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 <lr Philosophies 5th ' 3G:>.
 
 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<? <r<a<rei HE will save 
 His people. The message, therefore, does not 
 simply proclaim to those people the way of sal- 
 vation, leaving them to their own exertions alone in 
 following it. Still less is it content with announcing 
 to them a clearer revelation of the laws of their 
 nature. That which is announced is more than a 
 revelation, it is a birth. It is the introduction into 
 the world of a new creation, the second Adam, the 
 Lord from heaven, henceforth to be present, by His 
 personal power and Spirit, to redeem men, to rege- 
 nerate them, to save them : not merely, be it 
 observed, to teach them how to be saved, but to 
 save them to act with them, and for them, and in 
 them ; to be at their side in life and in death, to
 
 OF JESUS 81 
 
 be Himself the propitiation for their sius with the 
 God whom they have forgotten and offended in a 
 word, to die for them and to live with them, and to 
 render it possible for them to work out their own 
 salvation, by working with them both to will and 
 to do of His good pleasure. 
 
 It is this revelation of a personal Saviour which 
 constitutes the cardinal element of the Gospel mes- 
 sage ; and whether in days of controversy, or in 
 hours of temptation and sorrow, it needs above all 
 other things to be borne in mind. Never was it 
 more necessary to insist on it than at the present 
 day. In the controversies we hear around us, and 
 from which few of us can altogether escape, the 
 Gospel is constantly compared with other religions, 
 iind with forms of philosophy, as though the moral 
 truths enforced by them constituted an adequate 
 ground of comparison. Considering the question, 
 indeed, simply on that ground, the claims of our 
 faith are overwhelming. But it is important to 
 remember that all discussions conducted on this 
 level leave out of sight the main fact the one 
 only fact on which the heavenly messengers cared 
 to dwell that the Gospel proclaims the coming into 
 the world of a living Saviour, who is Himself per- 
 petually saving His people from their sins, and who 
 has promised that hereafter He will, completely 
 deliver them. When we hear any principles
 
 82 THE NAME 
 
 which involve the abandonment of the Gospel dis- 
 cussed, so to speak, with a light heart, this simple 
 truth and promise must surely have been left out 
 of sight. If there be, as the Gospel says, a perfectly 
 Holy and Almighty being, the man Jesus, in all 
 His gentleness, all His wisdom, all His power, per- 
 petually at our side, desiring to hear us, to guide us, 
 to control us, to save us, what man or woman can 
 contemplate the surrender of such an infinite 
 blessing without an intense pang? Who would 
 willingly forego the perpetual presence of a perfect 
 friend? Above all things who would forego it, for 
 time and for eternity, if that friend be a perfect 
 Saviour? It would surely check many a crude 
 speculation, and many a rash neglect of the claims 
 of our faith, if men bore in mind more clearly this 
 simple and cardinal element in it. It is not simply 
 a truth more or less which is abandoned by un- 
 belief, but a Person a living and a present Saviour. 
 In a word, the message of the Gospel, and its 
 essential blessing, is not merely the revelation of a 
 truth ; it is the creation of a fact the most blessed 
 fact in life that every human being has a 
 Saviour at his side, and that iu proportion as 
 he trusts that Saviour's help and follows His 
 guidance, he will be delivered from all his evil. The 
 methods, indeed, of that deliverance are various, and 
 the Saviour works by natural as well as by super-
 
 OF JESUS 83 
 
 natural means. The salvation of souls has been 
 wrought by sudden miracles in Apostolic times, and 
 since then by conversions scarcely less miraculous. 
 At other times, and in other cases, it has been 
 worked out by a gradual, and perhaps painful 
 education it may be by a severe and bitter disci- 
 pline. There is sternness, as well as gentleness, in 
 the character of a true Saviour ; and as His treat- 
 ment of His own people shows, He is capable of 
 wrath as well as of mercy. As applied in daily 
 life, that salvation involves the use of all means for 
 moral and spiritual purification. As with our 
 physical, so with our moral diseases, the Saviour 
 has proved to us by His miracles that they can all 
 be overcome, and that He possesses the power to 
 deliver us from any evil whatever; but it would 
 seem as though He were educating us, in both cases, 
 to the utmost possible development of our natural re- 
 sources. While, however, we are thus struggling to 
 do our utmost with all the means at our disposal, with 
 all the resources of religious and useful learning, 
 with the wisdom of statesmen and with all tin- 
 applications of art and science, the gracious truth 
 is proclaimed to us that He is with us, to bless 
 every agency that we can employ, and to complete 
 our work and His own by the mighty operation of 
 His spirit. We are justified by His death ; and \v- 
 are saved bv His life. To as many as believe in 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE NAME 
 
 Him, He gives the power to become the sons of 
 God, and they are assured that they will hereafter 
 be like Him, seeing Him as He is, and reflecting 
 His glory. 
 
 So simple, yet so far-reaching in its application, 
 is the heavenly summary of the Gospel message. It 
 is the life and soul of all Christian doctrine ; and in 
 proportion as it is borne in mind, does every truth 
 of our faitli become illuminated with a gracious 
 light, at once human and Divine. Take, for instance, 
 the doctrine of the Atonement, with which this text 
 has sometimes, perhaps, been too exclusively con- 
 nected, but which is deeply involved in it. Its 
 central principle is the simple fact that Christ, by 
 His personal act, and by the shedding of His blood, 
 has made reconciliation between us and God. In St. 
 John's comprehensive expression, 'He Himself is 
 the propitiation for our sins.' He, in His love, 
 and in His life and death, appeals alike to the love 
 of God and to the heart of man. It is the personal 
 Saviour, in His personal sacrifice, who constitutes 
 this propitiation. Or consider again the truth of 
 His Divinity. Its supreme practical importance is 
 sufficiently discerned from the fact that it is the 
 necessary condition of our belief in the simple 
 assurance of the text in all its fulness. For it is 
 because our Lord is God, as well as man, that He 
 is able to be everywhere present to every soul, at
 
 OF JESUS 85 
 
 all times, that we oau believe that He is ever with 
 us, perpetually speaking by His Spirit to our hearts. 
 None but one who is God as well as man can be a 
 Saviour in that comprehensive sense in which our 
 Lord constantly proclaims Himself, and in which 
 it is our blessing to believe on Him. None else c\n 
 be with us through life and death ; to none other can 
 we commend our souls at our last hours. The loftiest 
 heights of Christian truth are thus involved in this 
 text, when given its ample meaning. 
 
 Not less involved in it are the heights and depths 
 of all human experience, if they are to issue in 
 blessing and not in despair. The hour will come to 
 all of us when our flesh and heart will fail us, when 
 the eye will be dim and the mind be unable to retain 
 any but the simplest thought ; but in that hour to 
 the Christian, the one word Saviour, the name of 
 Jesus, will suffice to assure us that the eternal God 
 is with us, and that underneath us are the ever- 
 lasting arms. And as this short and simple Gospel 
 is the one adequate comfort in death, not less in life 
 does it transform our whole moral position. Its 
 effect is to render possib'e moral aims and moral 
 efforts, which would otherwise be impracticable and 
 desperate. Consider a man as standing alone amidst 
 his fellows, and left to no other influence than theirs, 
 and it cannot but be recognized that there are limit* 
 to the possibilities of his moral achievements. On
 
 $6 THE NAME 
 
 natural grounds, he cannot rise above himself and 
 the influences with which he is surrounded. There 
 are consequences of his past sins which he cannot 
 shake off, and it might even seem harsh to ask too 
 much of him. But once recognize that there is a 
 Divine Saviour at his side, and all is changed. No 
 aim is then too lofty, and no hope too bold. It is not 
 too much, then, to address to him even the com- 
 mand, ' Be ye perfect, even as your Father which 
 is in heaven is perfect.' The Sermon on the Mount, 
 in which that expression occurs, affords a most 
 striking illustration of this truth. Had it been 
 addressed to men in their natural condition, there 
 would be something terrible in its unsparing 
 severity, in the relentlessness with which it exposes 
 the fatal vice of even passing thoughts and looks 
 and words, and in the narrowness and straitness 
 of the path which it marks out. But it is not 
 addressed to men in their natural condition. It is 
 addressed by a Saviour to those whom He is ready 
 to save, and it is clenched, and enforced, and ren- 
 dered tolerable to our weakness by that Saviour's 
 evangelical promise, 'Ask, and it shall be given 
 you. ... If ye, being evil, know how to give good 
 gifts unto your children, how much more shall 
 your Father which is in heaven give good things 
 to them that ask Him?' With a Saviour at 
 our side, but only under this condition, that Sermon
 
 OF JESUS 87 
 
 is the revelation of an ideal at which every soul 
 may aim, and which every soul may hope some 
 day to attain. We are capable, with that aid, 
 of ever-increasing growth in truth, in righteousness, 
 and in all grace, and of ultimate union with truth, 
 and righteousness, and glory itself. This blessing 
 is ours because of the truth declared in the text 
 because there is a Saviour, who will save His people 
 from their sins. Such is the profound significance 
 of the angelic announcement which is recorded at 
 the outset of the Gospels. It is the key to all that 
 follows ; and only in proportion as we apprehend the 
 depth of its meaning and its supreme importance, 
 can we be in a position to appreciate either the 
 historic facts or the spiritual verities which are 
 involved in the life and ministry of our Lord. 
 
 Let me remark, in conclusion, that the truth of 
 this announcement has been tested by a long and 
 blessed experience. Above all, in a degree which 
 has too rarely since been approached, was it expe- 
 rienced and verified by the early Church. In the 
 strength which this promise of a Saviour afforded 
 them, and with the grace which that Saviour gave 
 them, they sprang forward with irrepressible eager- 
 in the pursuit of all Christian graces. The new 
 world of the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, 
 gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance 
 faith, hope, and charity seemed to open itself
 
 88 THE NAME OF JESUS 
 
 to their hopes and energies, and they lived 
 and breathed as new creatures in Christ. No de- 
 light seemed to them comparable to that of this 
 spiritual career, and every moment seemed lost 
 which did not advance them in likeness to their 
 Saviour. That blessing and that glorious career are 
 open to all of us. No soul need be so saddened 
 by failure, or so oppressed by weakness, or so bur- 
 dened by sorrow and pain, as to forego it. The 
 message of the text is adequate to renew the 
 spiritual life of every soul who is privileged to receive 
 it. We may well feel, as we contemplate our past, our 
 present, or our future, that we cannot save ourselves. 
 But our Christian faith is summed up in the acknow- 
 ledgment of One who was called Jesus, because He 
 shall save His people from their sins. Let us only 
 be among His people ; let us trust Him, obey Him, 
 pray to Him, work with Him ; and we are assured by 
 His promise, and by the unvarying experience of 
 Christians, that He will guide, support, and deliver 
 us.
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 "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. I 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." St. Matt. viii. 5-10. 
 
