The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ · 2018. 2. 7. · 6 The Preaching of Jesus and the...

The Preaching of Jesus andthe Gospel of Christ

Peter Taylor Forsyth

1915

About this version

This book was originally published as a series ofarticles by Peter Taylor Forsyth in The Expositoreighth series, entitled “The Preaching of Jesus andthe Gospel of Christ”:

Chap I. – vol. 9 (1915): 325–35.

Chap. II. – vol. 9 (1915): 404–21.

Chap. III. – vol. 10 (1915): 66–89.

Chap. IV. – vol. 10 (1915): 117–38.

Chap. V. – vol. 10 (1915): 340–64.

Chap. VI. – vol. 10 (1915): 445–65.

These articles were first collected together as,

Peter Taylor Forsyth, The Preaching ofJesus and the Gospel of Christ (Blackwood,South Australia: New Creation, 2000).(Available as PDF).

This version (updated June 22, 2017) has been freshlytypeset from the scanned originals using LATEX, in-dependent of the text prepared in the New Creation

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http://www.newcreationlibrary.net/books/pdf/193_PreachingofJesus.pdf

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version. The scanned original articles are availableon the Internet Archive. Original page numbers areindicated in the margins and linked to the originalscanned pages.

Please report any typos or errors by leaving acomment on this version’s Internet Archive page.

https://archive.org/details/PTFPreachingofJesus

https://archive.org/details/PTFPreachingofJesusB

Contents

Chapter I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Chapter III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Chapter IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Chapter V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Chapter VI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

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Chapter I

325WE are frequently referred to the words of Christ asforming the preacher’s warrant, and often indeed asforming his model. But if we aim at a precise mean-ing here, it should be remembered that preachingtook hold of the Church, less from the injunction, orthe example even, of Christ than from the native ac-tion of the Gospel itself. “It pleased God so to revealHis Son in me that I might preach Him.” It may beuseful, therefore, to discuss in what sense our Lordas preacher bears on our preaching to-day.

Christianity makes its appeal to the world as thereligion of redemption. What does that mean whenwe interrogate our terms, and seek positive ideas?

Let us begin by recognising that a religion of res-cue is one thing, a religion of redemption is another.The dull man, or the savage, believes in a religion ofrescue. His God helps him from time to time, extri-cates him from this peril, or leads him to that suc-cess. And it is only from time to time of need or ofprecaution that he turns to his God. But a religion of

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6 The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ

redemption bears not upon junctures but upon life,on the soul itself. And life is not atomistic. It is amoral personal unity. The soul is one. And thereforeif we come to a critical affair at all, it is not a series ofcrises but one great crisis, now less acutely felt, nowmore. The peril is a tissue, or rather a drama, of per-326ils woven into life as one whole. And the Enemy isnot many but one, as the Soul is one, and its Saviour.It is one vast moral issue that is at stake. It means thegain or loss of the Soul. And so great, so complete,is the unity, that the crisis involves not the visibleworld alone, but also the world unseen. It involvesGod and His help. And the help of God, bearing asit does on the whole soul’s fate, is more than help,it is salvation. It is redemption. It is thus that evenBuddhism construes religion. And so far Christian-ity and Buddhism stand together in isolation amidthe faiths of the world.

But beyond this point they part. Christianity isnot a religion of Redemption only, but also of Rec-onciliation. Any idea of Reconciliation in Buddhismis but the reconciliation of man to his fate. Butreconciliation to a fate is no more than resignation.Redemption becomes, then, the self-elevation ofthe Soul above the suffering of life by a subjectiveprocess all on one side. It is a process of internal-isation, of sinking into our self. It is self-salvation.It is not redemption by a reconciling person intocommunion with himself. And it is self-salvationfrom the innate woe of life. Now in Christianity alsowe are helpless—the more helpless the more we


Chapter I 7

turn our gaze inward; but we are saved by a powerfrom without, and only by that power. We are saved,moreover, not from life’s innate woe, nor only froman alien evil, but from one which is moral in itskind. It is a guilty paralysis of will. Our foe is onethat we discover in command of our commandingself whenever we set about escape from our alienill. It is something that impairs the very will bywhich we should escape from the tangle of sorrow.It destroys our power of uniting with any helper.The reconciliation we need is not with our dismalfate (which means with our distraught selves). but 327with a saving God. And our redemption is not fromsomething which crushes our happiness, but fromsomething which loads our conscience and marsour perfection. The fruit of our redemption is anethical reconciliation in a free conscience, and not aneudaemonist reconciliation in a free development. Itis a free soul and not a free career.

Let us be more explicit still. To Christian faiththe pain of our case is not merely the misery ofmoral impotence, nor the chagrin of perpetualfailure. These still leave us with a feeling more likemortification than repentance—mortification in thepresence of our ideal self rather than repentance inthe sight of God, a loss of self-respect rather thanof sonship. We suffer in our moral self-esteem, notbecause of our wound to the Holy. But to Christianfaith the sting in sin is its wound to God, its stain toholiness. To many a Christian man the first tormentafter his lapse is not fear nor remorse. It is nothing



so selfish. It is a passion of grief for the wound hehas dealt to the holiness of God, and to the Christhe has crucified afresh. There is shame indeed forhimself, but still more there is grief for another.There is of course the crushing loss of self-respect,the blow to his own satisfaction with his faith—hethought he was such a promising Christian too; butfar more poignant is the grief that he has struck hisGod, denied his Saviour, pierced Him anew, andundone His Cross. To Christian faith this is the stingof sin—the sense of having struck in the face God’sholy love. It is the sense of not merely denyingHim but denying ourselves to Him; the sense ofrobbing Him not of His honour but of our worship,our souls, our faith; the sense of loss, damage, andgrief to Him. We have soiled His purity, despisedHis love, and crossed His will. Our self-humiliationis less than our sense of having humiliated Him,and put the cross on Him again. Hence the recon-ciliation we need (when we take faith’s word for328what we need) is not a reconciliation either withour own self-respect or with our neighbour, butwith God and His holy love. The peace we need isnot calm, but it is the restoration of confidence, therenewal of personal relations, of communion withour Holy Father. Christian peace is not the saint’scalm, but the son’s confidence when, perhaps, weare anything but calm. And reconciliation is notlying on Jesus’ breast, as the unpleasant phrasesometimes is, but possessing the fruit of Christ inthe confidence of faith, the destruction of guilt, the


Chapter I 9

fellowship restored. Troubled we may be, but sure;with a deeper repentance, but one due to a deeperfaith; and we may be pressed with care, but we restsecure in Him who careth for us.

Christianity, then, has made its great appealto the world as a religion of such redemption andreconciliation, of redemption from guilt once forall, and reconciliation with God for ever. And bothcentre not in Christ merely, but in the Cross ofChrist.

There is no doubt about this for the apostles. Butquestion has been raised if it was so with ChristHimself. His references to the cross are few; andfewer still those that connect it with redemption.As a preacher He had far more to say about theKingdom than the Cross. And as a personality Hiswitness, it is said, was wholly to the Father and notto Himself. He was no part of His own gospel, sofar as His preaching went. So it is urged. And thecontention means, of course, that there is a greatgulf between the preaching of Christ and that of Hisapostles—especially Paul.

This raises a twofold question.1. Is Christ a preacher for us in the same sense as

He was for His own generation?2. In so far as He was a preacher at all, did He

preach the gospel? 329In this article I will deal with the first question

only.1. The issue raised by it is one of great moment

for our whole construction of Christ’s life-work. In



what He said to the Jews round Him had He anydirect or conscious reference to a remote posterity?Was He speaking to areal public, or, over their heads,to far later ages?

There can be little doubt about the answer,surely. There is no sign that He was talking over theheads of the people round Him in order to reach usthrough the reporters. He never made His disciplesHis reporters in the sense of taking His words downor memorising them for a distant future. He neverexamined them to see if they had got them correctly.It is now freely recognised that He regarded themission of His life as confined to Israel—at leasttill near its close. The Gentiles did not enter intoHis direct concern while He was dealing with Hisnation by parable or miracle. Allusions to theirreception of these but point His rebukes to Israel forits rejection of Himself; and miracles to Gentiles didnot flow, but were wrung from Him. In so far as Hewas preacher and teacher, in so far as the influenceof His historic personality went, He was a prophetto Israel alone. He met His people with a bona fidecall, and not one perfunctory and useless, whosefailure was foregone. It was a call, at first hopeful,to the greatest decision and the deepest repentanceto which that people had ever been summoned byall the prophetic line. It was not impossible that Heshould have been heard, though (by the indentifi-cation of Israel with Pharisaism, as of Catholicismwith Curialism) it soon grew improbable. He tookHis mission to Israel with entire seriousness. With

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all His heart He taught not only the lost sheep, butat first the national soul. But without the effectHe sought. He failed with His public. And it wasHis failure as prophet that extorted His resourcesas Redeemer. The Kingdom, His great theme, 330could only be established in His Cross. It was Hisdesertion as preacher that cast Him on His greatestwork of becoming the preacher’s Gospel. It was Hisill-success with Israel that turned Him to a worldcommensurate with the super-national greatnessof His soul. And the Cross, which seemed to Hisown at first but as a martyrdom, became His onegrand work. Israel’s martyr became the world’sSaviour. When the Cross was as forced upon Him(at whatever point this came home) it broke openas the world-cross. It was and is the universalelement in Christianity, as the conscience it savedis in Humanity. And when the agony seized Him,its immediate grief was the grief of the spiritualpatriot at the loss and guilt of His land. It was Hispoignant insight into the doom which His veryGrace had brought to His own through its refusal.If His deepest woe was His sympathy with the holyGrace of God in its wound, perhaps His nearest wasthe fearful judgment which seemed to Him the oneresult of His life to His own; whom yet He had notcome to judge with wrath but to save with all thelove of His divine heart.

