§ 7. Scantiness of our Information in regard to this Period of Christ’s Life.—Nothing further really essential to the Interests of Religion.

IN writing the life of any eminent man, we should not be likely to begin with a period when his character was fully developed and his world-historical importance recognized. On the contrary, we should study the growth of his being—seek for the bud which concealed the seed, and the powers that conspired to unfold it.

We cannot fail to have the same desire in studying that Life which far transcends every other, both in its own intrinsic excellence and in its bearing upon the history of the human race; but we are kept within very narrow limits on this point by the paucity of our materials, consisting, as they do, of fragmentary accounts, whose literal accuracy we have no right to presuppose. To exhibit these features in the life of Christ did not belong to the Apostolic mission, which was designed to meet religious rather than scientific wants; to relate the mighty acts of Christ, from the beginning of his ministry to the time of his ascension, rather than to show how, and under what conditions, his inner nature gradually manifested itself. It belongs to science to give a pragmatico-genetical developement of the history; religious faith occupies itself only with the immediate facts themselves. We cannot expect this part of the history to give so accurate a detail as that which treats of Christ’s public ministry and his redemptive acts; nor do the wants of faith require it.

§ 8. Fundamentally opposite Modes of apprehending the Accounts.

The problems offered to scientific inquiry at this point are, first, to distinguish the objective reality of the events from the subjective form in which they are apprehended in the accounts; and, secondly, to fill up, as far as may be, the chasms which necessarily arise in the history from its being composed of detached narratives. These problems nearly involve each other; for we must obtain a clear view of the events themselves, before we can solve the difficulties that arise in connecting them together. Of these, various views may be taken, different in themselves, yet each in harmony with the interests of religion.

But this cannot be said of all the different views which may be taken of the subject. The attempt might be made, for instance, to explain the life of Christ just as that of any eminent man, on the natural principles of human developement; rejecting, of course, the first truth of Christian belief in Christ as the Son of God and our Saviour. This theory, denying the supernatural element of Christianity, necessarily leads its advocates to consider every thing in the Gospel accounts which contradicts it as simply mythical. Thus, even in what may be called the ante-historical part of our work, we find arrayed against us those views which always reject the supernatural in the events of the life of Christ; although this is a dispute which cannot be settled empirically by inquiries into the separate accounts; for this very distinction of historical and non-historical presupposes a final decision between these opposing views made elsewhere. Thus, the Deistic and Pantheistic theories, which, although they arise from directly opposite modes of thought, agree perfectly in opposing supernaturalism, must deny, in the outset, what the supernatural-theistic views hold to be essential to the idea of a genuine world-redeeming Christ.

We must, then, in order to bring the individual features into harmony with our portraiture of Christ, form the latter definitely from a view of his whole life, and of the organism of that Christian consciousness which grows out of his impress left upon humanity, and manifests his perpetual revelation. In relation to the individual features of the history, it only remains to prove, by naked historical inquiry, that there is no sufficient ground, apart from the general prejudices of rationalism, to deny their historical basis; and to show that the origin of the accounts themselves cannot be explained without the actual occurrence of the events which they describe on the very ground where they arose.

§ 9. The Miraculous Conception demanded à priori, and confirmed à posteriori.

IF, then, we conceive the manifestation of Christ to have been a super natural communication of the. Divine nature for the moral renewal of man, a new beginning in the chain of human progress; in one word, if we conceive it as a miracle, this conception itself, apart from any historical accounts, would lead us to form some notion of the beginning of his human life that would harmonize with it.

It is true, this human life of Christ took its appointed place in the course of historical events—nay, all history was arranged with reference to its incorporation; yet it entered into history; not as part of its offspring, but as a higher element. Whatever has its origin in the natural course of humanity must bear the stamp of humanity; must share in the sinfulness which stains it, and take part in the strifes which distract it. It was impossible, therefore, that the second Adam, the Divine progenitor of a new and heavenly race, could derive his origin from the first Adam in the ordinary course of nature, or could represent the type of the species, the people, or the family from which he sprung, as do the common children of men. We must conceive him, not as an individual representative of the type which descended from our first parents, but as the creative origin of a new type. And so our own idea of Christ compels us to admit that two factors, the one natural, the other supernatural, were coefficient in his entrance into human life; and this, too, although we may be unable, à priori, to state how that entrance was accomplished.

But at this point the historical accounts come to our aid, by testifying that what our theory of the case requires did, in fact, occur. The essential part of the history is found precisely in those features in which the idea and the reality harmonize; and we must not only hold fast these essential facts which are so important to the interests of religion, but carefully distinguish them from unimportant and accidental parts, which might, perhaps, be involved in obscurity or contradiction.

§ 10. Mythical View of the Miraculous Conception.—No trace of it in the Narrative.—No such Mythus could have originated among the Jews.

The accounts of Matthew and Luke agree in stating that the birth of Christ was the result of a direct creative act of God, and not of the ordinary laws of human generation. They who deny this must make one of two assumptions; either that all the accounts are absolute fables, or that some actual fact was the ground-work of the fabulous conception.

Those who adopt the former view tell us that, after Christ had made himself conspicuous by his great acts, men, struck with his extraordinary character, formed a theory of his birth to correspond with it. But this assumption is utterly irreconcilable with the simple and prosaic style in which Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s perplexity at finding Mary pregnant before her time;

We cannot believe, notwithstanding what Strauss says on this point in his 3d edition, that a fable could originally be presented in so prosaic a garb as that of Matthew. Cases are not wanting, however, in which the substance of a mythus, after it had come to be received as history, has been given out in a prosaic form.

Nor would such a mythus have been consistent with Jewish modes of thought. The Hindoo mind might have originated a fable of this character, though in a different form from that in which the account of the Evangelists is given; but the Jewish had totally different tendencies. Such a fable as the birth of the Messiah from a virgin could have arisen any where else easier than among the Jews; their doctrine of the Divine Unity, which placed an impassable gulf between God and the world; their high regard for the marriage relation, which led them to abhor unwedded life; and, above all, their full persuasion that the Messiah was to be an ordinary man, undistinguished by any thing supernatural, and not to be endowed with Divine power before the time of his solemn consecration to the Messiahship, all conspired to render such an invention impossible among them. The accounts of Isaac, Samson, and Samuel cannot be quoted as in point; these case[ rather illustrate the Hebrew notion of the blessing of fruitfulness; and in them all the Divine power was shown, not in excluding the male, but in rendering the long-barren female fruitful, contrary to all human expectation. The conception of Christ would have been analogous to these, had Mary, after long barrenness, borne a son, or had Joseph been too old to expect offspring at the time.

E. g., in the apocryphal Gospel of James, ch. ix., it is stated, that when the priest was about to give Mary as a wife to the aged Joseph, the latter said, “I have sons and am old, while she is yet young; shall I not then become a mockery for the sons of Israel?”

It was on this very account, viz., because the miraculous conception was foreign to the prevailing Jewish modes of thought,

Professor Weisse, in his work, “Die Evangelische Geschichte” (The Gospel History, critically and philosophically treated, Leips., 1838), admits that the Jews could not have invented this mythus, but ascribes to it a heathen origin. How, in view of the relations that subsisted between early Christianity and heathenism, the pagan mythus of the sons of the gods could so soon have been transformed into a Christian one; and how the latter could have found its way into St. Matthew’s Gospel, which unquestionably had a Jewish-Christian origin, are among the incomprehensibilities which abound in Prof. W.’s very intelligible work. He says, p. 178, that “as Paul found himself involuntarily compelled, in addressing the Athenians, to quote Greek poetry (For we are also his offspring, Acts, xvii., 28), so it is possible that the apostles to the heathen were led to adopt the pagan mythus of the sons of the gods, in order to make known to them the truth, that Christ is the Son of God, in a form suited to their way of thinking, and that their figurative language, literally understood, formed the starting-point for such a mythus .” Things very heterogeneous are thrown together in this passage. What religious scruples need have hindered Paul from alluding to the consciousness of the Divine origin of the human race, which the Athenians themselves had expressed, and to the vague idea which they entertained of an unknown God? Not was such an allusion likely to be misunderstood. How could a man, imbued with Jewish feelings in regard to the heathen mythology (feelings which his conversion to Christianity would by no means weaken), compare the birth of the Holy One—of the Messiah—with those pagan fables, whose impurity could inspire him with nothing but disgust? Weisse has transferred his own mode of contemplating the heathen myths to a people that would have revolted from it.

It is quite another thing when Weisse adduces the comparisons in which the early Christian apologists indulged. These men, themselves of heathen origin, were accustomed to the allegorical interpretations of the mythology, and it was natural for them to seek and occupy a position intermediate between their earlier and later views. But, so far from these comparisons having given rise to the accounts of the supernatural conception, it was the latter which caused the former. They wished to show to the heathen that this miraculous event was not altogether foreign to their own religious ideas, while they carefully guarded against the sensuous forms of thought involved in the myths; and, as they could presuppose this event, they had a right to employ the myths as they did, inasmuch as these poetical effusions of natural religion anticipated (though in sadly-distorted caricatures) the great truth of Christianity, that the union of the Divine with the human nature was brought about by a creative act of Omnipotence. The early apologists expressed this in their own way “Satan invented these fables by imitating the truth.”

§ 11. Objections to the Narrative drawn from the subsequent Dispositions of Christ’s Relatives, answered (1) from the nature of the case; (2) from the name Jesus.

An objection to the credibility of the narrative has been raised on the ground that if such events had really preceded the birth of Christ, his own relatives would have been better disposed to recognize him as the Messiah. It is possible that the circumstances of his birth did raise their expectations to a lofty pitch; but as for thirty years no indications corresponding with ordinary views of the Messiah manifested themselves, their first impressions gradually wore away, only to be revived, however, by the great acts which Jesus performed after the opening of his public career. And as for Mary (in whom a doubt of this sort would appear still more strange, as she was directly cognizant of the miraculous features of the history), there is no proof whatever that she ever lost the memory of her visions, or relinquished the hopes they were so well calculated to raise. Her conduct at the marriage of Cana proves directly the reverse. She obviously expected a miracle from Christ immediately after the proclamation of his Messiahship by John the Baptist. The confirmation which John’s Gospel, by its recital of this miracle, affords to the other evangelists is the more striking, as John himself gives no account of the events accompanying the birth of Christ.

(a) John’s silence in regard to the miraculous conception is no proof that he was either ignorant of the accounts of that event or disbelieved them. His object was to testify to what he had himself seen and heard, and to declare how the glory of the Only begotten had been unveiled to him in contemplating Christ’s manifestation on earth. But that he recognized the miraculous conception is evident from his emphatic declarations (in opposition to the ordinary Jewish idea of the Messiah), that the Divine and the human were originally united in the person of Christ, and that the Logos itself became flesh in him; while at the same time he avers that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh.” No man could hold these two ideas together without believing in the immediate agency of God in the generation of Christ (b) The objection that Jesus was known among the Jews as the son of Joseph and Mary, and that this fact was adduced against his claims, has been sufficiently met in the text; but it has been urged further that Christ himself, when this objection was brought against him (Matt., xiii., 55), did not allude to the miraculous conception. As to this, we need only say that it was far more likely and natural that Jesus should call men’s attention to the proofs of his Divinity which were before their eyes in his daily acts, showing, at the same time, that the causes of their disbelief lay in themselves, rather than that he should dwell upon the circumstances which preceded his birth, the proof of which had to rest upon the testimony of Mary alone. (c) Nor is Paul’s silence on this point proof of his not acknowledging it. It only shows that, for his religious sense, the sufferings Ad resurrection of Christ, the centre and support of the Christian system, stood out more prominently than the miraculous conception.’ In the passages in which he speaks of Christ’s origin, he had a different object in view than to treat of this subject; e. g., in Rom., ix., 5, “Whose are the fathers, and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever,” and in Rom., i., 4, where he brings out prominently the two-fold manifestation of Christ, as the Son of David and as the Son of God, raised above all human and national relationships, as he revealed himself after the resurrection. If we could infer from such passages Paul’s disbelief in the miracle, we can draw precisely the opposite conclusion from Gal., iv., 4; although, as the case is, we do not lay much stress upon the expression, “born of a woman.” And if Paul could represent Jesus as the Son of God from heaven, as being without sin in the flesh (σάρξ), in which sin before had reigned, while at the same time he taught the propagation of sinfulness, from Adam down, it is likely that the supernatural generation of Jesus was so firmly established in the connexion of his own thoughts, that he felt the less necessity to give it individual prominence. We shall have occasion to make a similar remark hereafter in regard to the omission of the ac count of Christ’s ascension as an individual event.

§ 12. Analogical Ideas among the Heathen.

Moreover, inferences in favour of the accounts of the miraculous conception, as well as against them, may be obtained by comparing them with the ancient myths of other religions. The spirit of the pagan mythology could not have penetrated among the Jews, and therefore cannot be assigned to explain the similarity between the Christian and pagan views. We must seek that explanation rather in the relations that subsist between mythical natural religion and historical revealed religion; between the idea, forming, from the enslaved consciousness which it sways, an untrue actualization; and the idea, grounded in truth, and developing itself therefrom into clear and free consciousness.

The truth which the religious sense can recognize at the bottom of these myths, is the earnest desire, inseparable from man’s spirit, for communion with God, for participation in the Divine nature as its true life—its anxious longing to pass the gulf which separates the God-derived soul from its original—its wish, even though unconscious, to secure that union with God which alone can renew human nature, and which Christianity shows us as a living reality. Nor can we be astonished to find the facts of Christianity thus anticipated in poetic forms (imbodying in imaginative creations the innate yet indistinct cravings of the spirit) in the mythical elements of the old religions, when we remember that human nature itself, and all the forms of its developement, as well as the whole course of human history, were intended by God to find their full accomplishment in Christ. But the genius of Christianity is mistaken by those who despise the simplicity of the Gospel history, and contrast it with the poetry of religion. The opposition, apparently essential to the mere natural man, between poetry, transcending the limits of the actual, and the prose of common reality, is taken away by the manifestation of Christ, and will be done away wherever Christianity passes into flesh and blood. The peculiarity of Christian ethics is indeed founded upon this.

The characteristic difference between the religion of Theism and that of the old mythology lies in this one point: that in the evangelical histories the Divine power is represented as operating immediately, and not by the interposition of natural causes; while, in the mythical conceptions, the Divine causality is made coefficient with natural agencies; the Divine is brought down to the sphere of the natural, and its manifestation is thus physically explained.

Baumgarten-Crusius has noticed this distinction in his Biblical Theology, p. 397; but Strauss denies it, and asserts that the expression υἱὸς Θεοῦ in Luke i., 35, is to be taken entirely in a physical sense. There is no such meaning in the passage; it predicates the terms “the holy one,” “the Son of God,” of Christ, on the ground of the special agency of the Holy Spirit in his birth. He who was conceived under such an agency must stand in a special relation to God. Not merely the Jewish mode of thinking on the subject, bus also the fact that Jesus is designated both as the Son of David and the Son of God, exclude the physical interpretation.

§ 13. The Birth of Christ in its Relations to the Jewish Theocracy.

AS the entrance of Christ into the course of humanity was brought about by the co-working of supernatural with natural elements, so both these agencies conspired in preparing the way for that great event, the centre of all things, and the aim of all preceding history. So we interpret the relations of the Jews and heathens to the appearance of Christ. The natural developement of the heathen was destined, under the Divine guidance, to prepare them for receiving the new light which emanated from Jesus; and the history of the Jewish people was all preparatory to the appearance and ministry of Christ, who was to come forth out of their midst. This preparation was accomplished by means of a chain of separate, but organically connected revelations, all tending toward the full revelation in Him, whose whole life was itself to be the highest manifestation of God to man.

There was peculiar fitness in Christ’s being born among the Jewish people. His life revealed the kingdom of God, which was to be set up over all men, and it properly commenced in a nation whose political life, always developed in a theocratic form, was a continual type of that kingdom. He was the culminating point of this developement; in Him the kingdom of God, no longer limited to this single people, was to show its true design, and, unfettered by physical or national restraints, to assert its authority over the whole human race. The particular typifies the universal; the earthly, the celestial; so David, the monarch who had raised the political theocracy of the Jews to the pinnacle of glory, typified that greater monarch in whom the kingdom of God was to display its glory. Not without reason, therefore, was it that Christ, the summit of the theocracy, sprang from the fallen line of royal David.

However the discrepancies in the two genealogies of Christ may be explained, his descent from the race of David was admitted from the beginning, and the evangelists took it for granted as indisputable. How Weisse should deny this, as he does (p. 169), is unaccountable. His arguments can convince no one endowed with the slightest powers of observation, and need no answer. The only one which is at all plausible is that founded on Mark, xii., 35; and that depends upon the question whether Mark uses these words in their original application; a question which we shall hereafter have occasion to examine. Certainly, if they admit of more than one interpretation, we shall adopt any other sooner than that which comes into conflict with Paul, who assumed Christ’s descent from David as certain. Could the apostles have embraced a notion which the Saviour himself had denounced as an invention of the scribes? There was nothing in Paul’s turn of feeling or thought to incline him towards it, had it not been established on other grounds; on the contrary, the doctrine that Christ was not the Son of David, but the Son of God and the Lord of David, would have afforded him an excellent point of attack against Judaism. Although Luke’s genealogy is not directly stated as following the line of Mary, yet it may have done so, and have only been improperly placed where it is. Justin Martyr (Dial. c. Tryph., f. 327) was acquainted with such a genealogy referring to Mary. Luke, i., 32-35, seems to show that Mary was of David’s race. Her relationship to Elizabeth, the mother of John Baptist, does not prove the contrary; for members of the tribe of Levi were not restrained from intermarriage with other tribes; and Elizabeth, although of that tribe on the father’s side, and herself the wife of a priest, might very well have sprung from the tribe of Judah on the mother’s side.

§ 14. The Miraculous Events that accompanied the Birth of Christ.

The Divine purpose in the supernatural conception of Jesus could not have been accomplished without some providential forewarnings to his parents; nor could these intimations of the certainty of the approaching birth of the theocratic King have been given by ordinary, natural means. In the sphere of the greatest miracle of human history, the miracle which was to raise mankind to communion with Heaven, we do not wonder to see rays of light streaming from the invisible world, at other times so dark.

§ 15. The Taxing.—Birth of Christ at Bethlehem.

By a remarkable interposition of Providence, interwoven, however, with the course of events in the world, was it brought about that the promised King should be born in Bethlehem (as Micah the prophet had foretold), the very place where the house of David had its origin; while, at the same time, the lowly circumstances of his birth were in striking contrast with the inherent dignity and glory that were veiled in the new-born child.

The Emperor Augustus had ordered a general census of the Roman Empire, partly to obtain correct statistics of its resources,

This was not confined to the Roman provinces, but extended also to the Socii.—Tacit., Ann., i., xi.

§ 16. The Announcement to the Shepherds.

It is in accordance with the analogy of history that great manifestations and epochs, designed to satisfy the spiritual wants of ages, should be anticipated by the prophetic yearnings of pure and susceptible hearts, inspired by a secret Divine consciousness. All great events that have introduced a new developement of human history have been preceded by unconscious or conscious prophecy. This may seem strange to such as ascribe to God the apathy of the Stoics, or who believe only in the cold, iron necessity of an immanent spirit of nature; but to none who believe in a personal, self-conscious Deity, a God of eternal love, who is nigh unto every man, and listens willingly to the secret sighs of longing souls, can it appear unworthy of such a Being to foreshadow great world-historical epochs by responding to such longings in special revelations.

Far more probable, then, would such manifestations be, in reference to the highest object of human longings, the greatest of all world historical phenomena; and so, at the time of Christ’s coming, the people of Judea, guided by the prophecies of the Old Testament, yearned for the appearance of the Messiah with an anxiety only rendered more intense by the oppressions under which they groaned. This feeling would naturally be kept alive in Bethlehem, associated as the place was with recollections of the family of David, from which the Messiah was to come. So, even among the shepherds, who kept nightly watch over the flocks, were some who anxiously awaited the appearance of the Messiah. It is true, the account does not say that the shepherds thus longed for the Messiah. But we are justified by what followed in presupposing it as the ground for such a communication’s being especially made to them; and it is not unlikely that these simple souls, untaught in the traditions of the scribes, and nourished by communion with God, amid the freedom of nature, in a solitude congenial to meditation and prayer, had formed a purer idea of the Messiah, from the necessities of their own hearts, than prevailed at that time among the Jews. A vision from Heaven conducted them on that night, so big with interest to man’s salvation, to the place where the object of their desire was to be born.

Justly and beautifully says Schleiermacher, “There is something remarkable, something divine, in the satisfaction not seldom afforded in extraordinary times even to individual longings.” We agree with this great teacher in thinking that this account came indirectly from the shepherds themselves, as it recites so particularly what occurred to themselves personally, and makes so little mention of what happened to the child after their arrival. The facts may be supposed to have been as follows: The faithful were anxious to preserve the minute features of the life of Jesus. (We cannot be persuaded by the assertions of modern Idealism that this feeling had no existence. We see every day how anxiously men look for individual traits in the childhood of great men.) Especially would any one who had the opportunity prosecute such researches in the remarkable place where Christ was born. Perhaps one of these inquirers there found one of the shepherds who had witnessed these events, and whose memory of them was vividly recalled after his conversion to Christianity. We cannot be sure that such a man would give with literal accuracy the words that he had heard; but, taking them as they stand, it is astonishing how free they are from the materialism which always tinged Jewish expression, and in how purely spiritual a way they describe the sublime transaction of which they treat. Whether we follow the received version or that of the Cod. Alex., we find the same thought expressed in the statement of the shepherds, viz., that “God is glorified in the Messiah, who brings peace and joy to the earth, and restores man again to the Divine favour.”

§ 17. The Sacrifice of Purification, and the Ransom of the First-born; their Weight as Proof against the Mythical Theory.

The mass of the Jewish people, whose minds were darkened by their material and political views, entertained a totally false idea of the Messiah; but there were many at Jerusalem who longed for a purer salvation, and these, also, were to receive a sign that the object of their hopes had at last appeared.

Forty days after the birth of the infant Jesus his parents carried him to the temple at Jerusalem, in order to offer, according to their means, the prescribed sacrifice for the purification of Mary, and to pay the usual ransom for their first-born.

Exod., xiii., 2, 12; Num., iii., 45; xviii., 15; Levit., xii., 2.

Now a mythus generally endeavors to ennoble its subject, and to adapt the story to the idea.

The remarks of Strauss, 1. c., p. 326, do not at all weaken what is here said. He adduces, also, the fact that Luke (iii., 21) states the baptism without mentioning John’s previous refusal (Matt., iii., 14); but all the force of this lies in his presupposition that Luke’s narrative is also mythical, which I deny. As to Gal., iv., 4, we of course believe that Christ strictly fulfilled the Mosaic law; but this fact, on Jewish principles, is no parallel to the other, viz., that Mary, under the circumstances of the miraculous birth, needed purification, and that the Messiah, who was destined for the highest station in the Theocracy needed a ransom from the obligation to the priesthood.

§ 18. Simeon’s Prophetic Discourse.

The aged and devout Simeon,

We have no reason to suppose him to be the Rabbi Simeon, the father of Gamaliel, as no distinguishing mark of eminence is assigned to him.

Notice, now, the remarkable idea of the Messiah which these words convey; precisely such a one as we should expect from a longing Jew, of deep, spiritual piety. Although it cannot be said to contain really Christian elements, it is far above the ordinary conceptions of the times; and this not only confirms the truth of the narrative, but stamps the discourse as Simeon’s own, and not a speech composed in his name.

The accurate report of this discourse is accounted for by the supposition that the account came indirectly from Anna: not only the discourse, but the whole occurrence, must have made a deep impression upon her mind.

§ 19. The Longing of the Heathen for a Saviour.—The Star of the Wise Men.

Not only dwellers about Bethlehem, but also men from a far-distant land, imbued with the longing desires of which we have spoken, were led to the place where Christ was born by a sign suited to their peculiar mode of life, a fact which foreshadowed that the hopes of heathen as well as Jews, unconscious as well as conscious longings for a Saviour, were afterward to be gratified.

If this narrative is to be considered as mythical, we must yet ascribe its origin to the same source which produced the Hebrew Gospel, viz., the Jewish-Christian congregations in Palestine—a likely origin, indeed, for a myth ascribing so great interest and importance to uncircumcised heathen! An extravagant exaggeration of the real occurrence was subsequently made, probably from a fragment of one of the recensions of the Hebrew Gospel (Ignat., Epist. ad Ephes., § 19): “The star sparkled brilliantly beyond all other stars; it was a strange and wonderful sight. The other stars, with the sun and moon, formed a choir around it, but its blaze outshone them all.”

§ 20. The Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt.

The account of the massacre of the infants at Bethlehem cannot appear incredible when we consider the character of the man to whom this act of blind and senseless cruelty, worthy of an insane tyrant, is ascribed.

It was that Herod, whose crimes, committed in violation of every natural feeling, ever urged him on to new deeds of cruelty; whose path to the throne, and whose throne itself, were stained with human blood; whose vengeance against conspirators, not satiated with their own destruction, demanded that of their whole families;

Joseph., Archaeol., xv., viii., § 4.

§ 21. The Return to Nazareth.

Joseph and Mary remained but a short time with the child in Egypt. The death of Herod soon recalled them to Palestine, and they returned to their old place of abode, the little town of Nazareth,

It was formerly thought that Matthew and Luke contradicted each other here. Luke states that Nazareth was the home of Joseph and Mary, and that, laving gone to Bethlehem for a special purpose (the taxing), they remained long enough to perform the necessary ceremonies after the birth of the child, and then returned home. According to Matthew, Bethlehem appears to have been their settled place of abode, and they were only induced, by special considerations, to betake themselves to Nazareth after their return from Egypt. The apparent contradiction vanishes when we consider that the memoirs were collected and written independently of each other.

Luke may have received the account of the journey of Christ’s parents to Bethlehem, without learning either their intention to remain there with the child, or the cause that led them to change that intention; while the author of the Greek text of Matthew may have adhered to the separate statements that were given to him, in ignorance of the special cause of the journey to Bethlehem. Both accounts may be equally true, and harmonize well with each other, although those who put them imperfectly together may not perceive the argument. Moreover, even in Matthew (xiii., 54) we find Nazareth named as Christ’s “own country.” There is no improbability in supposing that Joseph and Mary were induced, by the remarkable events which marked the birth of the child at Bethlehem, and by the revelation of his destiny that was vouchsafed to them, to fix their residence at the seat of the tribe of David, in the vicinity of the Holy City; but that fear of Archelaus, who emulated his father’s cruelty and contempt of holy things, led them to change this purpose. This much is certain, that Matthew’s statement of the apprehension which grew out of Archelaus’s accession to the government agrees precisely with the testimony of history in regard to that prince, who, in the tenth year of his reign, was accused before Augustus of various crimes, and exiled to Vienna.—Joseph., xvii., xiii., 2.

§ 22. Brothers and Sisters of Jesus; the Mention of them in the Gospel Narrative, Proof of its historical Character.

Various scattered statements in the Evangelists lead us to conclude that Christ had younger brothers and sisters.

The word ἕως, in Matt., i., 25, in connexion with the statement that Jesus was Mary’s first-born, leads us to infer Matthew’s knowledge of children subsequently born to her (conf. De Wette on the passage), which we the more certainly conclude, as the same Evangelist mentions brothers and sisters of Jesus especially, together with his mother.—See Matt., xiii., 55. This view is the most natural in such passages as name them together, e. g., Luke, viii., 21; Mark, iii., 31; John, ii., 12; vii., 3. It would be forced work indeed to suppose that in all these passages ἀδελφοί is placed for ἀνεψιοί.

But had the miraculous conception been mythical, the idea of later-born children would have been abhorrent to the spirit which originated such a myth. In later times, indeed, this idea did appear abhorrent to some minds; but it still remains a mystery why the mythical spirit did not exercise its power in remodelling the historical elements.

It is worthy of note that Mark and John agree in stating that these brothers of the Saviour remained unbelievers during his stay on earth, a fact which illustrates the truthfulness of the history, since it by no means tended to glorify either Christ or his brothers, one of whom, at least (James), was in high repute among the Jewish Christians. It is not to be wondered at that the prophet was without honour among those who dwelt under the same roof, and saw him grow up under the same laws of ordinary human nature with themselves. True, this daily contact afforded them many opportunities of beholding the Divinity that streamed through the veil of his flesh, yet it required a spiritual mind and a lively faith to recognize the revealed Son of God in the lowly garb of humanity. The impression of humanity made upon their senses day after day, and thus grown into a habit, could not be made to yield to the Divine manifestations, unless in longer time than was required for others; but when it did yield, and, after such long-continued opposition, they acknowledged their brother as the Son of God and the Messiah, they only became thereby the more trustworthy witnesses.

§ 23. Consciousness of Messiahship in the Mind of Jesus.—Jesus among the Doctors.

The extraordinary circumstances of the birth of Christ not only served as portents of the greatest event in the world’s history, but also, perhaps, furnished external occasions for the developement, in the mind of Jesus, of the consciousness of his Messiahship. True, this developement, far from admitting of mechanical illustrations, required, above all, an inward light in the depths of the higher self-consciousness, the internal testimony of the Spirit; but such a testimony by no means precludes the agency of external impressions, acting as suggestive occasions. The inward Divine light and the revelation from outward events touch upon each other; and this connexion between the internal and the external belongs to the essence of purely human developement.

Weisse maintains (I cannot see on what grounds) that this view degrades the Divine element in the inner calling of Christ to a mechanical result of circumstances, p. 264.

Of the early history of Jesus we have only a singe incident; but that incident strikingly illustrates the manner in which the consciousness of his Divine nature developed itself in the mind of the child. Jesus had attained his twelfth year, a period which was regarded among the Jews as the dividing line between childhood and youth, and at which regular religious instruction and the study of the Law were generally entered upon. For that reason, his parents, who were accustomed

Luke (ii., 42) says, “that they went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover.” This may mean either that Joseph attended yearly no other feast but this, which would imply that it was not the general custom in Galilee to attend the three chief feasts at Jerusalem, or that Mary used to accompany him to this feast only. In either case, it proves the peculiar eminence of the Passover.

§ 24. The Pharisees.

In the outset, how unlike Christ was the legal spirit of Pharisaism, with its soul-crushing statutes, its dead theology of the letter, and its barren subtilties! Some few of the sect, endowed with a more earnest religious sense, and a more sincere love of truth than their fellows, could not resist the impression of Christ’s Divine manifestation; but they came to him with a full knowledge of the difference between his mode of teaching and theirs, and not as to a teacher sprung from among themselves. They had first to overcome their surprise at his strange and extraordinary language, before they could enter into closer connexion with him. They had to renounce the wisdom of their schools, to disclaim their legal righteousness, and to attach themselves to Christ with the same sense of deficiency in themselves, and the same desire for what he alone could impart, as all other men.

§ 25. The Sadducees.