 THE eighth chapter of St. Matthew is a portion of 
 that Gospel which has peculiar value from the light 
 which it throws upon our Lord's miracles. The 
 eighth and ninth chapters contain a record of ten 
 of His miracles, and these are one half of the whole 
 number recorded by that evangelist; while it is 
 also to be noticed that this record of all these works 
 of supernatural power and mercy immediately 
 follows the Sermon on the Mount. It may first 
 be observed that this close juxtaposition of two 
 such portions of the narrative is but one of many 
 instances of the impossibility of separating the tes- 
 timony of the evangelists to the miraculous works
 
 90 THE MIRACLES 
 
 of our Lord from their testimony to His moral 
 teaching. Their credibility in reporting the latter 
 is fully admitted by many persons who hesitate to 
 admit it with respect to the former. But their 
 admitted faithfulness in the one portion of their 
 narratives cannot but add immense weight to their 
 testimony in the other. In the three chapters pre- 
 ceding this miraculous record, St. Matthew has pre- 
 served to us, with a vividness and force of which the 
 most sceptical are sensible, a long discourse by our 
 Lord of supreme import, which is universally felt 
 to embody some of His most characteristic teach- 
 ing. Men of very diverse views, even among 
 those who are most hostile to our faith as a whole, 
 feel in their inmost consciences that these were the 
 words of one who spoke to men with an authority 
 beyond that of any other teacher, and accept them 
 as a true account of the greatest moral instruction 
 ever heard. Now, is it not a strange paradox, to 
 suppose that a writer who was sufficiently imbued 
 with the spirit of the teaching of the Sermon on 
 the Mount to record its substance with a force and 
 accuracy which have penetrated to the hearts of all 
 subsequent generations, should immediately, and, 
 as it were, almost in the same breath, pass to a 
 similarly long narrative of purely illusive reminis- 
 cences? In the one passage, we are surrounded 
 with a blaze of moral and spiritual light, piercing
 
 OF OUR LORD 91 
 
 to the very thoughts and intents of the heart, bum- 
 ing up all falsehood in word or deed, a 1 ! hypocrisy 
 and unreality; and in the next passage some would 
 ask us to believe that we find ourselves in an 
 atmosphere of illusion, credulity, and uncertainty ! 
 Such a transition from absolute light light un- 
 dimmed, unobscured by a single shadow, unper- 
 verted by a single false, colour, is certainly unknown 
 elsewhere, and may well be regarded as inconceiv- 
 able. But it is the same throughout the Gospels. 
 Many of onr Lord's most precious sayings are in- 
 separably bound up with His miracles, arise out of 
 them and point their lessons. The two are indis- 
 solubly united : and the Sermon on the Mount is 
 thus itself the best guarantee for the miraculous 
 narratives which immediately follow it. 
 
 But there is a special characteristic about these 
 two chapters which adds further weight to this con- 
 sideration. The record of these miracles appears 
 to be placed in this particular connection by express 
 design; for they are narrated with a marked devia- 
 tion from chronological order. There appears no 
 question, from the narratives of the other evangelists, 
 that the miracles here narrated did not all follow 
 immediately even if any of them did the de- 
 livery of the Sermon on the Mount. St. Matthew 
 would seem to have grouped them together here, 
 with little reference to the order in which they
 
 92 THE MIRACLES 
 
 occurred, for a special purpose ; and it is natural 
 to suppose that this purpose was to illustrate one 
 particular aspect of our Lord's ministry. He had 
 just given a long and comprehensive example of our 
 Lord's teaching, and he immediately proceeds to 
 exhibit a similarly comprehensive illustration of His 
 working. Such, at least, is the effect produced ; and 
 considering that the various incidents in these two 
 chapters are, as has been said, brought together out 
 of their order, we may well suppose that such was 
 the design. In fact, in the twenty-third verse of 
 the fourth chapter, St. Matthew has summarized 
 onr Lord's ministry under these two heads of teach- 
 ing and healing. ' Jesus.' we read, ' went about 
 all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and 
 preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing 
 all manner of sickness and all manner of disease 
 among the people.' Of this teaching St. Matthew 
 proceeds to give us an account in the Sermon on 
 the Mount ; and of these works of healing he next 
 gives an account in the eighth and ninth chapters. 
 At the end of the ninth chapter, in the thirty-fifth 
 verse, this ministry, in its two-fold character, is 
 again summed up in almost the same words. ' Jesus 
 went about all the cities and villages, teaching in 
 their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the 
 kingdom, and healing every sickness and every 
 disease among the people.' Then the evangelist
 
 OF OUR LORD 93 
 
 passes to describe the extension of the same mini- 
 sterial work by the mission of the twelve apostles, 
 and afterwards proceeds to other topics, such as that 
 contest with the Scribes and Pharisees which ended 
 in our Saviour's death. There thus appears a very 
 clear and instructive order in the arrangement of 
 the Gospel ; and the evangelist would seem most 
 carefully to impress upon us what were the two 
 main elements in our Saviour's ministerial work, 
 and their intimate connection with each other. He 
 was at once a Teacher and a Saviour ; in the one 
 character summoning men to repent, because the 
 kingdom of heaven was at hand a kingdom with 
 severer laws, sterner demands, more exalted ideals, 
 than any that had been heard of in this world ; but, 
 on the other hand, revealing Himself as the royal 
 possessor of new and glorious powers, and able to 
 save all who trusted Him from the evils, whether 
 bodily or spiritual, under which they were suffering, 
 and of which His teaching revealed the terrible 
 danger and misery. 
 
 It cannot but be felt that this second manifesta- 
 tion is at once a most gracious and a most neces- 
 sary addition to the former. Our Lord had just 
 been exhibiting a picture of the perfection of 
 human life, spiritually, morally, and even physi- 
 cally. He had described, in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, a character of perfect righteousness, gentle-
 
 94 THE MIRACLES 
 
 ness, purity, truth, mercy, and faith. Take St. 
 Paul's summary of Christian virtues, and you will 
 find it an abridgment of the Sermon on the Mount : 
 ' The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
 temperance.' These graces are enlarged upon by 
 our Lord, and exhibited in contrast to the im- 
 perfections presented by men's actual characters 
 and conduct. But He does not confine His descrip- 
 tion to the spiritual or moral life. He assures His 
 disciples that in proportion as they lived in this 
 spirit of faith, seeking first the kingdom of God 
 and His righteousness, all other things should be 
 added unto them. 'Consider the lilies of the 
 field,' He says, 'how they grow; they toil not, 
 neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you that 
 even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
 one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the 
 grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is 
 cast unto the oven, shall He not much more clothe 
 you, O ye of little faith?' It was this combina- 
 tion of complete soundness or salvation in body and 
 soul, to which the prophets of His people had 
 looked forward, uniting in one glorious vision all 
 spiritual, moral, and physical perfection. The pas- 
 sage which St. Luke tells us He Himself chose from 
 the prophet Isaiah, vividly depicts such a revela- 
 tion ' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
 
 OF OUR LORD 95 
 
 He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the 
 poor ; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, 
 to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery 
 of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are 
 bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 
 'This day,' He said, 'is this Scripture fulfilled in 
 your ears.' But how could it have been fulfilled, 
 unless, in addition to proclaiming anew these pro- 
 mises, in addition to enlightening the consciences 
 and stimulating the moral energies of His people, 
 He had actually exerted that healing and saving 
 power of which He spoke ? 
 
 Would it not, in fact, have seemed, we may 
 almost say, a cruel mockery of human hopes and 
 aspirations, had our Lord been unable to do more 
 than hold up before men more perfect ideals than 
 any they had ever dreamed of, without stretching 
 out His hand of power to enable them to realize 
 such visions? There has been no sadder experi- 
 ence, throughout the history of mankind, than 
 the desperate, if not despairing, efforts of noble 
 spirits to hold up such ideals before themselves 
 and their fellows, and the disappointment caused 
 by the ever-repeated failure to attain them. The 
 spectacle or the experience has, in age after age, 
 turned some passionate souls to cynicism, and h;is 
 tempted the mass of men to acquiescence in low 
 standards, as all they could attain to. But en-
 
 96 THE MIRACLES 
 
 deavonr for a moment to realize what a terrible 
 exhibition of this weakness would have been afforded, 
 if the words of the Gospels had presented to us 
 nothing but the Saviour's exhortations to perfection, 
 and no instances of His power to ensure their fulfil- 
 ment. We should have contemplated, as it were, a 
 glorious and inaccessible height, sensible above all 
 things that it was for ever beyond the reach of 
 ourselves and of our fellows. But at this point the 
 miracles of the Gospels come in, to give, as it were, 
 a reality to all these visions, hopes, and aspirations. 
 We see all the evils and miseries which afflict 
 mankind driven away at the Saviour's word, in re- 
 sponse to the prayer of earnest faith. A leper 
 comes and worships Him, saying, ' Lord, if thou 
 wilt, thou canst make me clean.' And Jesus puts 
 forth His hand and touches him, saying, 'I will, 
 be thou clean;' and immediately his leprosy is 
 cleansed. They bring unto Him many that are 
 possessed with devils, and He casts out the spirits 
 with His word, and heals all that are sick. He 
 speaks the word only, and the centurion's servant is 
 healed. There arises a great tempest in the sea, 
 and His disciples come to Him, saying, 'Lord, save 
 us ; ' and He arises and rebukes the winds and the 
 sea, and there is a great calm. The publicans and 
 sinners, the morally sick, come and sit down with 
 Him, and He receives them as their physician,
 
 OF OUR LORD 97 
 
 summons one of them from the receipt of custom, 
 and transforms him into an Apostle and Evangelist. 
 He heals the blind, and raises the dead, until the 
 multitudes exclaim, ' It was never so seen in Israel.' 
 This is the one harmonious and glorious picture 
 which is presented by our Lord in His combined 
 work of teaching and healing. To arouse in us a 
 longing for all perfection, and by His supernatural 
 might to bestow it upon all faithful hearty these 
 are His two-fold offices, equally characteristic of 
 Him, equally necessary for us. 
 
 We have, in these days more particularly, to 
 beware of allowing this complete image of our 
 Lord to be marred by any tendency to throw His 
 miraculous works in the back-ground, or to draw 
 any veil over them. Our chief privilege, in our 
 weakness, ignorance, and corruption, is to believe 
 that we have this Almighty Saviour ever at our 
 side, and that we can trust Him to protect us, to 
 cleanse us, to deliver us from evil, as really as 
 those among whom He lived when upon earth. 
 The preciousness of these narratives to ourselves 
 depends upon their being an exhibition of the re- 
 lation in which we ourselves stand to the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and in which He stands to us. When 
 we recite the creed, we are not, as is sometimes in- 
 sinuated, asserting mere abstract dogmas respecting 
 the nature of the Godhead, but are renewing and
 
 98 THE MIEACLES 
 
 refreshing the blessed belief that the Lord Jesus, 
 who is here described to us as preaching the Gospel 
 of the Kingdom, and healing every sickness and 
 every disease among the people, is the same yester- 
 day, to-day, and for ever ; that, as God, He is ever 
 with us ; that He sits at the right hand of the 
 Father, commanding, for our sakes, all power in 
 heaven and earth, and by His Spirit ever working 
 among us, to deliver us from our sins and evils. 
 