The staple of His preaching appealed directlyto Israel alone, without arriere pensee. He wasnot consciously using an Israel hopeless from the



first as a mere sounding-board to reach the world.Israel was not His mere audience for posterity. Hisconceptual world was that of Israel. It was God’sold controversy with Israel that He entered, Israel’shistoric mission and problem. He did not speak thelanguage nor seek the ideals of pagan culture. Hedid not make any overtures or concessions to it. Histeaching took up the Jewish tradition. His parablesare couched in the social dialect of His land andage, however universal the idea they enclose. Hedoes not boggle about economic situations whichHis gospel has now antiquated. “Can I not do whatI will with My own?” His words are not discourses331so much as demands or appeals illustrated in thecurrent national vein of the Maschal. We do not, andcould not, use that style with His effect. We followHis model in this regard sparingly. Our sermonsneed not deal in illustration to the extent His did, or,if we illustrate, we use the apologue less. He tookthat form because it was the form of His people. Theoriental has always used some form of apologue toa degree foreign to the West. Had Jesus been bornin Greece He would have used dialectic or oratoryas naturally as He used parable. And had He beena Latin He might have been as periodic as Cicero.The style of His preaching reflected the form andpressure of His place. His economic system, forinstance, is patriarchal. He contemplates neitherRoman law, nor modern conditions, nor the socialresults of His own Gospel. He was not a socialreformer. He used the relations He found without


Chapter I 13

criticising them. In ‘The Labourers in the Vineyard’(as I have said) He has no hesitation in using ex-isting, but antiquated, not to say arbitrary, socialrelations to symbolise the equal dependence of allmen on God’s free Grace. So with the DishonestSteward. There is no hint anywhere that He wasdissatisfied with the social relations current, oraimed at subverting them. Social inequalities do notseem to have greatly troubled Him, and He did notcontemplate adjusting them in a new programme.He was more anxious about the effect of wealthon its possessor than on the community or on theclasses below. He was engrossed with His relationto Israel, and Israel’s to its holy God; and He dealt inthe only language Israel could understand. His life-work, as distinct from His death (shall we say Hisprofessional work?) had no conscious address to theGentiles. When He treated them as He treated Israelit was with a struggle. I am thinking, of course, ofthe way He was overborne by the Syrophœnician orthe Centurion. And just as little did He deliberately 332address Himself to posterity. He was not dictatingmemoires pour servir. He knew He would surviveand rule in a community, but (or, therefore) we findno provision or precaution for the survival of Hisdiscourses. The new junctures should be met bythe new insight of the Spirit to the Church, and notby a preceptual use of His words. And Tolstoi isquite wrong, and all his kind are quite unhistoric. IfChrist preach to us it is not as He preached to Hiscontemporaries; it is in His Spirit. There is much for



the most trained and skilful minds to discount andto adjust in applying to our conditions His treatmentof His own. Not only was His milieu national, butHis speech, like His miracles, was always “occa-sional,” always ad hoc as well as ad rem. If it went tothe eternal heart of the matter it also rose from thesituation of the hour and addressed it. It is true Hewas not understood by His public, but that was notbecause He was reaching over His present publicin the effort to touch another centuries away. Suchat least is not the preaching style of the Synoptics.His ideas and calls were for immediate use, andthey were clothed in current forms. His style hadnothing archaic, His mind nothing cumbrous, Histhoughts nothing dreamy. His obscurity was due tothe obsession of His public by the God of the periodand the prince of this world. His gospel was hiddennot because men were dense, but because they werelost, because of moral and not mental stupidity,because of a religious obsession, because Israel hadbecome orthodox and pharisee. His reading of thesituation was absolutely relevant to it, and it washidden only to religious dulness. As a preacher,He won His popularity by His style, and lost it byHis meaning. As soon as He was understood Hewas deserted. As His invitation was a bona fide call,His rejection was a real rejection. It was not thepublic’s neglect of a dreamer, it was its repudiation333of a realist who angered His time by touching itsnerve. He stirred a resentment only too intelligentin all but moral insight. He did not simply trouble


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His enemies, He judged them; and they knew it.What He presented to His day both in His wordand person was what He presents to every age, amoral ultimatum. But yet it was not the same as Hepresents to us—by all the difference made by Hisdeath and what it implies once for all; for His Crosscan never be repeated. The Gospel comes to us ina form given it from its rejection by those to whomChrist first came. His preaching of His Kingdomto His public lacked that which is the staple of theApostolic κήρυγμα and the marrow of ours—Himselfin His death. But it was the preaching of one whoseperson was identical with His message, His religionwith His revelation. The Kingdom He preachedwas His own reign. On the few occasions whenHe spoke of His suffering and death it was not tothe public, it was but to His disciples, and perhapsto the inner circle only of those; even to them onlyon the most agitated and exalted occasions, whichbroke the crust of His habitual reserve. We, on thecontrary, hold up the Cross to all we meet as thewhole gospel. For the whole Christ was in it and thewhole Kingdom.

It is a mistake, therefore, to speak of Christ as thetypical preacher unless we are careful what we meanby the gospel. Whatever He may have thought it ex-pedient to preach about Himself, He has left us, bythe very way He preached other things, nothing butHimself to preach. If He preached the Kingdom itwas only as the King could whom we preach. Wecannot read the kingdom except through the Cross


and its royalty. If He preached the Father it was onlyas the Son could; and the Son whose supreme rev-elation of the Father was His revelation of the Fa-ther’s holiness on the Cross. Christ is Preacher, asHe is Revealer, only in the exercise of His task as334Redeemer. His function was not to be the heraldbut the hero. His preaching days were to His con-summate work of the Cross what the Baptist was toHimself—forerunners. He began by preparing menfor the Kingdom, He ended by setting it up in Him-self and His supreme deed. His great work at lastwas not to declare, nor even to offer, not to seek,but to achieve; and to achieve for the most part insilence, even about the very Cross which came to fillall His concern and taxed all His will. He does notdenounce sin, nor only convince us of it, but destroyit, condemn and execute it in the flesh. Nor does Heproclaim righteousness; He establishes it once for all.He is not witness but judge—not prophet, but King.

Christ began in the form of a prophet; but Heprophesied as one much more than a prophet, asonly Messiah could. And He behaved as Messiahin a way that only the Son of God could. HisMessiahship rested on His Sonship, not His Sonshipon His Messiahship. He was not Son of God asMessiah. He was Messiah as being Son of God. Hepreached not in an interpretive way but in a creativeway. He did not simply proclaim and expound theKingdom of God, like a prophet; nor did He simplyput Himself at the head of His Kingdom, like aMessiah. He did what none of the Messiahs could


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do, what they failed because they could not do—hecreated the men that composed the Kingdom. Hegave men power from the endless resource of powerHe felt in Himself. Nothing is so striking in Markas His early consciousness of superhuman power.His every act of power was but an expression ofHis soul’s power. Thus His words were more thanwords. They were deeds. When Jeremiah says theordinance of nature might fail, but the purpose ofGod could never fail, he was speaking on a verydifferent level from Christ when He said, “Heavenand earth may pass away, but My words shall neverpass away.” Christ did not moan that though He 335perished truth was so. He meant that if worldscrashed they would collide at the word of Himwhose words in their ears were even then works intheir Soul. Every word He spoke becomes in thisrespect a function of the Cross He achieved. Wecan see that now in the Spirit. While He was buta preacher He yet preached as Redeemer. WhenHe spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven in parablesHe was making the Kingdom. He was not utteringa doctrine, nor even making a claim. His wordonly escapes being a new law by being a gospel, anew power. He was exerting His creative power.He did not simply call to repentance: He createdrepentance. He gave it. He called to repentance inthe giving spirit of His habitual love. He demandedmuch, but only because He gave much more. Hebaptized with the Holy Ghost. Do not think of theHoly Ghost as genial light, but as mighty power,



almighty, creative power. He spoke from reservesof such power. He was Himself the energy in Hisown words, the effective thing, the creative thing.His sense of Himself was always a sense of power,and of outgoing power to bless men’s needs, not ofabsorbent power to exploit their powers. His everyword was a work. His loving was always a doing,never an enjoying; so that when He exchangedpreaching for doing and the parable for the CrossHe was but changing the form of what He had beendoing all along. He taught and He died as the NewCreator, however veiled at first that consciousnesswas.