The spirit of the Sadducees presents a still more rugged contrast to the spirit of Christ. Their schools agreed in nothing but denying; their only bond of union was opposition to the Pharisees, against whom they strove to re-establish the original Hebraism, freed from the foreign elements which the Pharisaic statutes had mixed up with it. But an agreement in negation can be only an apparent one, if the negation rests upon an opposite positive principle. Thus certain negative doctrines, that agree with Protestantism in rejecting the authority and traditions of the Romish Church, separate themselves further from Protestantism than the Romish doctrine itself, by the affirmative principle on which they rest their denial, and by carrying that denial too far. The single positive principle of Sadduceeism was the one-sided prominence given by them to morality, which they separated from its necessary inward union with religion. But Christ’s combat with the Pharisees arose out of the fullest interpenetration of the moral and religious elements. The Sadducees wished to cut off the progressive developement of Hebraism at an arbitrary point. They refused to recognize the growing consciousness of God, which, derived from the Mosaic institute, formed a substantial feature of Judaism, and hence could not comprehend the higher religious element from which, as a germ, under successive Divine revelations, the spiritual life of Judaism was to be gradually developed.

See below for the way in which Christ illustrated this to the Sadducees. As to the Canon, it cannot be actually proved that the Sadducees held it differently from other Jews. It is true, Josephus says (Archaeol., xiii., x., 6) that they rejected every thing but the Mosaic law—ἅπερ οὐκ ἀναγέγραπται ἐν τοῖς Μωϋσέως νόμοις. But the Mosaic law is not here opposed to the rest of the Canon, but to oral traditions; and the only question was whether the Mosaic law alone, or in connexion with oral tradition, was to be held as authority for religious usages. The remaining books of the Old Testament were not in dispute, as no religious usages at all were derived from them. Still, it is not unlikely that the Sadducees went so far, in their opposition to Pharisaism, as to reject all doctrines that could not be shown to have a Mosaic origin, and to consider the Pentateuch as the sole, or, at least, the chief, source of religious truth. As we find such views of the Canon among the Jewish-Christian sects (Cf. the Clementines), we may infer that they previously existed among the Jews. They would hardly have denied Immortality and the Resurrection, if they had held the Prophets to be law in the same sense as the Pentateuch; although it is possible that they interpreted such passages of the Prophets in another way. The general terms in which Josephus speaks of the recognition of the Canon among the Jews (i., c. Apion, § 8) do not suffice to prove that there were no differences in this respect in the different sects.

Some have detected an affinity between the moral teaching of Christ and the Anti-Eudaemonism of the Sadducees, the principle, namely, that man must do good for its own sake, without the hope of future recompense.

No reliance is to be placed in the Talmudic tradition in Pirke Aboth, i., 3, according to which the principle thus perverted to the denial of a future life came from Antigonus Ish Socho, or Simeon the Just. The prevalent orthodoxy was always inclined to ascribe error to the perversion of some orthodox doctrine.

§ 26. The Essenes.

The secrecy which the sect of the Essenes affected has given rise to many subtle and arbitrary hypotheses. Some have found in its ardent religious spirit ground for believing in a connexion between it and Christianity.

First alluded to in an unpublished treatise of J. G. Wachter, De Primordiis Christianae Religionis, libri duo. See, especially, Reinhard’s Versuch über den Plan Jesu [Reinhard’s Plan of the Founder of Christianity, translated by A. Kaufman, Andover].

§ 27. Supposed Influence of the Alexandrian—Jewish Doctrines.

A few words in regard to the supposed influence of the doctrines of the Alexandrian Jews upon Christ’s culture. Even admitting that these doctrines penetrated into Palestine, it can by no means be presupposed that they entered into Galilee, and especially into the narrow circle of the common people within which he was educated. The grounds on which some profess to find traces of such an influence in the discourses of Christ would serve as well to prove that Christianity derived its origin from Brama or Buddhu.

Cf. my Kirchengeschichte, 2d edit., Part I., for the relation between the Alexandrian theology and Christianity.

§ 28. Affinity of Christianity, as absolute Truth, for the various opposing Religious Systems.

On the dissolution of Judaism, its elements, originally joined together in a living unity, necessarily produced various religious tendencies, which mutually opposed and excluded each other. In all these we can find something akin to the new creation of Christianity. And wherever Christianity appears for the first time, or reveals itself anew in its own glory, it must offer some points of affinity for the different opposing systems. The living, perfect truth has points of tangency for the one-sided forms of error; though we may not be thereby enabled to put together the perfect whole from the scattered and repellent fragments.

§ 29. Christ’s Teaching revealed from within, not received from without.

Had the source of Christ’s mighty power been merely a doctrine, it might have been received, or at least suggested, from abroad. But his power lay in the impression which his manifestation and life as the Incarnate God produced; and this could never have been derived from without.

We recall here the profound sentiment of a prophetic German mind: “The pearl of Christianity is a life hidden in God, a truth in Christ the Mediator, a power which consists neither in words and forms, nor in dogmas and outward acts; it cannot, therefore, be valued by the common standards of logic or ethics.”—Hamann, iv., 285.

§ 30. The popular Sentiment in regard to Christ’s Connexion with the Schools.

Had Jesus been trained in the Jewish seminaries,

Dr. Paulus supposes that Christ, because he was called Rabbi, not only by his disciples, but by the distinguished Rabbi Nicodemus, and even by his enemies (John, vi., 25), obtained that title in the way usual among the Jews; and he intimates that Christ studied with the rabbis of the Essenes, and perhaps obtained the degree from them (Life of Christ, i., 1, 122). But when we remember that he stood at the head of a party which recognized his prophetic character, we can see why others, who did not recognize it, would yet call him their master, e. g., Matt., xvii., 24; ὁ διδάσκαλος ὑμῶν. Nicodemus, however, did really acknowledge him as a Divine teacher; nor were those who addressed him as Rabbi, in John, vi., 25, by any means his enemies. This style of address, therefore, does not imply his possession of a title from a Jewish tribunal, but rather arose in the circle of followers that he gathered around him. As to the Essenes, it cannot be proved that they created rabbis, as did the Jewish synagogues; and if they did, such titles would hardly be recognized by the prevailing party, the Pharisees.

§ 31. Growing Consciousness of His Messiahship in Christ.

ALTHOUGH so many years of our Saviour’s life are veiled in obscurity, we cannot believe that the full consciousness of a Divine call which he displayed in his later years was of sudden growth, If a great man accomplishes, within a very brief period, labours of paramount importance to the world, and which he himself regards as the task of his life, we must presume that the strength and energies of his previous years were concentrated into that limited period, and that the former only constituted a time of preparation for the latter.

Most of all must this be true of the labours of Christ, the greatest and most important that the world has known. We have the right to presume that He who assumed as his task the salvation of the human race made his whole previous existence to bear upon this mighty labour. The idea of the Messiah, as Redeemer and King, streamed forth in Divine light, from the course of the theocracy and the scattered intimations of the Old Testament, in full extent and clearness, and in Divine light he recognized this Messiahship as his own; and this consciousness of God within him harmonized with the extraordinary phenomena that occurred at his birth.

But the negative side of the Messiahship, namely, its relation to sin. he could not learn from self-contemplation. He could not learn depravity by experience; yet, without this knowledge, although the idea of the Messiah as theocratic king might have been fully developed in his mind, an essential element of his relations to humanity would have remained foreign to him. But although his personal experience could not unfold this peculiar modification of the Messianic consciousness, many of its essential features were continually suggested by his intercourse with the outer world. There, in all the relations of life, he saw human depravity and its attendant wretchedness. The sight, and the sympathizing love which it awoke, made a profound impression upon his soul, and formed, at least, a basis for the consciousness of his own relation to it as Messiah.

We may assume, then, that when he reached his thirtieth year,

The age at which the Levites entered on their office.—Numb., iv.

§ 32. How far the Baptist revived the Expectation of a Messiah.

PROCLAMATION of the approaching kingdom of God, involving the restoration of the sunken glory of the Theocracy, and the dawning of a brighter day upon God’s oppressed ones, was essentially necessary as a preparation for Christ’s public ministry.

But this was not all; it was equally necessary to announce Him who was called to the accomplishment of this great work. The expectation of the kingdom and the king should always have gone together; but we find that they did not actually do so. The prophecies of the general renewal were often distinct from those which foretold the agent chosen by God to accomplish it; and the hope of the former often existed in minds which had lost sight of the latter. A Philo proves this. The Greek and Alexandrian culture, and perhaps the combination of the two in the religious Realism of Palestine, may have tended to bring about this result. Be that as it may, it is essential for our purpose to keep the two ideas—the announcement of the kingdom and the proclamation of the Messiah—separate from each other.

Some suppose that John the Baptist was the first

So Schleiermacher (Christliche Sittenlehre, p. 19) states that John’s work was “to revive the forgotten idea of the Messiah.”

§ 33. Causes of Obscurity in the Accounts left us of the Baptist.—Sources: The Evangelists. Josephus.

The difficulties and obscurities that remain in the accounts of this remarkable man seem to have arisen necessarily from the peculiar stand-point which he occupied. In a prophet or a forerunner, we must always distinguish between what he utters with clear self-consciousness, and what lies beyond the utterance, concealed even from himself, until a later period; between the fundamental idea, and the form, perhaps not wholly fitting, in which it veils itself. Opposite elements always meet each other in an epoch which constitutes the transition-point from one stage of developement to another; and we cannot look for a logical and connected mode of thinking in the representative of such an epoch. In some of his utterances we may find traces of the old period; in others, longings for the new; and in bringing them together, we may find different views which cannot always be made perfectly to harmonize.

The nature of the authorities to which we are confined makes it peculiarly difficult to come at the objective truth in regard to John the Baptist. On the one side we have the accounts of the Evangelists, given from the Christian stand-point, and for religious ends; and on the other that of Josephus,

Archaeol. xix. 1.

§ 34. The Baptist’s Mode of Life and Teaching in the Desert.

We learn from Josephus

An example is afforded in the case of Banus, of whom Josephus, who was his disciple, gives an account in his autobiography, § 2: “ἐσθῆτι μὲν ἀπὸ δένδρων χρώμενον, τροφὴν δὲ τὴν αὐτομάτως φυομένην προσφερόμενον, ψυχρῷ δὲ ὕδατι τὴν ἡμέραν καὶ τὴν νύκτα πολλάκις λουόμενος πρὸς ἀγνείαν.”

§ 35. John as Baptist and Preacher of Repentance.

While John was thus sighing in solitude over the sins of a degenerate people, and praying that God would soon send the promised Deliverer, the assurance was vouchsafed to him from above that the Messiah should soon be revealed to him. He felt himself called to declare this assurance to the people, and to exhort them to prepare their souls for the approaching epoch. He abandoned the solitude of the desert for the banks of the Jordan,

We follow the statement of Luke (iii., 2), which has the advantage in distinguishing from each other the periods in John’s manifestation.

§ 36. Relations of the Pharisees and Sadducees to the Baptist.

We are naturally led here to inquire into the relations which John sustained to the different classes of the Jewish people. Was he, as preacher of repentance, only a man of the people, and did the Pharisees, the hierarchical party, manifest their jealous opposition from the very first, or did it arise by degrees at a later period? Of one thing we may be sure, from Matt., iii., 7, viz., that many Pharisees were to be found among the number that crowded about John and submitted to his baptism. Yet Christ, in one of his last discourses at Jerusalem (Matt., xxi., 32), drew a striking contrast between the publicans who believed in John’s prophetic calling, and were led by him to repentance, and the Pharisees, who persevered in their self-sufficiency and unbelief. The words of Matt., xi., 16, seem also to indicate that the general spirit of the people was as hostile to John as it subsequently showed itself to Christ, and that only a few, open to the lessons of heavenly wisdom, admitted the Divine mission of the Baptist. So, also, in Luke, vii., 29, 30, the course of the people and the publicans, in following John and submitting to his baptism, is contrasted with the very opposite conduct of the Pharisees and lawyers, who “rejected the counsel of God against themselves.”

Still, Matthew (iii., 7) states expressly, that “many Pharisees and Sadducees came to John’s baptism,” and the form of the statement distinguishes these from the ordinary throng. It seems somewhat unhistorical that these sects, so opposite to each other, should be named together here, as well as in some other places in the Gospels; but an explanation is perhaps to be found in the fact that it was customary to name them together on the ground of their common hatred to Christianity. It appears improbable that men of the peculiar religious opinions of the Sadducees should have been attracted by the preacher of repentance, the forerunner of the Messiah; nor does John, in his severe sermon, make any special reference to that sect, an omission which could hardly have occurred had any of the sect so far departed from their ordinary habits as to listen to his preaching.

We cannot support the expression of Matthew by the statement of Josephus (xviii., I., 4), that the Sadducees were accustomed to accommodate their own convictions to the principles of the Pharisees, on account of the strong hold which the latter had upon the people. In this case, at least, no such accommodation was required, from the repute in which John was held among the Pharisees.

In the earlier period of John’s preaching, then, there may have been nothing to excite the jealousy of the Pharisees. Moreover, it is not likely that all who bore the name of Pharisees were fully imbued with the spirit of the sect. Although the majority of them, intent only upon selfish and party aims, may have regarded John’s ministry with an eye of suspicion, there were probably among them some earnest, upright men, upon whom his preaching could not fail to make an impression. These two thoughts may serve to reconcile Matt., iii., 7, with the other passages quoted, in which the hostility of the Pharisees is mentioned. Again, the expression of Christ in John, v., 35, seems to imply that the Pharisees received and approved John’s prophecy of the coming Messiah, but did not allow his words to sink deep into their hearts or to operate upon their thoughts and inclinations. The severe sermon

Luke, iii., 7; Matt., iii., 7. Luke reports it as addressed to the people; Matthew to the Pharisees and Sadducees.

§ 37. Relations of John to the People, and to the narrower circle of his own Disciples.

True penitents who came to the Baptist inquiring the way of life found in the severe ascetic a kind and condescending teacher. He gave them no vague and high-sounding words, but adapted his instructions with minute care to their special condition and circumstances. John resembled the austere preachers of repentance who sprung up in the Middle Ages in more than one respect; but especially in the two fold relation which he sustained, to the people generally, and to his disciples in particular. While the latter imitated his own ascetic piety in order to fit themselves for preachers of repentance, he did not demand of the former to abandon their ordinary line of life, even when it was one obnoxious to the prejudices of the Jews; the soldier was not required to leave the ranks, nor the tax-gatherer his office, but only to fulfil their respective duties with honesty and fidelity. All alike were commanded to do good; but only those whose occupations were sinful had to abandon them, and at his command many did so

Matt., xxi., 32.

§ 38. John’s Demands upon the People compared with those of Christ. —His humble Opinion of his own Calling.

But how very moderate do John’s requirements appear in comparison with those of Christ, who demanded at the very outset an absolute sacrifice of the will and the affections! This difference arose naturally, however, from the different positions which they occupied. John was fully conscious that the moral regeneration which was indispensable to admittance into the Messiah’s kingdom could only be accomplished by a Divine principle of life; and, knowing that to impart this was beyond his power, he confined himself to a preparatory purification of the morals of the people. The great, the God-like feature of his character was his thorough understanding of himself and his calling. Filled as he was with enthusiasm, he yet felt that he was but the humble instrument of the Divine Spirit, called, not to found the new creation, but only to proclaim it; nor did the thronging of eager thousands to hang upon his lips, nor the enthusiastic love of his own immediate followers, ever ready to glorify their master, in the least degree blind his perceptions of duty, or raise him above his calling. Convinced that he was inspired of God to prepare, and not to create, he never pretended to work miracles, nor did his disciples, strongly as he impressed them, ever attribute miraculous powers to him.

§ 39. John’s Explanation of his Relation to the Messiah. The Baptism by Water and by Fire.

CAREFULLY, however, as John avoided exciting false expectations, they could hardly fail to arise at a period so full of foreboding and hope for the coming of Messiah, after time enough had elapsed for him to make a powerful impression upon the public mind as a preacher of repentance and proclaimer of a better future.

Paul’s words (Acts, xiii., 25) lead us to infer that this took place first towards the end of John’s career.

§ 40. John’s Conception of Messiah’s Kingdom.

Let us inquire now upon what view of the calling and work of the Messiah, and of the nature of his kingdom, these expressions of the Baptist were founded. He contradicts the notion, so prevalent among the Jews, that all the descendants of Abraham who outwardly observed the religion of their fathers would be taken into the Messiah’s kingdom, while his heavy judgments would fall upon the pagans alone. On the contrary, he maintains the necessity, for all who would enter that kingdom, of a moral new birth, which he sets forth to them by the Spirit-baptism; and proclaims, as a necessary preparation for this new birth, a consciousness of sin and longing to be free from it; all which is implied in the word μετάνοια, when stated as the necessary condition of obtaining the promised baptism of the Spirit, He expects this kingdom to be visible; but yet conceives it as purely spiritual, as a community filled and inspired by the Spirit of God, and existing, in communion of the Divine life, with the Messiah as its visible King; so that, what had not been the case before, the idea of the Theocracy and its manifestation should precisely correspond to each other. He has already a presentiment that the willing among the pagans will be incorporated into the kingdom in place of the unworthy Jews who shall be excluded. The appearance of Messiah will cause a sifting of the Theocratic people. This presupposes that he will not overturn all enemies and set up his kingdom at once by the miraculous power of God, but will manifest himself in such a form that those whose hearts are prepared for his coming will recognize him as Messiah, while those of ungodly minds will deny and oppose him. On the one hand, a community of the righteous will gather around him of their own accord; and, on the other, the enmity of the corrupt multitude will be called forth and organized. The Messiah must do battle with the universal corruption; and, after the strife has separated the wicked members of the Theocratic nation from the good, will come forth victorious, and glorify the purified people of God under his own reign.

§ 41. John’s Recognition of Jesus as the Messiah.

(1.) Import of his Baptism of Jesus.—(2.) The Continuance of his Ministry.—(3.) Possible Wavering in his Conviction of Christ’s Messiahship.—(4.) His Message from Prison.—(5.) Conduct of his Disciples towards Jesus.

As John’s conception of the Messiah included his office in freeing the people of God from the power of evil, and imparting to them a new life in the life of God, it appears that he presupposed also the fulness of the Holy Ghost dwelling in him in such a way as that he could best w it upon others. From the first germ of the idea of Messiah in the Prophets down to the time of Christianity itself, we find ever that a just and profound conception of his office involves in it a higher idea of his person. So, perhaps, John, although his expectation of a visible realization of the Theocracy shows him as yet upon Old Testament ground, may have at least touched upon the stand-point of Christianity. His position was very like that held by Simeon, and indeed, in general, by all those Jews who, in advance of the sentiments of the times, were inspired with earnest longings for the appearance of the Messiah, and thus stood upon the border-land between the two stages of the kingdom of God. And in John’s representation of his own inferiority to him “that should come,” and in his clear apprehension of the limits of his mission and his power—an apprehension that distinguished him from all other founders of preparatory epochs—we have an assurance that he will never imagine his preparatory stand-point to be a permanent one; and that, as he feels himself unworthy “to unloose the shoestrings” of the lofty One that is to appear, so he will bow himself in the same humble reverence when He, whom his spiritual sense shall recognize as the expected one, shall appear in person before him.

We are fully aware of the objections that may be raised against these conclusions. It may be said, and truly, that one may do homage to an idea, whose general outlines are present to his intuition, but may be unfit to recognize the realization of the idea when presented before his eyes in all its features. The prejudices of his time and circumstances are sure to start up and hinder him from the recognition. But surely, in the case of John, the lowliness of mind and sobriety of judgment to which we have just referred give us ground to expect that he, at least, would so far surmount his peculiar prejudices as to recognize the admission of a higher element into the course of events—to recognize a stand-point even essentially different from his own; especially as he had himself pointed out beforehand the characteristics of such a difference. Yet we do not wish to deny that doubts may arise, in regard to the fact of John’s recognition of Jesus as Messiah, in the minds of those who do not presuppose the unconditional credibility of the Gospels. Perhaps the remark above made, in reference to a possible commingling of the subjective and the objective in the Gospel accounts, may be applicable here. But before we proceed with our connected historical recital, we must seek sure historical footing, by inquiring into the grounds of the doubts referred to.

The following questions, perhaps, express these grounds: If John was really convinced of Christ’s Messiahship, why did he continue his independent ministry, and not rather submit himself and all his followers as disciples to Christ 1 Why did he wait until after his imprisonment before sending to inquire of Jesus whether he were tile Messiah, or men should look for another? Why, even after the Baptist’s death, did his disciples preserve their separate existence as a sect? How happened it that, in a public proclamation of the Gospel (Acts, x., 37; xiii., 25), no stress is laid upon John’s divinely inspired testimony concerning Christ—nay, it is not even quoted—while his exhortations to repentance and his announcement of the coming Messiah are dwelt upon as the preparation for Christ’s public ministry? Do not these difficulties make it doubtful whether John really did, before the time of his imprisonment, recognize Christ’s Messiahship? Or, is it not probable that the Christian view, which sees in Christ the ἐρχόμενος announced by John, was involuntarily attributed to the Baptist, and so the tradition grew up that he had personally recognized the Messiahship of Jesus, and introduced him into his public labours? In this case we should have to admit that he was first induced, while in prison, by what he heard of Christ, to recognize his calling—and that not only had this fact been transferred to an earlier period in his history, but too much made of it altogether.

Now it would be easy to overthrow this whole structure at once, by assuming the genuineness and authority of John’s Gospel.

John, i., 7, 15; iii., 32; v., 33.

§ 42. The Phenomena at the Baptism, and their Import.

(1.) No Ecstatic Vision.—(2.) The Ebionitish View and its Opposite.—(3.) Developement of the Notion of Baptism in New Testament.—(4.) The Baptism of Christ not a Rite of Purification.—(5.) But of Consecration to his Theocratic Reign.—(6.) John’s previous Acquaintance with Christ.—(7.) Explanation of John, i., 31.—(8.) The Vision and the Voice; intended exclusively for the Baptist.

Two questions present themselves here: the bearing of the baptism upon John, and its bearing upon Christ. The first can easily be gathered from what has been said already, and from the concurrent accounts of the Evangelists. It is clear that John was to be enlightened, by a sign from heaven, in regard to the person who was to be the ἐρχόμενος whom he himself had unconsciously foretold. The second, however, is not so easy to answer. The accounts do not harmonize so well with each other on this point, nor are all men agreed in their opinions of the person of Christ; and these causes have given rise to several different solutions of the question.

The point to be settled is this: Was the Divine revelation made on this occasion intended, though in different relations, for both John and Christ; not merely to give the former certainty as to the person of Messiah, but to impart a firm consciousness of Messiahship to the latter? And did Jesus, thus for the first time obtaining this full consciousness, at the same moment receive the powers essential to his Messianic mission? Did what John’s eyes beheld take place really and objectively, and the fulness of the Holy Ghost descend upon Jesus to fit him for his mighty work?

(1.) No Ecstatic Vision to be supposed in the case of Christ.

If we adopt this latter view, we must look at all the phenomena connected with the baptism, not as merely subjective conceptions, but as objective supernatural facts. It is true, we may imagine a symbolical vision to have been the medium of a Divine revelation common to Christ and John; but we must certainly be permitted to doubt the application of such a mode of revelation to Christ. It may be granted that the Prophets were sometimes, in ecstatic vision, carried beyond themselves and overwhelmed by a higher power: but in these instances there is an abrupt suddenness, an opposition of the human and the Divine; a leap, so to speak, in the developement of consciousness, which we could hardly imagine in connexion with the specific and distinctive nature of the person of Christ. Nor, in fact, is there a hint at such a possibility in the Gospel narratives.

(2.) Ebionitish Views of the Miracle at the Baptism, and its Opposite.

There are two opposite stand-points which agree in ascribing to the events of the baptism the greatest importance in reference to Christ’s Messiahship. The first is that of the Ebionites, who deny Christ’s specific Divinity. It is, that he not only received from without, at a definite period of his life, the consciousness of his Divine mission, but also the powers necessary to its accomplishment. The other view (proceeding, however, from firm believers in the divinity of Christ) supposes that the Divine Logos, in assuming the form of humanity, submitted, by this act of self-renunciation, to all the laws of human developement; and further, that when Christ passed from the sphere of private life to that of his public ministry, he was set apart and prepared for it as the prophets were; with this single element of superiority, viz., that he was endowed with the fulness of the Holy Ghost.

As for the first view, it is not only at variance with the whole character of Christ’s manifestation, but also with all his own testimonies of himself. In all these there is manifested the consciousness of his own greatness, not as something acquired, but as unoriginated, and inseparable from his being. He does not speak like one who has be come what he is by some sudden revolution. In short, this whole mode of thinking springs from an outward supernaturalism, which represents the Divine as antagonist to the human, and imposes it upon Christ from without; instead of considering his entire manifestation from the beginning as Divine and supernatural, of deriving every thing from this fundamental ground, and recognizing in it the aim of all the special revelations of the old dispensation. This is a continuation of the old Jewish view of the progress of the Theocracy: all is formed from without, instead of developing itself organically from within; the Divine is an abrupt exhibition of the supernatural. How opposite to this is the view which sees in the human, the form of manifestation under which the Divine nature has revealed itself from the beginning, and perceives, in this original and thorough interpenetration of the Divine and the human, the aim and the culmination of all miracles.

The second view above mentioned will appear the most simple and natural, if, instead of considering a Divine communication from without to have been made necessary by the self-renunciation of the Logos in assuming human form, we admit a gradual revelation (in accordance with the laws of human developement) of the Divine nature, potentially present, as the ground of the incarnate being, from the very first, and trace all that appears in the outward manifestation to the process of developement from within. In the lives of all other reformers, or founders of religions, whose call seems to have dated from a certain period of life, the birth-time, as it were, of their activity, it is impossible not to trace, in their later labours and in their own personal statements, some references to the earlier period when their call was unfelt.

As in Luther we see frequent references to the light which first broke upon his mind during his monastic life at Erfurth, an epoch of the utmost moment to his after-career as a reformer.

(3.) Different Steps in the New Testament Notion of the Baptism, up to that of John the Evangelist.

In the revelations of the New Testament, and in the process of the developement of Christianity which those revelations unfold, we can distinguish various steps, or stages, of progress from the Old Testament ideas to the New. Especially is this the case in regard to the person of Christ. The conception of Christ, as anointed with the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and superior to all other prophets, is akin to Old Testament ideas, and forms the point of transition to the New, which rest upon the manifestation of Christ. But it required a completely developed Christian consciousness to recognize, in his appearance on earth, the Divine glory as inherent in him from the beginning, and progressive only so far as its outward manifestation was concerned. These two views, however, by no means exclude each other; the one is rather the complement of the other, while both, at a different stage of developement, tend to one and the same definite aim. And the latter, or highest stage of Christian consciousness, we are naturally to look for in that beloved apostle who enjoyed the closest degree of intimacy with Christ, and was, on that account, best of all able to understand profoundly both his manifestation and his discourses. From John, too; we must expect the highest Christian view of the person of Christ. [The account of the principal event of the baptism is thus given in John’s Gospel: “And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. And I knew him not; but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw and bare record that this is the Son of God.”

John, i., 32-34.

§ 43. The Hunger.

The first temptation was as follows:

Matt., iv., 2-4.

§ 44. The Pinnacle of the Temple.

He was then taken to the pinnacle of the Temple, and the tempter said to him, “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down; thou art sure of aid by a miracle from God;” and quoted, literally, in application, the words of Psa. xci., 11, 12, “;The angels shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” But Christ arrays against him another passage, which defines the right application of the former: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” (Deut., vi., 16.) As if he had said, “Thou must undertake nothing with a view to test God’s omnipotence, as if to try whether he will work a miracle to save thee from a peril that might be avoided by natural means” (i. e., by coming down from the battlement in the usual way).

§ 45. Dominion.

We do not take the third temptation as implying literally that Satan proposed to Christ to fall down and do him homage, as the price of a transfer of dominion over all the kingdoms of the world: no extraordinary degree of piety would have been necessary to rebuke such a proposal as this. We consider it as involving the two following points, which must be taken together, viz., (1) the establishment of Messiah’s dominion as an outward kingdom, with worldly splendours; and (2) the worship of Satan in connexion with it, which, though not fully expressed, is implied in the act which he demands, and which Christ treats as equivalent to worshipping him. Herein was the temptation, that the Messiah should not develope his kingdom gradually, and in its pure spirituality from within, but should establish it at once, as an outward dominion; and that, although this could not be accomplished without the use of an evil agency, the end would sanctify the means.

We find here the principle, that to try to establish Messiah’s kingdom as an outward, worldly dominion, is to wish to turn the kingdom of God into the kingdom of the devil; and to employ that fallen Intelligence which pervades all human sovereignties, only in a different form, to found the reign of Christ. And in rejecting the temptation, Christ condemned every mode of secularizing his kingdom, as well as all the devil-worship which must result from attempting that kingdom in a worldly form. We find here the principle, that God’s work is to be accomplished purely as His work and by His power, without foreign aid; so that it shall all be only a share of the worship rendered to HIM alone.

And Christ’s whole life illustrates this principle. How often was he urged, by the impatient longings and the worldly spirit of the people, to gratify their intense, long-cherished hopes, and establish his kingdom in a worldly form, before the last demand of the kind was made upon him, as he entered, in the midst of an enthusiastic host, the capital city of God’s earthly reign; before his last refusal, expressed in his submission to those sufferings which resulted in the triumph of God’s pure spiritual kingdom!

§ 46. Fundamental Idea.

THE whole temptation taken together presents us one idea; a contrast, namely, between the founding of God’s kingdom as pure, spiritual, and tried by many forms of self-denial in the slow developement ordained for it by its head; and the sudden establishment of that kingdom before men, as visible and earthly. This contrast forms the central point of the whole. All the temptations have regard to the created will as such; the victory presupposes that self-sacrifice of a will given up to God which determines the whole life. And as this self-sacrifice of the created will in Christ had to be tested in his lifelong struggles with the Spirit of the world, which ever strove to obscure the idea of the kingdom of God and bring it down to its own level; so the free and conscious decision manifested in these three temptations, fully contrasting, as they did, the true and the false Messiahship, the unworldly and the secularized Theocracy, was made before his public ministry, which itself was but a continuation of the strife and the triumph.

§ 47. The Temptation rot an inward one, but the Work of Satan.

We find, then, in the facts of the temptation the expression of that period that intervened between Christ’s private life and his public ministry. These inward spiritual exercises bring out the self-determination which stamps itself upon all his subsequent outward actions. Yet we dare not suppose in him a choice, which, presupposing within him a point of tangency for evil, would involve the necessity of his comparing the evil with the good, and deciding between them. In the steadfast tendency of his inner life, rooted in submission to God, lay a decision which admitted of no such struggle. He had in common with humanity that natural weakness which may exist without selfishness, and the created will, mutable in its own nature; and only on this side was the struggle possible—such a struggle as man may have been liable to, before he gave seduction the power of temptation by his own actual sin. In all other respects, the outward seductions remained outward; they found no selfishness in him, as in other men, on which to seize, and thus become internal temptations, but, on the contrary, only aided in revealing the complete unity of the Divine and human, which formed the essence of his inner life.

Nor is it possible for us to imagine that these temptations originated within; to imagine that Christ, in contemplating the course of his future ministry, had an internal struggle to decide whether he should act according to his own will, or in self-denial and submission to the will of God. We have seen from the third temptation that, from the very beginning, he regarded the establishment of a worldly kingdom as inseparable from the worship of the devil; he could, therefore, have had no struggle to choose between such a kingdom, outward and worldly, and the true Messiah-kingdom, spiritual, and developed from within.

