceforth new and irresistible spiritual powers. One of His first utterances, when He came and stood in the midst of them while they were assembled in secret for fear of the Jews, was, ' Peace be unto you. As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this He breathed on them, and said unto them, Keceive ye the Holy Ghost.' He could bestow that gift then as He could not bestow it before. He bids them teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, bringing them therefore under the life- giving influences of those three sacred Persons, setting free, if the expression may be permitted, the whole power of the Godhead to work upon them. St. Luke accordingly, in the Acts, repre- sents His instructions to the Apostles during the interval between His Eesurrection and Ascension as mainly having reference to this promise. 'Being assembled together with them, He commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but OF THE SPIRIT 201 wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith He, ye have heard of Me.' Every message, every act, leads up to this great promise, as that in which the whole work of the Saviour was to be fulfilled. The Apostles, in a word, are not commissioned to go forth into the world as teachers only, but as men endued with new powers themselves and bringing new powers to others. That which they had seen of the glorification of our Lord's body was to be an example and a pledge to them of the work which was to be wrought in men's souls. A new creative influence was to be set at work by means of it, and the moral and spiritual life of all who submitted to the Saviour was to be regenerated. When, accord- ingly, we are told that ' with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,' it is added, ' and great grace was upon them all.' The power did not lie in the mere force of their testimony to the fact of our Lord having risen from the grave, but in their testimony to Him as a glorified and ascended Lord, and in the great grace which He bestowed on all who submitted to Him. This is an aspect of the revelation of the New Testament which is peculiarly liable to be obscured amidst the controversies of the present time, and which it is essential for us above all things to !<[ in view if we would meet the difficulties which those 202 THE GIFT controversies present to us. The main effort of all schools of thought which have struggled against the full supernatural revelation of the Gospel hus been to concentrate attention on the moral teaching of the New Testament, and to separate it from the miraculous narratives with which it is accompanied. But all such attempts fail to grupple with that which, if the facts be fully realized, may well appear the greatest miracle of all. That fact is the event to which this season bears witness the sudden creation of a new spiritual life, of new moral energies and powers, after the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. By no con- ceivable process of criticism can the fact of such a sudden creation be explained away. So far as the life of believers is concerned, it is impossible not to feel that we enter into a new world as we pass from the Gospels to the Ac's of the Apostles and the Epistles. In the history of the Gospels even the dis- ciples of our Lord are marked to the last by a weak- ness, a narrowness, and even a worldlines*, which is in amazing contrast with the infinite spiritual grace of our Lord Himself. At the last moment before His Ascension they recur to these mere worldly expecta- tions, saying, ' Lord, wilt Thou fit this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?' Equally striking is the absence in the Gospels of any evidence that our Lord's perfect moral and spiritual teaching produced OF THE SPIRIT 2<>:'. the effect of regenerating, to any appreciable extent, the lives of more than a few, and a very few, devoted followers. He gathers no church about Him, and the moment He dies His whole work seems for the moment to be at an end. Nor is the case different after His Resurrection, even the spiritual insight of the Apostles, as has just been mentioned, being still imperfect. But after the Ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit which followed it, the Apostles are enabled instantly to gather around them some thousands of followers, whose Christian graces have been the ideal of the whole Church ever since. Picture to yourselves, on the one hand, that hardened society of Scribes and Pharisees, and that fickle and passionate mob, by whom our Lord, not- withstanding all the grace and power of His teach- ing, was condemned to death ; and, on the other, that body of about three thousand souls who were added to the Church the very day of the descent of the Holy Spirit, and who ' continued steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine and fellowship,' who 'wnv of one he;irt and of one soul,' and who were animated by the same gracious influences of love, joy, and peace. Do not these wonderful manifestations of spiritual grace exactly correspond to our Lord's promise in tin- text 'He that believeth on Me, tin- \v..rks that I do shall he do also; and greater \v..rk.s than these .