Chapter II

404BY the Gospel we may mean one of several things.

It may mean what Jesus said, the express mes-sage of Jesus as the greatest of the prophets. Hiswork is then declaratory—with passion, compas-sion, conviction, and effect, but still declaratoryor exhibitory. He could be thus the exemplarypreacher, first in power, model in meekness, andstandard in matter for all Christian time. Thegnomic and pictorial style would then be our aim.And all testimony of Him, even the apostolic, wemust trim to the type of such relics of His discourseas have reached us, or to such a way of handlinglife. The didactic parts of the Gospels would becomethe doctrinal test of the Epistles, and the face valueof Christ’s express witness to Himself the soleground and measure of our faith in Him. And wehave the situation created for the New Testamentby Harnack’s statement that Jesus did not preachHimself at all, but only the Father and the Kingdom.

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He is then the martyr of His teaching, and not thepropitiation of His gospel.

If Harnack’s position were true it would onlyindicate anew the occasional and gradual characterof Christ’s teaching. Throughout He preached theFather as only the Son could, the Kingdom as onlythe King could, the prophetic word as only the405creating Word could. But, for this function, and forthe full revelation of either Father, or Kingdom, orWord, something more than a manner of teachingwas required, as the event showed. He spoke duringHis life with a manner of authority that flowed fromHis person; but when He spoke to Paul, or John, andinspired them after His death, it was much morethan manner. His teaching then had His finishedwork behind it, and all we mean by the Holy Ghost.The difficulty we have to face, if Christ was mainlya teacher, or even but a personal influence, is this—that, like prophetism altogether, He was a failurewith those who came under Him at first hand. Hispersonal influence through His doctrine avertedneither His unpopularity, His desertion, nor HisCross. It did not prevent the people it was turned onfrom disowning Him, nor the disciples from leavingHim, nor the authorities from killing Him. Indeedit provoked all three. How then are we to expectanother effect from it, taken alone, upon the worldof posterity? It must become diluted by distance,and enfeebled accordingly. It reaches the world onlyas a record, and an ancient one, always growing inantiquity and losing in historic directness. We are


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ever farther removed from the active personalityof the teacher and such good effect as it did have.Its power must leak in transmission and lose bydistance. But as a matter of fact that has not been theaction of Christ in the world. His power has grownwith distance—the power even of His teaching.How is this? It was never the slow saturation ofthe public by those precepts or doctrines that gavethem their present place. For as precepts especiallythey are but very partially honoured even by theChurch, and in some cases frankly ignored. Besides,they were not used by those apostles who foundedthe Church—being replaced by their own advice ascircumstances suggested. The triumph of Christ’s 406doctrines, so far as it has gone, has not been aposthumous redress due to men’s tardy awakeningto the value of a neglected genius. For they werenot, like the light of genius, flashes of fresh inter-pretation of life which experience gradually caughtand verified, but they went in the face of the naturallife, and mortified it, and crucified it. It was notreflection on Christ’s teaching, and it was not thedesiderium tam cari capitis, that restored the disciplesto their spiritual loyalty, and raised it once and forall to apostolic faith.

What was it that produced the change? Someanswers would remove the stress from the teaching,and place it upon the personality. In His cross Heis then the protagonist of man’s tragic fate, but notthe propitiation of man’s guilty soul. The change inthe disciples was produced by a revisit, actual or be-



lieved, from His immortal and insuperable person.Ever since Schleiermacher the person of Christ hasbeen placed in front of His teaching, the revelationin Himself has cast the true light upon all His words,and we have come to realise the autobiography inthem. And no doubt that has been a great move inthe right direction, and it was long overdue whenit was made. And, as I have hinted, it suppliesan expansion and corrective to Harnack’s startlingtheme. But even if we take it so, if we recognise theeffect of Christ’s personal reappearance after death,is that sufficient explanation of the immense andpermanent change in the apostles’ faith and action?Was it the re-emergence of Christ’s personality asinvincible to death, was it the mere indomitablepersistence of His vital principle, the quenchlessnessof His Spirit that raised them to a point from whichthey never looked back? Did He not Himself denythe possibility that true faith should be producedby a revenant—to say nothing of forgiveness forcowardly treason? “If they believe not Moses andthe prophets, neither will they believe if one rose407from the dead.” Was the whole soul and world ofthe apostles changed, was the Church set up, bythe rehabilitation of the Master after an interval ofarrest caused by a premature and unfortunate death,which merely retarded His Messianic schemes anddelayed the winning of the campaign by the lossof an early battle? Was the Church founded uponthe resurrection merely as a resurrection? Did theChurch rise upon the rising of an inextinguishable


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personality, which there emerged from the grave asif it had been no more than a tunnel or a retreat?Was it His mere experience and survival of death,was it an enlarged pertinacity of person, that turnedthe historic Jesus into the Church’s Christ? DidHe just emerge faithful and purified, in His granddegree, from the fire we must all pass through? HadHe gone there just “to prove His Soul”? Was thatthe impression? Or did He not rather return fromthe fire, not as one who had only passed through it,but as one who had extinguished the flames—theirmore than conqueror, their destroyer? Did he notstand on the earth which He revisited with the oldmoral world under His feet, with a new moral worldachieved in the crisis of all His soul, and realisedin His unearthly power, reign, and joy? Did Henot now face mankind full of the Eternity He hadwon for them, the spiritual stability that nothingpossible could now overthrow, and the moral, theholy power that nothing could at last withstand?

Surely the crucial effect of the Resurrection wasits evidence, not of an unimpaired spiritual vitality,not of the passing of an eclipse, but of an objectiveachievement for human destiny in Christ’s death, a fi-nal business done with the God Who engrossed Himin His death, the knot of a whole world loosed, theworld-foe vanquished for ever, the final and abso-lute conquest won, the everlasting Salvation broughtin. The Cross was the work that Christ did, the Res- 408urrection was the work that God, well pleased forever, did upon Him in its wake. God raised Him up



when He had overcome the world for good and all.The Resurrection was not so much the finished work,but God’s seal upon it. Historically it may have beenthe Resurrection that founded the Church, but it wasthe Cross that won the Resurrection by founding theNew Covenant of the Gospel.

Such at least is the burthen of New Testamenttestimony. The Resurrection there is not merely thesurvival of Christ’s personality (far less its merereanimation); but it is the due divine seal upon acrucial moral achievement and a victory once forall, which drew upon the whole spiritual resourcesof that unique personality in an act correspondinglygreat and final, and which gave it not only completeexpression, but practical effect as decisive for thewhole spiritual world of man’s relations with God.As in the Cross we have Christ’s great and final actupon God, so in the Resurrection we have God’sgreat and final act on Christ. I would press thegreat difference between the Cross as the affectingexpression in martyrdom of Christ’s propheticpersonality and the Cross as the purposed and finalachievement of that world-person, as the practicaleffect it took for God and man. Or, taking theCross as the completion of Christ’s personality, Iwould distinguish between such completion, takenæsthetically, as the finest spectacle of self-realisationby sacrifice to man’s tragic fate, and taken ethically,as the final moral act for man’s conscience andhistory before God. The one idea is artistic, like somuch of our modern religion, the other is dynamic

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and evangelical. The one is a moral marvel, theother a new creation. We have had much to sayin the name of religion about developing to flowerand fruit all that it is in us to be, realising ourselves,rounding the sphere of our personality, achievingour soul, being true to ourselves, and so forth. 409That is all very well as a youthful and idealist wayof beginning. But few have set to work on thisseriously without finding out that we have littlepower in our personality, even when it is reinforced,to be anything to God’s purpose, and that such aprogramme of life may be in the end more effectivefor the making of prigs than personalities. It ismorally impossible that a real personality should bedeveloped on any such self-centred lines, or madespherical or symmetrical by rotating on its own axis.To shrink your personality work at it; take yourselfwith absurd seriousness; sacrifice everything toself-realisation, self-expression. Do this and youwill have produced the prig of culture, who is insome ways worse than the prig of piety. So also ifyou would lose holiness, work at it. Do everything,not because it is God’s will, but because you havetaken up sanctity as a profession—shall I say anambition? Be more concerned to realise your ownholiness than to understand God’s. Study yoursoul freshly and your Bible conventionally. Cherisha warm piety and a poor creed. But if you reallywould save your soul, lose it. Seek truth first, andeffect thereby. Beware of ethical self-seeking. Todevelop your personality forget it. Devote yourself



not to it but to some real problem and work, sometask which you will probably find to your hand.The great personalities have not laboured to expressor realise themselves, but to do some real serviceto the world, and a service they did not pick andchoose but found laid upon them. Their best workwas “occasional”—i.e., in the way of concrete duty.They did not live for set speeches but for businessaffairs. They found their personality, their soul, inthe work given them to do; given them because ofthat soul, indeed, but never effected by petting it.They found their personality by losing it, and cameto themselves by erasing themselves. Their ideal410was not, “I must become this or that” or “I mustproduce my impression, and leave my mark,” but“I must will, I must do, this or that obedience.” Toeffect something is the way to become something.