Even the purest man who has a great work to do for any age, must be affected more or less by the prevailing ideas and tendencies of that age. Unless he struggle against it, the spirit of the age will penetrate his own; his spiritual life and its products will be corrupted by the base admixture. Now the whole spirit of the age of Christ held that Messiah’s kingdom was to be of this world, and even John Baptist could not free himself from this conception. There was nothing within Christ on which the sinful spirit of the age could seize; the Divine life within him had brought every thing temporal into harmony with itself; and, therefore, this tendency of the times to secularize the Theocratic idea could take no hold of him. But it was to press upon him from without; from the beginning this tendency threatened to corrupt the idea and the developement of the kingdom of God, and Christ’s work had to be kept free from it; moreover, the nature of his own Messianic ministry could only be fully illustrated by contrast with this possible objective mode of action; to which, foreign as it was to his own spiritual tendencies, he was so frequently to be urged afterward by the prevailing spirit of the times.

But if, according to the doctrine of Christ,

We must hereafter inquire whether this is Christ’s doctrine, and only make here a preliminary remark or two. The arguments of the rationalists against the doctrine which teaches the existence of Satan are either directed against a false and arbitrary conception of that doctrine, or else go upon the presupposition that evil could only have originated under conditions such as those under which human existence has developed itself; that it has its ground in the organism of human nature, e. g., in the opposition between reason and the propensities; that human developement must necessarily pass through it; but that we can not conceive of a steadfast tendency to evil in an intelligence endowed with the higher spiritual powers. Now it is precisely this view of evil which we most emphatically oppose, as directly contradictory to the essence of the Gospel and of a theistico-ethical view of the world; and, on the contrary, we hold fast, as the only doctrine which meets man’s moral and religious interests, that doctrine which is the ground of the conception of Satan, and according to which evil is represented as the rebellion of a created will against the Divine law, as an act of free-will not otherwise to be explained, and the intelligence as determined by the will. I am pleased to find my convictions expressed in few words by an eminent divine of our own time, Dr. Nitzsch, in his excellent System der Christlichen Lehre, 9d ed., p. 152. They are further developed by Twesten, in his Dogmatik. The same fundamental idea is given in the work of Julius Muller, already mentioned (Lehre von der Sunde).

§ 48. Had Christ a conscious Plan?

IT is most natural for us, in treating of Christ’s public ministry, to speak first of the plan which lay at the foundation of it. First of all, however, the question comes up, whether he had any such plan at all.

We use the phrase “plan of Jesus,” inasmuch as we compare his mode of action with that of other world-historical men, in order to bring out the characteristic features which distinguish him. The exposition which follows will show that I agree with the apt remarks of my worthy friend, Dr. Ullmann, made in his beautiful treatise on the “Sündenlosigkeit Jesu” (Sinlessness of Jesus), p. 71, and that his censures there of those who use the above-mentioned phrase do not apply to me. [See Ullmann’s Treatise, translated by Edwards and Park, in the “Selections from German Literature.”]

The greatest achievements of great men in behalf of humanity have not been accomplished by plans previously arranged and digested; on the contrary, such men have generally been unconscious instruments. working out God’s purposes, at least in the beginning, before the fruits of their labours have become obvious to their own eyes. They served the plan of God’s providence for the progress of his kingdom among men, by giving themselves up enthusiastically to the ideas which the Spirit of God had imparted to them. Not unfrequently has a false historical view ascribed to such labours, after their results became known, a plan which had nothing to do with their developement. Nay, these mighty men were able to do their great deeds precisely because a higher than human wisdom formed the plan of their labours and prepared the way for them. The work was greater than the workmen; they had no presentiments of the results that were to follow from the toils to which they felt themselves impelled. So was it with LUTHER, when he kindled the spark which set half Europe in a blaze, and commenced the sacred flame which refined the Christian Church.

Were we at liberty to compare the work of CHRIST with these creations wrought through human agencies, we should need to guard ourselves against determining the plan of his ministry from its results. We might then suppose that he was inspired with enthusiasm for an idea, whose compass and consequences the limits of his circumstances and his times prevented him from fully apprehending. We might also distinguish between the idea, as made the guide and the aim of his actions by himself, and the more comprehensive Divine plan, to which, by his voluntary and thorough devotion to God, he served as the organ. And it would rather glorify than disparage him to show, by thus comparing him with other men who had wrought as God’s instruments to accomplish His vast designs, that God had accomplished through him even greater things than he had himself intended.

But we are allowed to make no such comparison. The life of CHRIST presented a realized ideal of human culture such as man’s nature can never attain unto, let his developement reach what point it may. He described the future effects of the truth which he revealed in a way that no man could comprehend at the time, and which centuries of history have only been contributing to illustrate. Nor was the progress of the future more clear to his vision than the steps in the history of the past, as is shown by his own statements of the relation which he sustained to the old dispensation. Facts, which it required the course of ages to make clear, lay open to his eye; and history has both explained and verified the laws which he pointed out for the progress of his kingdom. He could not, therefore, have held the same relation to the plan for whose accomplishment his labours were directed, as men who were mere instruments of God, however great. He resembled them, it is true, in the fact that his labours were ordered according to no plan of human contrivance, but to one laid down by God for the developement of humanity; but he differed from them in this, that He understood the full compass of God’s plan, and had freely made it his own; that it was the plan of his own mind, clearly standing forth in his consciousness when he commenced his labours. The account of his temptation, rightly understood, shows all this.

With this, also, are rebutted those views which consider Christ as having recognized the idea of his ministry only through the cloudy atmosphere of Judaism; and those which represent his plan as having been essentially altered from time to time, as circumstances contradicted his first expectations and gave him clearer notions. They are further refuted by the entire harmony which subsists between Christ’s own expressions in regard to his plan, as uttered in the two different epochs of his history.

§ 49. Connexion with the Old Testament Theocracy.

The object of Christ was, as he himself often describes it, to establish the kingdom of God among men; not, as we have shown, after a plan of man’s devising, but after one laid down by God; not only in the general developement of the human race, but also, and specially, in the developement of the Jewish nation, and in the revelations of the old dispensation. We must, therefore, look back upon the Old Testament foundations of the kingdom of God, before we can correctly understand the plan of Christ as set forth in his. acts and words. The one prepared the way for the other. In the former it was outward and confined to the narrow community of the Jewish people, in the form of a state founded and governed by Divine authority; in the latter it was to be universal, all-embracing, a communion, springing out of the consciousness of God, intended to be the principle of life and union for all mankind. In the former, the Divine law, ordering from without all the relations of state and people, governed the nation through organs appointed by God and inspired by his Spirit, viz., priests, kings, and prophets. But this idea could not be realized; the kingdom of God could not be founded from without. It needed first a proper material; and this could not be found in human nature, estranged from God by sin. The history of the Jewish nation was designed to bring this contradiction out into clear consciousness; and to awaken a more and more vivid anxiety for its removal, and for the re-establishment and glorification of the Theocracy. So the revelations of God pointed more and more directly to HIM, the Messiah, under whose dominion the Divine kingdom was to be exalted, and the worship of Jehovah to be acknowledged and to triumph even among the nations so long estranged from him.

§ 50. Christ’s Steadfast Consciousness of his Messiahship.

And Jesus knew and testified to his Messiahship from the beginning, from his first public appearance until his last declaration, made before the high-priests in the very face of death; although he did not always proclaim it with equal openness, especially when there was risk of popular commotions from false and temporal conceptions of the Messiah on the part of the people; but rather gradually led them, from the acknowledgment of his prophetic character (by which, indeed, they were bound to believe in his words), to recognize him as the Messiah, a Prophet also, but in the highest sense.

In this respect there is no contradiction whatever between the Synoptical Gospels

Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

§ 51. No alterations of Christ’s Plan.

It may be imagined, however, that although Christ was conscious, from the beginning, of his calling to realize the idea of the kingdom of God, the plan of his work may have been modified from time to time according to the varying results which depended upon the vacillating temper of the public mind; that at first, perhaps, he hoped to find the greater part of the Jewish nation ready to receive him; and designed, under this supposition, to separate the incorrigible from the better part, and collect the latter into a Theocratic community under his government; and that he expected that the kingdom of God, once seated firmly in this way, would, by the might of its prevailing spirit of Divine life, by degrees transform all other nations into the same kingdom. In fact, what an incalculable influence might a nation, thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Christianity and illustrating Christianity in all its relations, exert toward the moral regeneration of the rest of mankind! A light indeed would it be, not hid under a bushel, but throwing its beams on all sides into the surrounding darkness: the salt and the leaven, truly, of all mankind. And some,

De Wette and Hase. Paulus also, with some modifications.

Yet, after all, these reasonings are only specious, not solid. Even the most important of them rather opposes than sustains the theory they are adduced to support. It is true, there is such a thing as a holy enthusiasm for a Divine idea, which is blind to all difficulties, or deems that it can gain an easy victory. Such, however, was not the enthusiasm of Christ for his Divine work; on the contrary, he combined with it a discretion which fully comprehended the opposition he must encounter from the prevailing opinions and feelings of the times. He was far from trusting to the momentary impulses under which the people, excited by his words and actions, sought to join themselves to him. He readily distinguished, with that searching glance that pierced the depths of men’s hearts, the few who came to him, drawn of the Father and following an inward consciousness of God, from those who sought him with carnal feelings, to obtain that which he came not to bestow. How did he check the ardour of his disciples, when he rebuked the false self-confidence inspired by a transient enthusiasm, and reminded them of their weakness! There was no extravagance in his demands upon men; nothing exaggerated in his hopes of the future. Every where we see not only a conscious possession of the Divine power to overcome the world, which he was to impart to humanity, but also of the obstacles it should meet with from the old nature in which the principle of sin was yet active. This was the spirit which passed over from him to the Apostles, and which constituted the peculiar essence of Christian ethics. CHRIST, while as yet surrounded only by a handful of faithful followers, describes the renewing power which the seed that he had sown would exert on the life of humanity; yet, brilliant as the prospect is, his eyes are not dazzled by it; he sees, at the same time, how impurity will mix itself with the work of God, and how clouds will obscure it. Could He whose quick glance thus saw the depths of men’s hearts, and took in at once the present and the future, who knew so well the corrupt carnality of the Jewish nation before he entered on his public ministry, so far deceive himself as to suppose that he could suddenly transform the larger part of such a nation into a true people of God? He that searched men’s hearts and knew what was in man could not be ignorant that his severest battles were to be fought with the prevalent depravity of men; and in connexion with these struggles, how natural was it for him to look forward to the death which he should suffer in the faithful performance of his calling! Even at an early date he intimated the violent death by which he was to be torn from the happy fellowship of his disciples, leaving them behind him in tears and sorrow.

Matt., ix., 15. Hase says, indeed, that these words do not imply necessarily an approaching violent death, but might be uttered in view of the common lot of mortals. But, in the first place, Jesus, if he applied to himself the Old Testament idea of the Messiah, could not believe that he would be torn by natural death from the Theocratic community which he should found among the Jews, and thus leave it to the direction of others; but must expect (if he hoped to found an external Theocracy) always to remain present as Theocratic king. (This applies, also, to what Hase says (2d edit. of his Leben Jesu, p. 89), in opposition to his previously expressed views.) Again, it would be strange indeed for a man of thirty to express himself to older men, in reference to the common end of mortals, in such language as the following: “Now is your time for festal joy; for when your friend shall be removed, it will be time for fasting and sorrow.” The whole connexion of the passage shows that Jesus did not expect to part from them under happy circumstances, but amid many conflicts and sufferings.

His temptation, the historical truth and import of which we have shown, makes it clear that he had decided, before he commenced his public labours, not to establish the kingdom of God in a mere outward way by miraculous power. And this is further shown by his assigning, in the first epoch of his ministry, to John the Baptist, whom he called the first among the prophets, a subordinate place in relation to the new era of religion; for this could only have been done in view of John’s in ability fully to comprehend the essential feature of this new era, viz.; the spiritual developement of the kingdom of God from within. And again, in reference to John he said, “Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me;” evidently presupposing that John’s Old Testament views would be offended at the new era; a presupposition which refers to the new spiritual growth of the Divine kingdom. It is, therefore, undeniable that from the beginning Christ aimed at this new developement of that kingdom.

We find further proof of this in all the parables which treat of the progress of his kingdom, and the effects of his truth upon human nature, viz., the parables of the mustard seed, of the leaven, of the fire which he had come to kindle upon earth, all which were designed to illustrate the distinction between the Old Testament form of the Theocracy and that of Christ; to illustrate a developement which was not at once to exhibit an external stately fabric; but to commence with apparently small beginnings, and yet ever to propagate itself by a mighty power working outwardly from within; and to regenerate all things, and thus appropriate them to itself. All these parables presuppose the renewal of human nature by a new and pervading principle of spiritual life; and imply that the kingdom of God. cannot be visibly realized among men until they become subjects of this renewal. To the same effect was Christ’s saying (which we shall further examine hereafter), “neither do men put new wine into old skins, else the skins break and the wine runneth out.” He who uttered such truths, involving a steadfast and connected system of thought, could not have set out with the purpose of establishing an outward kingdom, and have afterward been induced by circumstances to change his plan in so short a time. What an immense revolution in his mental habits and course of thinking must a few months have produced, on such a supposition! It would be, indeed, a gross misapprehension of the precepts given in the Sermon on the Mount to interpret them literally as laws laid down for an outward Theocratic kingdom. Such an interpretation would involve the possibility of a struggle between Good and Evil in the kingdom of God; such as can never take place in Messiahs reign, if it be realized according to its idea. The form of a state cannot be thought of in connexion with this kingdom; a state presupposes a relation to transgression; an outward law, the forms of judicature, the administration of justice are essential to its organization. But all these can have no place in the perfect kingdom of Christ; a community whose whole principle of life is love. Laws intended for the free mind lose their import when their observance is compelled by external penalties of any kind whatever. More of this view hereafter, when we come to treat especially of the Sermon on the Mount.

Nor is a change in Christ’s feelings to be in any wise admitted. The year of joy [the acceptable year, Luke, iv., 19] did not refer to the happy results which he hoped to attain, but to the blessed contents of the announcement with which he commenced his labours; the substance of the message itself was joyful, whether the dispositions of the people would make it a source of joy to them, or not. And even on his first proclamation at Nazareth, the hostility of the carnally-minded multitude could have enabled him to prognosticate the general temper with which the whole people would receive him. It follows by no means, from the wo which he uttered over his loved Jerusalem (Luke, xiii., 34, 35), that he had hoped at first to find acceptance with the entire nation, and to make Jerusalem the real seat of his Theocratic government. Yet, although he could not save the nation as a whole, he offered his warnings to the whole, leaving it to the issue to decide who were willing to hear his voice.

§ 52. Two-fold bearing of the Kingdom of God—an inward, spiritual Power, and a world-renewing Power.

There are two sides to the conception of the kingdom of God, as Christ viewed it; in reference to its ideal and its real elements, which must be contemplated in their connexion with each other. The discourses of Christ will be found every where to contradict a one-sided view of either of these elements.

The kingdom of God was indeed first to be exhibited as a communion of men bound together by the same spirit, inspired by the same consciousness of God; and this communion was to find its central point in CHRIST, its Redeemer and King. As he himself ordered and directed all things in the first congregation of his disciples, so he was subsequently to inspire, rule, and cultivate this community of men by his law and by his Spirit. The revelation of the Spirit, shared by all its members, was all that was to distinguish it from the world, so called in the New Testament, that is, the common mass of mankind, as alienated from God.

But as this community was gradually to prevail even over the mass of mankind through the power of the indwelling Spirit, it was not always to remain entirely inward and hidden, but to send forth, continually more and more, a renewing influence; to be the salt, the leaven of humanity, the city set upon a hill, the candle which, once lighted, should never be extinguished. And Christ was gradually, through this community, his organ and his royal dwelling-place, to establish his kingdom as a real one, more and more widely among men, and subdue the world to his dominion. In this sense were those who shared in his communion to obtain and exercise, even upon earth, a real world-dominion. It is the aim and end of history, that Christianity shall more and more become the world-governing principle. In fine, the end of this developement appears to be (though not, indeed, simply as its natural result) a complete realization of the Divine kingdom which Christ established in its outward manifestation, fully answering to its idea; a perfect world-dominion of Christ and of his organs; a world purified and transformed, to become the seat of His universal empire.

So did Christ intend, in a true sense, and in various relations, to describe himself as King, and his organs as partakers in his dominion of the world. It was, indeed, in a real sense that he spoke of his KINGDOM, to be manifested on earth. And as he was to build up this kingdom on the foundations laid down in the Old Testament, and to realize the plan of God therein prefigured, he could rightfully apply to himself the figures of the Old Testament in regard to the progress of the Theocracy, in order to bring the truths which they veiled clearly out before the consciousness of men.

Some suppose that every thing in Christ’s discourses, as reported by Matthew and Luke, in reference to this real Theocratic element, is to be ascribed to the Jewish views that obscured the truth as uttered by Christ, and caused it to be reported incorrectly That this is not the case is obvious from Paul’s plain references to such expressions of Christ’s, e.g., 1 Cor., vi., 2.

In thus comparing Christ’s discourses with each other, and in the unity of purpose which a contemplation of his whole life makes manifest, we find a guard for all after ages, against carnal misconceptions of his individual discourses, or of separate features of his life.

We shall speak more particularly of this when we come to treat of the mode in which Christ trained his apostles.

§ 53. Christ’s Observance of the Jewish Worship and Law.

No question can arise as to Christ’s intention to extend his kingdom abroad among the pagan nations; the Messianic predictions of the Old Testament had already intimated the general diffusion of the worship of Jehovah; and John the Baptist had hinted at the possible transfer of the kingdom of God from the Jews to the heathen, in case the former should prove to be unworthy of it. And what was afterward novel to the apostles was, not that the pagans should be converted and received into the fellowship of the Messiah, but that they should be received without accepting the Mosaic law. It was against the latter view, and not the former, that even the strictest Judaizers objected. It was to refute this that the Ebionites appealed to Christ’s strict observance of the law, and to his saying, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he “came not to destroy, but to fufil the law,” and that “not one jot or tittle of the law should pass away.”

We must not oppose this doctrine by quoting Christ’s declarations that the essence of religion must be found in the soul, and that outward things could neither cleanse nor sanctify mankind;

Such as Matt., xv., 11; Mark, vii., 15.

Viewing the relation of Christ’s doctrine to the legal stand-point only on this side, we might conceive it to have stood as follows: Directing his attention only to the necessity of proper dispositions in order to piety, he held, as of fundamental importance, that nothing in religion not springing from genuinely pious feelings could be of any avail; and, holding fast to this, did not investigate further the question of the continued authority of the ceremonial law. Satisfied with saving what was most essential, he permitted the other to stand as inviolable in its Divine authority. Such a course would have been eminently proper in Christ, if we regard him as nothing more than a genuine reformer Every attempt at true reformation must have, not a negative, but a positive point of departure; must start with some truth which it fully and necessarily recognizes.

The view which we have just set forth is not invalidated by Christ’s denunciations of the Pharisees for their arbitrary statutes and burdensome additions to the law.Matt., xxiii. In all these he contrasted the law, rightly and spiritually understood, with their false traditions and interpretations. As for actual violation of the law, he could never be justly accused of it; even Paul, who so strenuously resisted the continued obligation of the law, declares that Christ submitted to it.

Gal., iv., 4.

§ 54. His Manifestation greater than the “Temple.”

But a comparison of Matt., xii., 6-8, with Mark, ii., 28, will suggest to us something more than a mere assault upon the statutes of the Pharisees. In the first passage he begins with his opponents upon their own ground. “You yourselves admit that the priests who serve the Temple on the Sabbath must break the literal Sabbatical law in view of the higher duties of the Temple service.” Then he continues, “But I say unto you, there is something here greater than the Temple.”

I prefer Lachmann’s reading (μεῖζον) both on internal and external grounds. I cannot, however, believe, with De Wette, that the passage refers to Christ’s Messianic calling alone; but rather to his whole manifestation, of which his ministry as Messiah formed part. Similar expressions of Christ refer to his whole appearance, e. g., Matt., xii., 8, speaks of his person. Conf. Luke, xi., 30.

§ 55. The Conversation with the Samaritan Woman.

We have thus far confined ourselves to Christ’s declarations as given by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, avoiding John, because the credibility of his reports of Christ’s discourses has been more disputed. But, having shown the tendency of Christ’s doctrine of the Law from the first Gospels alone, we are surely now entitled to appeal to his conversation with the woman of Samaria (John, iv., 7-30), in which he set forth the Christian view, that religion was no more to be confined to any one place. In fact, the discourse involves no doctrine which cannot be found in Christ’s declarations elsewhere recorded. Perfectly accordant with his declaration to the hostile Pharisees who clamoured so loudly for the ritual law—“the manifestation of the Son of Man is greater than the Temple; and he is Lord of the Sabbath”—was his answer to a woman (ignorant, to be sure, and destitute of a spiritual sense of the Divine, but yet free from prejudice, and susceptible of receiving instruction from him, because she believed him to be a prophet), when she inquired as to the right place to worship God: “The time is coming when the worship of God will be confined to no visible temple for the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” This declaration could only have been founded on the fact that something greater than the Temple had appeared among men.

§ 56. The “Destroying” and “Fulfilling” of the Law.

But although we infer that Paul’s doctrine of the disjunction of Christianity from the Mosaic law was derived, mediately at least, from Christ’s own words, we must admit that the Judaizing Christians, unfit as they were, from their Jewish stand-point, fully to apprehend his teaching, might have found some support for their peculiar opinions both in his words and in his actions. Take, for instance, the passage, “Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”

Matt. v. 17.

We need only to understand correctly what kind of “destroying” it is which Christ disclaims. It is a “destroying” which excludes “fulfilling;” a destroying which is not at the same time a fulfilling. The general positive clause, “I am come to fulfil,” is used as proof of the special and negative clause, “I am not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets;” nor are we to make the former a special one, by seeking an object for it in the preceding words. On the contrary, the general proposition, “I am come to fulfil,” which holds good of Christ’s entire labours, is, in this case, specially applied to his relation to the Old Testament. Christ’s activity is in no sense a destroying and negative, but in every respect a fulfilling and creative agency. For instance, by that agency human nature is to lose none of its essential features; but only to be freed from the bonds and defects which sin has imposed upon it, so that its ideal, as originally designed by the Creator, may become the real. This is fulfilling; but yet it must be accompanied by the destroying of whatever opposes it. We apply the same principle to Christ’s relation to the Mosaic law. The Mosaic Institute, as the fundamental law of the special Theocracy exhibited in the Jewish nation, was a veil, a limited form, in which the will of God, the eternal law of the Theocracy, was appropriately impressed upon the men of that time. But the general and eternal Theocratic law could not find its free developement and fulfilment in the form of an outward State law. The law (in its whole extent I mean, including what is called in a narrower sense the moral, as well as the ritual law) aimed to realize the will of God, to present the true δικαιοσύνη under the relations above defined. But what the law, in its whole extent, aimed at, is accomplished through Christ; the veil is rent, the bonds are loosed by the liberating Spirit, and the law reaches its before unattainable fulfilment. This fulfilment, indeed, involves the removal of all obstructions; but this destroying process cannot be called destroying, as it is an essential condition, and a negative element, of the fulfilment itself. So the fulfilment of prophecy in the manifestation and labours of Christ necessarily involved the destruction of the prophetic veil and covering of the Messianic idea.

We shall see hereafter how this interpretation of Christ’s words is verified in the whole train of thought in the Sermon on the Mount.

The Ebionites, adhering only to the letter, misunderstood Christ’s declarations on this subject; but Paul, viewing them in their true spirit and universal bearing, obtained those views on the relation of the Law and the Gospel which he presents in such passages as Rom., iii., 31: viii., 3, 4.

§ 57. The Interpolation in Luke, vi., 4. (Cod. Cant.)

There is a traditional account of another remarkable saying of Christ in regard to the observance of the Sabbath,

In the Cod. Cant. (Cod. Bezae), this passage immediately follows Luke, vi., 4: “τῇ αὑτῆ ἡμέρᾳ θεασάμενός τινα ἐργαζόμενον τῴ σαββάτῳ εἶπεν αὑτῷ· ἄνθρωπε, εἰ μὲν οἶδας τὶ ποιεῖς, μακάριος εἶ· εἰ δὲ μὴ οἶδας, επικατάρατος καὶ παραβάτης εἶ τοῦ νόμον.”

§ 58. The Names Son of God and Son of Man.

OUR conception of the person of the Messiah, as Theocratic King, is closely connected with that which we may entertain of the kingdom of God itself, and of its process of developement. In reference to both, Jesus joined himself indeed to the existing Jewish conceptions, but, at the same time, infused into them a new spirit and a higher regenerating element.

Both of the names which he applied to himself—Son of God and Son of Man—are to be found among the designations of the Messiah in the Old Testament; but he used them in a far higher sense than was current among the Jews. He obviously employed them antithetically: they contain correlative ideas, and cannot be thoroughly understood apart from their reciprocal relation. It is clear from Matt., xvi., 16; xxvi., 63; John, i., 50, and from all that is known of the current theological language of the Jews at that time, that the name “Son of God” was the most common designation of Messiah, as the best adapted to denote his highest dignity, that of Theocratic King. The name “Son of Man” involves, indeed, an allusion to the description of the Messiah in Dan., vii. (further illustrated in Christ’s last words before the high-priests, Matt., xxvi., 64); but it is certain that this name was not among the more usual or best known titles of Messiah. This may explain why,

John, xii., 34.

§ 59. Import of the Title Son of Man, as used by Christ himself—Rejection of Alexandrian and other Analogies.

Christ must, therefore, have had special reasons for adopting, with an obvious predilection, the less known Messianic title. Even if we were to grant that lie used it more frequently because of its less obvious application, in order, at first, to lead the Jews gradually to recognize him as Messiah; still we should not have a sufficient explanation of his employing it so generally and so emphatically.

I must differ here from Scholten, Lücke, Von Cöln (Bibl. Dogm., ii., 16), and Strauss (Leben Jesu); and agree with Schleiermacher, Tholuck, Olshausen, and Kling (Stud. u. Krit, 1836, i., 137). Justly says Schleiermacher of the title “Son of Man,” “Christ would not have adopted it had he not been conscious of a complete participation in human nature. Its application would have been pointless, however, had he not used it in a sense inapplicable to other men; and it was pregnant with reference to the distinctive differences between him and them” (Dogmatik, ii., 91, 3d. ed). Certainly there is manifest, in the often-repeated expressions, sayings, and proverbs uttered by Christ, more the impression of an original and creative mind than a mere appropriation of what might have been given to his hand by his age and nation. It is one of the merits of the great man whose words we have just quoted, that he vindicated this truth in many ways in opposition to a shallow theology. The unclean spirit which he banished is now endeavouring, with seven others worse than himself, to take possession of this age, in which endeavour, please God, he will not succeed.

§ 60. Import of the Title Son of God.

(1.) John’s Sense of the Title accordant with that of the other Evangelists.

We are indebted to John’s Gospel, more than to either of the others, for those expressions of Christ which relate especially to the indwelling within him of the Divine essence. It does not, however (as some suppose), follow from this that John, consciously or unconsciously, remodelled the discourses of Christ according to the Alexandrian theology. The fact may be explained on entirely other grounds, e. g., his more intimate connexion with Christ, and the peculiar profoundness of his mind; moreover, the discourses recorded by him are longer and more consecutively didactic and controversial than those given by the other Evangelists. The impartiality, too, with which he sets forth the pure humanity of Christ is sufficient to prove the groundlessness of such a reproach.

If we can only find individual expressions in the other Evangelists which involve the idea of the “Son of God” in John’s sense, we shall have proved satisfactorily that the latter was derived immediately from Christ himself. Now Matt., xi., 27, “No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son,” is just such a passage. It intimates precisely such a mysterious relation between the Father and the Son as John more fully sets forth as imparted to him by the revelation of Christ. So, also, the question propounded by Christ to the Pharisees, “What think ye of the Christ? whose Son is he?” could have had no other object than to lead them to conceive Messiah as the Son of God in a higher sense than they were accustomed to. Again, the heathen centurion (Matt., viii., 5), who deemed his roof unworthy of Christ, and begged him, without approaching his abode, to heal the sick servant by a word, certainly considered him as a superior being who had ministering spirits at command. He evidently did not form his idea of Christ from the common Jewish conceptions of the Messiah; on the contrary, his explanation (verse 9) of the impression which he had received (either from the accounts of others, or from personal observation of Christ’s person and labours) is perfectly in keeping with his character and notions while as yet a pagan.

The whole account bears the inimitable stamp of historical truth.

In a word, the whole image of Christ presented in the synoptical Gospels exhibits a majesty far transcending human nature, and utterly irreconcilable with Ebionitish conceptions. A manifestation so extraordinary presupposes an inward essence such as that which John’s Gospel fully unfolds to us.

(2.) And confirmed by Paul’s.

Nor could the origin of Paul’s doctrine of the person of Christ be explained, unless Christ himself had given statements corresponding to those recorded in John’s Gospel. So, too, the various theological tendencies that developed themselves after the apostolic age presuppose a turn of thought intermediate between that especially exhibited in Matthew and that of Paul. Precisely such an intermediate point was occupied by John.

Lücke has justly remarked upon the difference between the classic, creative tendencies of the apostolic times, and the later imitations of them. The dividing line between the former and the latter is distinctly marked. The later developement of Christian doctrine presupposes the different apostolic types of doctrine, and among them that of John. It is, therefore, utterly unhistorical to seek the origin of such a Gospel as John’s in later Church developements (as some attempt to do). The latter are utterly destitute of the harmonious unity of Christian spiritual elements that distinguishes the former.

§ 61. Christ a Spiritual Teacher.

AS the kingdom which Christ came to establish was a spiritual one, intended to develope itself outwardly from within, so the means which he employed in its foundation were entirely of a spiritual nature. In his declaration before Pilate,

John, xviii. 33-38.

Inasmuch, therefore, as he himself designates the testimony of the truth as his means of founding his kingdom; inasmuch, also, as he appeared first as Prophet, in order to lead those who recognized him as such to recognize him also as Messiah and Theocratic King, we must treat of his work as Prophet, or of his exercise of the office of Divine Teacher, as the instrument by which he laid the ground-work of his reign among men.

§ 62. Different Theatres of Christ’s Labours as Teacher.

Christ exercised his office as teacher in two distinct theatres, Galilee and Jerusalem; and his mode of teaching varied accordingly. That carnal mania for miracles (directly contrasted by Paul

1 Cor., i., 22.

§ 63. Choice and Training of the Apostles to be subordinate Teachers.

Those who had no ear to hear the teachings of Christ fell off one by one, and left around him a narrow and abiding circle of susceptible souls, who were gradually more and more attracted by him, and more and more deeply imbued with his spirit. A closer [the closest] circle still was formed of his constant companions, the Apostles. As the seed which he sowed was received and developed so differently in the soils of different minds, and as the import of his teaching could not be thoroughly comprehended until his work upon earth was finished, there was danger that the confused traditions of the multitude would hand down to posterity a very imperfect image of himself and his doctrines, and that the necessary instrument for the foundation of the kingdom of God, viz., the propagation of the truth, would be wanting.

