Master explicitly contemplated the centuries of slow development still awaiting humanity, the actual form and phrasing of many a precept would have been different. Doubtless, too, He would have let fall a word or two on the creative moral value of institutions like the Family and the State. But the heart of the question is not here, but in those great anti-worldly paradoxes which have ever constituted the "offence" of Christian ethic.

"One thing thou lackest; sell all that thou hast, and come, follow Me." "Be not anxious for the morrow.' "If a man smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other." Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth," and the like. Do precepts like these represent the Master's estimate of real and fundamental values? Or did He only mean that wealth, forethought, self-assertion were good enough things in times past, and that preoccupation with them is foolish now only in view of the approaching catastrophe ?

Two main reasons seem to preclude this interpretation. Firstly, the approaching end of the world is not as a matter of fact adduced as a motive in the case of many of the most startling of these precepts. Men are urged not to be anxious for the morrow, not for the eschatological reason that to-morrow they may awake in another world, but because God's providence is daily shown in His feeding the fowls of the air and clothing the lilies of the field. Whether the end be far or near,

moth and rust will still corrupt, and thieves break through and steal, and wealth is disparaged primarily because the love of it distracts the soul in conflicting ways: "No man can serve two masters"; "Where "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." "Love your enemies " is commanded, not because the time is too short for petty squabbles, but "that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven, for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

But a further consideration arising even more from

the very heart of the matter is this. Every word and act of our Lord makes it clear that the love of God and man which was for Him the fundamental principle of life was not a mere emotional sentiment, neither was it a mere academic criterion for discriminating between the essential and non-essential elements in traditional morality. It was a consuming passion for service, that passion which dedicates whosoever is inflamed therewith to a life of renunciation, conflict, and reproach, and which demands the absolute sacrifice and surrender of all that would hinder devotion to the cause.

"Whoso hateth not his father and his mother-yea and his own life also cannot be My disciple." Sayings such as these are no doubt intentionally paradoxical in their expression, but they spring not from the eschatological expectations of His age but from His own. inward passion for God and man, and he who would neglect, explain away, or tone them down has missed the secret of the Master's power. Herein lies the

heroic element in Christianity, which alone has made it, and alone can make it, a religion fit for heroes.

Give all thou canst high heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more.

(c) in relation to the Divine Forgiveness

Yet to lay emphasis only on this stern summons to absolute singleness of purpose and absolute surrender to the ideal at whatever cost would give a one-sided impression of His message in its totality. Equally conspicuous is the tenderness and sympathy for those who have fallen short, even of a far less exacting moral ideal than that which He Himself both taught and lived, for the publican, the sinner, or the man whose sickness was due to his own sin (cf. Mark ii. 5). The ideal is infinite; infinite, too, is the compassion for those who miss it.

After the pattern of the ideals of a man's own mind.

are the predominant characteristics of that image of the Divine nature which he is capable of realising. To the old prophets God was pre-eminently a God of justice, stern and terrible, a God "that loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity." Another note, indeed, is struck from time to time in the Old Testament, and we hear of "the loving-kindness of the Lord " (cf. Psalm lxxxix. 1). In our Lord's mind it is this aspect which lies uppermost, though the sterner side is not forgotten. In His teaching, the stress on the Divine forgiveness at times almost drowns the warning note of judgment. Parables like the Prodigal Son; sayings like " your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things before ye ask"; "not one sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father"; must be set side by side with "strait is the gate" and "let him take up his cross," if we would realise the full meaning of His call to repent.

Just as the duty of man is no longer taught as the negative "thou shalt not harm," but the positive "thou shalt do good," so the Divine compassion is no longer conceived merely as that negative mercy which remits the just penalty for offences done, but as the overflowing tenderness which goes forth "to seek and to save that which is lost." It is under the figure of the Good Shepherd that the mind of Europe has loved best to think of Him who thus taught, and perhaps this aspect of His teaching is that which His Church has least conspicuously failed to keep alive.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

"The Kingdom is at hand." His attitude towards contemporary eschatological conceptions seems, as we should expect, to be characterised by that same blend. of acceptance and independent interpretation that is shown in His attitude towards the Law.

Jewish Apocalyptic was based on
based on a geocentric

picture, now long outgrown, of Heaven, Earth, Hell, tier above tier, populated by angels and demons, highest of all, God in supra-regal splendour seated on an almost material throne. Its conceptions of the method of the Divine working in history are fantastic, bizarre, often even repellent, to the modern mind. But the spirit which to the men of that age and that culture found a natural embodiment in these forms was a passionate faith in the Divine justice and the Divine providence, which, in a downtrodden section of a small nation crushed for centuries by corrupt and powerful empires, is not one of the least heroic manifestations of the religious spirit of man.1

Just as in His ethical teaching our Lord disentangles and develops the weightier matters of the Law, so in His language about the eschatological Kingdom attention is concentrated on the essential points, Judgment and Eternal Life. Contemporary Apocalyptic does not lack conspicuous ethical and prophetic elements, but its main efforts are expended in elaborating fanciful and detailed pictures of the precise nature of the tribulations, the demonic conflicts, the cataclysms celestial and terrestrial, which are to precede the great deliverance; in giving mysterious signs to calculate its date; or in vivid descriptions of the various stages of blessedness and torment in the intermediate state and in the world to come.

Of all this there is nothing or next to nothing in the teaching of our Lord. Again we are reminded of the great prophets of the eighth century in whom the detail and the stress is all devoted to the ethical and

1 Cf. the remarks in Essay IV. p. 200 f. on the Apocalypse of St. John.

2 The only real example the section Mark xiii. 6-27, where the detailed emphasis on various signs is in the manner of ordinary Apocalyptic. There are, however, good reasons for believing that this chapter contains a large admixture of unauthentic sayings; cf. my remarks in Studies in the Synoptic Problem, p. 179 ff. In the Appendix to the same volume I pointed out that if we compare the eschatological sayings in Q, Mark and Matthew, there is a distinct movement in the direction of making our Lord's sayings conform more closely to the conventional apocalyptic pattern. The fact is an important one, though the conclusions I was then inclined to draw from it were, I now think, somewhat too sweeping.

religious exhortation, while the "Day of the Lord" looms out dimly in the future, awful, certain, but undefined. What the Day of the Lord is to the old prophets, that the coming of the Kingdom is to our Lord-an essential part of His message, but not its

main content.

Another trait of independence in our Lord's preaching of the Kingdom must be touched upon. Two different types of teaching about the Kingdom occur in the Gospels. On the one hand words are frequent which imply or expressly state that He taught that that present "generation should not pass away till all things were accomplished," that the disciples would not have time even to "go through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man be come," and that the final consummation of the Kingdom would come "like a thief in the night," in sudden and catastrophic form.

Such sayings are so numerous, and in many cases are so intimately bound up with the context and with other sayings, that they cannot be explained away without grave risk of explaining away along with them the historical character of the Gospels altogether. Moreover, even if such language could be eliminated from the Gospels, the universal belief of the primitive Church-testified to in practically every one of the Epistles could hardly be accounted for, except as based on something in our Lord's teaching.

On the other hand I must needs think, in spite of the opposition of some distinguished scholars, that it is equally unscientific to explain away the collective force of certain passages of a different tenor.1 a different tenor.1 Such are the Parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven, the Seed growing secretly, the Hidden Treasure, and the Pearl of great price, also certain shorter sayings like, "If I by the finger of God cast out devils then is the Kingdom of

1 Both sides of the question are presented in some detail in a series of articles in The Interpreter, Jan. to Oct. 1911, which contain a friendly controversy between Professor Burkitt, Archdeacon Allen and myself on the subject.