So Christ’s purpose, whether in His preachingor in His Cross, was not primarily to stamp Hiswhole personality on the world in one careful,concentrated, and indelible expression of it, but tofinish a work God gave Him to do; than which thereis nothing more impressive for men. His purposewas, with all the might of His personality, to do acertain thing with God for the world. He was atthe last preoccupied with God, which is the finalway to command man. His engrossing work wasnot to leave an impression on the public; and HisGospel in the apostles was more than their witnessto an impression on their experience. His work’stotal effect on the moral universe was something


Chapter II 27

far greater than the impression he made even onthe apostles. His object was to do something withGod for the world, and only in that way to act onit. His preaching was not impressionist, it wasevangelical, seeking to adjust the conscience morethan to delight or even fortify the soul. His deatheffected something intimate for God and critical forthe conscience with God, something which only Hispersonality could do. But it could never do it bystriving to achieve itself and stamp itself on time,but only by devoting itself utterly to the holy andredemptive Will of God for the hallowing of it, for itssatisfaction. True, He was “priest for Himself.” Hemaintained His own personal life with God in theoffering of Himself for us. But He was not “priest ofHimself,” like the idol of a coterie. There is no signat the end that Christ was either guided or sustainedby thinking of the impression His death wouldmake on the world, but only by concentrating onHis offering of Himself to God. His way was the 411way of regeneration, not of religious impressionism.He did not rise above the fear of death by visionsof the grand result of His work to men. He hadno such visions. Had He had them there couldhave been no anguish for joy that man was reborninto the world. All would have been submergedin glory. He overcame by His perfect committal tothe will of God amid the collapse of insight into itsreason, by His perfect confession, amid actual sinfulconditions, of the holiness of God, by His pleasingit, satisfying it, sanctifying it. Our salvation was



built in an eclipse and rigged with curses dark; inlosing the Father’s face (but not the Father), Hebecame a curse for us—in the true incarnation Hebecame sin for us. His death was certainly service toman, but for Him it was an offering to God. It wentround to man that way. It was with God alone Hehad then to do. His saving act was in yielding to thedivine “must” more than to the human need. Norcan we say, even if we take His words alone, that thedivine “must” arose simply out of God’s mercifulperception of human need; for Christ’s obediencewas, in His own mind, to a holy God and not simplya pitiful, it was to hallow His name, and not simplygive His blessing. We need kindness oftener, butwe need grace more. In His death He stood forthe hallowing of God’s name as He had stood allalong, whether in His rebukes of the Pharisees orin the cleansing of the Temple. When He stoodas prophet on the side of God against Judaism Hewas but doing, in one phase of it, what He didcompendiously and essentially in His priestly death.He stood on God’s side against men, even while Hestood for them. He died before God and not beforemen. And it was God’s judgment that slew Himmore even than man’s. He was directly serving Godrather than man; and about the reaction on Himselfand His sanctity he did not think at all. If God in412Christ was reconciling the world, Christ in Godwas reconciling God in a sense most real, howevercarefully we guard the phrase. He was not indeedprocuring Grace, nor changing anger to love; but He


Chapter II 29

was altering the relation on both sides (as personalrelation must always be altered) by presentingthe consummate oblation of that holy obediencewherein the Holy Father was always pleased,wherein, finding Himself, the Father always founda full complacency and complete satisfaction. “Thisis My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”That contains the principle of the Christian doctrineof satisfaction, so lost in many forensic theologies.Would there be noticeable objection to the doctrineof satisfaction if it meant the joy and fulness inwhich one soul of infinitely holy love finds itself soperfectly and eternally in another that all men at lastfollowed the spell?

Such is the apostolic gospel, the dominant note,the organising note, in the New Testament creed, inthe total teaching of Christ. It was for the sake of thisGospel of God that the gospel of the apostles waspreached, and the gospels themselves were written.We get the secret of the Evangelists in the writingsof Paul that preceded them—to say nothing of Pe-ter. There we find the Gospel of the Church whichthe gospels arose to edify and sustain. There wefind the Gospel whose product the gospels were, theGospel whose preaching made the Church that re-quired the gospels for its use. These were not un-chosen scraps of memorabilia, stray memoirs filed,flyleaves of episode or anecdote in the life of a spiri-tual hero. They crystallise on a message and a faith,as the great prominence of the passion shows, noless than the drift towards it. The apostles were not


mere chroniclers. They were charged with a messagerather than a memoir. And the evangelists, who-ever they were, were apostles in function if not inname. They had apostles behind them. And the413message the apostles preached was not the GospelChrist preached so much as the Gospel He was, andthe Gospel He did when His preaching failed andceased. The Gospel that made the Church was lesswhat was said by Jesus than what was said aboutHim and about the Gospel He did. The gospel theapostles spoke was the fruit and echo of the GospelHe achieved. It was uttered, too, by men with whomHis earthly teaching did not succeed, who had to beshocked into their spiritual senses once for all by thestroke of His death and the sting of His resurrection.And the front of the message was that He was de-livered for our sins, in the deep sense in which thevision of the exilian prophet declared the Saviourmust be. This made the preaching of the apostlesdiffer from that of Jesus Himself. Preaching up tothe Cross is one thing, and some are but at that dis-ciple stage. Preaching down from it is another, andthat is the work of an apostle. The Saviour belongsto neither category. He is not the preacher but thething preached, the Gospel itself. The Cross, as thereal act now complete at the moral centre of the spir-itual world, made an essential difference in the his-toric situation of the soil, and in what was to be saidto it. The apostles preached under a historic some-thing which Christ only preached towards, whichHe preached with much reserve, almost reluctance,


Chapter II 31

as strong men speak of their greatest sorrow or theirgreatest deed. The apostles had nothing else to man-ifest but what He often hid, and sometimes shunned.Even they were more solemn and less voluble aboutit than we are. They rejoiced in nothing but what hadbeen His holy dread. And thus it can be more wrongthan right to speak of Jesus as the model preacher,or to test the Gospel wholly by His express words toIsrael, or even to His disciples.

Clearly I have been using the word Gospel at in-tervals in two senses, and the ambiguity may easily 414create confusion. I have spoken of it as the apostolicmessage, and I have spoken of it as the redeemingact; now as the apostles’ preaching about Christ, andnow as God’s saving action in Christ. The latter, ofcourse, is the ultimate sense. The apostolic preach-ing was but man’s gospel of God’s. Man’s gospel inword was the reverberation of God’s Gospel in deed.It was the returning wave on earth’s waters causedby the crisis on the eternal shore. It was God’s Workreturning on itself in a Word which it created, a Wordwhich was also a work, as being a function of HisWork. The one acted by inspiration, the other by cre-ation. The one was inspired by what the other did.It is this greater and final sense of the word Gospelthat restores it in its full sense to Jesus after all. Whatwe have in the life of Jesus is not a witness of God,nor a creature of God, but the incarnate act of God.We have the very work of God’s grace in the activityof Christ, a God of grace at work, and no mere tes-timony of it. We have God reconciling, not a recon-



ciliation redolent of God. It is not the mere messageof redemption, even from God’s own throne, nor itsecho in an apostle, nor the impression it made onthe Church. Certainly it is not a theory of the mes-sage or of the deed; which Christ never uttered, noreven had. When we reach the reality it is the achieve-ment of God Himself in the moral universe, and ofGod present not simply with Christ but in Him, notbreathing in His personality, nor ministering to HisSpirit, but living and acting in it, God living, dying,and redeeming in His Son. It is the word of Himwhose Word is at once a person and a deed coexten-sive with that person. It is the revelation to us thatthe invitation is the Redemption itself, that the Crossis itself the call, that the call is the act, that the actis the new creation and not a preliminary of it, itselfthe saving of the world and not a mere postulate of it.415Christ was the apostle and high priest of our callingin the sense that in Him God was His own apostleand preached in Christ’s atoning act. God in Christ’sCross was His own priest. As Ritschl puts the of-fices, Christ as prophet and priest was so supreme,perfect, and final that He was also King, and embod-ied in His Redemption the holy Sovereignty of God.“Christ is present in the Sacrament not simply as per-son but as crucified and broken for our sins. Consid-ered in the excellency of His person, He might bean object for the faith of angels; but as crucified Heis fitted for sinners. And He becomes not an objectof love for the excellency of His person, but of faithand confidence as a means and ordinance for the sal-


Chapter II 33

vation of sinners.” So Goodwin.The Gospel, then, which is the power and stan-

dard behind every testimony of it, the Gospel as theapostles learned it from the whole Christ, is God’sact of grace in Christ crucified (an act appreciableonly by a responsive act of ours called faith) in whichHe set upon a new ground (which yet was eternaland from the beginning) not only man’s whole re-lation to Himself, but also His own relation to man.This change is not a new affection in God; for thegrace and mercy at the source of it are inseparablefrom His eternal changeless holiness, and even theCross could not procure it. But it is a new relationand treatment on both sides; for you cannot treatyour son in his self-alienation as you could treat himin his filial confidence, though you loved him no less.But in Christ man stands before a gracious God, andstands in alienation no more.