It might be supposed that Christ could have best guarded against this result by transmitting his doctrine to all after ages in a form written by himself. And had He, in whom the Divine and the human were combined in unbroken harmony, intended to do this, he could not but have given to the Church the perfect contents of his doctrine in a perfect form. Well was it, however, for the course of developement which God intended for his kingdom, that what could be done was not done. The truth of God was not to be presented in a fixed and absolute form, but in manifold and peculiar representations, designed to complete each other, and which, bearing the stamp at once of God’s inspiration and man’s imperfection, were to be developed by the activity of free minds, in free and lively appropriation of what God had given by his Spirit. This will appear yet more plainly hereafter, from the principles of Christ’s mode of instruction, as set forth by himself. At present we content ourselves with one single remark. Christ’s declaration, “It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing,”

John, vi., 63.

Since, therefore, Christ intended to leave no such fixed rule of doctrine for all ages, written by himself, it was the more necessary for him to select organs capable of transmitting to posterity a correct image of himself and his teaching, Such organs were the apostles, and their training constituted no unimportant part of his work as a teacher.

§ 64. His mode of Teaching adapted to the Stand-point of his Hearers.

WE shall first seek, in the intimations of Christ himself, for the principles of his mode of teaching, and the grounds on which he adopted it.

Such an intimation may be found in Matt., xiii., 52. After he had uttered and expounded several parables in regard to the kingdom of God, and had been assured by the apostles that they understood him, he continued: “From the example I have given you, in thus making hidden truths clear by means of parables, ye may learn that every scribe who is instructed into the kingdom of Heaven is like a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” As a householder shows his visitors his jewels; exhibits, in pleasing alternation, the modern and the antique, and leads them from the common to the rare, so must the teacher of Divine truth, in the new manifestation of the kingdom of God, bring out of his treasures of knowledge truths old and new, and gradually lead his hearers from the old and usual to the new and unaccustomed. Utterly unlike the rabbins, with their obstinate and slavish adherence to the letter, the teachers of the new epoch were to adapt themselves freely to the circumstances of their hearers, and, in consequence, to present the truth under manifold varieties of form. In a word, Christ himself, as a teacher, was the model for his disciples.

As the passage above quoted referred primarily to the parabolic mode of teaching which Christ had just employed, we find in it an important reason for the frequent use which he made of figures and similitudes. It was, namely, in order to bring new and higher truths vividly before the minds of his hearers, by means of illustrations drawn from objects familiar to them in common life and nature.

But the passage can be applied also to many other features of his mode of teaching; for instance, to his habit of leading his hearers, step by step, from the stand-point of the Old Testament to that of the New adapting himself to the old representations and the Jewish modes of thought and speech derived from them (especially those which referred to Messiah’s kingdom), and thus imparting the new spirit under the ancient and accustomed forms. All his accommodation to forms finds its explanation here.

§ 65. His Teaching presented Seeds and Stimulants of Thought.

Again, he told his disciples (John, xvi., 25) that up to that time he had veiled the truth in parables, but that the time was approaching when he should declare plainly and openly all that he had to tell them of his Father. He thus taught them that they would be enabled, at a later period, by the aid of the illuminating Spirit, to develope from his discourses the hidden truths which they enfolded. It must, therefore, by no means surprise us to find that the full import of most of his words was not comprehended by his contemporaries: such a result, indeed, was just what we might expect. He would not have been “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” had not his words, like his works, with all their adaptation to the circumstances of the times, contained some things that were inexplicable; had they not borne concealed within them the germ of an infinite developement, reserved for future ages to unfold. It is this feature (and all the Evangelists concur in their representations of it) which distinguishes Christ from all other teachers of men. Advance as they may, they can never reach him; their only task need be, by taking Him more and more into their life and thought, to learn better how to bring forth the treasures that lie concealed in him.

Schleiermacher says beautifully (Christliche Sittenlehre, p. 72), that all our progress [in Divine knowledge] must consist solely in more correctly understanding and more completely appropriating to ourselves that which is in Christ.

The form of his expressions, whether he uttered parables, proverbs, maxims, or apparent paradoxes, was intended to spur men’s minds to profounder thought, to awaken the Divine consciousness within, and so teach them to understand that which at first served only as a mental stimulus. It was designed to impress indelibly upon the memory of his hearers truths perhaps as yet not fully intelligible, but which would grow clear as the Divine life was formed within them, and become an ever-increasing source of spiritual light. His doctrine was not to be propagated as a lifeless stock of tradition, but to be received as a living Spirit by willing minds, and brought out into full consciousness, according to its import, by free spiritual activity. Its individual parts, too, were only to be apprehended in their first proportions, in the complete connexion of that higher consciousness which He was to call forth in man. The form of teaching which repelled the stupid, and passed unheeded and misunderstood by the unholy, roused susceptible minds to deeper thought, and rewarded their inquiries by the discovery of ever-increasing treasures.

§ 66. Its Results dependent upon the Spirit of the Hearers.

But the attainment of this end depended upon the susceptibility of the hearers. So far as they hungered for true spiritual food, so far as the parable stimulated them to deeper thought, and so far only, it revealed new riches. Those with whom this was really the case were accustomed to wait until the throng had left their Master, or, gathering round him in a narrow circle, in some retired spot, to seek clearer light on points which the parable had left obscure. The scene described in Mark, iv., 10, shows us that others besides the twelve apostles were named among those who remained behind to ask him questions after the crowd had dispersed. Not only did such questions afford the Saviour an opportunity of imparting more thorough instruction, but those who felt constrained to offer them were thereby drawn into closer fellowship with him. He became better acquainted with the souls that were longing for salvation.

The greater number, however, in their stupidity, did not trouble themselves to penetrate the shell in order to reach the kernel. Yet they must at least have perceived that they had understood nothing; they could not learn separate phrases from Christ (as they might from other religious teachers) and think they comprehended them, while they did not. And so, in proportion to the susceptibility of his hearers, the parables of Christ revealed sacred things to some and veiled them from others, who were destined, through their own fault, to remain in darkness. The pearls, as he himself said, were not to be cast before swine. Thus, like those “hard sayings”

John, vi., 60.

A single example will bring this vividly before us. On a certain occasion, when Christ had pronounced a parable, and the multitude had departed, the earnest seekers after truth gathered about him to ask its interpretation.

Luke, viii., 10; Mark, iv., 11.

§ 67. His Mode of Teaching corresponds to the General Law of Developement of the Kingdom of God.

It was, then, according to Christ’s own words, a peculiar aim and law of his teaching, to awaken a sense for Divine things in the human mind, and to make further communications in proportion to the degree of living appropriation that might be made of what was given. And this corresponds with the general laws established by Christ for the developement of the kingdom of God. It is his law that choice must be made, by the free determination of the will, between God and the world, before the susceptibility for Divine things (which may exist even in the as yet fettered soul, if it incline towards God), and the emotions of love

Pascal (Art de Persuader), “qu’il faut aimer les choses divines, pour les connaitre.” Beautifully said.

Thus, then, the other Evangelists agree with John in regard to the fundamental principles of Christ’s mode of teaching.

§ 68 Idea of the Parable.—Distinction between Parable, Fable, and Mythus.

Without doubt the form of Christ’s communications was in some degree determined by the mental peculiarities of the people among whom he laboured, viz., the Jews and Orientals. We may find in this one reason for his use of parables; and we must esteem it as a mark of his freedom of mind and creative originality, that he so adapted to his own purposes a form of instruction that was especially current among the Jews. But yet his whole method of teaching, as we have already set it forth, would have led him, independently of his relations to the people around him, to adopt this mode of communicating truth. Not inaptly has one of the old writers compared the parables of Christ’s discourses to the parabolic character of his whole manifestation, representing, as it did, the supernatural in a natural form.

Διότε καὶ ὁ κύριος οὐκ ὢν κοσμκὸς, ὡς κοσμικὸς εἱς ἀνθρώ;πους ἦλθεν. Strom., vi., 677.

We may define the parables as representations through which the truths pertaining to the kingdom of God are vividly exhibited by means of special relations of common life, taken either from nature or the world of mankind. A general truth is set forth under the likeness of a particular fact, or a continuous narrative, commonly derived from the lower sphere of life; the operations of nature, and the qualities of inferior animals, or the acts of men in their mutual relations with each other, being assumed as the basis of the representation. Those parables which are derived entirely from the sphere of nature are grounded on the typical relations that exist

“It can readily be shown that the parables, as used by Christ, had the significance of their types. Nature, as she has disclosed herself to the mind of man, must in them bear witness of Spirit.” Steffens (Religionsphilosophie, i., 146). And so Schelling, on the relation between Nature and History, “They are to each other parable and interpretation.” Philos. Schriften, 1809, 457.)

Even though the fable be so defined as to be included in the parable, as the species is comprehended in the genus, still the latter, especially as Christ employs it, has always its own distinctive characteristics. The parable is allied to the fable, as used by Æsop, so far forth as both differ from the Mythus (an unconscious invention), by employing statements of fact, not pretended to be historical, merely as coverings for the exhibition of a general truth; the latter only being presented to the mind of the hearer or reader as real. But the parable is distinguished from the fable by this, that in the latter, qualities or acts of a higher class of beings may be attributed to a lower (e.g., those of men to brutes); while in the former, the lower sphere is kept perfectly distinct from the higher one which it serves to illustrate. The beings and powers thus introduced always follow the law of their nature, but their acts, according to this law, are used to figure those of a higher race. The fable cannot be true according to its form, e. g., when brutes are introduced thinking, speaking, and acting like men; but the representations of the parable always correspond to the facts of nature, or the occurrences of civil and domestic life, and remind the hearer of events and phenomena within his own experience. The mere introduction of brutes, as personal agents, in the fable, is not sufficient to distinguish it from the parable, which may make use of the same contrivance; as, for instance, indeed, Christ employs the sheep in one of his parables. The great distinction here, also, lies in what has already been remarked; brutes introduced in the parable act according to the law of their nature, and the two spheres of nature and the kingdom of God are carefully separated from each other. Hence the reciprocal relations of brutes to each other are not made use of, as these could furnish no appropriate image of the relation between man and the kingdom of God. And as the lower animals are, by an impulse of their nature, attached to man as a being of a higher order, Divine, as it were, in comparison to themselves, and destined to rule over them, the relations between man and this inferior race may serve very well to illustrate the still higher relations of the former to the kingdom of God and the Saviour. Thus, for instance, Christ employs the connexion of sheep and the shepherd to give a vivid image of the relations of human souls to their Divine guide.

There is ground for this distinction between parable and fable, both in the form and in the substance. In the form, because the parable in tends that the objects of nature and the occurrences of every-day life shall be associated with higher truths, and thus not only illustrate them, but preserve them constantly in the memory. In the substance, because, although single acts of domestic or social virtue might find points of likeness in the qualities of the lower animals (not morality in general, for this, like religion, is too lofty to be thus illustrated), the dignity of the sphere of Divine life would be essentially lowered by transferring it to a class of beings entirely destitute of corresponding qualities.

§ 69. Order in which the Parables were Delivered.—Their Perfection.—Mode of Interpreting them.

We find many parables placed together in Matthew, xiii.; and the question naturally arises whether it is probable that Christ uttered so many at one and the same time. We can readily conceive that he should use various parables in succession in order to present the same truth or several closely related truths, in different forms; this variety would tend to excite attention, to present the one truth more clearly by such various illustration, to put the one subject before the beholder’s eye more steadily, in many points of view, and thus to imprint it indelibly upon his memory. But it is not to be supposed that Christ delivered a succession of parables different both in form and matter, or, if somewhat alike in form, different in scope and design; for this could only have confused the minds of his hearers, and thus frustrated the very purpose of this mode of instruction.

It will be easy to gather what is necessary to the perfection of the parable, from what we have said of its nature. In the first place, the fact selected from the lower sphere of life should be perfectly adapted, in its own nature, to give a vivid representation of the higher truth; and, secondly, the individual traits of the lower fact itself should be clearly exhibited according to nature. Hence, in order to understand the parables correctly, we must endeavour to seize upon the single truth which the parabolic dress is designed to illustrate, and refer all the rest to this. The separate features, which serve to give roundness and distinctness to the picture of the lower fact, may aid us in obtaining a more many-sided view of the one truth, the higher sphere corresponding to the lower in more respects than one (e. g., the parables of the shepherd and the sower); but we must never seek the perfection of the parables of Christ in giving significancy, apart from the propel point of comparison, to the parts of the narrative which were merely intended to complete it; for this, by diverting the mind from the one truth to a variety of particulars, can only embarrass instead of assisting it, and must thus frustrate the very aim of the parable itself. Such a procedure would open a wide field for arbitrary interpretation, and could not fail to lead the hearer astray.

The separate parables will be treated in their proper connexions in the course of the narrative.

§ 70. Christ’s Teaching not confined to Parables, but conveyed also in longer Discourses.

It followed, not only from Christ’s chosen mode of teaching, but also from his relations to the new spiritual creation whose seeds he implanted in the hearts of his disciples, that he used pithy and sententious sayings and aphorisms instead of lengthened exhibitions of doctrine. They were intended to be retained in ever vivid recollection, and, notwithstanding their separation, to contain the germs of an organically connected system of moral and religious truth. The interpreter and the historian find the difficulty of placing these in their proper relations and occasions increased by the fact that the accounts of the first three Evangelists arrange and present them in different connexions of thought. The Church, however, has lost nothing by this; it only establishes the doctrine that the truths uttered by Christ admit of manifold apprehension and application. Yet there is no ground for the assumption that Christ taught only by means of parables and aphorisms. The supposition, in itself, is sufficiently improbable, that he never employed longer and more connected forms of discourse for the instruction of the circles of disciples who had received impressions from him and gathered themselves about his person; and, besides, an example of this kind (recorded by the first three Evangelists) is to be found in the Sermon on the Mount. We shall hereafter inquire more closely into the system of Christian truth contained in that discourse.

§ 71. John’s Gospel contains chiefly connected and profound Discourses; and Why?

We must here consider the difference between the form of Christ’s expositions as given by the first three Evangelists, and as recorded by John. Some recent writers have found an irreconcilable opposition between them both of form and substance; and have concluded therefrom either that John, in reproducing the discourses of Christ from memory, involuntarily blended his own subjective views with them, and thus presented doctrines which a real disciple could not at the time have apprehended; or that some one else at a later period, and not John, was the author of this Gospel. They contrast the thoroughly practical bearing of the Sermon on the Mount with (what they call) the mystical character of the discourses recorded by John. They find every thing in the former simple and intelligible, while the latter abounds in paradoxes, and seems to study obscurity. Moreover, the latter is almost destitute of parables; a form of eloquence not only national, but also characteristic of Christ, judging from his discourses as given in the other Gospels.

But let any one only yield himself to the impression of the Sermon on the Mount, and then ask himself whether it be probable that a mind of the loftiness, depth, and power which that discourse evinces, could have employed only one mode of teaching? A mind which swayed not only simple and practical souls, but also so profoundly speculative an intellect as that of Paul, could not but have scattered the elements of such a tendency from the very first. We cannot but infer, from the irresistible power which Christianity exerted upon minds so diversely constituted and cultivated, that the sources of that power lay combined

We should believe this even if we were to admit Weisse’s view, viz., that the basis of this Gospel was a collection of the λὸγια τοῠ κυρίου made by John, and afterward wrought by another hand into the form of a historical narrative. But Weisse’s critical processes seem to me to be entirely arbitrary. John’s Gospel is altogether (with the exception of a few passages which are suspicious both on external and internal grounds) a work of one texture, not admitting of critical decomposition. In Matthew, not only internal signs, but also historical traditions, when considered without prejudice, seem to distinguish the original and fundamental composition from the later revision of the work. On the other hand, the author in whom we first find the tradition referred to (Papias, Euseb., iii., 39) makes mention of no such thing in regard to John’s Gospel. He must have known the fact, had it been so, living as he did in Asia Minor. Some adduce Papias’s silence about John’s Gospel as a testimony against its genuineness; but his object, most likely, was to give in formation in regard to those parts of the narrative whose origin was not so well known in that part of the country; whereas John’s Gospel was fresh in every one’s memory there.

§ 72. The Parable of the Shepherd, in John, compared with the Parables in the other Gospels.

Parables, as we have said, are peculiarly fitted for oral tradition. We need not wonder, therefore, that they are more abundant in the first three Gospels, which were composed of such traditions, than in John; and, moreover, the latter, presupposing them to be known, may have had, in his peculiar turn of mind, and in the object for which he wrote his Gospel, sufficient reasons for omitting them. Yet the discourses of Christ, as given by him, are marked by the very peculiarity that gives rise to the use of parables, viz., the illustration of the Spiritual and the Divine, by images taken from common life.

But real parables are not entirely wanting in John’s Gospel. The illustration of the shepherd and the sheep (ch. 10) has all the essential features of the parable, and John himself applies that name to it (ver. 6). Here, as in other parables, we find a religious truth vividly represented by a similitude taken from the sphere of nature. As, for instance, in the parable of the sower, Christ is likened to the husbandman, the Divine word to the seed, and the various degrees of susceptibility for the word in men’s souls to the variously productive soils in which the seed is planted; so, in this similitude, the relation of souls to Christ is compared with that of sheep to the shepherd; and the self-seeking teacher, who offers himself, on his own authority and for a bad purpose, as a guide of men, is likened to a thief who does not enter the sheep-fold by the door, but climbs over the wall. Strauss has remarked that this parable differs from those of the Synoptical Gospels in this, that it does not give a historical narrative, with beginning, middle, and end, of a fact actually once taking place, but makes use simply of what is commonly seen to happen. But even this feature cannot be said to be essential to all the synoptical parables, but only to those in which a specific occurrence in human intercourse is assumed to illustrate a spiritual truth;

Even were the name parables (as a distinct form of similitudes) restricted to representations of this class, such a distinction would not destroy the analogy between Christ’s discourses in John and those in the other Gospels, founded on their use, in common, of the same mode of vividly exhibiting spiritual truths.

§ 73. Necessity of Accommodation.

We must mention Christ’s adaptation of his instruction to the capacity of his hearers, as one of the peculiar features of his mode of teaching. Without such accommodation, indeed, there can be no such thing as instruction. The teacher must begin upon a ground common to his pupils, with principles presupposed as known to them, in order to extend the sphere of their knowledge to further truths. He must lower himself to them, in order to raise them to himself. As the true and the false are commingled in their conceptions, he must seize upon the true as his point of departure, in order to disengage it from the encumbering false. So to the child the man becomes a child, and explains the truth in a form adapted to its age, by making use of its childish conceptions as a veil for it.

In accordance with this principle, every revelation of God, having for its object the training of mankind for the Divine life (and we must never forget that this was the sole aim of Christianity, as well as of the preparatory institutions which preceded it), has made use of this law of accommodation, in order to present the Divine to the consciousness of men in forms adapted to their respective stand-points. And as Christ by no means intended, as we have before remarked, to impart a complete system of doctrine as a mere dead tradition; but rather to stimulate men’s minds to a living appropriation and developement of the truth which he revealed, by means of the powers with which God had endowed them; it was the more necessary for him to adapt his instruction to the capacities of those who heard him. His teaching by parables, in which the familiar affairs of every-day life were made the veil and vehicle of unknown and higher truths, was an instance of accommodation. The pedagogic principle of joining the old with the new, of making the old new and the new old, and of deriving the new from the old, is fully illustrated in the saying of Christ before referred to, viz., that the teacher, instructed in the kingdom of Heaven, is like “a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” To this principle, constantly employed by Christ in his teaching, we must ascribe the extraordinary influence of Christianity upon human culture from the very beginning. But, just as the “form of a servant” hindered many eyes from seeing the Son of God in the Son of Man, so the Divine, which adapted itself to human infirmities by veiling its heavenly grandeur, was often concealed by the very veil which it had assumed.

§ 74. Distinction between Positive (Material) and Negative (Formal) Accommodation; the latter necessary, the former inadmissible.

We must carefully separate false from true accommodation; there is a broad distinction between a negative accommodation of the form and a positive one of the substance. The teacher who adopts the latter will confirm his hearers in an error, in order to gain their confidence, and to infuse into their minds, even by means of error, some important truth. But the laws of morality do not admit that “the end sanctifies the means;” nor can the establishment of error ever be a just means of propagating truth. And it is as impolitic as it is immoral; for error, as well as truth, contains within itself a fructifying germ, and no one can predict what fruit it will produce. He who makes use of it renounces at once the character of a teacher of truth; no man will trust him, and he can therefore exert a spiritual influence upon none. There is no criterion for distinguishing the truth of his aims from the falsehood of his means. Such an accommodation as this was utterly repugnant to the holy nature of Him who called himself The Truth; and there is no trace of it to be found in his teachings.

It is quite a different thing with the negative and formal accommodation. As Christ’s sole calling as a teacher was to implant the fundamental truths of the kingdom of God in the human consciousness, he could not stop by the way to battle with errors utterly unconnected with his object, and remote from the interests of religion and morality. Thus he made use of common terms and expressions without entering into an examination of all the false notions that might be attached to them. He called diseases, for instance, by the names in common use; but we should not be justified in concluding that he thereby stamped with his Divine authority the ordinary notions of their origin, as implied in the names. Nor does his citation of the books of the Old Testament by the accustomed titles imply any sanction on his part of the prevalent opinions in regard to their authors. We must never forget that his words, as he himself has told us, are Spirit and Life; and that no scribe of the old Rabbinical school, no slave to the letter, can rightly comprehend and apply them.

Nor did he make use of positive accommodation in seizing, as he did, upon those religious conceptions of the times which concealed the germ of truth under material forms. It was not his aim to preserve the mere shell, the outward form, but to disengage the inner truth from its covering, and bring it out into free and pure developement. This he could only effect by causing men to change their whole carnal mode of thinking, of which the material form of representation, just referred to, was only one of the results. These remarks apply especially to the use which he made of the common outward images of the Messianic world-dominion; which he certainly would not have employed, if they had not contained a substantive truth in regard to the developement of the kingdom of God from the Old Testament standpoint.

See p. 86 and 87.

Of the same character was the use which Christ made of figurative analogies like that in Matt., xii., 43,

We shall have occasion to speak of this passage more fully in another connexion.

§ 75. Christ’s Application of Passages from the Old Testament.

What we have said in regard to Christ’s habit of taking up a concealed truth is especially applicable to his use of quotations from the Old Testament, which enveloped, as it were, and contained the germ of truths which he was fully to unfold and develope. In this point of view, he derived, from the Old Testament, truths which, though not contained in the letter of its words, were involved in its spirit and fundamental import. The higher spirit, which appeared in its unlimited fulness in Christ, was predominant in the Old Testament; all the preparatory revelations of that spirit had Christ for their aim; the Theocratic idea, which formed the central-point both of the Scriptures and the Jewish nation, had found no fulfilment, but looked to the future for its realization. Christ was perfectly justified, therefore, in so interpreting the Old Testament as to bring out clearly its hidden intimations and germs of truth, and to unfold from the covering of the letter the profounder sense of the Spirit. We shall have occasion to illustrate this more fully in our exposition of Christ’s didactic and polemic use of the Old Testament. Paul’s interpretation of the Old Testament was of precisely the same character; with this difference only, that Christ was better able to distinguish the different stages of the Theocratic developement, pointing, as they all did, to his manifestation.

§ 76 Christ’s Relation to the Twelve.—Significance of the Number Twelve.—The Name Apostle.

WE have before remarked, that among the most important means employed by Christ in founding the kingdom of God was the training of certain organs; not only to replace his personal labours as a teacher (which were limited to so very brief a period), but also to propagate a true image of his person, his manifestation, his Spirit, and his truth. Here arises the question, whether Christ intentionally selected twelve men for this purpose, and took the individuals thus chosen into closer communion with himself, or whether this intimate relationship arose out of a gradual separation of the more susceptible disciples from the mass, who formed by degrees a narrower and more permanent circle about his person; whether, in a word, the choice of the twelve was made once for all, by a definite purpose, or arose simply from the nature of the case.

See the arguments for this view in Schleiermacher on Luke, p. 88.

This question would be at once decided, if we could consider the Sermon on the Mount as an ordination discourse for the Apostles; but this view, as we shall hereafter show, is untenable. But there are passages

Luke, vi., 13; Mark, iii., 13, 14.

§ 77. Choice of the Apostles.—Of Judas Iscariot.

There are a few examples on record of Christ’s drawing and attaching to himself disciples who exhibited to his piercing eye the qualities necessary for his service. Probably this procedure was the same in the cases not recorded. The wisdom of Christ, moreover, leads us to conclude that the cultivation of these agents, on whose fitness so much depended, was an object of his special care and attention. Although we have not sufficient information to decide, in the case of each Apostle, why he especially was admitted into the number of the twelve, yet such examples as Peter and John, men of most striking character, who show us how the most marked features of human nature receive and tinge Christianity, illustrate the profound wisdom of Christ, and the penetrating glance with which he could detect the concealed plant in the insignificant germ. Yet we are not bound, in order to vindicate Christ’s wisdom, to conclude that all the Apostles were alike men of mark, alike capable of great achievements. It was enough for the fulfilment of their calling that they loved him truly, that they followed him with child-like confidence, and gave themselves wholly up to the guidance of his Spirit; for thus they would be enabled to testify of him, and to exhibit his image in truth and purity. It was enough that among the number there were a few men of pre-eminently powerful character, on whom the rest might lean for support. It sufficed, nay, it was even advantageous, for the developement of the Church, that the Apostles, as a whole, left their accounts of the history of Christ without the peculiar stamp of individual character, since there was only one John among them capable of giving a vivid image of the life of the Saviour in harmonious unity. And it is, therefore, not at all wonderful that men appeared in the later period of the Apostolic Church who accomplished greater things than even some of the Apostles.

As for Judas Iscariot, it by no means follows from the passages which say that Christ knew him from the beginning, that he knew him as an enemy and a traitor; nor does the awful contrast between his Apostolic calling and his final fate show that Christ was wholly deceived in him. Judas may have at first embraced the proclamation of the kingdom of God with ardent feelings, although with expectations of a selfish and worldly stamp; which, indeed, was the case with others of the Apostles. He may have loved Christ sincerely so long as he hoped to find in him the fulfilment of his carnal desires. Christ may have seen in him capacities which, animated by pure intentions, might have made him a particularly useful instrument in spreading the kingdom of God. At the same time, he doubtless perceived in him, as in the rest of the Apostles, the impure influence of the worldly and selfish element, yet he may have hoped (to do for him what he certainly did for the others, viz.) to remove it by the enlightening and purifying effects of his personal intercourse; a result, however, which, we freely admit, depended upon the free self-determination of Judas, and could, therefore, be unerringly known to none but the Omniscient. And even when Judas, deceived in his carnal and selfish hopes, felt his affection for Christ passing into hatred, the love of the Saviour, hoping all things, though he saw the rising root of evil, may have induced him to strive the more earnestly to attract the wanderer to himself, in order to save him from impending ruin.

See, hereafter, more on the character and fate of Judas.

§ 78. The Apostles Uneducated Men.

It may appear strange that Christ should have selected, as his chosen organs, men so untaught and unsusceptible in Divine things, and should have laboured, in opposition to their worldly tendencies, to fit them for their office; especially when men of learned cultivation in Jewish theology were at hand, more than one of whom had attached themselves sincerely to him. But we are justified in presupposing that he acted thus according to a special decision of his own wisdom, as he himself testifies (Matt., xi., 25): “I thank thee, O Father, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” Precisely because these men, destitute of all higher learning, attached themselves to him like children, and obeyed even his slightest hints, were they best fitted to receive his Spirit with child-like devotion and confidence, and to propagate the revelations which he made to them. Every thing in them was to be the growth of the new creation through Christ’s Spirit; and men who had received a complete culture elsewhere would have been ill adapted for this. They were trammelled, it is true, by their carnal conceptions of Divine things; but this was counterbalanced by their anxiety to learn, and their child-like submission to Christ as Master and guide; while, on the other hand, in surmountable obstacles would have been presented in the want of such submission—in the stubborn adherence to preconceived views of men who had been trained and cultivated before. Moreover, this reverential submission to Christ on the part of the disciples, in their daily intercourse with him, tended surely and constantly to refine and spiritualize their mode of thinking. His image, received into their inner life, exerted a steady and overruling influence. In the mode in which the new revelations were embraced and developed, we recognize the general law, according to which truths beyond the scope of human reason are imparted to it from higher sources, to be afterward appropriated and elaborated as its own. They were first received and unfolded by men who had no previous education to enable them to work out independently that which was given them; and only at a later period was a Paul added to the Apostles—a man capable, from his systematic mental cultivation, of elaborating and unfolding, by his own power of thought, yet under the guidance of the same Spirit of Christ the material of Divine revelation that was bestowed upon him. The fact, too, that a people like the Jews, and not the Greeks, were first the chosen organ for the propagation of revealed religion, is an illustration of the same law, Here we find the source of the ever-renewed struggle between Revelation, which demands a humble reception of its gifts, and Reason, which will recognize nothing that is not wrought out, or, at least, remodelled, in its own laboratory.

Still Christ could not have deemed the period of two or three years sufficient to prepare these untrained disciples, according to his mind, for teachers of men. Nor could he have foretold, with such confidence, the success of such men in propagating his truth for the salvation and training of men, for the victorious founding of the kingdom of God in all ages, had he not been conscious of powers higher than had been granted to any other teacher among men, which justified him in making such predictions.

§ 79. Two Stages in the Dependence of the Apostles upon Christ.

From the very beginning the Apostles stood to Christ in a relation of complete dependence and submission, but we must distinguish in this two different forms and periods. In the first, their dependence was more outward and unconscious; in the last, it was more inward, and thoroughly understood by themselves. From the beginning, they gave themselves up, with reverent confidence, to the will of Christ as their supreme law, inspired by the conviction that what he commanded was right; yet without a clear apprehension either of his will or word, and without the ability to harmonize their will with his by free consciousness and self-determination. But, during this stage of outward dependence, they were to be trained to apprehend his will (or, what is the same thing, the will of God revealed and fulfilled by him); to incorporate it with their own spiritual tendencies; in a word, to make it their own. Christ himself pointed out this two-fold relation, when he said to them, in view of his approaching death, in reference to their dawning consciousness of the necessity of his suffering in order to establish the Divine kingdom: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”

John, xv., 15, 16. So, v. 14, “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” Their efforts to perform his will perfectly proved that they had made it their own.

§ 80. Christ’s peculiar Method of training the Apostles.

The words of Christ recorded in Luke, v., 33; Matt.. ix., 14,

More on these passages hereafter, in their proper connexion in the narrative.

Here we see the principle on which Christ acted in the intellectual, as well as in the moral and religious training of the Apostles. As he would not lay external restraints, by the letter of outward laws, upon natures as yet undisciplined, so it was not his purpose to impart the dead letter of a ready-made and fragmentary knowledge to minds whose worldly modes of thought disabled them from apprehending it. He aimed rather to implant the germ, to give the initial impulse of a total intellectual renovation, by which men might be enabled to grasp, with a new spirit, the new truths of the kingdom of God. In every relation he determined not to “patch the old garment, or put new wine into old bottles.” And this principle, thus fully illustrated by Christ’s training of his Apostles, is, in fact, the universal law of growth in the genuine Christian life.

