to our Lord's Parousia-the Lord, the Bridegroom, "tarried" (24:48; 25:5). Of course, it would be easy to over-stress the last of these: the problem involved in the delay of the Parousia would arise early, say within five years of the Crucifixion, and would be almost as difficult any time in the first generation of believers as at a later date. But taken all together, the safest interpretation of such indications as the book affords is to date it sometime after-and not long after-the Fall of Jerusalem. The place of writing is much more difficult to determine. We know so little of the actual conditions and circumstances of Church life in the first century that we can hardly say whether or not the Gospel presupposes a Palestinian provenance-or Asia Minor, or even Egypt. That the book is intended for Jewish readers, or Jewish proselytes-certainly readers fairly well acquainted with Judaism, seems most likely. The repeated references to the Old Testament (with the formula, "This came to pass in order to fulfil the prophecy spoken by .") sug

gest this; knowledge of the Old Testament is taken for granted. The whole purpose of the book seems to be, in large measure, to wrest from the unbelieving Jews the Messiah of the Old Testament, and to show that Jesus, rather than the still-expected national deliverer, is the true Promised One. Hence it is not unlikely that Palestine was, if not its place of writing, at least the home of its intended readers. Perhaps not southern Palestine, Judea, after the catastrophe of the year 70: one is inclined to think rather of the North, of Galilee, or the Christian-Jewish district about Pella, or even the highlands of southern Syria (see Allen, Commentary, and Bartlet in Hastings' Bible Dictionary). The "Catholic" character of the Gospel (see 16:17-19, the famous Petrine text; 18:15-20, ecclesiastical discipline of offenders; the Baptismal formula at the end, etc.) is difficult to reconcile with the theory of development held by certain scholars, according to which "Catholicism," or the world-wide missionary religion of the second and succeeding centuries, is the product of later Greek or Hellenistic influences. And consequently they are inclined to date the Gospel much later in the

first century, and to locate it outside Palestine. But it need only be pointed out that such a theory of development may, conceivably, fail to do justice to all the facts. We might quote Jülicher -who himself dates the Gospel circa 100-in a passage (Introduction to N. T., p. 309) which by implication calls in question the famous doctrine of Harnack: "It can only be urged that even at the present day there are many to whom a slight tinge of Jewish color counts as a sure sign of pre-Catholic origin; and that Hellenization is proclaimed far too one-sidedly as the one cardinal point of distinction between primitive Christian and early Catholic theology."

St. Matthew is easily the most ecclesiastical of the Gospels. Not only do the passages just referred to indicate this (and several others might be added), but the whole tone and temper, and even the arrangement of the book, point in this direction. The author evidently stood in the center of the expanding Church life about him. He wrote for readers whose interest in our Lord was not academic or historical, but mediated through the existing organization of His followers. To the (unbelieving) Jews, Christ was the founder of a heresy, and the object of a misguided cult devoted to His false Messiahship; to the Christian (Jew, Proselyte, or Gentile), He was the Son of Man expected on the clouds of Heaven, in expectation of whose Returning His flock remained faithful and ever-watchful, as He had bidden them remain before He ascended; and with Whom they were in constant, though invisible, communion. The organizationwhether of persecuted sect or of Messiah's faithful-stands clearly in the foreground. The writer enjoys the immense advantage (not enjoyed to the same extent by St. Mark, for example) of being able to work back from the existing organization, the conservative, tradition-cherishing Ecclesia with which he is familiar, to the events of the earliest days, the life of Messiah Jesus on earth. Hence the unconscious ease, so baffling to minds trained in modern historical method, with which he moves back and forth between the Church of his own day and the tiny band of devoted followers who were Jesus' companions and dis

ciples in His earthly life. (Objection may be made to my use of the term, "earthly life," as implying too developed a Christology on the part of our author. But I am unaware of any other designation which will mark off sharply enough the contrast which our author bore constantly in mind: between Jesus' life and ministry on earth, and the glory of His ascended Person -or "nature"-and coming Parousia.) The developed disciplinary regulations of his own time are presupposed in the injunctions left His followers by the Lord. In the very midst of traditional material relative to the Disciples' Mission (see 10:5 and 10:23), he inserts other material which has to do not with the local mission in Galilee (or Jewish Palestine) but with the world-wide mission of the Church after Pentecost (see 10:17-22).