The redeeming and atoning act of God filled thewhole personality of Christ, and covered His wholelife. It was the principle of it, whatever the form ittook in His consciousness or his situation for the mo-ment. But in the act of the Cross it had its consum- 416mate action, which gave value to all the rest, bothprospectively and retrospectively. The purpose ofthat act was to reveal the holy love of God in the onlyway it could be revealed to sinful and hostile men—as in deadly, final, active, victorious collision withactive sin, within one collective personality. This isto say, the Revelation of the Holy to us could onlybe Redemption. The eye to see it had to be created



in us. Holiness could be revealed to sin only by anact of Redemption, by a Redemption whose princi-ple consisted in that which active holiness alwaysis as it is established—the reaction on sin, the judg-ment of sin and its destruction. For judgment wasHe come into the world. But, according to what hasbeen said, it was a judgment whose condemnationmeant sin’s execution and destruction as the nega-tive side of what sets up the holy reign. In Christ’sCross sin was executed in that God’s holiness wasestablished for ever.

But one of the cardinal Christian errors ofthe time is that the idea of judgment has almostdisappeared from the current conception eitherof sin, sanctity, or gospel, in a way that it neverdid from even the preaching of Jesus. The gospelhas ceased in many quarters to be an ethical, andtherefore a social, Gospel at all on God’s side. Ithas become on that side only sympathetic; andthe ethic appears only in the human and individ-ual results—consequently even there with quiteinadequate power. We were told, and truly, thatthe forensic theories of the Cross were not ethicalenough—though they were a great ethical advanceon theories which preceded them about tricking ortrading with the devil, or satisfying feudal honour.And we were told, with less truth, that the oneethical reform in interpreting our relations with Godwas to transfer grace from the courts to the family,from the imperial to the domestic, to discard everylegal suggestion, and read everything in the light of417


Chapter II 35

the Fatherhood, and mostly the Fatherhood to thesingle soul. This alone (it was said) was the burdenof Christ’s message. But in practice it came to meansubstituting for the forensic idea a conception whichwas only affectional and not ethical, individual andnot collective as the Redemption was. It was over-looked, in the reaction from judicial categories, thatthe Father of Christ is the Holy Father and the uni-versal, that, while the forms of the jurist may pass,the living holiness is the one eternal and infrangiblething in the universe, with an inextinguishableclaim, and a claim on the conscience of the wholerace and its history. We cannot ethicise the relationto God till fatherhood itself is ethicised, and thename hallowed, the holiness met, on the absolutescale. For you do not introduce the moral elementby merely introducing the paternal. You must takethe holiness at least as seriously as the affection, andthe world as seriously as the individual, if you are todo justice to the Fatherhood of God on the scale ofaffairs. And you cannot take in earnest this holinesswithout giving judgment, and a public judgment,its own place in the gospel act of the Cross. If wewould but see that the real incarnation was not inChrist’s being made flesh for us, but in His beingmade sin for us! I hope it is not too much to say thatno one who has the due response to that truth inhis religious experience can fail to discern its actionin the Jesus of the gospels. And it may be amongthe moral fruits of the present calamity of war, andsuch a war, that the idea of collective judgment, of


which Christ had so much to say, should return to aplace nearer the centre of our religion, and to a vitalfunction, indeed, in the Cross of our worship.

This place has not been given to judgment inthe pseudo-liberal version of Christianity. And theomission not only places it in collision with the NewTestament. It is a moral defect at its core, which418makes it often as ineffective for the world of adult ordevilish sin, for spiritual wickedness in high placesof the soul, as it is engaging for the young and thekind. The Cross, which is the source and centre,the principle and foundation, of the whole moraluniverse, has become but the apotheosis of nobleself-sacrifice, the crisis of the tragedy in human fate,and the culmination of the native spirituality ofman. It ceases to be the hallowing even in man’sguilt of the holy love of God, the origin and focus ofthe Christian conscience and the creator of Christianethic. It loses its prime reference to the holiness ofGod, and ceases thus to be chiefly an adjustmentwith the whole moral soul of things. It becomesæsthetic rather than moral, the centre of religioussentiment rather than of the world-conscience. Pub-lic and social morals especially are sentimentalisedin a non-moral way, which is fruitful in due courseof the immoral. The moral note of authority is lost,however a seemly and humane piety may gain. Weare taught to think much of what was suffered onthe Cross for our admiration, or our relief, and littleof the judgment that fell upon our sin there. Salva-tion is not a decisive thing done for the world once


Chapter II 37

for all in the Cross, but it becomes identified withour repeated forgiveness. It becomes individualonly, and even atomic. And so forgiveness itself,with nothing to hold it up in the way of holiness,of moral seriousness absolute and universal, sinksto be merely amnesty on a wide and ready scale. Itbecomes a mere “making it up” with God on theprivate scale. There are even more sickly levels.And we shall not be able to keep Christianity or ourpreaching above them, we shall not do justice tothe element of judgment in the preaching of Jesus,unless we are taught by the New Testament to findin the death of Christ the judgment of God on theworld on a scale far vaster and more solemn thana European war; unless we, therefore, find our one 419redemption in the effect of that death on a holy Godrather than on poor man, and upon our sin moreeven than on our sympathies.

To restore to the Cross this focal and creativemoral place in some high and final form is the maincorrection which the Christ-taught Church, by apositive and ample theology, must make to a liberalreligion trying to ignore theology. It is to makeChristianity a religion of real redemption and notmere illumination, real regeneration and not merereformation, a religion of conscience and not mereconduct or sentiment. The more we dwell on therelation between God and man as a moral one, themore inadequate does a gospel of mere fatherhoodbecome, however extensive or intimate we mayconceive it to be. We want a conception of love less



quantitative and more qualitative, with more stresson the holiness of it than on its intensity or range, ifwe are to be led by the thought of God that ruled theword of Jesus. It is not breadth but depth that is nowthe need. The modern demand that we moraliseGod is a sound one. But the more we moralise God’sdealings with man the more firmly we must startfrom His holiness and its reaction against sin injudgment. The holy is the foundation of all religion.And we must recognise an eternal and fundamentalmovement in a holy God to judgment—not pri-marily a demand for suffering or for punishment,but for judgment, for the assertion of holy love indark, mortal, and final conflict with sin. If this wasnot in the Cross of Christ then there is yet a fearfullooking for it to come. “Either Christ or you mustbear the weight of your sins and the curse due tothem.” For the holy law cannot be set aside even bythe compassionate movements of God’s own heart.The temper of the hour on the other hand is that nodivine claim is so holy as pity, and no ill so greatas human misery, that anything may be sacrificedto give course to compassion, or anything done to420shorten pain or avoid it.

The element of divine demand has much fadedout of our Christianity before the element of humaneblessing; which again does not echo the preachingof Jesus. Christ, it is said, came to be beneficentand not exigent; or to be exigent only on the haves,and beneficent to the have-nots. But Christianitycan give to men only as it asks of them. (Why, even


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our autonomy means a nomos upon the autos.) Itslaw and its blessing are inseparable in the Cross aselsewhere. And the demand it sets up is as wide asits gift. Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis. But it does notsave our person and then ask certain acts, or certaingifts in a secondary way, as acknowledgments orquit-rents. If its boon save the person it is the wholeperson it requires. The responsibility is as great asthe gift. The love is itself the judgment. It is morallyuseless to ask Christian contributions where mendo not contribute themselves; and they will not,they cannot, do that where they do not feel thattheir whole soul’s blessed release came by an actwhich did full justice to the demand of God andHis urgent Eternity. What saves them sanctifies thedivine demand, it does not suspend it. It spreadsit over the whole soul. Christ’s preaching was veryexigent, with the exigence of one who believed inthe indivisible unity of the soul, in its single eye,and who claimed it all. But much in the tone of ourpublic opinion on moral questions of public ranktestifies to what we have lost by losing the sense ofthe moral objectivity and cruciality of the Cross, ofits spiritual finality, its absolute judgment of sin, andits supreme offering to the infrangible holiness ofGod as the only radical way of dealing with the lastneed of men. Is any need of ours so great as our needof a justifier with God! But is this really a convictionof the Churches? At the present time (thank God!)personal relations are more kind than they havebefore been, but they may be, perhaps, less sincere; 421



and public policy in a nation is more pitiful butoften less just; and therefore authority graduallysubsides. There is less of the finer conscience ingreat matters—as indeed we should expect whenthe greatest matter of all—the Cross—ceases toappear great and fontal to the conscience, and is soonly to the heart. Fraternity takes the place of thecommunion of saints, and patriotism of general jus-tice. It is the age of Fatherhood in faith, yet childrengrow more independent and disobedient, even inChristian homes. I have often known the childrenof good Christian people to be as morally ruined bythe laxity flowing from sentimental views of God’sFatherhood as any ever were by the stern old viewsof the Sovereignty. Gentlemanly form replacesmoral dignity, and the free spending of money (withor without good taste) hushes question as to how itcame. And heaven and hell dropping from practicalfaith as realities or motives—dropping from theplace they had for Jesus, have become a kind ofmythology in the Christian faith—in effect I mean,whether in creed or not.