§ 81. Founding of the Church.—Its Objects.

CLOSELY connected with the questions just discussed is that of the founding of the Church; for the Apostles were the organs through whom the religious community which originated in Christ was to be handed down to after ages, the connecting links that were to unite it with its Founder. A clear conception of the idea of the Church, in comparison with what we have said of the plan of Christ, will make it obvious that he intended to establish the Church, and himself laid its foundation.

By the Church we understand a union of men arising from the fellowship (communion) of religious life; a union essentially independent of, and different from, all other forms of human association. It was a fundamental element of the formation of this union, that religion was no longer to be inseparably bound up, either as principal or subordinate, with the political and national relations of men, but that it should develop itself, by its own inherent energy, as a principle of culture and union; superior, in its very essence, to all human powers. This involved both the power and the duty to create an independent community, and that community is the Church.

And Christianity is proved to be the aim and object of all human progress, not only by the craving for redemption, which no man can deny, in human nature, but also by the very idea of such a community as the Church, which overthrows all natural barriers, and binds mankind together by a union founded on the common alliance of their nature to God. The spirit of humanity, feeling itself confined by the limits which the opposing interests of nations impose upon it, demands a communion that shall overleap these barriers, and lay its foundations only in the consciousness, common to all men, of their relation to the Highest—a relation transcending the world and nature. Apart from Christianity, indeed, we could not conceive the idea of such a communion; but now that Christianity has freed Reason from the old-world bonds that hindered its developement, and unfolded for it a higher self-consciousness, there can be no science of human nature that does not reckon this communion as the aim of human progress, that does not assign to the Church its proper place in the universal moral organism of humanity. Schleiermacher has done this in his “Philosophical Ethics,” and has thus found, in the Church, the point of departure for Christian morals. And so every system of ethics must do which is not willing to fall in the rear of human progress, and to be guilty of cruelly mutilating the nature of man. Nay, the minds of the sages who sought to break through the limits of the ancient world yearned for this idea long before its realization in Christianity. Zeno,

In his work, περὶ πολιτείας.

Now as this revolution could only be brought about by Him who was at once Son of God and Son of Man, so He, when he recognized himself as the Saviour and King bestowed upon mankind, was fully conscious, also, of his power to realize this idea. It is clear, from what we have said of the Plan of Christ, that the results which were to flow in after ages from the indwelling power of the Word proclaimed and sent forth by him to regenerate and unite mankind, lay fully revealed before his all-surveying glance. He knew that it contained the elements of a spiritual community that would burst asunder the confining forms of the Jewish Theocracy, and take all mankind into its wide embrace.

§ 82. Name of the Church.—Its Form traced back to Christ himself.

But even if it be admitted that Christ intended to found a Church, the further (but less important) question arises, whether the name, ἐκκλησια, which has been stamped upon it, had its origin with himself. There is no ground for doubting even this (as some have done), and thereby casting suspicion upon passages like Matt., xvi., 18, in which he is reported to have used the term. The name corresponds to the Hebrew קָהָל, in connexion with הָאֱלהִים ,יְהוָה ,יִשְׂרָאֵל, which expressed the old Theocratic national community; and so was transferred to the new congregation of God, which was to emerge from the ancient covering. This communion in itself, indeed, is nothing but the form in which Christ has established the kingdom of God upon earth, and in which he intends it shall develope itself until its full consummation.

But it must not, therefore, be concluded that this community was ever to realize itself in the form of a State.

See this inference drawn by Rothe, in his work “Uber die Anfänge der Christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung,” p. 89.

But even though it be admitted that Christ intended to found a visible Church, and gave the first impulse to a movement that was afterward to propagate itself, it does not necessarily follow that he himself directly established such a separate community, and made the arrangements and preparations that naturally belonged to it.

It may be said that the outward fabric of the visible Church could not be erected until that which constituted its true essence, viz., the life of the invisible Church, which as yet lay only in the germ, should be more fully unfolded—until the higher life had obtained in the disciples a more substantial and self-dependent form, a state of things presupposed in a community whose manifold members were reciprocally to affect each other. So, too, it may be said

As is asserted by Weisse (p. 387, seq.; 406, seq.), whose views and proofs we shall examine in another place.

According to this view, the only defined community which Christ established was that of the Apostles, who, as bearers and organs of his Spirit, formed the sole prototype of the Church, which only grew up at a later period from the seed which Christ had sown. He did not wish to establish an exclusive school or sect, but to draw all men to himself. In this view, further, it would be necessary to suppose that he had, at that time, fixed no rite of initiation into his narrower fellowship; that such passages as John, iii., 22; Matt., xxviii., 19, arose only from the attempts of a later period to ascribe the origin of baptism directly to Christ; and that baptism, with confession of the name of Christ, was introduced by the Apostles subsequently

Weisse thinks that the first trace of the institution is to be found in Acts, ii., 38.

We agree fully with the fundamental principle of the view just recited. Christ only prepared the way for the foundation of the Church, according to its inner essence and its outward form; as he gave no complete doctrinal system, so he erected no Church fabric that was to stand through all time; his work was rather to implant in humanity the new spirit, which was to adapt to itself such outward forms as would meet the wants of human progress in successive ages But, while we cordially go thus far, we do not find ourselves warranted, either by history or by the idea of such a community, in granting so wide a latitude as the theory demands to a principle so just in itself.

The gradual and natural formation of the circle of disciples about Christ is no reason for believing that he did not found a Church. His manifestation to men of different degrees of susceptibility caused, indeed, a sifting process, which soon separated the congregation of believers from the mass that rejected Christ; but the natural way in which this result was brought about is no argument against the establishment of the Church at that time, more than against its existence at any time; for, in fact, in a certain sense this is always the case. The relations of Christ to the world typified, in every respect, what were afterward to be the relations of Christianity to the world. We find the name of disciples applied with a wider signification than that of Apostles; and why may we not consider the bands of these, scattered through different parts of Palestine, and especially those who, apart from the Apostles, formed the constant retinue of Christ, as constituting the first nucleus of the Church?

§ 83. Later Institution of Baptism as an Initiatory Rite.

As for Baptism, we certainly do not find, either in the nature of the case or in the historical accounts, any ground for assuming that Christ himself, during his stay upon earth, instituted it as a symbol of consecration. As long as he could, in person, admit believers into communion with himself, no substituted symbol was necessary; and, besides, the Holy Spirit, which constitutes the essence of Christian baptism, and specifically distinguishes it from that of John, had not as yet been manifested. The element of preparation was sufficiently indicated by John’s baptism, and therefore Christ (in the prophetic words which have been preserved to us in Acts, i., 5) contrasted that preparatory rite with the spiritual baptism which he himself was soon to impart to his disciples. The Apostles, however (quite naturally, in view of the ground which they occupied), were unwilling that John alone should baptize, and applied the rite, as the Messianic symbol of inauguration which Christ himself had recognized, in order to separate from the rest such as admitted the Divine calling of Jesus, and attached themselves to him.

John, iv., 2.

But when he was about to withdraw his personal presence from his disciples, it became necessary to substitute a symbol in its place for his sufferings and resurrection, the fundamental facts from which the new creation, through the Holy Spirit, was to spring, had necessarily to take place before the institution of Christian baptism proper; for that baptism implies an appropriation of the fruit of his sufferings, a fellowship in his resurrection, and a participation of that life, in communion with Him, which is above the world and death. The full import of baptism could not be realized until the process which began with Christ’s death and resurrection had reached its consummation; until the exaltation had followed the resurrection, and the glorified Redeemer had displayed his triumphant power in the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. The same effects which flowed to mankind in general from these facts, and the process which rested upon them, were to be repeated in every individual case of baptism.

§ 84. Connexion of Christ’s Miracles with his Mode of Teaching.

WE have before remarked that what most distinguished the Teaching of Christ was, that it was his self-revelation, and in this view it embraces both his Words and Works. His Miracles, then, must be spoken of in connexion with his mode of Teaching. Although they are not to be sundered from their connexion with his whole self-revelation, yet, as an especially prominent feature of it, they served the highest purpose, in a certain sense, in vividly exhibiting the nature of Christ, as Son of God and Son of Man. They have also an additional claim to be mentioned in this connexion, as they served as a basis and support of his labours as a teacher, as a preparatory means of leading from sensible phenomena to Divine things, and of rendering souls, as yet bound to the world of sense, susceptible of his higher Spiritual influences.

In regard to the Miracles, three distinct inquiries present themselves: (1.) What was their real objective character and relation to the universe, and the Divine government thereof? (II.) In what view, and with what impressions, did the contemporaries of Christ receive them? (III.) What decision did Christ himself pronounce as to their nature, their value, and the ends he sought to accomplish by them?

(A.) THE OBJECTIVE CHARACTER OF MIRACLES.

§ 85. Negative Element of the Miracle.—Its Insufficiency.

We must distinguish in the Miracle a negative and a positive element. The former consists simply in this, that a certain event, either in the world of nature or man, is inexplicable by any known laws or powers. Events, however, thus simply inexplicable,

A prodigium, or τέρας, but no σημεῖον, distinguishing these words according to their original import.

Even an objective (real) deviation from ordinary phenomena may be admitted by those who refuse to admit of miracles, in the religious sense of the term. That is, indeed, a narrow and ignorant skepticism which measures every thing by the stiff standard of known laws, and passes sentence at once upon every fact, no matter how well attested, which transcends those laws; but a more profound and scientific philosophy knows that there are powers yet undiscovered, which will explain many apparent anomalies. With such minds we can more readily come to an understanding in regard to the historical truth of a narrative of extraordinary events. No unprejudiced reader of history can deny the occurrence of inexplicable phenomena in all past ages; and even those of magnetism, ill-defined as they are as yet, have taught us not to decide so promptly against every thing that goes beyond our knowledge of the powers of nature.

Yet we must not suppose that all this gains any thing directly to the cause of religion, within whose sphere alone the conception of the miracle is a reality. It leaves us still in the domain of nature and of natural agencies. It is not upon this road, therefore, that we can lead men to recognize the supernatural and the Divine; to admit the powers of heaven as manifesting themselves upon earth. Miracles belong to a region of holiness and freedom, to which neither experience, nor observation, nor scientific discovery can lead. There is no bridge between this domain and that of natural phenomena. Only by means of our inward affinity for this spiritual kingdom, only by hearing and obeying, in the stillness of the soul, the voice of God within us, can we reach those lofty regions. If there be obstacles in our way, no science can remove them.

In fact, the mode of thinking to which we have refereed, instead of necessarily leading to Theism (the only religious stand-point; for religion demands something supramundane, and must enter the sphere of another world), is perfectly consistent with the Pantheistic view of the world, and may be used to confirm it. It is not the results of experience which fix our point of view; but the latter, independently assumed on other grounds, gives character to all our judgments of the former. Nay, by applying natural laws to religious phenomena, one may view new religions simply as proceeding from the laws of the developement of the universe, in order to form new epochs in the history of the world, and thence consider the founders of such religions as organs of the soul of the world, concentrating in them the hidden powers of nature. This was the view of Pomponatius, who thought that in this way, while denying every thing supernatural, he could admit many of what others call miracles. It is true, there are some of the miracles of the Bible which, on the face of them, admit of no such explanation, but one who holds such views will find no great difficulty in doubting every account of miraculous events which cannot be made to harmonize with them; as Pomponatius did, who could not with sincerity, after an utter denial of the supernatural, abandon his ground simply because come of the miracles could not be explained by it.

§ 86. Positive Element.—Teleological Aim of Miracles.

Miracles, then, are entirely different from results of the powers of nature intensified. The question of their character cannot be decided on the ground either of Deism or Pantheism (opposed as these theories are to each other; the one incorrectly separating the idea of God from that of the world, the other as incorrectly blending the two together), but only in regard to the Final causes of the government of God, considered as an Omniscient and Omnipotent personal Being. We might dispute with these theories in reference to isolated facts, on historical and exegetical grounds; but the question of miracles, as such, rises into a very different sphere, and no agreement on separate points would bring us nearer to an adjustment.

The positive element, which must be added to the negative one, already spoken of, in order to constitute any inexplicable phenomenon a miracle, is, that the Divine power in the phenomenon itself shall reveal it to our religious consciousness as a distinctive sign of a new Divine communication, transcending the natural progress and powers of humanity, and designed to raise it to a position higher than its originally created powers could have reached. That higher position to which the Divine revelations, accompanied by miracles as distinctive signs, were destined to elevate mankind, is the character originally stamped by God upon human nature, which was lost by sin. Man violently sundered his union with God, his true element of life, in which the Supernatural and the Natural were in perfect harmony: it was necessary, therefore, that the former should reveal itself in opposition to the latter—that Miracles should be opposed to Nature—in order that Nature might be brought back to her original harmony with God. But miracles, considered as signs of the Divinity revealed in the world of sense, cannot, as such, be considered apart from their connexion with the whole revelation of God. Their essential nature is to be discovered, not by viewing them as isolated exhibitions of Divine power, but as elements of his revelation as a whole, in the harmony of his inseparable attributes, the Holy Love and Wisdom appearing as much as the Omnipotence. It is this which stamps Divinity upon such phenomena, and attracts all souls that are allied to God. Thus the negative element of miracles is only a finger-post to the positive; the inexplicable character of the event leads us to the new revelation, which it accompanies, of that same Almighty love which gave birth to the laws of the visible world, and which, in ordinary times, veils its operations behind them.

§ 87. Relation of Miracles to the Course of Nature.

Omnipotence is always as directly operative in nature as it was at the creation; but we can only detect its workings by means of the law of cause and effect in the material world. Under this veil of natural laws, religious faith always discovers the Divine causality, and the religious mind, although it may, indeed, contemplate natural phenomena from different points of view, and may distinguish between free and necessary causalities in nature, will always trace them back to the immediate agency of Almighty love. Just so in miracles, we do not see the Divine agency immediately, but in a veil, as it were; the Divine causality does not appear in them as coefficient with natural causes, and therefore cannot be an object of external perception, but reveals itself only to Faith. But the miracle, by displaying phenomena out of the ordinary connexion of cause and effect, manifests the interference of a higher power, and points out a higher connexion, in which even the chain of phenomena in the visible world must be taken up.

Miracles, then, present themselves to us as links in that great chain of manifestations whose object is to restore man to his lost communion with God, and to impart to him a life, not derived from any created causality, but immediately from God. As here new and higher powers enter into the sphere of humanity, there must be novel effects re suiting from them, which cannot be explained apart from the accompanying revelation, but point out to the religious consciousness their self-revealing cause. Such effects are the miracles, which, from the considerations we have mentioned, lay claim, even as inexplicable phenomena simply, to a religious interest. And although, from their very nature, they transcend the ordinary law of cause and effect, they do not contradict it, inasmuch as nature has been so ordered by Divine wisdom as to admit higher and creative agencies into her sphere; and it is perfectly natural that such powers, once admitted, should produce effects beyond the scope of ordinary causes.

The Schoolmen of the 13th century rightly distinguished the potentia activa from the potentia passiva, in regard to the relation of the supernatural to the natural.

§ 88. Relation of the individual Miracles to the highest Miracle, the Manifestation of Christ.

In the miracles nature is shown to be related, like history, to the one highest aim of God’s holy love, namely, the redemption of the human race to the communion of the Divine life, or, what is the same thing, the establishment of His kingdom among men. Nature was destined to reveal and glorify God; but it can only do this in connexion with rational beings, together with whom it forms the world as a whole. Now the communion of rational beings, working together with conscious freedom to reveal and glorify God, is nothing else but the kingdom of God; and as the unity which is to exhibit the world as a whole can only be complete when nature has been fully appropriated for the revelation of that kingdom, it follows that the realization of the latter is the aim of the whole creation—of both nature and history.

The manifestation of Christ, the founder of the kingdom of God, the bestower upon mankind of that Divine life which constitutes the essence of the kingdom, was the highest miracle, the central-point of all miracles, and required other and analogous phenomena to precede and follow it. But as the re-establishment of the original harmony between the natural and the Divine (which coincides with the completion of the Divine kingdom) was the final aim of redemption, so, when the Divine life, the essential principle of the miracle itself, which is purely and in its essence supernatural, was incorporated with the natural progress of humanity by the manifestation of Christ, it followed that thenceforward, in all ages, it should operate within the forms and laws of human nature.

§ 89. Relation of Miracles to History.

The relation of miracles to history is perhaps sufficiently obvious from what has been said. Every theory of history that proceeds from the stand-point of natural reason, admitting nothing superior to itself, must, from its very point of departure, reject the idea of miracles. It must seek to include and explain all events by one and the same pragmatical connexion of causes, and can therefore find no place for miracles. Even if it be desirous to examine the acts of Christ without prejudice, it can only, from its peculiar stand-point, manifest such freedom by representing truthfully, according to the accounts that remain, how Christ himself wished these phenomena to be regarded, and what impression they made upon his contemporaries.

But this holds good of only a very limited and arbitrary idea of history, one which barricades itself by its own prejudices against all higher views. The conception of the miracle, as such, is in no way repugnant to a really scientific theory of history; and as it is the task of the latter to study the proper character of every fact and phenomenon, the import of miracles, as miracles, is one of its necessary problems. The manifestation of Christ, indeed, can only be rightly understood when it is conceived as being originally Divine and supra-historical, and as having become historical; and Christianity can only be explained as a supernatural principle, destined to impart to history a new tendency and direction. In this connexion the individual miracles, preceding, accompanying, and following the manifestation of Christ, appear entirely in accordance with nature. As for history itself, when it does not refer to Christianity and the kingdom of God as the object of all human progress, it appears but as a lawless play of forces moving hither and thither, rising and falling, without aim and without unity. Christianity alone shows us that it has both. But in order to comprehend Christianity, and, through it, History, reason must receive the higher light of faith, without which the eye of the mind must remain blind to the operations and revelation of the Divinity in the course of human progress.

My view of the miracles agrees with what Twesten has said in the Introduction to his “Dogmatik;” and I am gratified to find a similar agreement, also, in his second volume, pt. i., p. 170, seq.

(B.) THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST AS SUBJECTIVELY VIEWED BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

§ 90. Miracles deemed an essential Sign of Messiahship.

It is evident from many passages in the Gospel narrative that miracles were essentially necessary, as signs of the Messianic calling. Had Christ, therefore, wrought no miracles, his contemporaries could not have believed in his Messiahship; nor could he himself have been thoroughly and permanently convinced of it, had he not both been conscious of power to perform them, and put that power into exercise. John the Baptist was satisfied, from his own inability to achieve such works, that he was not endowed with the Messianic fulness of the Spirit; and it is obvious, from his receiving Christ’s miracles as a proof of his Messiahship, that he expected such signs of the indwelling fulness of Divine power in the true Messiah.

Nor can it be proved (as some suppose) that it was common among the Jews to spread rumours of miracles wrought by men whose deeds had made them objects of popular veneration, as was subsequently the case in the Middle Ages, where we find miraculous powers ascribed to such men even during their lifetime. There is a great difference in the relations of the two periods. The Middle Age was the period of a new creation, developed from the new principle of life which Christianity (even alloyed as it was with Jewish elements) introduced among the uncultivated nations. It was a period of youthful freshness, enthusiasm, and poetry. The men of that time, through their lively faith in the Divine power of Christianity, as ever present and ever active, kept their connexion with the miracles that attended its first appearance unbroken, and figured and imitated them by their youthful and inventive power of imagination.

The miraculous tales of the excited Middle Age may be explained from the co-working of various influences, but this is not the place to enter into the subject.

§ 91. Apparent Discrepancies, and Mode of Removing them.

There are apparent contradictions in the several explanations given by Christ of his miracles, and by following them out separately we might arrive at different views of the estimate which he himself placed upon them. But in order to bring perfect harmony out of these apparent contradictions, it is only necessary to distinguish the different points of view in which the miracles present themselves. It has been already said, that miracles can be correctly understood, not when viewed as isolated facts, but in connexion with the whole circle of Divine revelation. Those of Christ, especially, are intelligible only when considered as results of his self-revelation, or, as St. John expresses it, as the manifestation of his glory. They demand, therefore, to be so conceived in connexion as to exhibit vividly his whole image in each of these separate manifestations; and, on the other hand, the same considerations point out, as the highest aim of miracles, the revelation of Christ’s glory in the whole of his personal manifestation.

(1.) Christ’s Object in working Miracles two-fold.

In their formal import miracles are σημεῖα, signs, designed to point from objects of sense to God; powers which, by producing results inexplicable by ordinary agencies, are intended to lead minds yet under the bonds of sense, and unfitted for an immediate spiritual revelation, to yearn after and acknowledge a higher power. But as they were designed to show forth the whole revealed Christ, and as the Divine attributes, in the totality of which the image of God was realized in him, cannot be isolated from each other, so no separate manifestation of power could proceed from him, not at the same time exhibiting all the other attributes belonging to the Divine image. It is clear, therefore, that although miracles, in relation to nature, are especially manifestations of Power, they could not be performed except in cases where the other attributes, the Wisdom and the holy Love, were brought into requisition. For the same reason, too, we cannot conceive Christ’s miracles as epideictic, i. e., wrought for no other purpose than to display his power over the laws of nature. In them, as in all his other actions, the end which he had in view is shown by the given circumstances in each case.

Accordingly, we distinguish a two-fold object of his miracles, the first a material one, i. e., the meeting of some immediate emergency, of some want of man’s earthly life? which his love urged him to satisfy; the other and higher one to point himself out to the persons whose earthly necessities were thus relieved, as the One alone capable of satisfying their higher and essential spiritual wants; to raise them from this single exhibition of his glory in the individual miracle to a vivid apprehension of the glory of his entire nature. Nor was this last and higher aim of the miracle confined to the persons immediately concerned; it was to be to all others a sign, that they might believe in Jesus as the Son of God.

(2.) A Susceptibility to receive Impressions from the Miracles presupposed.

But all external influences designed to produce an impression such as we have stated demand a susceptible soil in the minds of those who are to receive them. The revelation of Christ by his works, no more than by his words, could produce a Divine impression without an inward susceptibility of Divine influences. The consciousness of God must exist in the soul, though dormant. The Divine revelation must find some point of contact in human nature before religious faith can spring up; there is no compulsory influence from without by which the unsusceptible soul can be driven to faith by an irresistible necessity.

So, when a carnal, worldly mind is the prevailing tendency, outward phenomena, however extraordinary, pass by, and make no impression. The mighty power of the will cannot be subdued by any external force. The worldly spirit makes every thing which touches it worldly too. Encompassed by Divine powers, it remains closed against them, in its earthly inclinations, thoughts, and feelings. The mind, thus perverted, cheats itself by denying all miracles, because to acknowledge them would oppose its fleshly interests, and contradict the system of delusion to which it is a slave. It calls the powers of sophistry to aid its self-deception, by converting every thing which could tend to undeceive it into a means of deeper delusion; like those Pharisees who, when compelled to acknowledge works beyond explanation by ordinary agencies, referred them to the powers of darkness rather than of light, in order to escape an admission which they were deter mined to evade. So he who totally rejects the supernatural has al ready decided upon all separate cases, and a miracle wrought before his very eyes would not be recognized as such. He might admit the fact as extraordinary, but would involuntarily seek some other explanation. A mode of thinking that controls the mind cannot be shaken by any power acting wholly from without. Such is the might of the free will, which proves its freedom even by its self-created bondage.

Or if miracles do impress the fleshly mind for a moment by the flash of gratification or astonishment which they afford, the impression, made merely upon the senses, is but transitory; for it lacks the point of contact in the soul which alone can make it permanent. How quickly are sensible impressions, even the strongest, forgotten when other and contrary ones follow them! And here we find one of the reasons why Christ refused the demand for miracles merely as proofs of his wonderworking power. For those, he said, whose perverted minds could not be roused to repentance by Moses and the prophets, would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead.

How grossly ignorant, then, of human nature must the Deists of the 17th century have been, who plead in opposition to the reality of Christ’s miracles, the comparatively little effect which they produced!

Like that strange enthusiast, Daniel Müller, who appeared in Nassau in the transition period between mysticism and rationalism, and in whom these two tendencies joined hands. From the extreme of mystic supernaturalism he passed over to the skeptical conclusions of our modern critics. In his treatise against Lessing he says, “It is impossible that there should have been a Christ 1700 years ago, who literally wrought such wonders as these. Had any man, by his mere word, caused the blind to see and the lame to walk, given health to the leper and strength to the palsied, fed thousands with a few loaves, and even raised the dead, all men must have esteemed him Divine, all men must have followed him. Only imagine what you yourself would have thought of such a man; and human nature is the same in all ages. And with so many followers, the scribes and Pharisees could not have killed him.”—Ilgen’s Zeitschrift, 1834, p. 257.

We shall find, therefore, Christ’s own statements in regard to his miracles to harmonize perfectly with each other, if we properly distinguish the various classes of human character in their religious and moral relations to miracles, and the different relations and tendencies of the miracles themselves.

§ 92. The Sign of the Prophet Jonah.

Christ’s declaration, in answer to a demand for a miraculous attestation of his Messiahship, that “no sign shall be given to this generation but the sign of the Prophet Jonah,” has been thought by some to indicate either that he wrought no miracles at all, or that he did not mean to employ them as proofs of his Divine calling. The passage preceding that declaration of itself is enough to refute this; for he had just appealed to the healing of a demoniac as proof of the Divine character of his power,

Luke, xi., 20.

The works of Jesus had made a great impression, very much to the discomfort of those whose mode of thinking and party interests made it necessary for them to oppose him. They naturally sought to counteract this impression; to dispute the evidence of the facts which confirmed his ministry as Divine. While the most base and hostile, compelled to admit the superhuman powers of Christ, attributed them to the kingdom of darkness, there were others who did not dare to utter such an accusation, but asked a sign of a different character, an objective testimony from God himself in favor of Christ and his ministry, which could not deceive; a visible celestial phenomenon, for instance, or a voice from heaven, clearly and unequivocally authenticating him as a messenger from God. In answer, then, to those who asked a Divine sign apart from his whole manifestation, a sign for that which was of itself the greatest of all signs, Christ appeals to that loftiest of signs, his own appearance as the God—Man, which included within itself all his miracles as separate, individual manifestations.

We cannot but be surprised at the remark of De Wette, Comm. on Matt., 2d ed., p. 132: “If Jesus had wished to express this thought, he would have uttered nonsense—No sign shall be given to them, but still given.” Christ said that to those who were not satisfied by his whole manifestation, as a sign, no other separate sign would be given; how could any thing be a sign for them to whom the highest sign was none? The words, however, do wear that air of paradox which we often find in the discourses of Christ.

§ 93. “Destroy this Temple,” &c.

Similar to this was Christ’s reply at the Passover, which he first kept in Jerusalem, to those who, unable to comprehend an act of holy zeal, asked him to prove his calling as a reformer by a miracle—“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Instead of working a miracle, uncalled for by the circumstances, for their idle satisfaction, he pointed them to a sign that was to come, a great, world-historical sign, which may have been either his resurrection, that was to seal the conclusion of his ministry on earth, and bring about the triumph of his kingdom, in spite of the machinations of his foes, who hoped to destroy his work by putting him to death; or the creation, as the end and aim of his whole manifestation, of the new, spiritual, and eternal Temple of his kingdom among men, after the visible Temple should have been destroyed by their own guilt.

§ 94. Christ’s Distinction between the material Element of Miracles and their essential Object.—John, vi., 26.

Christ himself distinguishes the material part of the miracle, i. e., its effect in satisfying a momentary want, and its formal part, as a sign to point from objects of sense to God, and to accredit himself as capable of satisfying all higher spiritual wants. To those who embraced the miracles in this latter sense, properly as σημεῖα, he freely communicated himself; and, on the other hand, he must more and more have alienated himself from those who attached themselves to him only from a momentary interest of the former kind. He, therefore, reproached those who eagerly sought him after the feeding of the five thousand, by saying that they did not seek him because they “had seen the miracles” (i. e., as signs to lead them to something higher), but simply because their human wants had been satisfied—“Ye did eat of the loaves and were filled.” The light of his works (he told them) was not sufficient to lead them to believe on him, inasmuch as they lacked—what was essential to faith—a sense for the Divine. The gratification of their natural senses was all they sought. In the spirit in which they were, faith was impossible; their preponderating worldliness of mind, subjugating the better tendencies of their nature, left room for no sense of higher wants, and prevented them from feeling the inward “drawing of the Father.”

John, vi., 36, 44.

§ 95. Christ appealed to the Miracles as Testimonies; John, xv., 24.—Three different Stages of Faith.

Although Christ appeals (in John’s Gospel) to the miracles as testimonies of his works, we are not to understand him as appealing to them simply as displays of power, for the grounds already stated. Yet he does, in more than one instance, declare them to be signs, in the world of sense, of a higher power, designed to lead minds as yet unsusceptible of direct spiritual impressions, to acknowledge such influences. “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin.”

John, xv., 24.

In viewing the miracles thus as means of awakening and strengthening faith, we must distinguish different stand-points in the developement of faith. On the lowest stage stood those who, instead of being drawn by an undeniable want of their spiritual nature, inspired by the power of God working within them, had to be attracted by a feeling of physical want, and by impressions made upon their outward senses. Yet, like his heavenly Father, whose providence leads men to spiritual things even by means of their physical necessities, Christ condescended to this human weakness, sighing, at the same time, that such means should be indispensable to turn men’s eyes to that which lies nearest to their spiritual being. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.”

John, iv., 48.

A higher stage was occupied by those who were, indeed, led to seek the Messiah by a sense of spiritual need, but whose religious feelings were debased by the admixture of various sensuous elements. As these were yet in some degree in bondage to sense, and sought the Saviour without perfectly apprehending him as the object of their search, they had to be led to know him by miracles suited to their condition. Such was the case with the Apostles generally, before their religious feelings were purified by continued personal intercourse with Christ. He condescended to this condition, in order to lead men from it to a higher stage of religious life; but yet represented it as subordinate to that purer stage in which they should receive the whole impression of his person, and obtain a full intuition of the mode in which God dwelt and wrought in Him. Jesus said unto Nathanael, “Because I said I saw thee under the fig-tree, believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than these. Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

John, i., 50, 51.

A far loftier stage of faith was that which, proceeding from an inward living fountain, did not wait for miracles to call it forth, but went before and expected them as natural manifestations of the already acknowledged God. Such a presupposed faith, instead of being summoned by the miracles, rather summoned them, as did the pagan centurion whom Christ offered to the Jews as a model: “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.”

Matt., viii., 10.

It appears, therefore, that Christ considered that to be the highest stage of religious developement in which faith arose, not from the sensible evidence of miracles, but from an immediate Divine impression finding a point of contact in the soul itself—from a direct experience of that wherein alone the soul could fully satisfy its wants; such a faith as testifies to previous motions of the Divine life in the soul. We have an illustration in Peter, who expressed his profound sense of the blessings that had flowed to him from fellowship with Christ, in his acknowledgment, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”

Matt., xvi., 16, 17.

§ 96. The Communication of the Divine Life the highest Miracle.—John, xiv., 12.

Finally, the words of Christ himself assure us that the communication of the life of God to men was the greatest of all miracles, the essence and the aim of all; and, further, that it was to be the standing miracle of all after ages. “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 to my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” The power of diffusing the Divine life, which had been confined to him alone, was, by means of his glorification, to be extended to others, and to assume in them a peculiar self-subsisting form—the miracle which was to be wrought among all men, and in all time, by the preaching of the Gospel. [“He shall send you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of Truth.”]