 But we know too well the objections which are 
 raised against such a belief. Where, it is asked, 
 are the evidences of the Saviour's interpositions in 
 the affairs of ordinary life, in the natural course of 
 physical existence? Miraculous signs, such as those 
 recorded in the Gospels, are no longer exhibited 
 among us, and how are we to believe in a constant 
 personal action which is not open to our perception? 
 Now, the first and most direct reply to such ob- 
 jections was anticipated by the Centurion, whose 
 signal display of faith is recorded in the text 
 as having aroused our Lord's admiration. He 
 realized, from his experience of the methods of 
 action in human affairs, that there was no occasion, 
 for the purpose of our Lord's intervention, of any 
 extraordinary and conspicuous manifestation. If he, 
 a man under authority, yet had soldiers under him, 
 and could say to this man, Go, and he goeth ; and 
 to another, Come, and he cometh ; and to his servant,
 
 OF OUR LORD 99 
 
 Do this, and he doeth it ; our Lord had but to speak 
 the word to those natural elements of which He 
 was the creator and master, and His will would be 
 surely, though it might be silently, executed. 
 
 But the excellence of the Centurion's faith in this 
 respect deserves a more particular consideration, 
 and it will be more apparent by contrast with two 
 opposite states of mind. The contrast to it which 
 our Lord chiefly encountered was the peculiar dis- 
 position of the Jews, who, except they saw signs 
 and wonders, would not believe. They fully re- 
 cognized the existence of a Divine Power possessing 
 command over all the forces of nature ; but they 
 would not believe in our Lord's ability to exert it, 
 or in His readiness to aid them, unless it were 
 manifested by some signal and extraordinary means. 
 But there is another state of mind, akin to this in 
 reality, and yet contrasted with it, which is preva- 
 lent at the present day. The form of unbelief 
 which we have to encounter and to encounter in 
 ourselves, no doubt, as well as in others is not one 
 which craves for startling and overpowering in- 
 stances of divine interposition, but one which doubts 
 the reality of personal interposition at all, on the 
 part of God, in the course of nature and in human 
 life. To the Jews that interposition had, so to say, 
 become so common and familiar an idea that they 
 thought nothing of it, and scarcely regarded it as 
 
 H 2
 
 100 THE MIEACLES 
 
 specially concerning them, unless it were exhibited 
 in some exceptional form. To many among our- 
 selves, on the other hand, the idea has become so 
 unfamiliar that we find a difficulty in applying it to 
 every-day life ; and because we see no signs and 
 wonders, we, too, do not believe. Starting in the 
 opposite direction, we have come round to the same 
 point as the Jews. Modern thought is absorbed 
 and fascinated by the contemplation of the order of 
 nature and the constancy of its methods. Fixing its 
 attention, almost exclusively, on the impersonal 
 part of nature, it fails to penetrate to the persona- 
 lity behind ; and thus even, it is to be feared, to 
 many true Christian hearts the intense conviction 
 expressed in the Psalms of the living God being 
 present with us, and directly acting upon us in 
 every moment of our existence, controlling for us 
 every circumstance of our lives, and ordering all 
 that concerns ourselves and others, and the course 
 of the world at large, in accordance with His will, 
 with His approval and disapproval, and with His 
 own spiritual purposes this realization of the per- 
 sonal presence and action of the living God in 
 many cases, alas ! absolutely denied and excluded 
 is, it is to be feared, in many others grievously 
 enfeebled. 
 
 Now, that which forms the great and abiding 
 wonder of the faith of the Centurion is that, by one
 
 OF OUR LORD 101 
 
 simple observation, he supplies the conclusive and 
 permanent answer to all these doubts and denials. 
 As Luther puts it, with his usual vividness, ' This 
 heathen soldier turns theologian, and begins to dis- 
 pute in as fine and Christian-like a manner as 
 would suffice for a man who had been many years 
 Doctor of Divinity.' He cuts the knot at once, by 
 that bold reasoning by analogy from man to God, 
 of which our Lord's teaching is so full, and which is 
 involved in the cardinal doctrines of the Gospel, 
 such as the Divine Fatherhood and the forgiveness 
 of sins. He says, simply, that the kind of action 
 which men exhibit must be possible for God. It is 
 impossible for Him to be more restricted in His 
 action than His creatures ; and if they are able, by 
 subordinate agencies, to carry out their will, and to 
 modify, by the interposition of that will, what would 
 otherwise be the natural course of events, it is in- 
 conceivable that it should be impossible for Him to 
 do the same. 
 
 The force of this argument should be vastly 
 enhanced to us by that development of science 
 and civilization which has been produced since 
 the Centurion's time, and which is sometimes un- 
 gratefully used to obscure its truth. Let us 
 realize how, in the present day, a single human 
 will, at the centre of a great nation, or, rather, of a 
 great empire like this, can make itself obeyed to
 
 102 THE MIKACLES 
 
 the very extremities of the world, by means of a 
 subtle electrical current, scarcely perceptible to the 
 touch, and during a great part of its course buried 
 in obscurity under vast oceans; and with what 
 reason can it be denied that the Creator of all these 
 subtle forces, in whose hands they all lie, can 
 silently modify, by an act of His will, the course of 
 any event in His universe, and that He can say to 
 His servants, as we to ours, Do this, and it is done ? 
 When we, with our utterly imperfect knowledge, 
 can so modify the action of natural forces as to 
 neutralize a disease by a little counter poison, or 
 revivify the nervous forces of life by galvanic cur- 
 rents, must it not seem the height of all unreason to 
 deny an infinitely superior, and at the same time, 
 infinitely more mysterious and invisible capacity, to 
 Him who created at once these forces, and the 
 human brain which makes use of them? The 
 simple principle, in a word, to which the Centurion 
 appeals may be stated in our more scientific way, by 
 saying that whatever forces there are in nature, 
 must reside within the maker of nature, only in an 
 infinitely enhanced degree ; and the point on 
 which it is more especially necessary to insist in 
 applying this principle, is that which the Centurion 
 grasped namely, that the powers of man, of man's 
 intellect and will, must, above all things, be re- 
 garded as an example of one form of the divine
 
 OF OUR LORD 103 
 
 action. The kind of things which man can do, God 
 can certainly do ; and if modern men of science can 
 modify the operation of nature by methods which, 
 to men not so scientific, would be incomprehensible, 
 and even invisible, certainly God can modify nature 
 and control it by means which, even to men of 
 science, are similarly incomprehensible and invisible. 
 There seems, in fact, to lurk an extraordinary 
 sophism in the offence which is taken at so-called 
 anthropomorphism. Men observe the operation of 
 the inanimate forces of nature, and deduce from 
 them the methods of God's operation. There, they 
 will say, you observe the course of His action ; and 
 you notice its absolute regularity, and the absence 
 of any indication that we can detect of its distur- 
 bance by persona] action and will. But the moment 
 the moralist, or the theologian, points to another 
 sphere of nature that of human nature, which is 
 nature still and argues from it in a similar man- 
 ner, regarding it as a revelation of part, at all 
 events, of God's method of action, we are denounced 
 as anthropomorphic. Be it so. But what is the 
 scientific conception but if I may be allowed to 
 coin the word physico-morphisni ? They see the 
 likeness and reflection of God in nature ; we see the 
 image and reflection of God in man ; and why not 
 the one as well as the other? The corruption of 
 our moral nature creates, indeed, a gulf between us
 
 104 THE MIRACLES 
 
 and Him. But considered from the point of view 
 of a physical philosopher, man is not only a part of 
 nature, but the highest and most completely de- 
 veloped part. By all means let us learn all that 
 natural philosophers can tell us of the Divine 
 nature, and methods, and power, from the inanimate 
 and irrational creation ; but let them not refuse to 
 take into account what we can tell them, or rather 
 what their own hearts can tell them, respecting 
 God's nature, His power and the method of His 
 action, as exhibited in the mind and will of man. 
 You discern in nature an order which, in some sense, 
 is immutable ; and if you admit a Divine mind at 
 all, you attribute a similar order, and a similar 
 immutability, to that mind. Then let us argue in 
 the same way from our own nature ; and if we see 
 the very noblest expressions of human nature in 
 our love, our hatred, our wrath, our mercy, our re- 
 pentance, our forgiveness, let us acknowledge, on the 
 same principle, that these also are a reflex, however 
 faint, of Divine perfections, and let us not shrink from 
 recognizing, in the language of the Scriptures, that 
 the Creator of those emotions loves and hates, and 
 is wrathful and merciful, and repents and forgives. 
 And if we hold in our hands a vast complexity of 
 agencies, human, animal, physical, chemical, which 
 come as we bid them come, and go as we bid them 
 go, in accordance, not with any immutable order of
 
 OF OUR LORD 105 
 
 external nature, but in obedience to our intel- 
 lectual designs and moral intentions, to fulfil our 
 love or our enmity, our justice or our mercy, with 
 what reason can we doubt that He too but with a 
 completeness, an invisibleness, a continuousness, a 
 supremacy, of which we have no conception is 
 controlling every physical element, and every cir- 
 cumstance which surrounds us ? Argue from nature 
 exclusive of man, and you may acquiesce in the 
 hard mechanical views which alone it suggests to 
 you. Argue from nature with man, and man's 
 actions, and man's will, included within it, and you 
 will agree with Luther that the Centurion was a 
 great Doctor of Divinity. 
 
 In short, any objections against the daily moral 
 interposition of a Divine will in the course of nature, 
 on the ground of the immutability of physical laws 
 and of their action, is equally, as is now candidly 
 confessed, an argument against the independent 
 personal action of a human will. Man's body, in 
 all its functions, is a part of the whole sum of nature. 
 It enters the sphere in which all the laws of physical 
 nature work. It is subject to the law of the con- 
 servation of force, and to every other physical con- 
 sideration by which personal divine will is supposed 
 to be excluded. And yet, in spite of this, and side 
 by side with it, we are all acting on each other by 
 moral forces ; our physical actions are prompted by
 
 106 THE MIRACLES 
 
 moral motives, by intellectual designs, by deter- 
 minations of will. But this, it is sometimes replied, 
 is an illusion. You seem to have a free will ; but 
 you have not ; you are a link in the chain of causa- 
 tion, and your apparent morality is a physical pro- 
 duct. For the purposes of such an argument as 
 the present, this is a mere dispute about words. 
 Let your will, your love, your intellect, be what you 
 please. All the theologian is concerned to main- 
 tain is that the Divine will, the Divine love, the 
 Divine wisdom, can act and does act, in a similar 
 manner ; and that if we say to one subordinate 
 agent, from moral motives, and for moral purposes, 
 Go, and it goeth, and to another, Come, and it 
 cometh, and to our servants, Do this, and they do 
 it, our Creator, the source and eternal strength of 
 all these powers, is perpetually employing in a 
 similar manner, and for similar motives albeit 
 with an exaltation of their character far beyond our 
 conceptions the innumerable agencies which are 
 under His command. 
 