Amid so much wreck in things around us it willnot have been all loss if we recover from the preach-ing of Jesus some lost belief in the judgment of Godas an integral element in His Redemption, and as avital factor in the Gospel of Christ and the Cross ofour Salvation.

Chapter III

THE MIND OF CHRIST ON HIS DEATH.66

DID Jesus say about Himself every word that thefourth Gospel reports? If He did, is the Jesus of thefourth Gospel the Jesus of the Synoptics? Could theJesus of the Synoptics think or speak of Himself asthe Jesus of John did? Yet we recall that exalted hourin Matthew xi. 25-7. Could the Jesus of John notlie deep in the Jesus of the Synoptics? Must He bealways fully conscious of all He was? Or might Henot be reserved—for other reasons than mere accom-modation? Would it not argue some lack of historicsense as well as of spiritual insight to say that Je-sus in His lifetime could speak, or even think, ofwhat He was, and was doing, in the terms whichbecame inevitable to Him after His personality wasperfected, and His work done, in death and resur-rection? It was the same Jesus, the same personal-ity, in grief as in glory, in eclipse as in power. Thesame Jesus as spoke of Himself in the Synoptics also

41



spoke of Himself to Paul and John, and in them andthrough them. But He spoke differently in these—speaking not only through their mentality, but fromHis own final mastery of the world. The glorifiedChrist, of whom this John has so much to say, is nota Christ illuminated with an overhead ray turned onHim, but a Christ whose inner light broke out in anachieved consummation of power. He is not a Christin the light but a Christ of the Spirit, the Light ofLife. Such glory is not illumination but transfigu-ration. The light does not fall on Him, it flows fromHim. It is the complete revelation of His true and la-tent nature come to a head in His complete act. It isthe overflow of His intrinsic fulness upon a fulness67of time. It is Christ coming to His true self, and de-termined into His own native power (Rom. i. 4).

He did not in His life, therefore, preach thewhole gospel, unless we include in the message thePreacher, the personality of whom all His wordswere sacramental, and the thing that He had it inHis person at the end to do. Nor did He in any waybefore His death utter, or give effect to, His wholeself. There was more in that mighty person thananything short of His redeeming death could realise,or anything less than His Resurrection express, oranything lower than His Holy Spirit reveal. Hesaid, indeed, from time to time what the occasiondemanded, and always the deep thing, the rightthing, and the decisive. But it was the thing alwaysright for His complete work, the thing the finalSaviour should say at that stage; not necessarily the


Chapter III 43

right thing measured by the moment’s success, orby a sectional or a pagan ethic. (And, of course, notthe thing that He judged would be theologicallyconsistent with what the Spirit might one day teachabout His death.) His whole self did not receiveeffect till the consummation at once so fatal, so vital,and so final. On the third day He was perfected.His whole self is not in His biography. No soul,indeed, with a real history has its full self at anyone stage of life. We never once possess our soulsbefore we die. And Christ had a dramatic history,with a movement, a crisis, a culmination in it. Itssummit emerged beyond the clouds of earth. Hiswhole action upon the world was a cumulative andascending thing, as in His Church so in His life.In humbling Himself down, down, to the depthsof death He kept rising always to the summit ofresurrection. He ascended into hell. But at no pointin His life’s process till the crisis was over could Hesay the final word about His final work. If sayingthings had been His work, we might have expected 68the final work in some final word; and yet, in theway of a teaching word, there are so many thingsthat we feel acutely He ought to have settled andhas not . But if redemption was His one work, Hisredeemed feel more keenly still that there is nomore to be done. All they need in Him they find.About that redemption, indeed, we wish often Hehad said more. But He could not while it was inthe doing. Nor could He till He spoke to and incongenial Paul or John. And as to doing, what was



to be done more? We might deny that He has donefor the world what His Church has experienced andbelieved. But if He has done it, must we not admitthat it is the one thing the world needs, and the onething a living God was called on to do—to save?The Church exists to say He has saved and doessave to the uttermost.

The old orthodoxy, like the old rationalism, hadno historical perspective, no sense of development.It saw but a map on a wall. It thought that the greattruths of Revelation must have been equally wellknown at every stage in its course. And much inge-nuity went to surmise what Adam’s theology musthave been when God talked with him in the garden,and when he knew that the Trinity looked out of themajestic plural, “Let us make man,” or to prove thatthe whole doctrine of satisfaction was compressedin the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. If we could lighton some script of unfallen Adam carried from theLibrary of Eden to the cells of Tel-el-Amarna, wemight have an anticipation of the great theologies ofthe future, similar to the prognosis of future historywhich was found in the arithmetical conundrums ofthe Book of Daniel or the Apocalypse. But we haveoutgrown all that fantasy. We realise that revelationgives no programmes; nor was it a formed, finished,69and alien mass dropped like an aerolite into history,or deposited from heaven like an erratic block onearth. However superhistoric, it was of history, andhad itself a history. We realise that that history camein Christ to a climax which was also a perennial


Chapter III 45

source; and that we now live in and from the ful-ness which the pre-Christian ages were but livingtowards. We are on the plateau to which they rose,“the shining table land to which our God Himself issun and moon.”

And is Christ Himself, in the drama of His soul,not an epitome of this waxing history of revelation?Did not His earthly life correspond, on its ownrising plane, to the growing and tragic revelation inIsrael? And does not His life after death answer tothe final revelation which has ended Israel’s missionand replaced it by the living Church? The crisisof His death was the culmination of the onwardhistory at once of His person and of His nation. AsJesus was to Israel, so was His death and perfectingto Jesus. It took all Israel to produce the Christ weknow; and it took all Christ to die so that we shouldknow Him as He is and is to be. His earthly life wasbut the sacrament of His vital person, which founditself as these earthly occasions fell away. While helived, was not His true life a buried life, a retractedlife, a life limited in the expression, and perhaps inthe sense, of itself; a life that had not yet fully cometo itself in action? He could say more about Himselfin Paul than He could in His own flesh. To expectin the teaching of His life the self-interpretation ofHim which we find in the apostles is to commit thesame error as if we should look for a dogmatic ofAtonement in Numbers or in Isaiah. The historianswho would make Christ speak but in His life, andwho find His whole self between birth and death,


seem to show some lack of both historic tact andmoral sense. It shows a lack of power to appreciate70so great a personality if we think that it couldcome to itself during a life so brief, or even in amerely posthumous effect independent of personalcontinuity and control. God’s revelation has alwaysbeen by historic deeds more than by historic wordsor luminous examples. A soul like Christ’s, also,would not be there only as an æsthetic spectacle.And where in His life was there a deed adequateto a personality so great? A personality like thatcould not put itself into any doctrine, nor into anynumber of sporadic deeds, however wonderful andbeneficent, nor into anything less than the greatestact of history and the moral focus of the race. IfHis death was only a martyrdom, an arrest of thegreat deed, and His resurrection but a myth to coverthe calamity, what a manque tale! The mighty per-sonality was nipped in its bloom. Its promise wasshrivelled by His end. Its power was mocked by itsfate in the world, its effect dissipated and wasted.Nay, but the real expression, the real effectuation,of His person was in that death as His final work.There alone He did a thing as vast as He was. Tosay His message was as great as God and greaterthan any act He did, is to mistake the message in itsnature, and to put His religion below His revelation.To say He was as great even as Humanity, and yetto have that greatness put into no correspondingdeed (i.e. no final deed) is to detach Him from thedoers who most truly represent their race. To say


Chapter III 47

that He left Himself to posterity would mean thenbut that He left a memory, or an ideal, or at mostan inert mystic presence, but not a power, not thepower, of a historic God in a world like this. But Hismessages were only facets of His mission; and Hismission, according to the new Testament, our onlysource, was to do the historic work of a redeemingGod. He remains King and Lord as one in whosegrand act we are more than conquerors—we are 71redeemed. The gospel in the gospel is His work;it is what His life effected in its death; that is thedeed which made the real message, made it morethan His conviction, and made it eternal. That is thegospel which all His preaching had deep in its heart.He brought God to man and man to God in a mysticact and on moral terms once for all. That was whatHis teaching did in word and in part to some, to anunstable group—as to some souls and such groupsit may do still; but it was what His death did in deedfor a Church, for a world, and for ever. He, with thatact deep in Him and working often, perhaps, moremightily than even He always knew, He Himselfwas the power and substance of His own preaching,as the apostles saw, and said most clearly. Theirword of the Cross and Resurrection was their onegospel. If there is no name but His, there is nosalvation but in His death. The real Jesus of historyis the Christ that the Apostles preached, and thatthe Church exists to preach. It is not the Jesus ofbiography but the Jesus of Gospel, made unto usjustification, and sanctification, and redemption. For



the Church to leave behind that apostolic Gospel isto leave behind its vocation, dignity, and existenceas a Church.