§ 97. Transition from the Natural to the Supernatural in the Miracles.

IT has been asserted in modern times, that in order to receive miracles at all, we must conceive them as directly and abruptly opposed to nature, and admit no intermediate agencies whatever. But we cannot be confined to this alternative by men who wish to caricature the views which we maintain. Abrupt contrasts may be set up in abstract theories; but in real life we do not find them. There are always intermediate agencies and points of transition. And why should this not be the case in the opposition between the natural and the supernatural? We think that we have already shown that the higher unity of the Divine plan of the world embraces miracles as well as the ordinary developement of nature. We hold ourselves justified, therefore, in distinguishing, with regard to the marvellous part of the miracles, certain steps of transition from the natural to the supernatural. Not that we can separate these gradations so nicely as to constitute a division of the miracles thereby; but we can trace an important harmony with the universal laws of the Divine government of the world in the fact that here, too, there are no sudden leaps, but a gradual transition by intermediate steps throughout.

Looking at all the miracles, there are some in regard to which it may be doubted whether they belong to the class of natural or supernatural events; on the other side, there are some in which the creative power is exhibited in the highest degree, and which. bear no analogy whatever to the results of natural causes. Between these extreme classes, there are many miraculous works in which the supernatural can be made vividly obvious by means of natural analogies. To these last belong most of the miracles which Christ wrought upon human nature; while those wrought upon the material world, rejecting all natural analogies, may be ranged under the second extreme class above mentioned. The latter are very few in comparison with the former, and far less intimately connected with Christ’s peculiar calling.

A. CHRIST’S MIRACLES WROUGHT UPON HUMAN NATURE.

I. The Healing of Diseases.

§ 98. The Spiritual Agencies employed.—Faith demanded for the Cure.

Those works of redeeming love which Christ wrought upon the human body, the healing of diseases, and the like, displayed the peculiar feature of his whole ministry. The ailments of the body are closely connected with those of the soul;

It is remarkable that great plagues often spread over the earth precisely at the same time with general crises in the intellectual or moral world; e. g., the plague at Athens and the Peloponnesian war: the plagues under the Antonines and under Decius; the labes inquinaria at the end of the 6th century; the ignis sacer in the 11th; the black death in the 14th, &c. That great man, Niebuhr, whose letters contain so many golden truths, alluded to this coincidence in another connexion.—Leben, ii., 167.

Some of these diseases, also, arose purely from moral causes, and could be thoroughly cured only by moral and spiritual remedies. Little as we know of the connexion between the mind and the body, we know enough to make it in some degree clear to us how an extraordinary Divine impression might produce remarkable effects in the bodily organism.

We do not mean, however, by this remark, to bring all such influences down (as some have done) into the sphere of the purely subjective. It is true that a natural power, highly intensified, might produce effects closely resembling the supernatural; it is true that the imagination, strongly stimulated and exalted, often works strange wonders; but we have to do here only with effects which must be attributed to higher causes, which must be due to an objective Divine agency. In. the cases to which we refer (as, indeed, in all cases), the objective and subjective factors could co-operate; the Divine influence of Christ upon the soul, and, through it, upon the bodily organism, could work together with the susceptibility to impression, the receptivity (so to speak), on the part of man. Hence it was that Christ demanded a special Faith as a necessary condition of his healing agency; indeed, we can find no instance of his working a miracle where a hostile tendency of mind prevailed.

We can conceive of bodily cures thus wrought by means of spiritual influences more readily than any others; and they correspond precisely with the laws which Christ’s operations have never ceased to follow. But we cannot bring all the instances of healing which he wrought under this class; some of them were wrought at a distance, and offer no point of departure of this kind. And as we are compelled to admit, in some of the miracles, immediate operations upon material nature, we are the less authorized to deny that such direct influences were exerted upon the bodily organism.

§ 99. Use of Physical Agencies in the Cure of Diseases.

Christ employed his miraculous power in various modes of operation. He operated by his immediate presence, by the power of that Divine will which exercised its influence through his word and his whole manifestation; and this in the very cases in which we might admit a bodily cure by the use of physical agencies. Sometimes, indeed. there was besides a material application, e.g., the contact of the hand. In other cases he made use of material substances, and even of such as were thought to be possessed of healing virtues, as, in blindness, of saliva,

Plin., Hist Natur., xxviii., 7.

But in these cases the means were too disproportionate to the results, for us to imagine that they were naturally capable of producing them; and as Christ did not always employ them, there is no room to suppose that they were necessary as vehicles of his healing power—a supposition which brings the miracles too far down into the sphere of merely physical agencies. We must rather presuppose that as Christ. in his teaching, &c., took up the forms in common use among men to work out something higher from them, so he allowed his powers of healing to exhibit themselves in the use of these ordinary means in symbolical way. He may have designed thereby to bestow some peculiar lessons of instruction.

The cures wrought at a distance do not admit of this material connecting link; but the operations of Christ’s will could overstep all the barriers of space.

§ 100. The Relation between Sin and Physical Evil.—Jewish Idea of Punitive Justice.—Christ’s Doctrine on the Subject.

We must now examine Christ’s miracles of healing in their moral aspects, and in their connexion with his ministry as Redeemer. If it can be shown that all those disturbances of the bodily organism, which we call diseases, have their origin in Sin, as the source of all discord in human nature, we may infer that there is a close connexion between these miracles and his proper calling; and that, in healing the diseases produced by sin, by means of his influence upon the essential nature of the disturbed organism, he displayed himself also as the Redeemer from sin. In many cases, also, we may find the physical and the moral cure reciprocally operating upon each other.

The question first occurs, In what relation does Christ himself place disease to sin? This question is connected with the broader one, In what relation to sin does he place physical evil in general? In Luke, v., 20, and John, v., 14, he seems to assign a special connexion between sin and certain diseases as its punishments; but other expressions of his appear to contradict such a connexion. To solve this difficulty, we must not only distinguish the different aims of these several expressions, but also discriminate between the true and the false in the modes of thinking prevalent among the Jews.

The doctrine that sin is guilt, and that the Divine holiness reveals itself in opposition to sin, as punitive justice, is one of the characteristics of the religion of the Old Testament in its relations to the various shapes of natural religion. Punitive justice displays itself in the established connexion between sin and evil, in consequence of which the sinful will that rebels in act against the Divine law must be compelled, through suffering, actually to acknowledge that law, and to humble itself before its majesty. According to this view of the world, which subordinates the natural to the moral, all evil is to be attributed to sin; it shows itself to the soul estranged from God as belonging to, and connected with sin; the consciousness that sin is opposed to the Divine order of nature is developed by sufferings; and thus sin appears, even to the sinner, to be deserving of punishment. All history proves that the consequences of bad actions, as well as of good ones, operate for generations; all history testifies that “God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.” We can see this especially in the crises of the history of nations, by tracing them to their preparatory causes. The history of the Jewish nation, particularly, was designed to exhibit this universal law in miniature, but with striking distinctness.

To this conception of the punitive justice of God, as displaying itself in the progress of history and in the course of generations, a contracted Theodicy had joined itself, which arrogantly assumed to apply the universal law to special cases.

The fact that this view was maintained by the carnally-disposed, and that the later Jewish history often apparently reversed the connexion between sin and evil, piety and happiness, gave rise, subsequently, to an Ebionitish reaction, which maintained that in this world, belonging as it does to Satan, the wicked have possession of the goods of this life, while poverty and pain must be the lot of the pious; and that this state of things will only be compensated in the Millennium, or in the life to come. Christ’s truth opposes both these false views.

The doctrine of punitive justice was in no degree impugned by the new and lofty prominence which Christ gave to the Redeeming love of God; on the contrary, the latter doctrine presupposed the former, but at the same time gave it peculiar modifications. And as Christ teaches us that all human events are subservient to the manifestation of redeeming love, the highest aim of God’s moral government, it follows that the connexion between sin and physical evil, ordained by Divine justice, must serve the same great end. The universal evil introduced by sin is so distributed in detail as to aid in preparing the soil of men’s hearts to receive and appropriate redemption and salvation, and in further purifying the hearts of those who have already become partakers of the Divine life.

There are two passages in which Christ contradicts, in the one negatively and in the other positively, the contracted view of punitive justice, before referred to.

The negative contradiction is given in Luke, xiii., 2, 4: “Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, nay; but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?” In this passage Christ teaches that the evil that befel the individuals did not necessarily measure their individual guilt, but that their particular sufferings were to be traced back to the general guilt of the nation.

§ 101. Two Theories of the Affliction: (a) Possession by Evil Spirits (b) Insanity.—Analogous Phenomena in other Times.

There are two points of view, opposed to each other, but yet, perhaps, admitting of an intermediate ground, in which we may contemplate these forms of disease; they may have originated either (a) from internal causes in the soul itself, or (b) from causes entirely outward and supernatural. Those who adopt the first view confine their attention to the characteristic symptoms as reported, and compare them with the very similar ailments, the diseases of the mind and of the nervous system, which not only existed in that age, but have appeared at all subsequent periods.

Similar diseases, occurring in the first centuries, were explained in this way by the physicians.—Orig., in Matt., xiii., § 6.

If, in accordance with this view, we admit no intermediate agency, but ascribe the phenomena immediately to evil spirits, the cures must be directly attributed to Christ’s dominion over the powers of the other world; thus strikingly showing his supernatural control over a supernatural cause of disease. And, on the other hand, if we class these phenomena with diseases of the mind in general, and consider the supposed indwelling of evil spirits only as a symptom grounded on natural causes, we shall more readily be able to conceive how a disease arising entirely, or, at least, chiefly from a psychical cause, could be cured by a purely psychical agency. Nor would this in the least degree deny, or even detract from, the miraculous character of Christ’s acts; for to restore a raving maniac to reason by a look or a word was surely beyond all natural psychological influence, and presupposed powers transcending all ordinary agencies. It is true, we find analogous cases in later times, in which great things were wrought by immediate Divine impressions, and by devout prayer in the name of Christ.

We must not take the spirit of an age of materialism or rationalism as a rule for judging of all phenomena of the ψυχή, which veils within itself the Infinite; which is capable of such manifold excitement; and whose various powers are alternately dormant and active—now one prevailing, and now another. An age may be destitute of certain phenomena and experiences, because it has no organs for developing them; and this would prove no thing against their reality.

Although I can hardly think it possible that the view given in the text, taken in connexion with the general principles of this book, can be misunderstood, yet, in order to guard against a possible misinterpretation, I deem it best to add, that it was far from my intention to do away with the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, or to trace the latter entirely to the developement of powers inherent in the ψυχή. I wished only to point out the organ, the point of contact, in the ψυχή, for supernatural communications and influences; to show that it is itself supernatural in its hidden essence, which looks forward to be unfolded hereafter in the higher world to which it is allied.

Not only at the time of Christ’s appearance, but also in the centuries immediately following,

As seen in the Fathers, and in Lucian’s Philopseudes.

§ 102. Connexion of the Phenomena with the State of the Times.—Conceptions of the Jews in regard to them: of the Demoniacs themselves.

The diseases of the mind in every age bear the stamp, to some degree, of the prevailing tendencies and ideas of the times; and those to which we refer reflected the peculiar and predominant features of the Jewish mind of that age. The wretched demoniacs seemed to be hurried onward by a strange and hostile power that subjugated their intellectual and moral being, and whose chief characteristic, as displayed in their paroxysms, was a wild and savage destructiveness. The Jews explained these phenomena according to their own notions, and especially by the general opinion that man was surrounded on every side by the operations of evil spirits, who were the authors of both moral and physical evil.

Some have attributed the prevalence of this opinion to an admixture of Persian religious doctrines; but it had a far deeper ground in the religious spirit of the age. It arose from the sense of discord which penetrated the whole mind of that time, and which was reflected in the doctrine of Dualism, then so extensively prevailing.

§ 103. Accommodation of the two extreme Theories.

If now the question be asked whether these phenomena are to be considered as wholly natural or as supernatural, we answer, that these two extreme views may be more or less abruptly opposed to each other. On the one hand, we may ascribe the origin of the disease to natural causes, and judge of the symptoms accordingly, without excluding the operation of the other concealed cause; the question whether such a cause existed or not can be by no means decided merely by the symptoms.

Christ teaches that all wickedness, and all evil in its connexion with wickedness, must be traced back to a higher cause—to a Spirit

“If it could be proved that Christ had only taken up the doctrine of the existence of Satan by way of formal accommodation (p. 114), the question of the demoniacs would be at once decided. It cannot be denied that in many of his expressions we might substitute, for Satan, the objective notion of evil, without at all affecting the thought. We might, in deed, admit that he used the doctrine (borrowed from the circle of popular ideas) merely as a figurative covering for evil, if he himself had any where intimated that he did not intend thereby to confirm the view of the origin of evil which the popular notion involved; just as we showed from his own words that, in transferring the popular figures to his Messianic kingdom, he did distinguish between the substantial truth and its formal covering. But this is by no means the case here. There is not a vestige of evidence in his conversations with his disciples to show that he did not intend to establish the doctrine that a higher intelligence, estranged from God, was the original source of evil. Neither can we class this question (as some do) among those which have no bearing on the interests of religion, and which Christ’s mission did not require him to interfere with; our conception of evil will be very different if we confine it to human nature, from what it would be, if we admit its existence also in spirits of a higher order.

In John, viii., 44, Christ gives a perfectly defined conception of Satan; he designates him as “the Spirit alienated from truth and goodness (for, according to John’s usage, ἀλήθεια involves both the true and the good); in whom falsehood and wickedness have become a second nature; who can find no abiding-place in the truth.” The revelation of truth which the spirits were to receive from communion with the Father of Spirits passes by him unheeded; he cannot receive and hold it fast, because he has no organ to embrace it, no susceptibility for its impressions. Christ tells the Pharisees that they, serving the Spirit of Lies, and living in communion with him, showed themselves, by the spirit which their actions manifested, to be children of Satan, rather than of Abraham and God. Schleiermacher’s attempt to prove (Works, iii., § 45, p. 214) that even in this passage the idea of a personal Satan is untenable, is by no means successful. “This passage,” says he, “can not be interpreted throughout on the theory of the reality of the devil, without either opposing the devil to God in the Manichaean sense, or else calling Christ the Son of God in the same extended signification in which the Pharisees are called Sons of the Devil. “The argument is unsuccessful, we say, because the proper point of comparison would be, not the sense in which Christ can be called the Son of God, but the sense in which pious men could be so called; and in a comparison it is not necessary that al the relations should be adequate, but only those which are common to the point of comparison itself.

Nor can we admit that Christ, in making use of the current doctrine as a covering for his own, added nothing new to it. It is true that he made no disclosures on the subject to satisfy the speculative curiosity of science, but here, as elsewhere, made his communications only to meet practical wants. It is, however, precisely in the region of practical religion that the doctrine of the personality of Satan was newly modified by its connexion with the doctrine of Jesus, as the author of salvation. As for the passages in which “evil” might be substituted for “Satan,” it is enough to say, that after the existence of such an intelligence, the first rebel against God, had been given as a fact, it was natural to employ him as the representative of evil in general. We may use “Satan” as a symbol for wickedness in general, without implying any thing against the doctrine of his personal existence. See p. 74

§ 104. Christ’s Explanations of Demonism purely Spiritual.—His Accommodation to the Conceptions of the Demoniacs.

It is important to inquire whether Christ assigned, in express words, any definite view of the origin of these diseases, or established any view by taking it as a point of departure. That he did not dispute the current opinion, does not prove that he participated in it; this would have been one of those errors, not affecting the interests of religion, which his mission did not require him to correct. Apart from its moral ground, it belongs to the domain of science, which is left to its own independent developement—to natural philosophy, psychology, or medicine; sciences entirely foreign to the sphere of Christ’s immediate calling as a teacher, although they might derive fruitful germs of truth from it. It was his peculiar office only to reveal to men the moral ground of both general and special evil, and thus to convince them that its thorough cure could be effected only by influences wrought upon the principle of moral corruption in which it originated. In order to this, the doctrine that these diseases were caused by indwelling evil spirits could be made use of as a point of departure, especially as the truth of the idea of a kingdom of Satan, in its moral sense, was presupposed.

In regard to Christ’s accommodation to the conceptions which the demoniacs themselves had of their own condition, our remarks in another place (p. 114) in reference to the distinction between formal and material accommodation are not fully applicable. The law of veracity, in the intercourse of beings in possession of reason, does not hold good where the essential conditions of rational intercourse are done away. In such cases, language obeys its natural laws only in proportion as the use of reason itself is re-established.

There lay a profound truth at the bottom of the demoniac’s consciousness that his feelings, inclinations, and words did not spring from his rational, God-allied nature (his true I), but from a foreign power belonging to the kingdom of the devil, which had subjugated the former. And this truth offered the necessary point of contact for the operation of Christ’s spiritual influence to aid the soul, which longed to be delivered from its distraction and freed from its ignominious bond age. In the mind of the demoniac, the fundamental truth was inseparable from the form in which he conceived it; it was, therefore, necessary to seize upon the latter, in order to develope the former.

§ 105. Difference between Christ’s Healing of the Demoniacs and the Operations of t/he Jewish Exorcists.

The so-called Exorcists were at that time practising among the Jews their pretended art of expelling demons; an art which they affected to derive from Solomon.

Joseph., Archaeol., viii., 2, § 5. Josephus appeals to a remarkable proof of this fact, which one of these exorcists had given before Vespasian in presence of part of the Roman army. See the Greek Testament of Solomon (written at a later period) in Dr. Fleck “Theologische Reisefrüchte,” iii., 113.

An excellent illustration of this is afforded in the account of the cure of the deaf and dumb demoniac, in Luke, xi., 14; Matt., xii., 22. Even the most hostile Pharisees could not deny that in this instance something was done which could not be explained by natural causes; and to obviate the impression which it made upon the multitude, and to prevent them from acknowledging the Divinity of Christ, they accused him, contrary to their own convictions, of being in league with the ruler of evil spirits, and of working his wonders by powers derived from that dark source. Christ points out the contradiction involved in their assertion, and showed that such works could be wrought only by the power of God, which alone could free the human soul from the dominion of the evil spirit. He designates this individual case as a sign that the kingdom of God, before which the powers of darkness must flee away, had manifested itself. He gives them to understand that the original source of evil in mankind and in men had first to be re moved, before its particular effects could be subdued. And from this it necessarily followed (he showed) that every casting out of evil spirits, every healing of demoniacs, which was not founded upon a victory over the original evil power, was only an apparent exorcism, and must be followed by a worse reaction. Thus the ordinary exorcists, who apparently produced the same effects as Christ, in reality did the very opposite. The evil was banished only to return with increased power.

He that does not work in communion with Christ, and by the power of the same Spirit, will, in producing effects apparently the same, bring about totally different results. He advances the kingdom of the devil, and not the kingdom of God.

The case of the Gadarene

Mark, v., 1. Luke, viii., 26.

The silence of John’s Gospel in regard to Christ’s healing of demoniacs may be ascribed to the fact that the disease was more common in Galilee than in Jerusalem.

III. The Raising of the Dead.

§ 106. Different Views on these Miracles.

The position to be assigned to the miracle of the raising of the dead will depend upon the view which we take of the real condition of those said to be raised. Some suppose that they were not absolutely dead in the physiological sense, but that there was an intermission of the powers of life, presenting symptoms resembling death; and those who adopt this view of the case consider the miracle to differ only in degree from that of healing the sick.

But if the accounts are taken literally, and we suppose a real death, the miracle was specifically different from that of healing, and, in fact, constituted the very culminating point of supernatural agency. Yet, even to awaken the dormant powers of life, and kindle up again the expiring flame, would certainly have been a miracle, demanding for its accomplishment a Divine power in Christ.

A precise account of the symptoms, and a knowledge of physiology, would be necessary to give us the elements for a decision of this question, in the absence of any testimony from Christ’s own mouth to decide it. In regard to Christ’s own words, it is a fair question whether he meant to distinguish closely between apparent and real death, or whether he made use of the term “death” only in accordance with the popular usage.

If it be presupposed that the dead were restored to earthly life after having entered into another form of existence—into connexion with another world—the idea of resurrection would be dismal; but we have no right to form such a presupposition in our blank ignorance of the laws under which the new form of consciousness developes itself in the soul after separation from the body.

See hereafter on the resurrection of the “Widow’s Son,” and of “Lazarus.”

B. CHRIST’S MIRACLES WROUGHT UPON MATERIAL NATURE.

§ 107. These exhibit Supernatural Power most obviously.

We pass now to a consideration of the miracles which Christ wrought upon material nature, in which the supernatural exhibits itself in the highest possible degree, as an intermediate psychical agency is, by the very nature of the case, excluded.

Apart from individual cases, it is certain that a power of controlling nature is one of the marked features of the image of Christ given to us in the evangelical tradition. He had fully impressed men’s minds with a belief of this. And in deciding upon the individual cases themselves, every thing depends upon the conception of Christ’s character as a whole, with which we set out. Were such a narrative of the acts of an ordinary man handed down to us, even though we might be unable to separate the actual course of fact from the subjective dress given to it in the account, we should yet be inclined to suppose that the man had wrought some mighty influences upon the minds of his contemporaries, and that they had involuntarily transferred these to nature, which is so often made the mirror of what passes in the mind of man.

But if we set out in our investigation of the Gospel narrative with a just idea of the specific difference between Christ and any, even the greatest, of mere men; if we set out with a full intuition of the God-Man, we shall find no difficulty whatever in believing that he operated upon the most secret powers of nature as no other could have done, and, by the might of his Divinity, controlled nature in a way which finds no parallel among men.

§ 108. Differences of Chronology.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke include but one feast of the Passover within the period of Christ’s public ministry, while John’s narrative embraces three or four. It may be enough to say in regard to this, that the former Gospels do not confine themselves to a chronological arrangement, and therefore we are entitled to draw no conclusion from the fact that the Passover is mentioned in them but once, and that towards the close of Christ’s career upon earth. The facts narrated may have extended through several years, and yet the mention of the Pass. over feasts may have been omitted, as other chronological marks have been.

There is nothing in the first three Gospels to contradict the theory that Christ’s ministry lasted for several years. Even in Luke himself

Luke, vi., 1 the σάββατον δευτερόπρωτον, in connexion with the “ripe ears of corn.”

§ 109. Differences as to the Theatre of Christ’s Labours.

According to the synoptical Gospels, Galilee was the chief theatre of Christ’s labours, and he only transferred them to Jerusalem whey he was going to meet his approaching death.

We must here more minutely examine the question before lightly touched upon (p. 99). Did Christ purposely confine his labours chiefly to Galilee in hope of finding more ready access to the hearts of its simpler-minded inhabitants, who were less in bondage to the traditions of the Pharisees than the people of Jerusalem? or was it because he was less exposed there to the “snares” of the Pharisees, and could, therefore, hope to exercise his labours more uninterruptedly, and for a longer period? Did he wait until he had laid the foundation of his work so firmly that it would endure, and propagate itself after his death, before he determined to go and meet the perils that awaited him at the seat of the priesthood? Did he only make up his mind to go, in spite of the dangers which he foresaw would environ him, in order to avoid the reproach of distrusting the Divinity of his own cause, and thereby giving occasion of perplexity to his disciples?

If these questions are answered in the affirmative, we should have to suppose that the tradition which John followed in his Gospel did not give correctly the original relations of Christ’s labours. It war utterly inconsistent with a wish on his part to be recognized as Messiah, for him to conceal himself so long in a corner of Galilee, and to hold back, for so long a time, his testimony to his Divine calling before the face of the people and the priests at Jerusalem. It would have been a stumbling-block, indeed, for one who professed to acknowledge the old Mosaic religious ideas in all their holiness, to refrain, during the whole course of his public labours, from visiting the Temple at one of the chief feasts of the Jews.

§ 110. Proof that Christ frequently exercised his Ministry in Judea and Jerusalem.

It is every way accordant, indeed, with internal probability, that Jesus should have expected to find easier access to the simple-minded Galilean peasants than to the rich, the haughty, and the learned at Jerusalem. But it is altogether improbable to suppose that he would subject himself to the reproach of despising the ancient and holy institutions

In the Talmudical treatise “Chagigah,” c. ii., none (among adults) but the deaf, the sick, the insane, and the very aged, are exempted from the obligation to attend the principal feasts at Jerusalem. Of course, this law could not apply to the Jews of distant countries, who were only required to send annually a deputation to the Temple, with sacrifices, and with the money arising from the price of the first fruits. Conf. Philo, Legat. ad Cajum, §§ 23, 31.

§ 111. Message of the Sanhedrim to John at Bethabara.

Meanwhile John, with his disciples, had been traversing both shores of the Jordan; and just at that time he was on the east side of the river, in Perea, at Bethany, or Bethabara.

Two different names given to the same place at different times, both having the same meaning, “a place of ships,” “a place for crossing in ships” (a ferry). See Lücke on John i. 28; Winer’s “Biblisches Realwörterbuch,” i., 196, 2d ed.

John did not at once give as positive a statement as was desired, but satisfied himself with giving a negative to the popular idea which had probably caused the deputation to be sent [“I am not the Christ”]. But as he accompanied this denial with no further explanation in regard to himself, the messengers were compelled to press him with further questions. They naturally asked him, then, whether he wished to be considered as one of the great personages who were looked for as precursors of Messiah; presupposing that only in this sense he could assume a Divine calling to baptize. John continued to give curt replies, just enough to meet each separate question. Although in a spiritual sense he was the Elias who was to precede Messiah, he denied that he was so (i. e., in the carnal sense in which they put the question and would understand the answer). He described himself only in general terms, not liable to perversion, as the one through whom the voice of God called upon the nation to repent and prepare for a new and glorious revelation that was at hand. Humbling himself, as the bearer merely of a prefigurative baptism, he pointed to the mightier One who should baptize with the Spirit, who already stood, unrecognized, in their midst. His remark, “ye know him not,” was doubtless founded upon the fact (which he did not utter) that he knew him, as he had before been revealed at his baptism.

These answers to the deputation are less clear and full than those which the Baptist gave for the warning and instruction of individuals, as recorded in the first Gospels. As the ruling powers had little favour for John, he had good reason to suspect the intentions with which the Sanhedrim had sent their messengers. Hence the brevity and reserve with which he answered them.

§ 112. John points to Jesus as the Suffering Messiah, and testifies to his Higher Dignity.

On the day after John had thus (officially, as it were) pointed Christ out as having already appeared among the people, though unrecognized by them, the Saviour came forth from his seclusion, and showed himself in the midst of John’s disciples.

John, i., 29.

§ 113. John and Andrew, Disciples of John, attach themselves to Jesus.—Gradual Attraction of others.

These words of the Baptist were listened to by two Galilean youths, who stood in the circle of his disciples—John and Andrew. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, when, obeying the hint of the Baptist, they followed Jesus; refraining, however, in reverence, from Disturbing his meditations. The Saviour, noticing them, turned kindly and asked what they desired. Even then they did not venture to express their longing to be honoured with his friendship; but only timidly inquired where he dwelt. Anticipating their request, he kindly invited them to visit him. The few hours that remained before evening were spent in his society. This was their first impression of Christ: he left it to work in their hearts. Thus was it also with Simon (John, i., 42), in whom Christ discerned in a moment the yet dormant spirit of the Man of Rock. And those whose first impressions were thus received pointed Christ out to their fellows; and thus arose the first circle of disciples, which accompanied him from Peraea back to Galilee.

John, i., 42-47. It is apparent from John’s statement alone that Christ did not take these young disciples, who were afterward to be his organs, immediately into close fellowship, but left them for a while to themselves. John gives us no further account of the forming of the Apostolic community; he presupposes many things, which we must endeavour to fill up by comparing the synoptical Gospels.

§ 114. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.—Effect of the Miracle on Peter.

ON his return to Galilee Christ at once began his labours as a teacher; not, however, in the synagogues, but in instructing the groups that gathered around him. He betook himself first, not to Nazareth, his native place, where he could least hope to be received as a prophet (the carnal mind looks only at the outward appearance), but to the little town of Capernaum. The young men who had accompanied him from Peraea were from the neighbourhood of Capernaum and Bethsaida; and he only waited for a suitable opportunity to take them into closer communion. Such an opportunity was the following:

One day, as he was walking upon the western shore of the Sea of Genesareth, an increasing throng of eager listeners collected about him. Some fishermen who had toiled all night and brought up nothing but empty nets, had left their vessels fastened near the shore. Jesus asked Simon, to whom one of the fishing-boats belonged, to push it out a little way from the shore, that he might stand on board, and thus address the people to better advantage.

A comparison of Luke, v., with Matt., iv., 18, will vindicate the correctness of this representation. Here we have two independent statements: that in Matthew an abbreviated one, while Luke’s is the vivid and circumstantial account of an eye-witness. The words of Christ to Peter, as given by Matthew (iv., 19), “I will make you fishers of men,” seem to presuppose an event such as the miraculous draught of fishes; but Matthew presents them as entirely isolated, while Luke gives the occasion of them very graphically. None but those abstractionists who must measure all phenomena, however infinite in variety, upon the Procrustean bed of their own logical formulas, will see in this account the stamp of a legendary story. It has all the freshness of life and reality about it. Whoever is well read in the history of the diffusion of Christianity in all ages will be able to recall many analogous cases. Schleiermacher (Comm. on Luke, in loc., or “Werke,” ii., 53), in his remarks on this case, showed with what nice tact he could distinguish history from legend. Honour to the memory of that great man, whose profoundly logical mind humbled itself, in pure love of Truth, before the power of History!

§ 115. The Calling of Nathanael.

In the case of a John, the full impression of Christ’s personality, first received, prepared the depths of his youthful soul for sudden and separate impressions of the Divinity of Jesus, which soon brought him to a complete decision. But the narrow prejudices of a Nathanael had to be overcome by a separate supernatural sign before he could receive the impression of Christ’s manifestation and nature as a whole When Philip first announced to him that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, he expressed both surprise and incredulity that any thing so high should come forth from a corner like Galilee. Instead of discussing the point, Philip appeals to his own experience, and tells him to “come and see.” Nathanael’s prejudice was not strong enough to prevent his compliance, or to hinder him from being convinced by facts. Christ sees and esteems his love of truth, and receives him with the words, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” (a true and honest-hearted member of the Theocratic nation). The candid youth is surprised to find himself known by a stranger. He expresses his astonishment, and Christ increases the impression made upon his feelings, by a more striking proof still of his supernatural knowledge, telling him that his glance, piercing the barriers of space, had rested on him before Philip called him as he stood “under the fig-tree” (this probably had some reference to the thoughts which occupied his mind under the fig-tree). His prejudices are readily removed [he acknowledged Christ as “Son of God and King of Israel”]; Christ admits that he is in the first stage of faith,

See p. 138.

§ 116. The Change of Water into Wine.—Character and Import of the Miracle.—Little Impression made upon the People.

THREE days after Christ had thus set forth the mode in which he from that time should reveal himself, he displayed, at a wedding in Cana,

It is to be remarked that Nathanael was “the son of Tholmai,” i. e. Bartholomew, of Cana, which fact may confirm our view of the order of the events.