 It follows from considerations such as these that 
 it is not necessary for us to see conspicuous instances 
 of supernatural operations around us, in order to be 
 assured that, in the words of our office for the visi- 
 tation of the sick, ' Almighty God is the Lord of 
 life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, 
 as youth, strength, health, age, weakness, and sick-
 
 OP OUR LORD 107 
 
 ness;' so that whatever may befall us, the one 
 thing we may ' know certainly ' is, that 'it is 
 God's visitation.' But still, some one may repeat, 
 we do not see it ; we discern no traces of this 
 personal action by the unseen God. And because 
 we do not see it we, with our limited perceptions ; 
 we, who are conscious that we are but on the thresh- 
 old of the mysteries of nature ; we, who cannot 
 so much as foresee a snow-storm the day before it 
 arrives are we to conclude from this incapacity 
 of vision to a limitation of the action of Him, ' who 
 giveth snow like wool, who scattereth the hoar 
 frost like ashes ; who casteth forth His ice like 
 morsels ; who can stand before His cold ? who 
 sendeth out His word and melteth them? who 
 causeth His wind to blow and the waters flow ? ' 
 We may, as a rule, not see it. That divine inter- 
 position is mysterious, and often impenetrable. 
 But this, at least, must be said on this point there 
 are some things apparent to those who have eyes 
 to see and hearts to understand, which will not 
 force themselves upon the attention of those who 
 are indifferent to them, or prejudiced against them ; 
 and in this matter, similarly, the faithful Christian 
 has eyes to see things which are often obscure to 
 those who are destitute of his faith ; and they are 
 none the less realities because others cannot perceive 
 them. To many a faithful and thoughtful heart
 
 108 THE MIRACLES 
 
 the experience of life is a strong confirmation of 
 the assurance that the Saviour has been at its side, 
 shielding it in many a critical moment of life from 
 the dangers with which it was threatened, ensuring 
 that it should not be tempted above that which it 
 was able to bear, and with every temptation making 
 a way of escape. In many moments of serious and 
 humble reflection on the past, the reality of such 
 interpositions will come home to the soul. We 
 recognize we feel forced with profound gratitude 
 to recognize glimpses of the Divine hand, shield- 
 ing us by a touch, which was at the time imper- 
 ceptible, from some terrible moral or physical 
 calamity. Keverent and faithful souls, who walk 
 through the world with the consciousness that the 
 Saviour is at their side, are often vouchsafed, as the 
 Scriptures and the records of the Church bear 
 witness, such apprehensions of His presence, and 
 learn more and more to look up to Him with the 
 trust of experience, as well as of faith. Such ex- 
 periences may not be arguments for convincing 
 unbelievers, though they are certainly facts which 
 have a claim to be taken into account. But they 
 are, at least, strong encouragements and assurances 
 to the faithful ; and perhaps we ought to ask our- 
 selves whether, especially in times like the present, 
 we are not called upon to divest ourselves, more 
 frequently than we are wont, of the reserve or is
 
 OF OUK LORD 109 
 
 it the timidity which clings to us, and to join more 
 openly, and more boldly, in the language of the 
 Psalmist, ' bless our God, ye people, and make 
 the voice of His praise to be heard ; which holdeth 
 our soul in life, and suffereth not our feet to be 
 moved. . . . Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and 
 I will declare what He hath done for my soul. 
 Verily, God hath heard me ; He hath attended to 
 the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, who hath 
 not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me.' 
 But there remains another observation, more open 
 to ordinary criticism, with which it is important to 
 conclude any consideration of this subject, and which 
 is naturally suggested by a review of this portion of 
 St. Matthew's Gospel. This is, that we observe clear 
 indications, alike in the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 in the records of the miracles themselves, that the 
 natural order of the Saviour's working is not so much 
 directly upon the bodies of men and their physical 
 circumstances, as upon their spirits, and that His 
 physical miracles were designed to lead their 
 thoughts to His spiritual power, and thus to ensure 
 the regeneration of their lower nature by means of 
 their higher. Our Lord expressly points to this use 
 of His miracles in the case of His cure of the sick of 
 the palsy, which is recorded in the midst of this col- 
 lection of His works of power, at the commencement 
 of St. Matthew's ninth chapter. ' He said unto the
 
 110 THE MIRACLES 
 
 sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins 
 be forgiven thee ; ' and when ' certain of the Scribes 
 said within themselves, This man blasphemeth,' 
 Jesus, ' knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore 
 think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is 
 easier ; to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee ; or to say, 
 Arise and walk ? But that ye may know that the 
 Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then 
 saith He to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy 
 bed, and go unto thine house.' The ultimate pur- 
 pose of that miracle, therefore, was to lead those 
 before whom it was wrought to look to the same gra- 
 cious hand for the invisible, but still supernatural, 
 grace of spiritual forgiveness and moral regeneration. 
 He who could command a physical miracle, and 
 prove His power by instantly effecting it, might be 
 appealed to with confidence for the still higher 
 miracles of the spiritual sphere. 
 
 But in thus pointing men above the physical to 
 the spiritual, our Lord, as has just been observed, is 
 acting in full harmony with His teaching in the 
 Sermon on the Mount. It is through righteousness 
 that He teaches His disciples to seek for the blessings 
 of this life. ' Take,' He says, ' no thought, saying, 
 What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, 
 Wherewithal shall we be clothed ? (For after all 
 these things do the Gentiles seek :) for your heavenly 
 Father knoweth that ye have need of all these
 
 OF OUR LORD 111 
 
 things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and 
 His righteousness; and all these things shall be 
 added unto you.' This exhortation may be applied 
 with eminent instruction to the subsequent exercise 
 of our Lord's saving power, first in His ministry, 
 and afterwards in the history of His Church. His 
 miracles, here recorded, were wrought during the 
 darkest hours of human nature, at the time of its 
 deepest despair, to awaken men's faith, and to lead 
 them to trust Him for deliverance. But it was in 
 strict conformity with the constitution of their nature, 
 and with His highest designs for their good, that 
 this saving work should for the most part be directed 
 to their spiritual deliverance ; and that He should, 
 as it were, lead them to work out their physical eal- 
 vation by means of their moral. It is by moral evil 
 that physical evil has been brought upon us ; and 
 could we be delivered from moral evil, we should be 
 saved from physical. 
 
 It is contrary, in fact, to all the analogy of God's 
 dealings, in nature and in grace alike, to excuse 
 us from the due exercise, to the utmost of our 
 powers, of our natural faculties. During His stay 
 on earth, He took us, as it were, by the hand, 
 and placed us in the right path, and He has 
 since been training us in all the ways of spiritual, 
 moral, intellectual, and physical truth. Undoubtedly 
 the physical condition of mankind has been vastly
 
 112 THE MIRACLES 
 
 ameliorated, and is being daily more and more ame- 
 liorated, by the elevation of their moral nature 
 through the Gospel, and through spiritual grace ; and 
 we may well believe that infinite possibilities in this 
 respect still remain, which God designs us to realize 
 in the exercise, under that spiritual influence, of 
 our natural powers. He would have us exert our- 
 selves in all ways to the utmost, according to His 
 own lesson in one of His miracles, ' Gathering up 
 the fragments that nothing be lost.' But what a 
 supreme blessing to be assured that He is ever with 
 us, to bless and to complete every effort that we 
 can make ! The law laid down by the Apostle 
 applies to our whole career. God will not protect 
 us from all temptatioD, nor deliver us at one stroke 
 from the evils which we have brought upon our- 
 selves. But He is ever near, as with the disciples 
 in the storm, to ensure that we shall not be over- 
 whelmed ; He ' is faithful, and will not suffer us to 
 be tempted above that we are able, but will with 
 the temptation also make a way to escape, that we 
 may be able to bear it.' Under His guidance, and 
 with His aid, a way of deliverance from all evils is 
 ever open to us. If we have failed to realize it, let 
 us ask ourselves how far we have appealed to Him 
 with the faith which is exhibited in those examples 
 of His saving power which St. Matthew here brings 
 before us. The rule of His working has ever been,
 
 OF OUR LORD 113 
 
 ' As thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.' All 
 things all things necessary for our spiritual health, 
 and for our physical welfare also, so far as the latter 
 is compatible with the former are still, as ever, pos- 
 sible to him that believeth ; and let us pray, at the 
 conclusion of such meditations, ' Lord, I believe, 
 help thou mine unbelief.'
 
 THE PASSION AND DEATH OF OUK 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. 
 
 THE history of our Saviour's Passion is a subject 
 which must be approached at any time with feelings 
 of deep apprehension ; and we must above all things 
 feel reluctant to bring its sacred and solemn asso- 
 ciations into connexion with discussions which have 
 anything of a controversial nature. At the same 
 time it would be impracticable to form a just view 
 of the general character of the Gospel narratives 
 without considering that history, were it only in 
 consequence of the large space in them which it 
 occupies. On an average, the narrative of the 
 Passion occupies not less than one-tenth of the 
 four Gospels, while of the rest of St. John's Gospel, 
 a great portion may be said to lead up to it. The 
 character, therefore, of the evangelical narratives
 
 THE PASSION AND DEATH OF OUR LORD 115 
 
 on this subject must go very far to determine their 
 general credibility, and must afford no inadequate 
 measure of the power with which they have appre- 
 hended and presented to us the essential elements 
 of our Lord's life and work. 
 
 Now it is very remarkable, from this point of 
 view, that there is practically no difference of 
 opinion as to the credibility, in all substantial 
 points, of this momentous portion of the story of 
 the Gospels. Thus Dr. Hase, already referred to 
 as one of the most distinguished and venerable of 
 the theologians of Germany, and sufficiently ration- 
 alistic to hold very sceptical conclusions as to our 
 Lord's Kesurrection and Ascension, says that in 
 respect of this period of our Lord's life, all four 
 Gospels go side by side with each other, and 
 exhibit in their variations only the various sides and 
 conceptions of the same occurrence ; and that up to 
 the hour of our Lord's death, all is narrated with 
 the particularity with which men are wont to pre- 
 serve the memory of the last moments of a beloved 
 and great man.* This result is the more remarkable 
 because there are some real difficulties in point of 
 chronological harmony in this part of the narrative, 
 as, for instance, with respect to the evening on 
 which the Lord's Supper was instituted. But it is 
 
 * Geschichte Jesu, 92, p. 525; Leipzig, 1876. 
 
 I 2
 
 116 . THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 felt that the narrative in each Gospel bears the 
 most unmistakeable marks of truth, and that no 
 such difficulties of detail, which are probably only 
 due to our own ignorance of some reconciling facts, 
 can affect their authority. 
 