It is useless, it is too late in the day, to challengethe right to apply modern critical methods to theNew Testament and to the Gospels in particular. Itis not only impossible to evade this application, butit would be wrong. It would be refusing light fromheaven. The critics have done wonders not only forparticular passages, but for our construction of thewhole Bible and its historic atmosphere. They have,in certain respects, made a new book of it, and in asense have saved it. The New Testament shares inthe radiance which criticism has poured on the OldTestament. And in a sense, too, it shares in the revo-lution effected there.72

There is this mighty difference, of course, tobe noted by a criticism that regards all the factsand evaluates them, that in the New Testamentwe are dealing with what we have not in the OldTestament—a historical character who is not onlyliving to-day, nor only acting on us, but is theobject of our action also, and especially of our chiefaction, our worship. We are in living communion,especially by prayer, with Jesus Christ in virtue ofwhat He did. Both as single souls and as a wholeChurch we are so. He is our life. The nature of ourdealings with the Risen is part of the evidence thatHe rose.

We are obliged to recognise that our verdict in


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such a case is not a matter of purely scientific history,or of cold “evidence.” Our judgment of the value ofa historic fact has much to do with our critical treat-ment of it, just as the will to believe has much todo with the belief. Belief of what happened in his-tory is much affected by belief in it, belief in whathappens thereby for and in me. We even have someof the leading students of comparative religion andits philosophy telling us that the philosopher of reli-gion ought to be a personally religious philosopherin order to be just to the facts he handles. Here, aselsewhere, we find that Nature and Supernature donot simply coexist; they interpenetrate in an organicunity. So also do the past and the present, Jesus andthe soul. So that what collides in the discussion ofthe matter is not two views of history purely sci-entific, but two ways of construing the world, twoWeltanschauungen, one exclusive and one inclusive ofpersonal experience of the fact, Christianity belongsto the latter. And there is no Weltanschauung whichis out of relation to Christianity, and does not inviteits verdict.

It is to be added, in connexion with our presentsubject, that we have in one section of the NewTestament, in the Epistles, an inspired, and so farauthoritative, interpretation of the value of that his- 73toric figure—inspired and authoritative as claimingto be, in substance, Christ’s word about Himself,His self-exposition, through a special action ofthat indwelling communion with Him which theapostles shared with the whole Church. To that we



have nothing parallel in the Old Testament.But when we allow for all that, we may welcome

the critical principle and certain of its criticised re-sults on the Gospels. Thorough-going as the criticsmay be, it is by criticism they must be corrected, bya criticism more thorough-going. The results mayappear to some almost as revolutionary as the inver-sion now accepted for Israel’s history. But historicinversions matter less, so long as they do not amountto spiritual subversion. And some of the results thatI mean do light up, or promise to light up, certainthings in the life and motive of Christ which haveperplexed many, and to light them up with, on thewhole, the apostolic ray.

To take a case. Take the question, Why didChrist go to Jerusalem if He knew that it could onlymean failure and death? Why did He denounceand exasperate the authorities, instead of concili-ating and educating them as we are often advisedin His name to do? To that problem there is, ofcourse, a familiar theological answer, but interestto-day fastens rather upon the historical answer.Will it carry the theology? There has seemed tosome no historical necessity for the Cross, or atleast for Christ’s polemical language and conductthat provoked it. It has seemed gratuitous. Thesedenunciations have appeared to some mere moralcholer. Why did He not stay in Galilee where Hehad the crowd—or return there? Why did He beardthe authorities so prematurely, directly, and alone?Why did He not make Himself so powerful with

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the public as to force their hand? To such questionsthe answers are various. For one thing, it was notthe public merely that Christ wanted, but the nation 74with its rulers. He had no idea of a democracy as thetrue nation with a constitutional right to impose itswill on the rulers. That is a discovery of the modernworld. It was not within Christ’s view, for Whomthe powers that were were ordained of God, and thenation was the real vis-a-vis of God, and the directobject of God’s appeal.

But it looks now as if some of the critics, lesspedantic and more “actual” than the rest, hadset the true historical answer in train, and by aloopline were actually restoring to us a theologicalinterpretation. It becomes possible that the historicexplanation is a theological one after all, that it wasa theological motive that urged Jesus, and urgedHim to a tremendous national coup d’etat in a waywe shall see.

In our return to Christ our preaching has sufferedmuch from the anecdotal treatment of Him, and theloss has not been fully repaired by the biographical.We must, therefore, return to the evangelical. Butwith this difference, that the work of Christ on thecross be regarded much less as a Passion and muchmore as an Action, and as a national action with uni-versal finality, the action for the race and for eternityboth of a person and of a people. The Cross is notthe supreme feat of endurance, but the supreme andhistoric act of obedience and of victory on a worldscale. It is not primarily suffering, but achievement.



It is also the work of a national personality, of a king,more than the offering of a social victim. It is thetriumph of one who is always master of himself, ofthe situation, of God’s public purpose, and of theworld. It is a heroic occasion and not a pathetic. Andthe only adequate and divine interpretation of a per-sonal, national, universal, eternal crisis is a theology.

The critics have done much to rescue the Gospelsfrom the popular anecdotal treatment, and to extractfrom them something in the nature of a biography.75The whole “Life-of-Jesus movement,” as it has beencalled, is the most distinctive feature of the mod-ern study of the New Testament. And it has had avery great effect upon the current way of looking atChristianity both in Protestant countries and in Ro-man Modernism. But that biographical movementhas run its course. It is felt more and more in criti-cal quarters that a real biography of Jesus is impossi-ble. And, if it were more feasible than it is, it wouldneither explain nor reproduce the tremendous actionof Christ on the world, which has been theologicalup to now at least for Christ’s Church, and there-fore was so all the more possibly for Christ Him-self. The attempt to squeeze Jesus into the mould ofhuman psychology, or place Him in a succession ofspiritual genius, reduces Him to a figure that can nolonger do the work of Jesus. A mere historical Jesus,a Jesus of biography, which ignores the theologicalChrist is not only inaccessible, it is ineffectual. “His-torical knowledge,” says one of the powerful critics(Julicher), “can clear up many of our current notions


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of spiritual life, but one thing it cannot do—it cannotawake life.”

So criticism itself, in certain of its most vividrepresentatives, is moving to return not indeed to aChrist of orthodoxy but to a theological Christ, inthe sense, at least, of a Christ whose leading motiveswere theological, whatever we think of His nature.The Gospels are here held to be substantially inline with the Epistles. Their note, their continuity,their culmination, is dogmatic. They are not a silentprotest against the dogmatic apostles. Some, ofcourse, explain the fact through Pauline influenceinfecting the simpler sources of the Evangelists.But at least the connexion, and even the continuity,of the two parts of the New Testament is criticallyrecognised; which is a great matter to-day, when somuch on the surface points the other way. The Jesus 76of the Synoptics is being construed dogmatically, asthe Evangelists meant—in the light of the thing Hewas to accomplish for God at Jerusalem when HeHung His whole personality upon the Cross. His ac-tion was not merely the defiant preaching of certainradical principles or ideals at the national head-quarters in scorn of consequence; but it was witha very clear and deliberate regard to consequence,and to the divine strategy. It was the fulfilmentof a certain programme of action that filled andtaxed His whole soul, as being God’s instruction toHim for the kingdom. The necessity for His deathwas primarily created and forced by Himself inGod’s name; not indeed as if He was obsessed by



an artificial and advertising form of suicide, but asthe result of certain eschatological convictions aboutGod’s procedure and requirement which wouldnow be called dogmatic rather than simply ethical.We are here far beyond the mean conception whichreduces that death to a mere martyrdom, and makesChrist a sufferer historically as passive as He hassometimes been viewed theologically to be. Christ(it is now suggested) was moved to force the wholesituation by convictions from God about the priornecessity of a national judgment and expiation forthe coming of the kingdom (Schweitzer). He wasthus far more of an agent, and a national agent, thanan individual victim or hero. He was also more thanthe classic case, or the sacrificial protagonist, of thegreat human tragedy and fate. He was really theruling power of the public situation, and the arbiterof the future. He created the historic necessityof His death by His own views of that necessityas divine; it was not merely incidental to certainethical teachings of His, which the rulers resented.He knew (as a defiant modernist might know andintend in the Roman Church to-day) that He wasmaking it humanly impossible for these rulers totake any other course than they did at the pitch to77which their misconception of God had come. It wasnot the mere collision of His principles with thoseof the public, nor of His individual holiness with itsmoral stupidity. It was not but a fatal accident fromcollision with antagonists too strongly entrenchedin the prejudices which He challenged. It was


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not the too common case of a strong and stiff oldinstitution, in its ordinary brute movement, rollingover a violent but fine and helpless critic. The criticwas creative enough to dominate and shape thetotal position, and bold enough to compel a crisison an issue of national life or death in the interestsof God’s universal kingdom of righteousness. Thenecessity of His death was forced upon the historyof the hour by the Victim Himself, acting on a certaintheological conviction of His death’s vital place inthe national vocation by God, and ultimately in theworld’s destiny viewed as God’s ultimate will. NoPharisee could have been surer than Jesus was of theworld-mission of Israel and its lead of history; theydiffered as to the nature of the lead and the geniusof the mission. Pharisaism and Jesus were equallydevoted to God’s will; they differed as to its nature.And the breadth of the difference was all the depthof the Cross. Israel had in trust the revelation of theworld righteousness, and the possibility, therefore,of a history of the world. Of this righteousness itwas to be the organ. But by its treatment of Jesusit became instead the organ of the world’s sin. TheCross of Christ, therefore, judged and took away thesin of the whole world.