-hall 204 THE GIFT he do, because I go unto My Father ' ? Were they not an exact fulfilment of the assurance, ' It is ex- pedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I depart I will send Him unto you. And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteous- ness, and of judgment.' Then it was that those who listened to St. Peter ' were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the Apostles, " Men and brethren, what shall we do ? " ' and Peter was able to reply, ' Kepent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.' Unquestionably the moral and spiritual power exerted by the Apostles after the descent of the Holy Spirit produced greater works far more conspicuous and more enduring results than all the teaching of our Lord during His lifetime, notwith- standing the miraculous manifestations by which it was attested. This is, after all, the decisive fact of Christian experience, and perhaps the chief practical evidence of our Faith. The undoubted facts of Christian history bear irresistible testimony to the truth that, after our Lord's death and resurrection, a new spiritual life was at work in the world, trans- figuring the lives of those who faithfully submitted to it, just as our Lord's body was transformed and glorified. Henceforth, it was evident, Christians OF THE SPIRIT 205 were not living merely by their own powers as they had lived before, subject only to the intellectual and moral influences of Christian teaching. But they were in the hands of a life-giving Spirit, from whom they drew continual supplies of new spiritual energy. With the evidence of the Epistles in our hands, bearing witness to the intense spiritual and moral beauty of Christian life as represented in the teach- ing and the practice of the Apostles, it is strange men should fail to acknowledge the presence of this new and life-giving influence. We seem to behold the Divine Spirit breathing over the moral chaos to hear the Divine command, ' Let there be light !' and to see that it was fulfilled ' and there w;i light.' It is, indeed, but too natural and easy to point to facts which appear to conflict with this gracious truth, and which render it sometimes diffi- cult of belief. Where are the signs, men may ask, of the continued existence and operation of this transforming influence in the subsequent history of the Church and in our own day? If such a spiritual power as that we have been considering -a power like that which transfigured our Lor.l'< bodily nature, and which transformed the livs od the Apostles and early Christians-has been at wo in the Church ever since, and is at work witi it now, how are we to account for the frequent 206 THE GIFT and grievous decay of Christian virtue, for the scandals which in age after age have disgraced Christendom ? How is it that such powers are not so conspicuous among us at this moment as to silence all objection, and to compel men to confess that the Spirit of God is with us of a truth ? As I will observe in a moment, it is too easy to account for this sad contrast, for this failure to realize the Christian ideal. But we may boldly say, in the first place, that, grievous as are these defects in our practice, grievous as they ever have been in the history of the Church, history never- theless does, on the whole, bear the most con- spicuous witness to the ever-present influence of this Spirit of Grace. It can certainly be said, with- out fear of contradiction, that in every age since the first preaching of the Gospel to the present time, a succession of faints has been maintained, not un- worthy to be enrolled with those of the primitive Churcli. They have been fewer or more obscure at one time than another, but no one acquainted with the course of ecclesiastical history will deny their continuous existence. The life of this brotherhood of saints has flowed on in a perennial stream, pure and gracious in itself, and bringing vitality to the arid wastes of natural society, or corrupt Christianity, which lay around its course. Connected with this, and as a consequence of it, is another fact equally OF THE SPIRIT 207 conspicuous throughout the Christian ages that of a power of constant revival and reformation within the Christian Church. This, it must be owned, on candid consideration, is a unique phenomenon in human experience. In all history, except that in \\hich the Church has been the prominent influ- ence, the law of development has been that which prevails in the natural world, of growth up to a certain point, followed by decay. One nation after another has come on the stage of the world's history, and each has brought some new contribution to its life, some new energy, moral or intellectual. Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for instance, have thus succeeded one another, and each has established for a time an imposing civilization. But in each case the civilization became corrupt, and when that corruption had once set in, there was no power of resistance or renovation. But the history of Chris- tendoma history which is now that of eighteen centuries is that of a succession of reformations of moral and intellectual life. There is no race, neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Celtic, nor German, which has not from time to time felt this reforming and regenerating power, and which has not thus been enabled to cast off its corruptions and enter on a new career. It was by the influence of th- Church, as no impartial historian will question, that out of the corrupted elements of the Greek ami 208 THE GIFT Roman world, and the fierce and untamed energies of the Teutonic races, the grand and enduring fabric of our present civilization was built up. The moral and spiritual energies of Christian missionaries exerted a creative force and a power of control which were lacking alike to Greek arts and to Eoman arms, and they thus sowed the seeds of an ever-growing Christendom. All other civili- zations and faiths have fallen into decay, while this alone exhibits the elements of an enduring vitality. In proportion, indeed, as the simple truths of the Gospel have been obscured by human ignorance, or misused by human ambition for unworthy ends, have these gracious influences of God's Spirit been lost. But the Church has never long been without her prophets, to revive the truth and to set free anew the springs of Christian life. The work of the great saints of the early Church and of the Middle Ages was re- vived by the great leaders of the Reformation ; and the Evangelical succession, reinvigorated through the spiritual insight of the Reformers, has never since been interrupted. The Church, in short, has succeeded in taking up into itself members of all nations in all ages, and in moulding them into members of her own body, constituent parts of the same great Christian creation. It is this feeling often unconscious, but this alone which gives to OF THE SPIRIT 1_>O.| modern life its hopefulness and energy. The history of the Church in the past forbids us to despair <>t the moral and spiritual renovation of any people whatever; and thus we work and struggle, alike at home and abroad, in the hope of a continu<>n< progress. But, while this is true, and is a sufficient answer to the objections I have mentioned, we must none the less admit a grievous falling short in our realization of those spiritual powers we have been considering ; and the reason must be familiar to us all. Our Lord proceeds after the text to say, 'And whatso- ever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, thnl the Father may be gloritied in the Son. It y shall ask anything in My name, I will do it.' It need not be said that this asking in Christ's name implies no ordinary or cursory petition; it involve earnest, devout, and constant prayer, in that spirit of faith, and that striving and wrestling for spiri- tual graces, which our Lord Himself displayed in the days of His flesh, and which His Apo>tl'- urge on us as indispensable for obtaining an an>\\-r to prayer. ' Let a man ask in faith,' says St James, 'nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tos-ed. For let not that man think that he shall rec -i\- anything of the Lord;' and he tells us that it is the effectual fervent prayer of a riirhti-nis man p 210 THE GIFT which availeth much. If, then, any of us ask, or if we are asked, Where is the moral and spiritual grace which should transform our lives, as they trans- formed those of the first Christians? let the ques- tioner ask himself whether he is conscious of that supreme devotion to the kingdom of God, and that craving, above all things, for righteousness, which impels him to the incessant and earnest prayer in answer to which alone this grace is promised. One essential character of the operation of the Spirit of God is that His grace never works mechanically. He speaks indeed to the heart. He touches the springs of the conscience, and is thus ever arousing in each of us a craving for grace and truth ; but His further influences are dependent on the degree in which we yield to those gentle invita- tions. But the history of the Acts of the Apostles, confirmed as it is in all ages by Christian experience, may give us a firm assurance that this spiritual power, or rather that Holy Spirit and that gracious Lord, are here, and ever at our side ; that we owe it to Their grace alone that we are not worse than we are, and that, in proportion as we yield to Them, in proportion as we are able by Their aid to set our affections on things above, and to appeal to Them in faith and prayer, They will give us larger measure of this grace, and will help us to transform our lives. The Holy Spirit is still given, as in the OF THE SPIRIT 211 lays of the early Church, to those who truly seek Him. May God give us grace thus to strive after the likeness of Christ, and thus to realize it, that ' like as we do believe our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with Him con- tin nally dwell.' THE END. LOW*: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CUWTM AND O8, L.MITID. SIAMFOW, ST" ASI> '.HAKIM; CBOSS. ONAi U8RARY FAOUTY A 000 685 002 8