The numerical arrangements of the book have often been noted: e. g., the three divisions of the Genealogy, three miracles of healing in ch. 8, three complaints of Pharisees in ch. 9, three parables of sowing in ch. 13, three prayers in Gethsemane, etc. Use is also made of arrangements by five and seven (see Allen's Commentary, Introduction, page lxv). But more important for the author's plan was the bulking together of similar or related matter. It is obvious that the chronological criterion has almost disappeared, and the arrangement of material is decided upon grounds of appropriateness of subject. It was in this way that the teachings gathered together in ch. 5-7 came to form the "Sermon on the Mount"; so also, as suggested above, the Charge to the Twelve in ch. 10; so, too, the group of parables in ch. 13; and the eschatological discourse at the end (ch. 24f). The greatest amount of such rearrangement is found in the first half of the Gospel, where the discourse-material predominates. It is here, accordingly, that we find the scattered sections of that "Collection of the Lord's Sayings" by St. Matthew of which we spoke earlier in this paper. These have been fitted (as in the Sermon on the Mount and the Charge to the Disciples) into Mark's framework of narrative, often to the disadvantage of the latter. Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount, we find whole chapters on the character required in

those who are to inherit the Kingdom, on the true interpretation and fulfilment of the Law, on the duties of almsgiving, prayer and fasting: material nowhere to be found in Mark, and to be discovered in Luke only by searching through page after page, where it is found, usually, related to some historical incident or occasion. It seems quite certain that it is the author of Matthew who has gathered together this material and arranged it by topics, rather than St. Luke who has-for no conceivable reason-scattered it over the length of his pages.

The motive for this collection and arrangement of material is not far to seek: it is even suggested by the ecclesiastical character of the author-he wished to teach, and to make his book the basis for such instruction in the life and teaching of the Lord as could most readily be remembered, and such edification through study of the Lord's commandments as the Christian community of his time and region required. And incidentally, for the benefit of his non-Christian Jewish readers, whom he was endeavoring to persuade, the arrangement made far easier reading: the plan of the book became vivid, and its argument stood out unmistakably. Each chapter, each section, added somewhat to the accumulating logic of the whole.

Is there not some advantage for us today in such a method, and for all the generations of the Church between that first century and our own? Can we not understand what it was that made this "Jewish" Gospel the most popular of all in the second century? It has not the lively and fresh manner, the captivating realism of St. Mark. It is lacking in many of those artistic qualities which make St. Luke's Gospel-as Ernest Renan has said "the most beautiful book in the world." Its author shared none of those profound theological-mystical sentiments of the author of the Fourth Gospel, which have touched the hearts and awakened the love of countless thousand in all ages of the Church. And yet in this Gospel the discourses of our Lord unveil to us His personality in such wise that He Himself stands forth before us, and it is His own voice and words that we hear. For the Gospel is more than a record,

more than a record as well as less, it is an interpretation. Passage is compared with passage, saying relating to saying, one word of the Lord illuminating another when they are placed side by side. For our devout, industrious, patient author had studied long and earnestly the substance of

"Christe's lore, and His Apostles' twelve,"

before taking up the pen to write. We know that our Lord's discourses were more than isolated sayings, that He delivered real discourses, sermons, addresses. And when we wish to recover the impression which those sacred discourses made on His first hearers, in the synagogues of Galilee, and in the lanes and market-places of the countryside, by the sea and "in the house," it is to the Gospel according to St. Matthew that we go.

BOOK REVIEWS

Christian Belief in God. A German Criticism of German Materialistic Philosophy by Georg Wobbermin, Ph.D., Professor of Dogmatics in the University of Heidelberg. Translated from the third German edition by Daniel Sommer Robinson, Ph.D., Acting Chaplain, U. S. N. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1918.

A momentary significance of this little book of 173 pages arises from the fact embodied in its sub-title, that it is a German Criticism of the materialistic philosophy that lies behind, and to a degree explains, the immoral motives of the German Empire in the great world-war.

To describe the book more specifically, Dr. Wobbermin criticises adversely the current forms of antitheistic philosophy, including the super-man theory of Nietzsche and the materialistic monism of Haeckel, rightly regarding them as interrelated developments; and proceeds to elaborate constructively the natural reasons for the Christian belief in God.

In the first chapter Dr. Wobbermin gives a genetic and critical survey of the chief tendencies of current German philosophy, devoting the remaining chapters to constructive exposition of the natural bases of Christian theism, as discoverable respectively in epistemology, cos