But Christ, although he held all purely human feelings sacred, yet demanded that “man should deny father and mother” when the cause of God required it. He had now to apply this principle to his own mother, and, conscious of his Divine character and calling, to rebuke the request thus made to him, and the feelings which prompted it. “What have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come;” as if he had said, “Our wishes lie apart. My Divine powers cannot be made subservient to earthly aims and motives. My acts obey a higher plan and loftier laws, in accordance with which each of them has its appointed time. As yet, the moment for revealing myself in my Messianic dignity, by miracles apparent to all eyes, has not arrived.”

Christ intended, as he here intimates, to come forth gradually from his obscurity. He had no idea of displaying his glory, as Mary wished, at once. Still, as she might have been accustomed to take from his words and look more than he uttered, she probably understood that her wish would be met, so far as the fact was concerned, though from a point of view totally different from her own. And so it was; the thing was done, but in no very striking way, nor in a way calculated to reveal his Messianic glory to all eyes.

As for the character of the miracle itself, we cannot place it, as some do, among the highest of Christ’s miraculous acts. We conceive it thus: He brought out of water, by his creative energy, a substance (wine), which is naturally the joint product of the growth of the vine, and of human labour, water being only one of the co-operating factors; and thus substituted his creative power for various natural and artificial processes. But we are not justified in inferring that the water was changed into manufactured wine; but that, by his direct agency, he imparted to it powers capable of producing the same effects; that he intensified (so to speak) the powers of water into those of wine.

I would be pleased to believe, if I could, that the view here taken had as old ecclesiastical authority as the late Baumgarten-Crusius supposes he has found for it, in the ancient hymn “De Epiphania Domini” (Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, i., p. 19): “Vel hydriis plenis aqua vini saporem infuderis.” But the word saporem can hardly be made emphatic. In the sense of the hymn, the words “vini saporem infundere” probably mean nothing more than “in vinum mutare.”

It is not a sufficient explanation of the final cause and moral bearing

The supposition that John’s Gospel was written by some one of Alexandrian education, with a tendency to Gnosticism, is refuted by this narrative. Such a man would never have assigned such an object and such a scene for Christ’s first miracle. Such a one could not have invented and put into the mouth of the “ruler of the feast” the clumsy jest which he uttered (John, ii., 9), (although we do not (as some do) lay stress upon it, and infer that the guests were nearly drunk). Any one writing a history of Christ apologetically, and with a view to exalt his character according to the tendency of those times, would rather have altered and adorned a true narrative of such facts (if such existed) than have invented a false one bearing against his object; or, if he had some symbolical meaning in his view, he would certainly have stated it.

While in retirement, he had resembled, in the austerity of his life, the ascetic preacher of repentance, John the Baptist. Now, however, in the very beginning of his public labours, no longer in solitude, but mingling in the social life of men, he enters into all human interests, shares all human feelings, and thus at once presents a contrast to the severe legalism of John. In the joyous circle of a wedding, he performs his first miracle to gratify a social want. Thus he sanctifies connexions, feelings, joys, that are purely human, by his personal presence, and by unfolding his Divine powers in such a circle and on such an occasion. In this view the miracle gives the spirit of Christian Ethics, whose task it is to apply to all human relations the image of Christ as stamped upon his self-revealed life. But it has a further and a great symbolical import: Christ employed water, one of the commonest sup. ports of life, as the vehicle of a higher power: so it is the peculiarity of Christ’s Spirit and labours, the peculiarity of the work of Christianity not to destroy what is natural, but to ennoble and transfigure it; to enable it, as the organ of Divine powers, to produce effects beyond it, original capacities. To energize the power of Water into that of Wine is, indeed, in every sense, the peculiar office of Christianity.

This first stay of Christ in Galilee after his inauguration as Messiah was attended with important results in the training of the narrower circle of his disciples: but he does not appear, in that short time, to have made any lasting impression upon the people. There were few so ingenuous in their prepossessions as a Nathanael; the prejudices of many against the “son of the carpenter at Nazareth” could not be removed until they had obtained a vivid impression of his public labours at the feast of the Passover in the metropolis. Even in this beginning of his labours in Galilee, he had probably found occasion to apply the Jewish proverb, “a prophet hath no honour in his own country.”

John. iv., 44: doubtless referring to this period; a supposition which the use of γάρ renders probable. Thus interpreted, we should have John’s testimony that Christ had already sought to appear as a teacher in Galilee.

§ 117. The Purifying of the Temple.

DURING the feast of the Passover Jesus appeared at Jerusalem in his prophetic calling, and accredited it by miracles.

Although the purifying of the Temple doubtless belongs to an early period of Christ’s teaching, it is by no means clear, from John’s account, that Christ had not taught and wrought miracles before; indeed, the manner in which the priests addressed him rather shows the contrary.

§ 118. The Saying of Christ, “Destroy this Temple,” &c.—Additional Exposition of it given by John.

Some of the priests asked Christ by what signs he could prove his authority to act thus. He gave them an answer, at once reproof and prophecy, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

The most natural and apparent interpretation of these words, according to the circumstances under which they were uttered, laying no particular stress upon the specification of “three days,” would be the following: “When you, by your ungodliness, which desecrates all that is holy, have brought about the destruction of the Temple, then will I build it up again;” alluding (according to the mode of conception every where prevalent in the New Testament) to the relation between Christianity and Judaism. The kingdom of God had a common basis in both; the new spiritual Temple which Christ is to erect among men is, therefore, represented as the Temple at Jerusalem, rebuilt after its destruction; the latter being a symbol of the destruction of the entire Jewish worship, which was identified with the Temple itself. The Temple and the kingdom of God are identical in Judaism and in Christianity:

Just as the “House of God” (Heb., iii., 2-6) is made the same in both dispensations; as the later one fulfills the law of the older. I cannot see any force in Kling’s objections (Stud. u. Krit., 1836, i., 127). The καινόν is already implied in the ἐγείρειν.

But what a glance into futurity was required in him thus to foretell not only the ruin of the Temple by the guilt of the Jews—the dissolution of their worship being necessarily identified therewith—but also the erection of the spiritual Edifice that was to take its place; to predict in himself the mightiest achievement in the history of humanity, at a time when but a few apparently insignificant men had joined him, and even they had but a distant dawning idea of what he intended to accomplish! So vast a meaning was involved in those dark words—dark, as all prophecies are dark! An analogous meaning was contained in his expression on another occasion, “Here is something greater than the Temple;”

See above, p. 89.

Among the accusations brought against Christ by the false witnesses, at a later period, was this, that he had said, “I am able to destroy the Temple of God, and to build it in three days.”

Matt., xxvi., 61.

§ 119. Interview of Christ with Nicodcmus.

(1.) Disposition of the People and Pharisees towards Christ.—Dispositions of Nicodemus.

Many of the people were attracted to Christ during this his first stay at Jerusalem. And although the prevailing Pharisaic party looked upon him with an eye of suspicion, they could not openly oppose him, as he had not as yet arrayed himself against their statutes and traditions, but directed his blows against abuses which no one dared to defend. And even of the Pharisees it cannot be supposed that all were hypocrites, governed only by selfish motives; doubtless there were many whose piety, however debased by the errors of their entire system, was yet sincere.

It is probable, in the nature of things, that although the Pharisees, scribes, and chief men, as a whole, were ill-disposed to Christ, there were among them individual susceptible minds. In the first Gospels we find Joseph of Arimathea; in Matt., ix., 18, a ruler; in Mark, xii., 28, a scribe, manifesting an interest in his Divine calling, and from these we may infer the existence of other cases. There is no ground, therefore, for Strauss’s assertion that the case of Nicodemus is improbable. Utterly unhistorical, too, is his assertion (i., 633) that the accounts of rich and chief men coming secretly to Christ (and so of Nicodemus) were invented at a later period, to remove the reproach brought against the primitive Christians, “that none but the poor and illiterate attached themselves to Jesus.” Instead of being a “reproach,” it was the pride and glory of the primitive Church that the new creation of Christianity began among the poor; that the wise of this world were put to shame by the ignorant. There was no inducement, then, for such inventions. Moreover, this mode of thinking pervades the whole of John’s Gospel; he that could represent Jesus as unfolding his highest truths to a poor woman could not have been tempted to in vent a conversation between him and a distinguished scribe.

A specimen of this better class was Nicodemus.

Strauss strains hard to give a symbolical and mythical meaning to this common Jewish name, נַקְדֵימוֹן. There is no trace in the early Christian history of mythical persons thus originating from mere fancy, without any historical point of departure. Only at a later period was the history of really eminent men exaggerated by (voluntary or involuntary) invention into fables; e. g., Simon Magus was thus made mythical.

We may presuppose that he shared in the ordinary Jewish conceptions of the Messianic kingdom, and expected it soon to be founded in visible and earthly glory; although he may have had, at the same time, some more worthy and spiritual ideas in regard to it. He considered himself sure, as a rigidly pious Jew and Pharisee, of a share in that kingdom. and was only anxious to be informed as to the approaching manifestation of Messiah.

Addressing Christ as an enlightened teacher, accredited from God by miracles, he expected to obtain from his lips a further account of his calling and of his relation to the Messianic kingdom. But instead of entering upon this, Christ purposely gives an answer especially adapted to the moral and religious wants of Nicodemus, and all of like mind.

An answer, too, entirely characteristic of Jesus, and which would not have occurred to one inventing this dialogue.

(2.) The New Birth.

Uprooting the notion that any particular line of birth or descent call entitle men to a share in God’s kingdom, Christ points out an inward condition, necessary for all men alike, a title which no man can secure by his own power. His answer to Nicodemus presupposes that all men are alike destitute of the Divine life. It was directed as well against the arrogant self-righteousness of the Pharisees as against the contracted externalizing of the kingdom of God in Jewish particularism. It involves also (although we are not sure, from the form of the expression, that Christ intended precisely this) that a faith like that of Nicodemus was insufficient; springing, as it did, from isolated miracles, and not from inward experience, or an internal awakening of the Divine life. Certainly it hit the only point from which Nicodemus could and must proceed in order to change his mode of conceiving the Messianic kingdom. Even if he at first still expected it to appear as an outward one, he must have had a higher and nobler moral conception of it. He doubtless took Christ’s words “cannot see the kingdom” to mean “cannot share in the visible kingdom;” while Christ meant an inward spiritual “entering into” that kingdom which was first to be founded, as a spiritual one, in the hearts of men.

The idea of a “new birth” was not unknown to the Greek and Roman mind, although its true import is only revealed in the light which Christianity lends to self-scrutiny. The non emendari, sed transfigurari of Seneca (Ep. ad Lucil., vi.), which is rather a rhetorical expression any how, applies to a gradual amendment of character by lopping off separate vices, and not to a radical change of nature. As the Christian new birth is the beginning of a process in human nature, which is to go on until the consummation of the kingdom of God, the new birth in individuals preparing the way for the new birth of a glorified world, so the Stoic doctrine speaks of a περιοδικὴ παλιγγενεσία τῶν ὅλων, ἀναστοιχείωσις. But this is connected with the pantheistic conception of a cycle of alternate destructions and renewals of the world, utterly opposed to the teleological point of view in Christianity. Ὁ τεσσαρακοντούτης, ἐάν νοῦν ὁποσονοῦν ἔχῃ, πάντα τὰ γεγονότα καὶ τὰ ἐσόμενα ἔώρακε κατὰ τὸ ὁμοείδες.—(Anton. Monol., xi., 1.) “He who lives only forty years and observes well, has experienced every thing which occurs in the whole eternity of this ever-renewed process.”

§ 120. Jealousy of John’s Disciples.—Final Testimony of the Baptist.—His Imprisonment.

The rapid growth of Christ’s sphere of labour excited the jealousy of many of John’s disciples, who would hear of no other master but their own, and who had not imbibed enough of his spirit to know that he was to give way before the higher one. They had seen that Christ obtained his first disciples by John’s testimony in his favour. Having no desire themselves to go beyond John’s teaching, they did not strive to understand that testimony fully, and deemed it unreasonable that Christ, who owed his first followers to the recommendation of their own master, should exalt himself above the latter. But when they mentioned their surprise to John, he answered them, “Do not wonder at this; it had to be so. No man can usurp what Heaven has not granted him. (No man’s labours can transcend the limit appointed by God. Christ’s influence proclaims the Divinity of his calling. Men would not join him, if God did not give them, in him, what I could never bestow.)” He then calls them to witness that he had never announced himself to them as Messiah, but always, and only, as the Forerunner: “I said I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him.”

It is to be observed (and it confirms what we have said of the historical position of the Baptist) that he does not here appeal to his private declarations as to Christ’s Messiahship, made to individual susceptible disciples, but only to his continuous public testimony. The jealous spirits, therefore, may never have had, from the lips of their master, any Such special direction to Christ.

But he added, “My goal is reached; my joy is fulfilled. I have led the Bride (the Theocratic congregation) to the Bridegroom (the Messiah), to whom she belongs, who alone can fulfil her hopes. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

John, iii., 30. Thus far the words bear the stamp of the Baptist, their meaning being figuratively intimated rather than expressed. But those which follow (31-36) are totally different. The Evangelist, having in his own Christian experience so rich a commentary upon the words of his former Master, feels bound to apply it in explaining them. The relation of the Baptist to Christ sets aside all that has been said, in later times, about some imaginary person’s having invented this scene and tacked it on to John’s Gospel. Had such a one, as Strauss thinks, made the fiction in order to oppose the disciples of the Baptist (who kept aloof from Christianity) by the authority of their own master, he would have gone much further; it would have been just as easy, and far more effective, to invent a dialogue between Christ and the Baptist himself. The apocryphal writings of that period, manufactured to favour certain religious ideas, were not wont to confine their inventions within such narrow limits.

In uttering these words the Baptist probably had a presentiment that the end of his career was at hand. When he returned to the other side of the river, Herod Antipas, who ruled in Peraea, succeeded in laying hold of him. The rigid censor of morals, who had no respect for persons where the holy law of God was concerned, had offended the tetrarch;

Josephus differs from the Gospels (Matt., xiv., 3-5; Mark, vi., 17-20; Luke, iii., 19-20; as to Herod’s reasons for this act; according to the latter, it was done because John had reproved him for carrying off and marrying his brother Philip’s wife; according to the former, the tetrarch was induced by fear of political disturbances. “Δείσας τὸ ἐπὶ τοσόνδε πιθανὸν αὐτοῦ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις μὴ ἐπὶ ἀποστάσει τινὶ φέροι· πάντα γὰρ ἐώκεσαν συμβουλῇ τῇ ἐκείνου πράξοντες, πολὺ κρεῖττον ἡγεῖται πρίν τι νεώτερον ἐξ αὐτοῦ γενέσθαι, προλαβὼν ἀναίρειν ἤ μεταβολῆς γενομένης εἰς τὰ πράγματα ἐμπεσὼν μετανοεῖν.”—(Archaeol., xviii., v., § 2.) Now the character of the Evangelists, as historians, would not be affected, if we admit that they followed the popular report, even though incorrect, as the matter had no connexion with their immediate object. But the difficulty is cleared up, and a better insight into the nature of the case obtained. by the supposition that Josephus gave the ostensible, and the Evangelists the real and secret reason that impelled Herod. As the Baptist did not claim to be Messiah, and exhorted the people to fidelity in the several relations of life, Herod could have had no political fears except such, indeed, as might arise from John’s honest boldness in reproving his sins. It is a further proof of his personal hatred to John, that he not only imprisoned, but killed him. History affords many instances in which faithful witnesses to the truth have fallen victims to the craft of priests or women, and often of the two combined.

§ 121. Impressions made upon the Samaritan Woman.

In the mean time the summer months, and part of autumn, had passed away. It was in seed time, which lasted from the middle of October to the middle of December, that Jesus arrived in the fertile plain of Sichem. Fatigued with travelling, he stopped to refresh him self about midday

That traveling could be continued until twelve o’clock shows that it must have been late in autumn.

§ 122. Christ’s Decision between the Worship of the Jews and that of the Samaritans.

Struck with his insight of her secret history, the woman recognized him as a prophet. She must, in consequence, have supposed that a higher sense lay hid in what he had uttered, enigmatical as it yet appeared to her, and she laid it up in her mind. It was natural, also, for her to question him further, as a prophet, on religious subjects, and thus elicit from him new instruction. And what question so likely to occur, or fraught with deeper interest to her, than that which formed the bone of contention between the Jews and Samaritans, and which was suggested to her by the very spot on which they stood, Mount Gerizim itself towering up just at hand [“Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship”].

The answer of Christ has a two-fold reference: one to the existing stage of the Theocracy, thus answering the spirit of the woman’s question; the other alluding to the higher stage of the Theocratic developement which he himself was about to introduce.

In regard to the first, he decides (v. 22) in favour of the Jews “The Samaritans are ignorant of the true worship of God, because they reject the prophets, the several stages of revelation that have prepared the way for that which is the aim of all, the manifestation of the Redeemer; the Jews, on the other hand, do worship God intelligently,

This, of course, is only said objectively, with reference to the stand-point of the Jewish nation; subjectively, applied to individuals, it would only be true of those who correspond in spirit to the definition that follows.

§ 123. The Worship of God in Spirit and in Truth.

Christ thus showed that the worship at Jerusalem was only preferred in view of the salvation that was to come forth there, and that the superiority would cease at the time of its coming forth. He had, then, to describe that higher era before which the question in dispute between Jews and Samaritans would wholly cease: “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him: God is Spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” To the worship of God as previously conceived—the sensuous, external worship, confined to special times and a fixed place—Christ opposes a worship limited by neither, but proceeding from the Spirit, and embracing the whole being. The true worship of God, as Spirit, can only spring from Divine affinities in the Spirit.

And such worship can only be “Worship in the Truth;” the two are inseparable; the Truth must be taken up into the life of the Spirit before it can utter spiritual worship—Truth, the Divine element of life, the link that binds the world of spirits to God, their original. As worship in spirit is opposed to that which is confined wholly, or chiefly, to isolated outward acts, so worship in the Truth is opposed to that which adheres to sensuous types and images that only veil the truth, And this true spiritual worship can only flow from those who are in communion of life with God, as Father.

Christ used the words, “the time cometh, and is now,” because the true, spiritual worship was realized, in its perfection, in himself; and because he had planted seeds in the hearts of his disciples, from which it was to develope itself in them, and through them m all mankind.

§ 124. The Spiritual Worship.—Its Bearing upon Practical Life.

Christ uttered here no merely theoretical truth, bearing only upon knowledge, but one eminently practical, and including in itself the whole work which he was to accomplish in humanity. The sages of both the East and the West had long known that all true worship must be spiritual; but they believed it impossible to extend such worship beyond the narrow circle of thoughtful and spiritually contemplative minds; nor did they even know rightly how to realize it for themselves. They sought in Knowledge what could only spring from Life, and was in this way to become, not the privilege of a favoured few, but the common good of all men.

On the other hand, Christ not only gave the true Idea, but realized it. As Redeemer of men, he placed them in a relation to God, through which the tendency to true and spiritual worship is imparted to their whole life. He made the Truth which he revealed the source of life for men; and by its means, as spirits allied to God, they worship him in Truth. Only in proportion as men partake of the Divine life, by appropriating Christ’s revealed truth, can they succeed in worshipping God in spirit and in truth.

The knowledge of God as Spirit was by no means communicated to men ready made and complete. It was to develope itself in the reflective consciousness only from true worship of God, rooted in the life; here, and here only, were men to learn

The history of religious opinions in the first three centuries affords most vivid proof of this. E. g.: “πᾶν πνεῦμα, εἰ ἁπλούστερον ἐκλαμβάνομεν, σῶμα τυγχάνον.” (Orig. in Joann., t xiii., § 22.)

How has the lofty truth, the world-historical import, of this saying of Christ been lost sight of by those who have taken it as an isolated expression, apart from its connexion with Christian Theism and with the whole Divine process for the developement of Christian life, by those abstract, naked, one-sidedly intellectual Deists and Pantheists who have dreamed that they could incorporate them into their discordant systems by their spiritual Fetichism, which substitutes the deification of an Idea for the spiritual, truthful adoration of God as Spirit! The aristocracy of education, the one-sided intellectualism of the ancient world, was uprooted by Christ when he uttered this grand truth to an uneducated woman, who belonged to an ignorant and uncultivated people: For all men alike, the Highest must spring from life [and not from culture].

§ 125. Christ’s Glances at the future Progress of his Kingdom, and at his own Death.

After Christ had made himself known as Messiah to the Samaritan woman, she hastened joyfully to the city to tell the strange things that had happened to her. Her countrymen came out in throngs at her call. In the mean time, however, the disciples had returned, and found their Master just closing his conversation with the woman; and, although both surprised and curious, they asked no questions about the occasion or subject of the conversation.

But they wondered that he did not touch the provisions they had brought. His corporeal wants are forgotten in the higher thoughts that occupy him; the work of his life is before him, the planting of the seeds of Divine truth in a human soul, and through it in many others, even beyond the limits of the Jewish people. The Samaritan woman is an exponent of this new progress of the kingdom of God. Her countrymen are approaching; the seed is already germinating. He replies, therefore, to his disciples, “I have meat to eat which ye know not of. (The nourishment of the body is forgotten in that of the Spirit.) My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work (to sow the seed for the general diffusion of the kingdom of God among men).”

He then illustrates the work of God, which he had just begun among the Samaritans, by a similitude

This similitude is of the same character with Christ’s parables given in the first three Gospels in general, and especially with those taken from sowing seed, &c.; a sign of the common character that pervaded all his discourses.

§ 126. Subsequent State of the Samaritans.

At the earnest request of the Samaritans, who were deeply impressed with his appearance and his words, Christ remained two days with them before continuing his journey to Galilee. We have no information as to the immediate fruit of these his first labours among that people; perhaps it was the source of that religious awakening among them which is recorded in the Acts (viii., 14). If this be so, the seed sown by Christ, rich and fruitful as it was in the short time of his stay, was not afterward carefully cultivated until the Apostles went to Samaria; many foreign elements had crept in, and enthusiasts and false prophets had led the people astray. The pure manifestation of Divinity was followed by a paltry caricature. The unsophisticated Samaritans believed in Christ, from the Divine power of his words and his appearance, without any miracle; but at a later period, when their minds had been debauched by magical arts and legerdemain, the most striking miracles were requisite to restore them.

§ 127. Christ heals the Nobleman’s Son.—Chooses Capernaum for his Abode.—Healing of Peter’s Wife’s Mother.

ON his arrival in Galilee Jesus went again to Cana. (John, iv., 46.) While there, there came to him a man belonging to the court (βασιλικὸς) of Herod Antipas, and begged him to go down to Capernaum and cure his son, who was dangerously ill. Distress drove this man to Christ; although he might (if he had chosen), perhaps, have received Divine impressions before. He probably was, at first, among the number of those who verified the proverb in regard to Christ, “a prophet is without honour in his own country.” The Samaritans believed, because of their inward wants, and of the inward power of Divinity; the faith of the Galileans had to be roused by visible miracles and material blessings. To this must we refer the words of reproof uttered by Christ before he granted the man’s prayer: “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.”

See p. 138.

Having, by the miracle wrought in this case, produced a new and favourable impression upon the public mind at Capernaum, he chose that place as the seat of his ministry. Here he taught in the synagogue, and healed the sick. It happened on a certain Sabbath, that when he left the synagogue he went, attended by his disciples, to the house in which Peter lived, with his mother-in-law, who lay ill at the time of a fever.

Luke, iv., 38; Matt., viii., 14; Mark, i., 29.

§ 128. Christ appears in the Synagogue at Nazareth.—His Life is Endangered. (Luke, iv., 16-30.)

From Capernaum Christ went to Nazareth, but the fame of his great deeds at the former place had gone before him. All eyes were turned upon him when he appeared in the synagogue on the Sabbath; they had known him as a very different person from what fame now proclaimed him to be. He took the scroll of the prophets that was handed to him, and, Divinely guided, opened it at Isaiah, lxi., 1. We may infer from the words of this passage that he proclaimed the arrival of the prophetical Jubilee, and declared himself to be the promised one that was to open the eyes of the blind, and to bring liberty to those who languished in the bondage of sin and Satan.

But his hearers were unconscious of their spiritual bondage, and longed for no deliverance; they knew not of their blindness, and asked not to be healed. Engrossed in the affairs of life, they were conscious of no higher wants, and, therefore, although his words made an impression, it was only upon the surface. Their astonishment that a man whom they had known from childhood should speak such words of power was soon followed by the doubt, “How comes it that such a man should do such great things?” Incapable of appreciating the heavenly gifts which Christ offered, they wished him (in their hearts, if not with their lips) to work wonders there as he had done at Capernaum.

We have seen already

See p. 136.

At this rebuke the wrath of the scribes and of the rude multitude was enkindled against him,

Luke’s account of this is very graphic, but very brief; many other things may have occurred to stir up the anger of the people. But when we remember the fame that had preceded his coming, the striking exordium with which he opened his speech (addressed, however, only to susceptible souls), and, finally, that, instead of complying with their request, he refused and rebuked them at the same time, we may readily conceive why they should be angry at the “son of the carpenter,” now coming forward with the pretensions of a prophet. Their excited selfishness now took the garb of zeal against a false prophet. According to Luke’s account, Christ wrought no miracle here, and this accords with the words he uttered; the less detailed statements of the other Evangelists (Matt., xiii., 58; Mark, vi., 5) imply that he wrought a few. In this last case, it might be supposed that he did not leave the town immediately after the synagogue service, and that, meanwhile, something occur red to excite the people. It is probable, however, that we must consider Luke’s statement the most definite, both in view of the general principles on which Christ wrought his mighty works, and also of the special relation in which he stood to the Nazarenes.

This rejection of Christ at Nazareth, due mainly to the disposition of the chief men, is worthy of note as a type of the rejection which awaited him at the hands of the leaders of the whole nation from the same cause.

§ 129. The Parable of the Sower.

Matt., xiii., 1-9; Mark, iv., 1-9; Luke, viii., 4-8.

The time intervening between Christ’s return to Galilee in November, and his journey to Jerusalem to attend the feast of the Passover in the following March or April, was spent in scattering the seeds of the kingdom more widely among the people of that country. Probably many of the events recorded by the first three Evangelists belong to this period.

Perhaps, also, it was during this period that he took occasion, as he walked by the shores of Genesareth, to offer Divine truth to the gathered crowds around him, in the form of a parable suggested by the labours of the peasants who were sowing their fields around. He exhibited vividly to their minds, under the figure of the seed, the object of his proclamation, the dispositions of mind with which it must be received in order to accomplish that object, and the hindrances with which it is wont to meet in human nature.

It is not to be supposed that Christ uttered this parable (which refers solely to the operations of the word proclaimed by him) as an isolated speech; indeed, it is distinctly intimated (Mark, iv., 2) that an exhortation or warning to his hearers preceded it.

He divides his hearers into two principal classes, (I.) those in whom the word received is unfruitful, and (II.) those in whom it brings forth fruit. In the first class, again, he distinguishes (a) the totally unsusceptible, and (b) those to whom the word, indeed, finds access, but yet brings forth no fruit. Of these last, again, there are two subdivisions.

I. THE UNFRUITFUL HEARERS.

(a.) The totally Unsusceptible.

The seed, which does not penetrate the earth at all, but remains upon the surface, and is trodden or devoured by birds, corresponds to the relation of the Divine word to the wholly worldly, who, utterly unsusceptible, reject the truth without ever comprehending it at all.

(b.) The partially Susceptible.

(1.) The Stony-ground Hearers.—Under the figure of the stony ground, in which the seed shoots up quickly, but withers as soon, for want of earth and moisture, he depicts that lively but shallow susceptibility of spirit which grasps the truth eagerly, but receives no deep impressions, and yields as quickly to the reaction of worldly temptations as it had yielded to the Divine word. Faith must prove itself in strife against the world without, as well as within; but the mind just described never appropriates the truth in such a way as to obtain power to resist.

(2.) The Word Choked among Thorns.—The seed which germinates and takes root, but is stifled by the thorns that shoot up with it, figures the mind in which the impure elements of worldly desire develope themselves along with the higher life, and at last become strong enough to crush it, so that the received truth is utterly lost.

II. THE FRUITFUL HEARERS.

When seed is sown into good ground, it is variously productive ac cording to the fertility of the soil. So the fruitfulness of Divine truth, when once appropriated, depends upon the degree in which it penetrates the whole interior life and all the powers of the spirit, stamping itself upon the truth-inspired course of life.

With what perfect simplicity are the profoundest truths in regard to the growth of religious life unfolded in this parable! So vivid an impression was made upon a woman in the throng, that she exclaimed, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the breast that gave thee suck.”

Luke, xi., 27. We shall give our reasons, further on, in placing these words in this connexion.

After the dispersion of the multitude, the smaller circle of disciples gathered about Christ and asked a further explanation of the parable.

Matt., xiii., 18-23; Mark. iv.. 10-25; Luke, viii., 9-18.

§ 130. Parable of the various Kinds of Fish in the Net.

Matt., xiii., 47.

Marvellous was the spirit-glance with which Christ surveyed not only the process by which the higher life which he had introduced into humanity was to develope itself, according to its own inherent laws, but also the manifold corruptions and hindrances that awaited it. The parables in which he illustrated the hindrances and obstacles of the truth were also derived from the sphere of nature and of life immediately around him—the toils of the fishermen in the Sea of Genesareth, and of the husbandmen in the fertile fields about its shores.

He had to teach his disciples that not all who joined him were fitted to be genuine followers, and that the spurious and the true should be intermixed in his visible kingdom, until that final process of decision which God had reserved to himself. To convey this truth, he compares the kingdom of God, in the process of its developement on earth (which corresponds to the visible Church as distinguished from the invisible), to a net cast into the sea, in which fish of all kinds, good and worthless, are caught, and which are only assorted after the net has been drawn to the shore.

It was, perhaps, an expression of surprise on the part of his disciples, at the long forbearance of Christ toward some whom they deemed unworthy—and certainly there was one such in the immediate circle of his followers—that gave him occasion to utter the parable of the “Wheat and the Tares.” Its object was to warn them (and the leaders of the Church in all ages) against arbitrarily and impatiently anticipating the Divine wisdom, which guides all the threads of the Church’s progress to one aim; against attempting to distinguish the spurious from the genuine members before that final sifting of the kingdom which God himself will make; to teach them that men have no means of making such decisions unerringly, and might cut off, as false, some who were, or might become, true subjects of the kingdom.

The chief point in the parable is, that while the genuine seed germinates and brings forth fruit, the bastard seed is also sown among it, and both shooting up together, the bastard wheat, from its likeness to the true, cannot well be discriminated until harvest, when its real nature is manifested. The other point of comparison is the impatience of the servants, who wish to pull up the tares at once.

§ 131. Christ subdues a Storm on the Sea.—Character of the Act as a Miracle.—Its moral Significance.

The disciples had many opportunities, on the Sea of Genesareth, of contrasting their own spiritual feebleness with the calmness of the Saviour’s soul; an experience that was useful, not only at the time, but as a preparation for their own subsequent calling.

On one occasion,

Luke, viii., 22-25; Matt., viii., 23-27; Mark, iv., 36-41. The connexion of this history with that of the Gadarene in the text of the Evangelists is a proof of historical reality, no causal ground of such a connexion exists.