 In fact, by a sort of unconscious agreement, how- 
 ever men may dispute the truth of other parts of 
 the Gospels, they tacitly assume the truth of the 
 story of the Passion; and among unbelievers, no 
 less than believers, Jesus Christ is regarded as 
 having suffered the martyrdom which the evangelists 
 describe, and as having suffered it for the reasons 
 which they allege. It would seem there is some- 
 thing in the intense reality of the narrative which 
 compels belief, and makes men feel instinctively 
 that the narrators are telling the simple and terrible 
 truth. The perfect simplicity of the narration, and 
 yet its revelation of depths of sorrow and suffering, 
 and at the same time of the loftiest truth and 
 majesty, in our Lord all this is felt, and is practi- 
 cally confessed, to be beyond the power of any 
 invention. The absence of a single false note, of a 
 word or a comment, inconsistent with the awful 
 character of the scene, compels men to acknowledge 
 that they are in the presence of absolute realities. 
 
 There is one other mark of complete sincerity 
 and truthfulness in the narration which deserves 
 particular attention, and which has been forcibly
 
 OF OUR LORD 117 
 
 dwelt upon by the eminent French preacher, M. 
 Bersier, in his great sermon on the testimony of 
 the Apostles.* These narratives, as we have seen, 
 are written by Apostles, or by friends of Apostles, 
 and the writers do not shrink from describing their 
 own conduct, or that of their masters, as of a 
 character which nothing but an absolute submission 
 to truth could have induced them to confess. They 
 frankly acknowledge, as M. Bersier observes, 'that 
 at the supreme hour of their Master's fate, they 
 trembled like children and cowards. ' They confess 
 that when their Master, who had never ceased to 
 love them, and to bless them with a divine tender- 
 ness, had been betrayed by one of themselves, and 
 led before His judges, they all forsook him and 
 fled ; and that the very one of them who had sworn 
 to remain faithful to Him, denied Him three times 
 at the challenge of a servant-maid. Without taking 
 any notice of the scandal and disgrace of such a 
 story, they relate it in full detail, without omitting 
 a word. They were about to proclaim to the world 
 the cross of Jesus Christ, and to point men to 
 it as the means of salvation; and yet they dare 
 to acknowledge that, at the hour when that c 
 was erected, they deserted it like cowards, leaving 
 to weak women the honour of attending their 
 
 * Sermons, par E. Bersier ; Tomevi., LeTtmoignagedes Aj 
 pp. 50-53.
 
 118 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 Master in His agony, leaving to a robber tbe 
 honour of being the first to announce the eternal 
 royalty of the Crucified, just as three days after- 
 wards Mary Magdalen was allowed the honour of 
 b j ing the first to proclaim the triumph of the risen 
 Christ.' If there is something amazing in the 
 rigid truthfulness which confessed all these lament- 
 able facts, it establishes for the narrators a claim 
 for the most ample trust when recording events of a 
 more welcome character. 
 
 Indeed, apart from the evidence of sincerity 
 afforded by these confessions of the Apostles re- 
 specting themselves, it is sufficiently remarkable 
 that they should have preserved with' such fulness 
 the story of their Master's humiliation. Christ 
 crucified was, we are told by St. Paul, * unto the Jews 
 a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.' 
 It was a constant reproach to Christians that they 
 worshipped a man who had been crucified as a 
 malefactor. The main fact, of course, could not be 
 disguised. But that the evangelical writers should 
 have so diligently preserved what might otherwise 
 have been forgotten all the minute circumstances 
 of their Master's humiliation, the very weakness of 
 His flesh, and His shrinking, in the garden, from 
 the cup He had to drink, all those marks, in fact, 
 of His human weakness which were obliterated by 
 His resurrection this is an instance of truthfulness
 
 OF OUR LORD 119 
 
 \vbicli seems at least incompatible with any legen- 
 dary origin of the narratives, at a time when our 
 Lord was contemplated in the glory of His ascen- 
 sion, and of His session at the right hand of God. 
 But whatever impression of truthfulness, and of 
 intense reality in detail, is thus created by the 
 history of the Passion, must in justice be allowed 
 to reflect back over the whole preceding history. 
 To accept, as many persons seem unconsciously to do, 
 the story of Christ's Passion, forming so considerable 
 and important a part of the whole Gospel, as pro- 
 foundly true, and yet to deal with the remainder as 
 open to the most unsparing suspicion, is not, it would 
 seem, a proceeding that can be reasonably justified. 
 The story of our Lord's death has established a claim 
 to be accepted as a truthful record of the most solemn 
 event in the world's history ; and the four witnesses 
 by whom that story is told, and who are fully 
 agreed together respecting it, have for that reason 
 a claim to be regarded as at least among the most 
 trustworthy witnesses to any other historical facts 
 they may relate. 
 
 We may be spared, therefore, for our present 
 purpose, the ungracious task of critical discussions 
 on this topic, and may address ourselves to more 
 vital considerations. It has been the purpose of 
 these Lectures, not merely to vindicate the historic 
 credibility of the Gospel narratives, but to illustrate
 
 120 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 the spiritual and moral significance of the leading 
 facts which they record; and in no part of our 
 subject are such considerations so urgently incum- 
 bent upon us. As is indicated by the space which 
 the narrative holds in the Gospels, the whole 
 mystery of our Lord's life and work centres around 
 His Passion. To this, in fact, the history in the 
 Gospels points from their commencement. Our 
 Lord's forerunner pointed to Him at the outset as 
 ' The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of 
 the world,' that is to say, the sacrificial victim who 
 should suffer for that sin, and by whose death 
 it should be done away. Similarly, He Himself, at 
 the commencement of His ministry, in His interview 
 with Nicodemus, proclaimed this as the essential 
 part of His mission. ' As Moses lifted up the 
 serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of 
 Man be lifted up : that whosoever believeth in Him 
 should not perish, but have everlasting life.' At a 
 later date, in the transfiguration, when He was for a 
 moment revealed to His disciples in glory, the two 
 great prophets who appeared communing with Him 
 'spake of His decease which He should accom- 
 plish at Jerusalem.' The whole of His ministry, 
 in a word, led up to that death, and was consum- 
 mated in it. Accordingly, St. Paul's account of 
 His message to the Corinthians is an exact summary 
 of the most important part of the Gospel narrative
 
 OF OUR LORD 121 
 
 ' I delivered unto you first of all that which I also 
 received, how that Christ died for our sins according 
 to the Scriptures ; and that He was buried, and that 
 He rose again the third day according to the Scrip- 
 tures.' The Creed, in passing so swiftly from His 
 birth to His death, is thus in complete harmony 
 with His own teaching respecting His ministerial 
 work. 
 
 This consideration has a decisive bearing upon 
 the attempts which have been frequently made, 
 especially of late years, to exhibit our Lord solely 
 as a preacher of righteousness, alike by word and 
 by example, and to represent as alien from His 
 teaching the prominence which is given in the 
 Epistles, particularly in those of St. Paul, to the 
 doctrine, or rather to the fact, of the Atonement. 
 But there is one circumstance singularly independent 
 of any critical debates, and resting on the plainest 
 historical evidence, which is more than sufficient to 
 refute such misconceptions. That circumstance is 
 the institution of the Lord's Supper. Alike from 
 the Evangelists and from St. Paul, we learn that 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, in the same night in which 
 He was betrayed, instituted that sacrament in re- 
 membrance of Himself. It was to be, as it has 
 been, the central memorial of the Saviour and of His 
 work for us through all the ages of the Christian 
 church. Instituted at that solemn moment, and
 
 122 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 for this supreme object, it cannot but be regarded 
 as commemorating that peculiar aspect of our 
 Lord's work which was paramount in its importance, 
 and which it was above all things necessary that 
 we should ever bear in mind. And what is this ? 
 Not His teaching, not His example, not His 
 miracles, nay, not even His resurrection, but His 
 death as a sacrifice for sin. In the account of the 
 three Evangelists and of St. Paul of the words He 
 used, there are the slight variations of form which 
 frequently mark their reports, and which, in com- 
 bination with their substantial agreement, afford 
 such strong evidence of their independence and 
 truthfulness. But this central conception is men- 
 tioned in all of them. St. Matthew and St. Mark, 
 for instance, do not mention that when our Lord 
 broke and distributed the bread He said that He 
 was about to die for others ; but they both tell us 
 that when He took the cup He said, ' This is my 
 blood of the New Testament, which is shed for 
 many.' St. Paul, on the other hand, does not men- 
 tion that when our Lord took the cup He said His 
 blood was to be shed for others, but he tells us that 
 when our Lord took the bread He said, 'This is 
 my body, which is broken for you.' St. Luke 
 combines the two accounts, by stating that our 
 Lord declared His death to be a death for others, 
 both when He broke the bread and when He gave
 
 OF OUR LORD 123 
 
 the wine. ' He took bread and gave thanks, and 
 brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my 
 body, which is given for you ; this do in remem- 
 brance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, 
 saying, This cup is the New Testament in my blood, 
 which is shed for you.' There could not possibly 
 have been a more solemn declaration on our Lord's 
 part that the fact of His having died for our sins, 
 and to procure their remission, was the one grand 
 truth respecting Himself which He desired to be 
 ever present and ever prominent in the thoughts of 
 His people. 
 
 Now, in approaching this subject, we shall do 
 best to endeavour, in the first place, to realize 
 simply the historic significance of the fact of our 
 Lord's Passion. The difficulties which have been 
 felt of late years in apprehending the truth of the 
 Atonement appear to be in great measure connected 
 with a feeling that there is something arbitrary and 
 artificial in the circumstances and conditions with 
 which it is associated. Probably some partial 
 expositions of the doctrine which, as a natural 
 consequence of our imperfections, have been from 
 time to time put forward as though they were a 
 complete account of it, are in great measure respon- 
 sible for these misapprehensions. It is no wonder, 
 indeed, if in their efforts efforts which they were 
 bound to make to apprehend the profoundest of all
 
 121 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 the truths respecting human nature and its relation 
 to God, men have fallen short of the mighty reality, 
 and have been induced to take refuge in systems to 
 some extent of their own construction, and therefore 
 more within their compass. There is, to say the 
 least, great peril in all such attempts. But if, 
 without presuming to attempt any theory on the 
 subject, we concentrate our attention on the plain 
 and terrible realities of the history, and on the 
 revelation which its facts afford us of God and of 
 Man, we may be able to lay hold of some of the 
 great truths it exhibits, with at least sufficient 
 clearness for the main purposes of our spiritual life. 
 Let us observe, then, in the first place, the 
 momentous import of the history of the Passion, as 
 exhibiting historically, and as a matter of fact, the 
 condition of human nature at the time, and our 
 Lord's relation to it. Those events cannot but be 
 regarded, from almost any point of view, as affording 
 the most fearful exhibition conceivable of the capa- 
 cities of human nature for evil. I say from almost 
 any point of view, because the main fact in the case 
 is all but universally admitted. That fact is the 
 perfection, the supreme truth, goodness, and beauty, 
 of our Lord's life and teaching. Even those who do 
 not regard Him as divine rarely admit any excep- 
 tion to His paramount claims in this respect. A 
 few audacious critics have, perhaps, ventured to
 
 OP OUR LORD 125 
 
 challenge some of His utterances as too enthusiastic 
 for the practical necessities of life; but no such 
 criticisms command any general attention. He now 
 receives the general homage of the civilized world, 
 as the ideal of moral and spiritual excellence. But 
 nevertheless, and notwithstanding a beneficent public 
 ministry of about three years, He was encountered 
 with the most intense hatred, and was at length 
 loaded with every kind of insult, and ignominiously 
 and cruelly put to death. That human nature was 
 capable of such conduct as this had, indeed, been 
 foreseen by the profoundest philosopher of antiquity, 
 in one of whose dialogues a comparison is drawn 
 between the fate of the perfectly just, and of the 
 perfectly unjust, man.* Plato there maintains that 
 while the perfectly unjust man would enjoy every 
 worldly honour, the just man ' will be scourged, 
 racked, bound, have his eyes put out, and will at last 
 be crucified. 1 There are few, however, who would 
 have regarded such a terrible suggestion as more 
 than a philosophical dream, unless it had been 
 actually verified in experience ; and now that it has 
 been so verified, in the fearful realities of our Lord's 
 Passion, it must ever remain the most amazing fact 
 in the history of mankind. The simplest evidence 
 that such a result is contrary to all natural antici- 
 
 * Plato's Republic, pp. 360-362. See Professor Jowett's 
 translation, vol. ii. p. 18.
 
 126 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 pations, is that we are perpetually judging of men 
 and things by a rule which implies the contrary. 
 Unconsciously, and by a kind of instinct, we attach 
 great weight to the reputation which a man holds 
 in common opinion, and in the judgment of his 
 contemporaries ; we hesitate to set ourselves against 
 such a judgment, and are extremely reluctant to 
 believe that large bodies of men can be united in de- 
 testation of truth, goodness, and beauty of character. 
 Yet this, beyond all question, is what occurred in 
 the case of our Lord. 
 
 The difficulty, it must be observed, cannot be 
 escaped by throwing the whole blame upon the 
 Jewish rulers, by whom the opposition to our Lord 
 was organized. Their offence indeed was probably 
 the deepest, with the exception of that of the false 
 Apostle ; for they were animated by motives of the 
 most deliberate selfishness and calculating hypocrisy. 
 This of itself would have seemed antecedently in- 
 credible. That a body of men who vere occupied 
 day by day, and hour by hour, with the most sacred 
 functions and the holiest words, should all but 
 unanimously conspire in a malignant and mur- 
 derous plot against a person of perfect holiness 
 and goodness this is of itself astounding. But the 
 Scribes and Pharisees were not alone. Though the 
 common people had at other times heard our Lord 
 gladly, they, too, deserted and repudiated Him at
 
 OF OUR LOED 127 
 
 the last, and became the ready instruments of 
 Pharisaic hatred. ' Then answered all the people, 
 and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.' 
 Nor is there any sign that this horrible impulse was 
 repented of until the preaching of St. Peter, on the 
 day of Pentecost, brought home to some of his 
 hearers the enormity of the crime they had com- 
 mitted. Immediately after the crucifixion, we find 
 the disciples meeting in secrecy, and apparently 
 dreading a fate like that of their Master. Had it 
 not been for the resurrection, the descent of the 
 Holy Ghost and the preaching which followed it, 
 there is nothing to show that any reaction against 
 the crime would have arisen, even among the few 
 thousands whose consciences St. Peter touched. The 
 one absolutely perfect being who has ever appeared 
 in the world would thus have been cast out of it 
 ignominiously, by the practically unanimous consent 
 of priests and religious leaders and rulers and 
 people ; and a mere handful of timid followers would 
 alone have shown towards Him any real allegiance, 
 and even that a wavering one. Among the evidences 
 of our Lord's Divine prescience, none perhaps is so 
 striking and conclusive as that in His parables, and 
 in His private discourses with His disciples, these 
 amazing results should have been calmly, systema- 
 tically, and minutely predicted. 
 
 Now there can be no reason whatever for re-
 
 128 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 garding the people who were guilty of this crime as 
 in any way unworthy representatives of human 
 nature in general. On the contrary, the Jews, in 
 addition to their splendid natural endowments, 
 had enjoyed a higher moral and spiritual training 
 than any other people of that day. For centuries 
 the Jewish teachers and people had had in their 
 hands, as the food of their daily meditation, words 
 which remain to this day the most powerful of all 
 expositions of the essential principles of truth and 
 righteousness. That which was possible for them is 
 possible, and even probable, in the case of all men 
 in like circumstances. The story of the Passion, 
 therefore, must needs be regarded as casting its 
 lurid and terrible light upon the condition and the 
 dangers of all men by nature. The consideration is 
 one, perhaps, which needs especial meditation at the 
 present day. One of the most characteristic and 
 popular tendencies of our time is that which prompts 
 us to place confidence in the natural impulses of 
 mankind, or, as the phrase runs, of humanity, and 
 to believe in the continuous progress of society. 
 Now the Christian, above all men, has a right, 
 subject to some grave qualifications, to view with 
 hope the course of history and of human develop- 
 ment, because he believes that a Divine hand is 
 guiding it, and that a Divine Spirit is present to 
 convince men, more and more, ' of sin, of righteous-
 
 OF OUR LORD 129 
 
 ness and of judgment.' But the amazing facts now 
 in question seem to show that, apart from that 
 guidance, there is no justification for such confi- 
 dence in the natural instincts of mankind, and no 
 such hope in humanity itself. The matter has been 
 put to the test of experiment, and the result was the 
 commission of the greatest crime the world has ever 
 seen. Perfect truth and righteousness were brought 
 before men, exhibited in flesh and blood, under 
 the most favourable circumstances, and the result 
 uas that human nature rejected them. That is the 
 bare and indisputable fact, and its lesson is uumis- 
 takeable. The surmise of Plato has been established, 
 by this experience, as an unquestionable truth. 
 There was an occasion when Light, absolute Light, 
 came into the world ; but men loved darkness rather 
 than light, and did their utmost to extinguish the 
 illumination, or, as in the example of Pilate, were 
 indifferent to its extinction. 
 
 The cross must thus be regarded as an exhibition 
 of human nature of the nature which we all share 
 on the one hand rising up in rebellion against the 
 Incarnation of Truth and Goodness, and on the other 
 exhibiting a complete indifference to truth and 
 justice as compared with the gratification of selfish 
 comfort and with ease in this world. It was the 
 malice of the Jew on the one side, and the indiili-r- 
 ence and levity of the Gentile on the other, by 
 
 K
 
 130 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 which our Lord was brought to the Cross. That 
 Cross thus stands for ever, through all time and 
 eternity, the witness to the true nature and conse- 
 quence of sin not by any arbitrary estimate, but 
 by the invincible and indisputable evidence of 
 actual experience. To this it was that man actually 
 did come under the reign of nature, and law and 
 philosophy. All the circumstances of ignominy, 
 insult, and cruelty, which were heaped upon our 
 blessed Lord, recoil in shame upon human nature, 
 and are the standing condemnation of all our evil. 
 To spurn everything that is good and true and pure, 
 to insult and to murder the oue man who embodied 
 in Himself this truth and purity this was shown 
 by experience to be the natural working out of 
 human evil, even under the guidance of a divinely 
 instituted law, and under the authority of a repre- 
 sentative of the highest pagan civilization. 
 
 But now let us pass on to enquire what must, by 
 the nature of the case, be the attitude of God, not 
 merely towards the particular crime then committed, 
 but towards the moral evil of which it was the 
 natural development ? Could it be other than that 
 of which the Scriptures speak, an attitude of hos- 
 tility and of wrath, in the absence of some satisfac- 
 tion for violations of His laws, of so heinous and 
 deadly a character? It is certainly very strange 
 that in these days there should be such hesitation ,
 
 OF OUK LORD 131 
 
 as there often is, in admitting this necessity. In 
 the present day we have been taught more and more 
 the inflexible and stern character of natural laws, 
 when not interfered with, as at the time of the 
 Gospel, by supernatural agency. We have come to 
 understand that we are surrounded on all sides by a 
 mass of physical laws which, in the ordinary course 
 of things, exact payment, as it were, for every 
 offence against them, to the uttermost farthing. 
 They take no account of excuses on the ground of 
 ignorance or even of good intentions. They avenge 
 themselves, regardless of persons, of circumstances, 
 and of consequences, upon all who violate or even 
 neglect them. Nor is this true only of the laws of 
 physical nature. We apprehend more and more 
 that it is also true of social laws. The laws of poli- 
 tical economy, the principles which govern trade 
 and commerce, have their unbending operation. 
 This unbending and irresistible character of law is 
 one of the deepest convictions of our time; it i< 
 impressed on us more and more every day by every 
 fresh discovery, and it has doubtless enlarged and 
 elevated, in some important respects, our conception 
 of the Divine nature and attributes. But is it tn 1" 
 supposed that, while the laws instituted by God to 
 govern the action of inanimate matter are thus 
 immutable and certain, and assert and aVenge them- 
 selves, the laws He has instituted for the government 
 
 K I.'
 
 132 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 of our moral nature are less immutable, and will be 
 maintained by Him with less firmness? May we 
 not apply in this connection our Lord's own illustra- 
 tion, and enquire whether, if He asserts with un- 
 wavering firmness the laws which regulate the 
 growth of the flowers of the field, or cause the death 
 of a sparrow, He will vindicate with less strictness 
 those which He has laid down for the government of 
 human hearts and wills ? Surely, if there be any 
 comparison between the two, the reverse must be the 
 case. In proportion as spiritual and moral interests 
 are greater than those of merely physical nature, in 
 proportion as such awful scenes as those we are con- 
 templating transcend, in their momentous import, 
 any physical manifestations whatever, in that pro- 
 portion must the justice of God be bound to assert 
 the immutability and the operative force of His 
 moral laws, with a solemnity vastly transcending His 
 assertion of physical laws. 
 
 Men sometimes say of other laws, and of their 
 consequences, that they are founded in the nature 
 of things ; but of the moral laws, we feel we have 
 a right to say, without hesitation, that they are 
 founded in the Divine nature itself. Righteous- 
 ness, truth, and purity are manifestations of the 
 essence of the Divine character; they are God's 
 will, not in the sense of being determined by the 
 choice of His wisdom for certain finite and tern-
 
 OF OUR LORD 133 
 
 porary ends, but because they are one with Himself, 
 and are as eternally necessary as He is. The 
 heavens are the work of His fingers, and the phy- 
 sical laws which maintain them in their place are 
 the rules which His wisdom has devised for that 
 special purpose. ' In the beginning He laid the 
 foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the 
 works of His hands ;' but the Psalmist contracts 
 them, in all their apparent stability, with the 
 eternity of God Himself: 'They shall perish, but 
 thou retnainest; and they all shall wax old as doth 
 a garment ; and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them 
 up, and they shall be changed ; but Thou art the 
 same, and Thy years shall not fail.' He is the 
 same, ever loving righteousness and hating iniquity. 
 He is Love, and He is Light. Other ordinances we 
 may conceive being changed by a decree of His 
 omnipotence, but the laws of right and wrong He 
 cannot alter, because He cannot alter Himself. 
 