Not only the disciples, but the other persons in the ship, were deeply impressed by this miracle. One of the strangers

The expression οἱ ἀνθρωποιin Matt., indicates that these persons were not disciples.

The question has been started whether this occurrence cannot be explained from the subjective apprehension of the men themselves, e. g., as follows. When Jesus awoke, and spoke calmly to them, his composure quieted their perturbed minds. A calm in the elements ensued; and they transferred the impression made upon their minds to Nature. Interpreting the few words uttered by Christ in this way, they involuntarily altered them a shade in repeating them afterward.

§ 132. The Gadarene Demoniac.

Matt., viii., 28; Mark, v., 1-20; Luke, viii., 26-39. Two demoniacs are mentioned by Matthew, perhaps because the demoniac speaks in the plural number.

Christ landed on the eastern shore, near the town of Gadara. Many pagans probably resided in that vicinity, as herds of swine abounded. A demoniac,

Cf. p. 145.

§ 133. Christ Returns to the west side of Genesareth.—Healing of the Issue of Blood.

Matt., ix., 18-26; Mark, v., 21; Luke, viii., 40.

When Christ returned to the western shore of the lake, he found a multitude of people awaiting his arrival. One of the rulers of the synagogue, named Jairus, whose daughter of twelve years

Strauss says that this age of “twelve” was a mere fiction, in imitation of the twelve years of the issue of blood. There is not a shadow of reason to suppose that Luke’s statements are not literally correct in both instances; but even if they were not, if a round number only is meant, and the one period modelled after the other, the veracity of the narrative would be in nowise impeached.

A woman who had suffered with an issue for twelve years, and had sought aid in vain from physicians, approached him through the press from behind. She did not venture to address him directly, but having formed the idea in her own way, she thought that a sort of magical healing power streamed forth from his person, and that she might be relieved of her malady simply by touching his garment. Her believing confidence, although blended with erroneous conceptions, was not disappointed.

Christ felt that some one had touched his robe,

Luke’s account could have been given by none but an eye-witness in such lively and minute detail; e. g., Christ’s question, Peter’s answer, the repetition of the question, etc. Moreover, Luke makes the cure immediate upon the touching of the garment; in Matthew it follows the words of Christ in the usual way. Luke’s eye-witness had the conception of the mode of cure that the woman herself had, and so interpreted Christ’s words (viii., 46).

§ 134. Raising of Jairus’s Daughter.—And of the Widow’s Son at Nain.

In the mean time a message came from the house of Jairus that his daughter was dead, and that, as nothing could be done, the Master need be troubled no further.

The discrepancy between Luke’s account (viii., 49) and Matthew’s (ix., 18, seq.) has been made a ground of objection. It has been supposed that the second message is a mere filling up of Luke’s. A similar discrepancy, as to the sending of a message, occurs in the case of the centurion, Matt., viii., 5-10; Luke, vii., 6. Grant that the two cases were entirely alike, it would not follow that there had been an intentional invention. But the dissimilarity of the two is greater than their similarity. In both cases, indeed, the message is, that Christ need not come; but the reason assigned in the one is, that he can help without coming, and in the other, that it is too late for him to help at all. What, then, is unlikely in either? especially as Luke’s statements, derived from eye-witnesses, are full, while those of Matthew are abridged reports.

What right had he to hold out this hope to the parent, and in what sense did he do it? Did he know, from the reported symptoms, that the death was only apparent, and that he was going to cure a fainting-fit by remedies in his possession? Had this been the case, he surely would have guarded against exciting hopes that might be disappointed; he would have said, in words, that his expectations were founded only on the supposition that the girl was in a trance; and as natural signs alone could give no unerring certainty of cure, he would, in mere prudence, have spoken conditionally, telling the father, perhaps, to trust in God, but yet, at the same time, to resign himself to the Divine will. In a word, he could only have spoken as he did, from a Divine confidence that he could, by the power of God within him, restore life to the dead body.

At the door of the house the mother comes to meet them. A throng of curious persons at the door desire to enter, but he admits only the parents, with three of his most intimate disciples. In the chamber of death he finds already gathered the minstrels and mourners. “Weep not,” said he to them; “she is not dead, but sleepeth.”

These words might have been used, it is true, if he meant (as some suppose) to state her condition according to the symptoms, and to make this a ground of consolation; as if he had said, “she is only in a trance resembling sleep.” But they were equally appropriate, if, without any reference to natural symptoms and consequences, he meant only to say that this condition would be, for her, only sleep, as he was able to raise her out of it. The character in which Christ acted, as well as the whole connexion of the narrative, compel the conclusion that he spoke with reference to the result rather than to the nature of the condition in which the maiden lay; even though the circumstances might make it probable that this condition was a trance.

[“And he put them all out.”] In stillness must such a work be wrought!

When the noisy mourners were gone, and he was alone with the few that had accompanied him into the chamber of death, he spoke to the maiden the life-inspiring words. He then “charged them to tell no man what had been done.” It has been said that he did this to prevent their giving him the false reputation of having done a miracle in the case; false, because he had restored the maiden, in an entirely natural way, from a death that was only apparent. Had this been the case, he certainly would have explained himself more definitely. He would have told them, in that case, how to report the matter; not that they should not report it at all. But he could not have wished that the event should be otherwise regarded than as a work of Divine power; and the prohibition was doubtless made in view of circumstances, especially in view of the dispositions of the people.

To this period of Christ’s ministry, probably, belongs also a miracle akin to the raising of Jairus’s daughter, which is reported only by Luke.

Luke, vii., 11.

On a journey, accompanied by his disciples, and by many others who had joined him on the road, he arrives before the little town of Nain,

Now a little village, Nein, inhabited by a few families.—Robinson, iii., 460 [Am. ed., iii., 218, 226].

§ 135. Doubts of John the Baptist in his Imprisonment.

Matt., xi., 2-15; Luke, vii., 19-30.

John the Baptist had now languished in prison for several months in the fortress Machoerus. He was not wholly interdicted from intercourse with his disciples; for the fear of political disturbance from him was, as we have seen,

Cf. p. 179.

In the testimony which he gave to Christ, just before his imprisonment,

Cf. p. 178.

In this reply Christ gives them, as proof of his Messiahship, the miracles that he had wrought, both upon matter and spirit.

It by no means follows, from the narrative, that Christ wrought all these miracles in presence of John’s messengers. They could hear of them any where, and see their effects. Nor is a chronological connexion between the resurrection of the widow’s son and this message of John’s to be inferred from the juxtaposition in which Luke places them; he may have been led to this by Christ’s mention of “the raising of the dead.”

§ 136. Christ shows the Relation of his Contemporaries to the Baptist and to Himself.

Matt., xi., 17.

The discourse which Christ continued to the groups around him is especially important as unfolding the relation in which he stood to the Jews.

“They are like children sitting in the market-place, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not wept.” The merry music and the mournful are alike displeasing; they will neither dance nor be sad. So it was with John and the Son of Man on the one hand, to the people of that time on the other. The ascetic of the desert, preaching repentance with fasting and austerity, was laughed at as a madman; the Son of Man, mingling in the intercourse of men, and sharing in their human joys, was “a glutton and a wine-bibber.” Yet “Wisdom was justified of her children,” was recognized by those who really belonged to her. (While the multitude, sunk in worldly-mindedness and self-conceit, and deaf to the voice of Divine wisdom, took offence, for opposite reasons, at both these messengers of God, the humble and susceptible disciples of the wisdom of God, on the other hand, could understand the different standpoints of John and Jesus, and appreciate the reasons for their different modes of life and action.)

§ 137. Christ’s Conversation with the Pharisees in regard to the Mode of Life indulged by his Disciples.

Matt., ix., 11-17; Mark, ii., 15-22; Luke, v., 33-39.

It is not strange, therefore, that on a certain occasion the Pharisees came to Christ, and expressed their surprise at the free and social mode of life in which he indulged his disciples. They did not confine their appeal to the example of their own school, but intentionally added that of the Baptist’s disciples, believing that the latter would be the more to their purpose, as Christ had recognized John for an en lightened teacher.

It may be asked whether the Pharisees, in putting this question, sought only for instruction, and wished to obtain from Christ himself the principles on which a course so inexplicable to them was founded, or whether they meant to reproach him personally for sitting at the banquets of publicans and sinners, and only made use of their question about the disciples for a crafty blind to their attack? The gentle and instructive tone of Christ’s reply seems (although it certainly is not proof) to favour the first view.

The collocation of Luke, v., 33 and 34, if it be the original chronological order, opposes this view. In that case, after Christ had caused the question of the Pharisees to recoil upon themselves, they returned with it in a more concealed form. But it is probable [that different classes of Pharisees were concerned in the two cases], and that, this distinction being lost sight of, the occurrence in question was connected with one of the real machinations of that party in general against Christ.

§ 138. The Parable of the New Patch on the Old Garment, and of the New Wine in Old Bottles.

Matt., ix., 16; Mark, ii., 21; Luke, v., 36.

Christ added another illustration in the form of a parable. “No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles (skins), else the new wine will burst the bottles and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles, and both are preserved.”

The old nature cannot be renewed by the imposition from without of the exercises of fasting and prayer; no outward and compulsory asceticism can change it. Individual points of character are significant only so far as they are connected with the tendency of the whole life: a reformation in these, indeed, may be enforced, and the stamp and spirit of the life remain unchanged. A fragment of the higher spiritual life, thus broken off from its living connexion (destroyed in the fracture), and forced upon the nature of the old man, would not really improve it; but, on the other hand, by its utter want of adaptation, would worsen the rent in the old nature—would tear it rudely away from its natural course of developement. A mere renewal from without is at best an artificial, hypocritical thing. The new cloth is torn, and a patch laid upon the old that does not fit it. The new wine is lost, and the old skins perish.

We deviate from the ordinary interpretation of this parable. Our explanation is not only adapted to the preceding context (Luke, v., 33-35), but also fits the minute details of the comparison, which the one commonly given does not. According to the latter, the substance of the parable is, that the outward religious exercises of Judaism are not adapted to the higher stage, Christianity, for which the disciples were training. But Christ admits (verse 35) that fasting may be a good thing at the right time; which, he said, had not then come, but would come. Instead of taking up this point, and unfolding it in the parable in another aspect, as one might expect, the common interpretation introduces a new and entirely different thought, viz., that such exercises were unsuitable (not to their condition at that time, but) to Christianity at any time. Again, one would naturally think, from v. 34, 35, that the “new wine” and the “new cloth” of the parable were intended to represent the fasting, &c., of which Christ was speaking, viz., that fasting which the Apostles were to practice at a later period. But the usual interpretation, on the other hand, supposes fasting to be something defective in itself, and as belonging to that form of life which is represented by the “old garment.” The sense thus obtained contains a thought not true in itself; for, in the case of the Apostles, the new wine of Christianity was put into the old bottle of Judaism, and was intended to break it to pieces. If the prescribed fasting was to be disregarded by the Apostles as belonging to Jewish legalism, so also, on the same principle, the whole Jewish legalism would have to be done away by them, as foreign to the new spirit introduced by Christ.

It is remarkable that this obviously false interpretation should have kept so long in the back-ground the true one developed by Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt., xxx., § 4. Independently of my exposition, Wilke has recently declared himself (in his Urevangelisten) in favour of the view here given. De Wette styles it “forced,” but how the term can apply to an interpretation so accurately fitting the details of the parable, I cannot imagine. I should be very glad to see the attention of interpreters directed to the views which I have set forth.

§ 139. Forms of Prayer.—The Lord’s Prayer; its Occasion and Import.

Luke, xi.

We take up now a subject akin to that of which we have just treated, without implying (what, indeed, is of no importance) a chronological connexion between them.

We have seen that one thing which surprised the Pharisees was that Christ did not lay stress upon outward prayers. He had not, like John the Baptist, prescribed forms of prayer for his disciples. In this respect, as well as others, their religious life was to develope itself from within. From intercourse with Christ, and intuition of his life, they were to learn how to pray. The mind which he imparted was to make prayer indispensable to them, and to teach them how to pray aright.

On a certain occasion, the desire arose in their hearts, from beholding him pray, to be able to pray as he did; and one of them asked, “Lord, teach us how to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”

We follow Luke, xi. The passage in Matt., vi., 7-16, appears foreign to the original organism of the Sermon on the Mount, in which prayer, fasting, &c., were treated especially in contrast with the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. As that longer discourse was made a repertory for Christ’s sayings, in which they were arranged according to their affinities, so perhaps it was with this. We may certainly conclude that Christ would not have sketched such a prayer for the disciples without a special occasion for it; for the wish to lay down forms of prayer was, as we have seen, remote from his spirit and object. But we cannot think it possible [with some] that Christ uttered this prayer as appropriate for himself, and that the disciples adopted it for that reason; it had no fitness to his position: he, at least, could not have prayed for the pardon of his sins. The occasion given by Luke was a very appropriate one; the form was drawn out by Christ at the request of the disciples. It was probable, moreover, from the nature of the case, that Christ, who did not wish to prescribe standing forms of prayer, would make use of such an occasion to explain further the nature of prayer itself [as he does in Luke, xi., 5-13]. In the Sermon on the Mount, also (Matt., vii., 7), a passage similar [to Luke, xi., 9] is found; and Matt., vi., 7, perhaps contains the beginning of Christ’s reply to his disciples’ request on the subject.

Christ replied that they were not, in their prayers, to use “many words,” and to repeat details to God, who knew all their wants before they could be uttered. And then, in a prayer framed in the spirit of this injunction, he gave them a vivid illustration of the nature of Christian prayer, as referring to the one thing needful, and incorporating every thing else with that. As prayer is no isolated thing in Christianity, but springs from the ground of the whole spiritual life, so this prayer, which forms a complete and organic whole, comprehends within itself the entire peculiar essence of Christianity.

“Our Father who art in Heaven.”

In the shorter form of the prayer given in Luke, the words ἡμῶν and “ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς are omitted. It is probable that the original form of the prayer is that given by Matthew. Luke is more accurate in giving the chronological and historical connexion of Christ’s discourses, but Matthew gives the discourses themselves more in full.

§ 140. Christ forgives the Magdalen at the House of Simon the Pharisee.

Luke, vii., 36, seq.

It was Christ’s free mode of life with his disciples, his intercourse with classes of people despised by the Pharisees, his seeking the society even of the degraded, in order to save them, which first drew upon him the assaults of that haughty and conceited sect.

On one occasion he was invited to dine with one of the Pharisees, named Simon, a man certainly incapable of appreciating the Saviour Either from his natural temper, or from his peculiar disposition to wards Christ, he gave him but a cool reception. While the Saviour was there, a woman came in who had previously led a notoriously vicious life, but who now, convinced of sin and groaning under it, sought consolation from Christ, from whom she had doubtless previously received Divine impressions. She threw herself at his feet, moistened them with her tears, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them with ointment. With what power must He have attracted the burdened soul, when a woman, goaded by conscience, could come to him with so sure a hope of obtaining balm for her wounded heart!

The Pharisee was astonished that He should have any thing to do with her. “Were this man,” thought he, “possessed of the prophet’s glance, piercing the thoughts of men, he could not be so deceived.” Christ, noticing his amazement, gave an explanation of the principle on which he acted, that must have shamed and humbled Simon; contrasting his cold hospitality with the heartfelt love which the woman, though oppressed with grief and sin, had manifested for him. Looking at the disposition of the heart, he prefers the woman—guilty, indeed, before, but, even for that reason, now longing the more earnestly for salvation, and penetrated with holy love—to the cold, haughty, self-righteous Pharisee, who, with all his outward show of observing the law, was destitute of quickening love, the essential principle of a genuine Divine life. “Her sins,” said he, “which are many, are all forgiven, for she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, he loveth little.”

It is love, according to Jesus, which gives to religion and morality their true import. The faith of the woman proved itself genuine, because it sprang from, and begat love; the love from the faith, the faith from the love. Her grief for her sins was founded in her love to the Holy God, to whom, conscious of her estrangement, she now felt herself drawn. Her desire for salvation led her to Jesus; her love aided her in finding a Saviour in him; with warm love she embraced him as such, even before he pronounced the pardon of her sins. Therefore Christ said of her, “Her many sins are forgiven, because she has loved much;” and to her, “Thy faith hath saved thee, go in peace;” thus exhibiting the reciprocal relations of the two—the faith proving itself true by the love. The Pharisee, whose feelings were ossified, bound up in the mechanism of the outward law, was especially lacking in the love which could lead to faith; and therefore, in speaking to him, the woman’s love, and not her faith, was made prominent by Christ.

The very vices of the woman made her conviction more profound, her desire for salvation more ardent, her love for the Redeemer, who pronounced her sins forgiven, more deep and heartfelt. But she had not, even in the midst of her transgressions, been further removed from the true, inward holiness that springs from the Divine life, than was the Pharisee in his best estate. He separated himself from God as effectually, by that unfeeling selfishness which often coexists with what is called morality, and with a conspicuous sanctity of good works, as if he had yielded, like the woman, to the power of evil passions. He was none the better because his colder nature offered no salient points for such temptations. Christ’s standard of morality was different from that which the world, deceived by appearances, is wont to apply. The Pharisee had succeeded in avoiding these glaring sins, and in keeping a fair show of obedience to the law; but all this only propped up his self-deceiving egotism, which delighted in the illusion of self-righteousness. In such a man, the sense of alienation from God, the consciousness of sin, as an abyss between him and the Holy One, without which there can be no true repentance, could find no place.

Nay, the abject woman, in her course of vice, may have been nearer to the kingdom than the haughty and self-righteous man; even then, there may have been a spark of love, stifled, indeed, by sensuality, but still existing in her heart, which needed only the touch of a higher power to kindle into flame. In her case, what was in itself bad may have been a means of good; good, however, which certainly might have been arrived at by another road. The pangs of repentance made her susceptible of Divine impressions, the Divine love that met her kindled the spark in her own heart; and she rose, by the living faith of love, above the Pharisee, who, in his arrogant selfishness, was hardened against Divine impressions, and did not recognize the love of God, even when he saw it manifested.

The simplicity of this narrative, and the stamp of Christ’s spirit which it bears, are sufficient proofs of its originality and truth. But I find no ground for believing it to be identical with the anointing of Christ by Mary at Bethany, which also, according to Matt. (xxvi., 6), occurred in the house of a Simon. The resemblances are accidental; such things could occur again and again amid Oriental customs. That a woman, in order to show her reverential love for the Saviour, might serve him like a slave, wash his feet, not with water, but with the costliest material in her possession, &c.; all this could easily have occurred twice and both times, too, in the house of a man named Simon, which was a very common name among the Jews; although it is possible that the name may have been transferred from the one account to the other. But while the resemblances are accidental, the differences are substantial. In the one the woman is an awakened sinner; in the other, one who had always led a devout life, and was, at the time, seized with additional gratitude at the saving of a beloved brother’s life. In the one, the different relations in which a self-righteous Pharisee and an awakened sinner stand to Christ, who rejects no repentant sinner, are set forth; in the other, a heartfelt love, which knows no measure, is contrasted with the common mind, incapable of comprehending such love. In the one it is Christ that is blamed and justified; in the other, the woman.

§ 141. Matthew the Publican called from the Custom-house.—Familial Intercourse of Christ with the Publicans at the Banquet.—The Pharisees blame the Disciples, and Christ justifies them.—“The Sick need the Physician.”

What surprise and offence must the Pharisees have felt when they saw Christ admit even a publican into the immediate circle of his disciples.

There are discrepancies in the narrative of the calling of Matthew, not, however, affecting the credibility of the account, which comes from several independent sources, and bears no marks of exaggeration. In Matthew’s Gospel, ix., 9, the person here spoken of is called Matthew, and in x., 3, Matthew the publican is mentioned among the Apostles; but in Luke, v., 27; Mark, ii., 14, he is called Levi. Mark appears to be more definite than the others, calling him the son of Alpheus, which does not look like a fanciful designation. The difficulty might be overcome by supposing (what was not uncommon among the Jews that the same man was designated in the one case by the name, in the other by the surname. An objection to this (though not decisive) is the fact that in the list of Apostles given in Matt., x., 3, he is called merely Matthew the publican, with no surname, and in the lists given by Mark and Luke, Matthew, simply, with no surname; and, farther, that an old tradition existed, which discriminated Matthew and Levi, and named the latter, in addition, among the prominent heralds of the Gospel. (Heracleon, in Clem. Alex., Strom., 1. iv., c. xi.) On this ground we might admit, with Sieffert, that the names of two persons, i. e., of the Apostle Matthew, and some other who had been admitted, at least, among the Seventy, had been confounded together. But as Matthew himself was the original source of the materials of the Gospel which bears his name (materials arranged, perhaps, by another hand), we cannot attribute the confusion to this Gospel. It is, at the same time, possible that the giver of the feast (Luke, v., 29), Levi, was another rich publican, a friend of the publican Matthew, who afterward also attached himself to Jesus; especially as nothing is said in Matt., ix., 10, about a great feast being given at the house of Matthew; and that thus the name of Matthew, whose call to the ministry occasioned the feast, and that of Levi, the host, in whose life it made an epoch, and who afterward became known as a preacher of the Gospel, were confounded together.

As he was walking one day along the shore of the lake,

Mark, ii., 13.

§ 142. Christ’s different Modes of Reply to those who questioned his Conduct in consorting with Sinners.—The Value of a Soul.—Parable of the Prodigal Son.—Of the Pharisee and the Publican.

There is a difference in one respect in Christ’s replies at different times to those who found fault with his kindness to publicans and degraded sinners. In some cases he stopped short after vividly exhibiting the mercy of God to all truly repentant sinners; in others, he not only justified his own conduct, but took the offensive against those who had attacked him, and showed them their own deficiencies in true righteousness, and their inferiority to the sincerely repentant publicans. The former course was probably taken with those who were more sincerely striving after righteousness, and who took offence at him on purer grounds. It is necessary to note this distinction is order to apprehend Christ’s words rightly, and to derive, from comparing his discourses together, a connected system of doctrine.

Under the first class may be placed the parables which are recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke. In verses 3-10 we have a vivid illustration of the value which God attaches to the salvation of one soul, shown by the great joy which the repentance of a sinner causes in a world of spirits, allied in their sympathies to Him. This is the one point which is to be made prominent and emphatic in interpreting the passage; we should err in pressing the separate points of comparison further.

To the same class, also, belongs the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Luke, xv., 11-32.

Christ does not go far, in this parable, in illustrating the deficiencies of the Pharisee. His legal righteousness goes without specific rebuke, but his envy (v. 28) and his want of love (“the fulfilling of the law”) show clearly the emptiness of his morality. It may have been the Saviour’s intention to lead the person here represented to discover, of himself, his total want of the substance of religion.

The one chief point of the parable is to illustrate, under the figure of relations drawn from human life, the manner in which the paternal love of God meets the vilest of sinners when he returns sincerely penitent. How strikingly does this picture of the Father’s love, ever ready to pardon sin, rebuke not merely the Jewish exclusiveness, but all those limitations of God’s purposes for the salvation of the human race, whether before or after Christ, which the arbitrary creeds of men have attributed to the Divine decrees! The parable clearly implies that the love of the Father contemplates the salvation of all his fallen children, among all generations of men. Yet it by no means excludes, although it does not expressly declare, the necessity of the mediatorial work of Christ; we must not expect to find the whole circle of Christian doctrine in every parable. Indeed; the mediation of Christ itself is the precise way in which the paternal love of God goes out to meet and welcome all his fallen children when they return in repentance. The parable images the condition of fallen man in general, as well as of that class of gross sinners to which, from the occasion on which Christ uttered it, it necessarily gives special prominence.

The line of distinction between the Pharisee and the publican is still more closely drawn in the parable contained in Luke, xviii., 9-14.

This parable is one (cf. p. 107) in which a truth relating to the kingdom of God is illustrated by an assumed fact; but the fact is one taken from the same sphere of life as that which it intended to depict. Moreover, the relation which must exist, in all time, between the self-righteous saint by works and the humbly penitent sinner is illustrated by an example such as once constantly occurred in real life—in Pharisees and publicans.

In this parable we find the germ of Paul’s doctrine; even of some of his weighty expressions on this subject. The doctrine is the same as that which Christ taught in pronouncing the “poor in spirit” blessed.

§ 143. The Miracle at the Pool of Bethesda.—The Words of Christ in the Temple to the Man that was healed. (John, v., 1-14.)

CHRIST, having spent the winter in Galilee, was called again to Jerusalem by the feast of the Passover. His stay in the city at that feast forms a marked period in his history; for a cure wrought upon a certain Sabbath in that time was the occasion, if not the cause, of a more violent display of the opposition of the Pharisees than had yet been made against him.

A certain spring at Jerusalem was believed by the people to possess remarkable healing powers at particular seasons, when its waters were moved by (what they supposed to be) a supernatural cause.

Against the credibility of this account, Bretschneider and Strauss adduce the silence of Josephus and the Rabbins in regard to such a healing spring; but this argument—like every argumentum e silentio, unsupported by special circumstances—is destitute of force. These very authorities tell us that there were many mineral springs in Palestine. Eusebius, in his work, “περί τῶν τοπικῶν ὁνομάτων τῶν ἐν τῇ θείᾳ γραφῇ, (Onomasticon), says, under the word “Βηζαθὰ”—“καὶ νῦν δείκνυται ἐν ταῖς αὐτόθι λίμναις διδύμοις, ὧν ἐκατέρα μὲν ἐκ τῶν κὰτ᾽ ἔτος ὑετῶν πληροῦται, θάτερα δὲ παραδόξως πεφοινιγμένον δείκνυσι τὸ ὕδωρ, ἴχωος, ὥς φασι, φέρουσα τῶν πάλαι καθαιρομένων ἱερείων, παρ᾽ ὅ καὶ προδατικὴ καλεῖται διὰ τὰ θύματα.” (Hieron., Opp., ed. Vallars., tom. iii., pt. i., p. 181.) The old tradition, that the waters had become “red,” from the washing of the sacrifices in them in old times, leads to the conclusion that it contained peculiar components. The legend of the angel (in v. 4, which, according to the best criticism, does not belong to John, but is a later gloss) could not have arisen unless the spring and its phenomena really existed. Robinson (Palestine, ii., 137, 156) thinks that he found in the irregular movement of the water in the “Fountain of the Virgin” phenomena similar to those recorded of the Pool of Bethesda, and contributing to explain them.

§ 144. The Pharisees accuse Christ of Sabbath-breaking and Blasphemy.—His Justification. (John, v., 10, 17-19.)

This occurrence gave the Pharisees the first occasion (so far as we know) to accuse Christ of breaking the Sabbath and of blaspheming against God. The first accusation was made in their contracted sense of the Sabbatical law, and of its violation; the latter arose from their legal Monotheism, and their narrow idea of the Messianic office.

In his justification, Christ struck at the root of the first error, viz., the carnal notion that the sanctity of the Sabbath was founded solely upon God’s resting after the work of creation, as if his creative labours were then commenced and ended; and points out, on the other hand, the ever-continuing activity of God as the ground of all being—my Father worketh hitherto, and I work.

John, v., 17. This is not out of place, nor borrowed from Philo, as some suppose, nor a mere metaphysical proposition, but one belonging immediately to the religious consciousness. It is said, moreover, that Christ’s transition (in verses 17, 19, seq.) from the Sabbath controversy to an exposition of his higher dignity is out of keeping with his character and mode of teaching, as exhibited in the first three Gospels. What would be said, then, if a transition like that recorded in Matthew, xii., 6, were recorded in John’s Gospel?

§ 145. The Discourse continued: Christ intimates his future greater Works.—His Judgment, and the Resurrection. (John, v., 20-29.)

Christ proceeds to declare (v. 20) that the Father will show him greater works than these, i. e., than reviving the dead limbs of the paralytic. And what were these “greater works?” Without doubt, that work which Christ always describes as his greatest—as the aim of his whole life—the awakening, namely, of Divine life in the spiritually dead humanity; a work which nothing but the creative efficiency of God could accomplish. “That ye may marvel;” for those who then would not recognize the Son of God in the humble garb of the Son of Man would indeed, at a later period, be amazed to see works (wrought by one whom they believed to be dead) which must be acknowledged to be great in their moral effects, even if their intrinsic nature could not be understood.

He describes these greater works more exactly, and points out, at the same time, the perfect power which he would have to do them in the words: “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.” The raising to life is as real in the latter clause as in the former. It depends upon His will, indeed; but his is no arbitrary will; and it follows that submission to his will is requisite before man can receive this Divine life. This, like that other passage—the wind bloweth where it listeth—breaks down the barriers within which Judaism inclosed the Theocracy and the Messianic calling.

And because it depends upon the Son to give light to whom He will the whole judgment of mankind is intrusted to his hands. “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son.” The negative is joined to the positive. The judgment is brought about by men’s bearing towards Him from whom alone they can receive life: “That all men should honour the Son, even as also they honour the Father.” He that will not recognize the Divine mission of the Son dishonours the Father that sent him.

The truth thus enunciated in general terms, Christ presented still more vividly, by applying it to his work then beginning, and which was to be carried on through all ages, until the final judgment and the consummation of the kingdom of God. “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death into life (the true, everlasting, Divine life). The hour is coming, and now is, when the (spiritually) dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live; for as the Father hath (the Source of Divine) life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have (Divine) life in himself. (If the Source of life, which is in God, had not been communicated to the human nature in him, then communion with him could not communicate the Divine life to others.) And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of Man (as man he is to judge men).”

His hearers, who saw him before their eyes in human form, were startled, doubtless, by these declarations. They looked for Messiah to establish a visible kingdom, with unearthly splendours, expecting it to be attended by an outward judgment; and Christ’s announcement of a spiritual agency, that was to be coeval with the world’s history, was beyond their apprehension. He referred them, therefore, to the final aim of the course which he was laying out for the human race, the final Messianic work of the Judgment and the general Resurrection; a work in itself, indeed, more familiar to them, but which, as ascribed to him, must have still more raised their wonder. “Marvel not at this; for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall Hear his voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good, to the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”

§ 146. The Discourse continued: Christ Appeals to the Testimony of his Works. (John, v., 30-37.)

Having thus unfolded his whole Messianic agency, embracing both the present and the future, Christ returns (v. 30) to the general proposition with which he had commenced (in v. 19). As he had applied his unity of action with the Father to his whole course, so now he applies it specifically to his judgment, which must, therefore, be just and true: “I can of mine own self do nothing; as I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just.”

His decision against his opponents must, therefore, be just and true also. They need not say (he told them) that his testimony was not trustworthy, because given of himself (v. 31), It was another that bore witness of him, whose testimony he knew to be unimpeachable (v. 32). He did not allude to John, whose light, which had been to them, as to children, a source of transitory

The words of John, v., 35, imply that the ministry of the Baptist belonged to the past, and they may have been spoken after his death; although the only necessary inference is, that he had ceased his public labours.

§ 147. The Discourse continued: Incapacity of the Jews to Understand the Testimony of God as given in the Scriptures. (John, v., 37-47.)

It was precisely through the works, Christ told them, that the Father had testified to him. “But,” continued he, in effect, “ it is no wonder that you ask another testimony of me, seeing that you are destitute of the spiritual capacity which is necessary to perceive this one. It can not be perceived with the senses;

We may remember how the Jews were inclined to look for Theophanies (visible appearances of the Deity).