 With what jealousy then, as the Scriptures ex- 
 press it, must He not uphold among the creatures 
 wkom He has made in His image these moral and 
 spiritual laws, in the obedience of which they chiefly 
 resemble Him ! If they are violated, is it not evi- 
 dent that it would be contrary to the deepest prin- 
 ciples of the Divine nature to leave the violation 
 without some conspicuous punishment some vindi- 
 cation adequate to the depth and intensity of the
 
 134 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 evil which such violation involves ? It may be 
 permissible to observe, in passing, that in proportion 
 as we realize this truth, shall we be in a position to 
 apprehend the justice and necessity of those terrible 
 punishments which, by God's command, were from 
 time to time inflicted, in the course of His education 
 of His chosen people, for heinous violations of the 
 moral laws ; such, for instance, as the extermination 
 of the Canaanites. It is, too probably, because we 
 are deficient in that moral indignation, that righ- 
 teous wrath, which is an essential constituent in a 
 perfectly righteous character, that such instances 
 of Divine justice occasion us perplexity. If you 
 regard people like the Canaanites as merely in an 
 imperfect stage of morality, the judgment pro- 
 nounced on them may appear harsh. But if, in 
 accordance with St. Paul's teaching in the first 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Eomans, they are to be 
 regarded as offending, in consequence of repeated 
 neglect of the dictates of their conscience, against 
 the eternal principles of the moral law, and as thus 
 being in antagonism to the very essence of the 
 character of God Himself, we shall not feel it diffi- 
 cult to understand that it was necessary for the 
 intensity of that antagonism to be revealed and 
 avenged. 
 
 If, in fact, we contemplate on a large scale this 
 necessary relation of God to sinful man, this neces-
 
 OF OUR LORD 135 
 
 sary relation of the Divine righteousness to evil, our 
 marvel will be, not that in particular instances the 
 indignation of God against moral evil has been 
 expressed in terrible punishments, but that He, has 
 endured human evil with such lon^sufftrin^ and 
 
 O o 
 
 patience, and tliat His moral laws, the most 
 momentous of all, have not produced more over- 
 whelming misery to the race which for so many 
 centuries has violated them. There is a fine 
 passage in the first book of Hooker's * Ecclesiastical 
 Polity,' in which he describes the momentous im- 
 portance to men of the observance of natural laws. 
 ' If nature,' he says, ' should intermit her course, 
 and leave altogether, though it were but for a while, 
 the observation of her own laws ; if those principal 
 and mother elements of the world, whereof all 
 things iu this lower world are made, should lose the 
 qualities which now they have ; if the frame of that 
 heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen 
 and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget 
 their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility 
 turn themselves any way as it might happen ; if the 
 prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant 
 doth run his unwearied course, should as it were 
 through a languishing faintness begin to stand and to 
 rest himself; if the moon should wander from her 
 beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend 
 themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the
 
 136 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield 
 no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influ- 
 ence, .... what would become of man himself, 
 whom these things now do all serve ? See we not 
 plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of 
 nature is the stay of the whole world ? ' But see 
 we not as plainly, that if such would be the neces- 
 sary and terrible consequences of the disobedience of 
 physical things to the law of nature, similar and 
 more awful must be the natural consequences of 
 the disobedience of moral beings to the law of right 
 and wrong? This description of the disorganization 
 of the physical frame of nature has but to be trans- 
 ferred to the moral world, in order to give an 
 account, only too true, of that which has been the 
 actual condition of human nature, as a whole, from 
 the day of the fall until now. Our moral nature 
 has intermitted her course, and has left, not merely 
 for a while, but continuously, the observation of her 
 own laws. The principal and mother elements of 
 our moral constitution have been corrupted, and 
 have lost the qualities with which they were endued ; 
 the frame of that heavenly arch erected in our souls, 
 and revealing the will of God, has been loosened 
 and dissolved ; our conscience, that prince of the 
 lights of the moral world, has languished and grown 
 faint in an ineffectual struggle with human per- 
 versity ; our passions and affections have blended
 
 OF OUR LORD 137 
 
 themselves by disordered and confused mixture, 
 until our earth lias been * defeated ' of its most neces- 
 sary heavenly influences. Can it be ascribed to 
 anything but the mercy and longsuffering of God, 
 to His gracious resolve that He would not allow the 
 whole consequences of our evil to fall on us, that 
 human nature, amidst its utter moral confusion, has 
 escaped complete misery, degradation, and ruin ? 
 St. Paul does not hesitate to say so. * The times 
 of this ignorance,' he says, ' God winked at.' He 
 exercises His omnipotence to reserve His judgments 
 to the uttermost, and to give men time for repent- 
 ance. But, unless all the principles of God's govern- 
 ment were to be undermined, and the whole analogy 
 of His dealings were to be falsified if His moral laws 
 were to possess any real and effectual sanction, some 
 vindication they must have, one which should be at 
 least as conspicuous, as awful, and prominent, in 
 the moral sphere, as is the constant vindication of 
 His other laws in the physical and social universe. 
 
 Now the chief truth embodied in the doctrine of 
 the Atonement is that this vindication has been 
 afforded by the Passion and Death of our Lord ; and 
 although, as has been already said, no theory on this 
 subject has fathomed, or is likely to fathom, its 
 deep mysteries, we can hardly be wrong in observing, 
 as a matter of fact, one important respect in which 
 that vindication was exhibited by the awful events
 
 138 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 we have been considering. We have seen that our 
 Lord's death was the natural consequence, the inevit- 
 able working out, of human evil, when brought into 
 contact with truth, righteousness, and purity. Had 
 men been left to themselves, this is the result to 
 which they would have come ; they would have 
 trampled out the truth and goodness which is the life 
 of their soul?, and God must needs have abandoned 
 them, in the necessary vindication of His laws, to all 
 the misery which they inflicted on our Saviour. But 
 in enduring that misery, our Lord has exhibited 
 once for all, to earth and to heaven, to time and 
 .to eternity, what is the natural consequence of the 
 violation of God's moral laws. By suffering the 
 extremity of misery, in soul and body, on the tree, 
 He has manifested to the world the consequences of 
 human sin the consequences which in God's justice 
 it must produce, if left to itself as fully, as terribly, 
 as vividly, as if the human race as a whole had 
 themselves suffered such extremities. Nothing could 
 be more horrible, nothing could be a more fearful 
 manifestation of the deadly evil of sin, than that the 
 holy and perfect and gentle Lord Jesus, who did no 
 sin, neither was guile found in His mouth, should 
 be betrayed and insulted, and tortured and crucified, 
 and cast out of the world as one of its malefactors. 
 It is sin which on the cross is crucified, and exposed 
 to the scorn and hatred of men and angels. Nay,
 
 OF OUR LORD 139 
 
 surely it is a more awful exhibition of the evil of 
 sin that it should bring this suffering upon one so 
 holy and innocent, than that it should simply have 
 been left to work out the just judgment of those 
 who were guilty. It is so fearful a curse, so awful a 
 disease, that it involves not merely the guilty, it 
 inflicts its terrible penalties not only on those 
 who themselves have done wrong ; but when the 
 Son of God Himself takes human flesh for the salva- 
 tion of mankind, it must needs bring its fearful 
 consequences upon Him, and inflict on Him the 
 worst sufferings which man can endure. All this, as 
 has been said, is not by an arbitrary arrangement, 
 not by any formal convention, as it were. God 
 left men for a while to the consequences of their 
 own evil acts, and permitted His Son to appear 
 among them, arid the moral laws He had established 
 vindicated themselves, by their violation working 
 itself out into this fearful crime and cruelty. 
 
 In short, what do these events prove, but that 
 men, if left to themselves, could have gone on in no 
 other course than that of extirpating from among 
 themselves more and more every grace, every truth, 
 and every virtue -for which they were designed? 
 That which they did to goodness incarnate, they 
 must have done to goodness wherever it appeared. 
 Their very curse, the natural expression of the 
 wrath of God against their sins, would be that those
 
 140 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 sins should be left to develop their hateful fruit, 
 until it issued in utter moral corruption. As they 
 did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God 
 gave them over to a reprobate mind, or, as the 
 same method of the divine judgment is expressed 
 in the Psalms, He gave them up unto their own 
 heart's lusts, and let them follow their own imagina- 
 tions. Had our Lord been simply a perfect man, 
 His death would still have been the example and 
 the prophecy of the uprising of human nature 
 against all things that are just and true and pure, 
 against everything, in a word, that is precious iu 
 life. And thus by the exercise of the very passions 
 which put Him to death, men must have gone on 
 revenging their sins upon themselves, until they had 
 made human society a hell upon earth. This would 
 have been the natural and inevitable operation of 
 the Divine judgment upon them ; and by no other 
 natural means could the righteousness of God have 
 been fully manifested. If we could suppose God 
 interposing by some act of arbitrary power to create 
 men afresh, as it were, and to blot out the conse- 
 quences of their sins, it would have amounted to a 
 practical declaration that the moral law could be 
 readily dispensed with, and the eternal supremacy 
 of righteousness would have been superseded. 
 But on the other hand, if that eternal law had been 
 left to work itself out, we see by its operation in
 
 OF OUR LORD 141 
 
 bringing about the death of Christ that it must 
 have wrought out the death of all righteousness and 
 peace among mankind. 
 
 But here, far as our conceptions must needs fall 
 short of a truth which appears to be the very centre 
 of the Divine dealings with mankind, we may, 
 perhaps, apprehend something of the mystery of the 
 sacrifice of Christ. ~\Ve perceive that the Son of 
 God, by taking human flesh, allowed that inevit- 
 able consequence of the operation of the law of 
 righteousness to be wrought on Himself. He 
 endured that He should be cast out from among 
 mankind ; and if He had been one of themselves that 
 rejection would have been irreparable. But He 
 was more than the Son of Man ; He was the Son of 
 God ; and though they thus cast Him out, their 
 wicked effort, through His mercy, was ineffectual. 
 He revealed to them, in His sufferings, what was 
 the real nature of their sin and its consequences ; 
 and then, having thus satisfied the law of God by 
 a) lowing it to work itself out to the full, He inter- 
 ceded with His Father for mercy towards us. and 
 returned among us to save us, having obtained for 
 us the remission of sins. 
 
 But this having been done, and done once for all, 
 that vindication stands for ever, and we can at least 
 see that it goes far to answer the main purposes of 
 the actual infliction of punishment on the sinner.
 
 142 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 God willed not the death of the sinner, but rather 
 that he should return and repent. Provided His 
 law is vindicated in such a way as to declare His 
 righteousness, to make it manifest to the whole 
 universe that He cannot be reconciled to evil, and 
 at the same time to arouse in men a due hatred of 
 evil and love of righteousness He has no pleasure, 
 but the contrary, in exacting the ultimate penalty 
 of sin from every one of His feeble creatures ; and 
 He offers them forgiveness, on condition they submit 
 themselves to His justice and His mercy, by seeking 
 that forgiveness solely on the ground of the satisfac- 
 tion which has been offered by our Lord. As long, 
 indeed, as a man desires to stand by himself, and 
 expects God to overlook his offences, as though they 
 did not need any exemplary punishment, it may well 
 be necessary, for his very salvation, that he should 
 for a while be left in his sin and its misery, that he 
 may learn the intense reality and terror of God's 
 moral law. But if, by sheltering himself solely 
 under the sacrifice of Christ, he does homage to God's 
 righteousness, confessing that his evil and the evil 
 of his fellows deserved, and must in the course of 
 nature have received, an intolerable punishment, 
 then may it become compatible with God's relation 
 to such a soul, that He should pardon it, that He 
 should stay the natural consequences of its moral evil, 
 that He should bestow His Spirit on it, sanctify and
 
 OP OUR LORD 143 
 
 save it. Again let me repeat, for fear of misappre- 
 hension, that the Atonement in its relation to man, 
 no less than in its relation to God, must needs present 
 aspects, and exert influences, which no single point 
 of view can include. But so far as these considera- 
 tions reach, they appear to show, in some measure, 
 how the Passion of our Lord would, by its inherent 
 moral efficacy, provide means of reconciliation be- 
 tween God and man. Far, in fact, as we must be 
 from entering into the depth of the riches of 
 the wisdom and mercy of God, and of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, which were manifested in the great 
 sacrifice of the cross, do not these considerations 
 serve to help us to realize at once the evil of sin, 
 the grace of our Saviour in offering an atonement 
 for it, and the justice of God, alike in demand- 
 ing such a satisfaction for sin, in accepting that 
 which was offered Him on the cross, and in pardon- 
 ing those who believe in it ? Is not this com- 
 prehensive manifestation of justice and mercy summed 
 up in St. Paul's words, ' 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 justih'er of Him which 
 believeth in Jesus ? ' 
 
 Let me add only one consideration, at once to
 
 144 THE PASSION AND DEATH 
 
 obviate one of the chief objections which are raised 
 against this great doctrine, and to recall the deep 
 obligation which it has created for us. It has been 
 objected that this is a vicarious atonement, and that 
 the innocent is made to suffer for the guilty. Now 
 if it were a vicarious atonement by one of those 
 arbitrary and artificial arrangements of which I 
 have spoken, and if the innocent had been made to 
 suffer for the guilty by the decree of God, against, 
 or without, the will of the sufferer, such objections 
 might apply. But it is an essential part of our 
 Saviour's suffering for us that it is perfectly volun- 
 tary on His part. That it is so, depends on the 
 cardinal doctrine of Christianity, that He is the 
 Son of God, one in substance with the Father. As 
 God, He saw perfectly the whole nature and con- 
 sequences of the sin of man ; He foresaw, as His 
 agony in the garden shows, the whole bitterness of 
 the cup which He had resolved to drink ; and being 
 one with the Father, and equal to Him as touching 
 His Godhead, He of His perfect free will consented 
 to lay aside the power and privileges of His Divine 
 nature, and to be the victim in whom human sin 
 should work out its terrible consequences. There is 
 here no infliction of vicarious suffering on unresist- 
 ing innocence. There is the deliberate and infi- 
 nitely gracious resolve of one who was under no 
 obligation, or none but that which His own perfect
 
 OF OUR LORD 14j 
 
 love created, to die that we might not die eternally, 
 to suffer that we might be saved. Let us contem- 
 plate the Father and the Son thus working together 
 for men's salvation the Father sending the Son, 
 and consenting that He should suffer all this misery 
 and ignominy in human form, and the Son consent- 
 ing to it, of His own original free will, for the 
 vindication of His Father's law and what do we 
 behold but infinite love, co-operating with infinite 
 justice, and establishing the intensest obligations on 
 us for love in return that could possibly be con- 
 ceived? Shall we not respond to the exhortation of 
 the Apostle : ' Herein is love, not that we loved God, 
 but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the 
 propitiation for our sins. . . . We love Him because 
 He first loved us ' loved us in all our sin and misery, 
 and gave His life to save us ? Shall not ' the blood 
 of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered 
 Himself without spot to God, purge our conscience 
 from dead works to serve the living God ? ' Let us 
 at least learn, from the contemplation of these awful 
 consequences of human sin, the deep solemnity of 
 that struggle between good and evil which is every 
 day, and every hour, going forwards in our own 
 hearts. Let us remember that whenever we are 
 faithless to the dictates of our consciences, and dis- 
 obedient to the vo : ce of God within us, we are com- 
 mitting sins of precisely the same kind as tin-' 
 
 L
 
 146 THE DEATH OF OUR LORD 
 
 which brought our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. 
 But that, on the other hand, in every word spoken, 
 or deed done, or thought controlled, in obedience to 
 righteousness and truth, we are rendering Him the 
 one reward which He desires for His sufferings in 
 our behalf. We are enabling Him, in some measure, 
 ' to see of the travail of His soul, and to be satisfied.'
 
 ( 147 ) 
 
 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. 
 
 THE glorious event celebrated on Whit-Sunday is 
 the culminating point of the revelation of the New 
 Testament. On the one hand it is the immediate 
 result to which the life and death of our Lord were 
 directed, and it is also the point from which the 
 history of the Church takes its start. Until a 
 comparatively recent date, it was the last of the 
 great festivals of the Christian year ; for it was not 
 until the fourteenth century that the observance of 
 Trinity Sunday was enjoined upon the Western 
 Church. Accordingly Whit-Sunday casts its illu- 
 mination upon all the sacred events which have been 
 previously commemorated, and they are all to be in- 
 terpreted by its light. More particularly will this be 
 found to be the case with respect to the events we 
 have been celebrating in the season just passed 
 those of the Resurrection and Ascension. The re- 
 markable position which the great event of the day 
 
 L 2
 
 148 THE WITNESS 
 
 of Pentecost holds in this respect is sufficiently illus- 
 trated from the character of St. Peter's argument in 
 the passage from which my text is taken. That 
 argument was delivered on the day of Pentecost, 
 and was the first public utterance of the Apostles 
 since our Lord's death and resurrection. He had 
 been with them forty days between His Resurrec- 
 tion and Ascension ; and since then, in obedience to 
 His command, they had been quietly waiting in 
 Jerusalem. When they returned from witnessing 
 the Ascension, they went into an upper room, and 
 continued with one accord in prayer and supplication 
 with the women, and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and 
 with His brethren. There, and in this attitude of 
 prayer and supplication, they waite 1 for the promise 
 of the Father, of which their Lord had spoken to 
 them ; taking no step whatever in pursuance of their 
 commission as Apostles, except to complete the 
 number of twelve chosen witnesses, by the election 
 of Matthias into the room of Judas. But at the end 
 of the ten days, on the great Jewish feast of Pente- 
 cost, the wonderful manifestation of spiritual power 
 came upon them which we to-day commemorate. 
 They were enabled to proclaim, in the various 
 tongues spoken by the Jews then gathered in Jeru- 
 salem out of every nation under heaven, the won- 
 derful works of God doubtless the great facts of 
 our Saviour's ministry, which had just been com- 
 pleted. Then it was, but not iill then, that St. Peter
 
 TO OUR LORDS RESURRECTION 149 
 
 opened to the Jewish people the gracious message 
 with which he had been entrusted, respecting our 
 Saviour's Ascension, and His exaltation to the right 
 hand of God. Then was exhibited to the eyes of the 
 Jews a marvellous exercise of new spiritual powers 
 a momentous fact which aroused amazement, 
 and compelled men to say one to another, * What 
 meaneth this ?' St. Peter comes forward to give the 
 answer, and announces that this is the manifestation 
 of the risen Christ. He reminds his hearers of 
 the whole course of our Lord's ministry, and of its 
 awful close : ' Jesus of Nazareth,' he said, ' a man 
 approved of God among you by miracles and wonders 
 and signs, which God did by Him in the midst of 
 you, as ye yourselves also know : Him, being de- 
 livered by the determinate counsel and foreknow- 
 ledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands 
 have crucified and slain : whom God hath raised up, 
 having loosed the pains of death : because it was 
 not possible that He should be holden of it. . . This 
 Jesus halh 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. . . . Therefore let all the 
 house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made 
 that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord 
 and Christ.'
 
 150 THE WITNESS 
 
 Such was the order and method of the first preach- 
 ing of the Resurrection. The great event is pro- 
 claimed, in the first instance, not in itself, nor even, 
 in relation to the ministry and the death which 
 had preceded it, but in relation to a new and 
 great manifestation of spiritual power, and as ex- 
 plaining that manifestation. The Apostles are 
 not commissioned to bear witness simply to the 
 historical miracle that our Lord bad risen from the 
 grave, or even to the historic fact of His Ascension 
 in glory. Their commission was to declare that He 
 had risen in power, and that He was a living Saviour, 
 bestowing the gifts of the Holy Ghost upon those 
 who submitted themselves to Him. ' Repent,' he 
 said, '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.' The 
 Resurrection, the Ascension, and the bestowal of the 
 Holy Ghost are presented in such immediate rela- 
 tion to each other that it is difficult to distinguish 
 them. ' This Jesus hath God raised up. . . There- 
 fore, being by the right hand of God exalted, aud 
 having received of the Father the promise of the 
 Holy Ghost, He hath shed forth this, which ye now 
 see and hear.' The Resurrection, in short, is not 
 proclaimed for its own sake, for the mere significance 
 of the fact that our Lord had risen from the grave, 
 but as involving the supreme fact of His having
 
 TO OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 151 
 
 assumed a new, a mightier, and still more gracious 
 life, and as being the giver of new spiritual powers. 
 The proclamation is not merely that Christ did rise, 
 but that Christ is risen ; has assumed all power in 
 heaven and earth, and is working spiritual miracles, 
 even mightier than those He displayed when he was 
 upon earth. 
 
 The same characteristic is to be observed in all 
 the discourses and acts of St. Peter which follow. 
 The next instance of which we read is the healing of 
 the lame man, and St. Peter turns it to account as 
 evidence of the presence and power of the living 
 Saviour : * Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at 
 this ? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though 
 by our own power or holiness we had made this 
 man to walk ? . . The God of our fathers hath glori- 
 fied His Son Jesus, whom ye delivered up. ... Yi> 
 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