The sense seems to grow, among critics sensitivestill to both history and the soul, that the historicalJesus as His modern biographers would give Him,the psychological Jesus of modern desire, is not theJesus that has made the past, or can make the future.


We have gone too far, as Schweitzer himself tells his78fellow-critics after passing them all in review, in theattempt to put Jesus into modern categories, andmake Him the grand agent and congenial denizenof modern culture. Theological liberalism, startingfrom ideas, has committed suicide; and there isthe more room for a liberal theology starting fromthe saving facts; but there is still greater need forone deep, large, and full of spiritual imagination,intimacy, and distinction. The present state of theChurch, the poverty of its influence on the world,and especially the German world, shows that wehave gone much too far in the effort of liberalism tointerpret Him as the expression and patron of whatis best in the world, as the tutelar of civilisation,at the cost of His work in renouncing, challenging,overcoming, and so commanding, the world. TheJesus of the Cross has succumbed, even within theChurch, to the Jesus of society, the Jesus of culture,or the Jesus of the affections. We are trying to acton men with a Jesus of distinguished religion, ora Jesus the sanest of all the deep saints, with Jesusthe historic character, or the fraternal, or the pietist,rather than with Jesus the Gospel power, the livingdynamic of the Kingdom of God. And the resulton the world is disappointing. Jesus was nothing ifnot dogmatic—not only in His manner but in Hismotive and conviction. He was neither suggestive,nor tentative, nor apologetic. He broke His nationon a theology. He was a ruler and commander ofthe people. Of all things in the world He was not “a


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thoughtful preacher.” His vein was that of a tribuneof the Kingdom—when it was not expressly that ofits King. And He did not explain His words. Hewas often obscure and paradoxical. Perhaps He sentout His seventy in the hope of getting at peoplewhom His own style of address did not reach. Hewas not too careful either to avoid or to clear upmisunderstanding. It was as if He cared less to be 79understood than to get something done that waslaid on Him. He did not reveal His inmost life, orobtrude His guiding theology. What He did saybewildered. To the end His intimates, His disciples,were in great ignorance about His deep intent andfinal goal. It came home to them only from theevent.

Of course, the precise form of theology in Christ’sown mind, looking forward to the crisis, may nothave been quite what it was for Paul looking back onit. How far it was so is another question. The pointhere is that it was on theological considerations thatHe acted, and it was for theological convictions asto God’s purpose, and method, and requirementthat He died. He was not bowing in resignationto a divine will honoured but not understood, anecessity piously but blindly felt to be of God, amere pressure without a plan. He was carrying outa conviction, sure however informal, of that will andits way—much though He kept hoping that Godmight possibly reveal to Him some other way beforethe bitterest end. In the great hour He was moreengrossed with obedience to this divine requirement



than with His own blessed effect on man. In so faras He thought of man, it was of the national, socialeffect of His death and not only of its individualaction upon souls. And this first and immediateeffect on the society round Him He knew, and meantat last, to be judgment. His death would throw Hispeople in the wrong. That was the essence of Hisagony. Their greatest lover was to be their finaldoom. But nothing turned Him. And all becauseHe knew that to be God’s way, to be God’s grandprerequisite of the true Messianic work. Amid thejudgment He was offering His obedience to God forHis Kingdom, and making the sacrifice required bythe holiness of that Will. He sacrificed Himself to thedivine judgment. “The Kingdom could not come,”says Schweitzer again, “till the guilt was brought80to a head and atoned.” But that changed the wholeview of the Kingdom. Christ went to Jerusalemlike a rushing mighty wind, in a rapt motion offateful impatience and divine urgency, for a purposewhich was less to convert than to hasten a crisis, soto give His message as to precipitate the issue, toforce the rulers to a choice which would ruin Israelfor ever if it did not save it; and by such violenceHe would take the Kingdom. He would put God’sfortune to the touch and win or lose it all. Therewas a strategy in it. Jesus coerced events, forced asituation, and compelled the Kingdom in. His deathshould involve that prophesied time of tribulation,catastrophe, and judgment prior and necessary toHis coming with the unmistakeable Kingdom of


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God. His sorrow was not the agony of a man full ofdivine vitality shrinking from death. He was moreof “a public person” than that. It was the agonyof an old nation not only dying but damned; andall its vast tragedy transpiring not only within thesoul of one man, but (chief horror!) by the solemnchoice and awful act of that man himself, and Heits lover. Think of a whole nation proud, stubborn,and passionate, with an ingrained belief in a worldprerogative and mission, expiring in one man, inwhom also by a dreadful collision was rising thekingdom of God they had forsworn; the fate ofGod’s whole Kingdom in the world decided in anArmageddon of that one spirit; a world’s eternalwarfare and destiny forced through the channel ofone soul vast enough, whatever He did not know orcould not do, to be in His death alive and adequateto such an issue. When we remember that it wasnot Israel’s doom alone that was sealed in that soulbut also (in His own belief) the divine fate of theworld, is it quite easy to avoid the conclusion thatwe have here to do with something more than eithera preacher or a paragon, that He is more even thanthe first tragic figure of our human fate, and that the 81sufferer and the judge is at once the Son of lost manand the Son of redeeming God?

What has been said may be illustrated more fullyfrom the critical treatment of a parable which has avery close bearing on the question whether Christmade Himself a part of His own Gospel. It is easy



to go too far in depreciating the value of Christ’steaching in the interest of His work. It should nevereven seem to be depreciated except in that interest.Surely more than enough has lately been done onthe other side—in depreciating His work comparedwith His words. And I would refer to a passagein His teaching where He is more explicit than inany other (except in the ransom passage and at theSupper) about His death and its action.1 I refer tothe parable of the wicked husbandmen in Mark xii.1-12. Our Lord’s habitual reserve on the subject ofHis death is here maintained by His putting Hismeaning in the dark form of a spoken parable—asat the very close He put it into the symbol andmystery of His “last parable,” the enacted parableof the Supper. As Dr. Burkitt says, it is coming tobe recognised, even among advanced scholars, fromGermany to America, that a doctrine of Atonementthrough Christ’s death is implied in St. Mark’sGospel. It could hardly be otherwise, inspired asthat Gospel was by Peter, and written for Churchesthat certainly took their origin in the preaching ofsuch a message. Of course the position is turned bysaying that our Mark was written, and covered upQ, under the deflecting influence of Paulinism—as if82

1 My interest in this point was first roused by Schweitzer,and the special bearing of parable came home to me in con-versation with Dr. Burkitt, the Norrisian Professor of Divin-ity at Cambridge, who has since been good enough to sendme a copy of his paper discussing the passage at the OxfordCongress of Religions in 1908. The next few pages owe it much.


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every apostle did not believe with the whole Churchthat “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. xv. 3). Dr.Burkitt gives reasons, into which I need not herego, why this cannot have been so, why no suchdeflection can be supposed.

What we have in this parable is Christ’s inter-pretation of His death, on the lines I have alreadydrawn, as the crisis in God’s historic judgment ofIsrael. The Cross was the organ of that judgmentwhich goes with all the promise in the Old Testa-ment, and was never dissociated from the coming ofthe Kingdom of God. The general idea of judgmentin the Bible, and certainly in the Old Testament, isnot ours. It is looked forward to with hope and joy.See especially Psalm xcvi. 11-13. It is not retributionthat is the uppermost notion in it, but vindication.It is not terror but glory, not our day of doom butthe day of a righteousness whose victory is estab-lished in this way. The great event is not shunnedbut hailed. It is not the destruction of God’s enemiesthat fills the foreground, but the establishment of Hispeople for the sake of His kingdom. Judgment is ad-justment far more than vengeance. It is sanctificationmore than punishment. Nothing could be more shal-low than talk about the Old Testament God as beingangry in the sense of vindictive.

How then could a soul like Christ’s have possiblymissed that essential feature of judgment in the OldTestament purpose and method of God which heknew converged on Himself? If we read the parablein the larger context of Christ’s mind thus fed, He


not only felt His death to be inevitable (for Heoften says that), but He here indicates why. It wasa necessity of judgment in God’s providence, thelabourers behaving as they did—a historic necessityin any history where God’s purpose must rule all.The murder of the son does not destroy the estate,its administration, or the interest in it of the owner.83There is, to be sure, a great change, with freshtenants, but not a surrender of the business, whichis God’s sovereignty on earth. The old occupiers aredestroyed, but the vineyard goes on. The last gift ofthe Son is also the last judgment, but also the finalatonement and salvation. Israel is judged, but thekingdom goes on in other hands under the sameLord. To bring about this crisis, this new departureand sure establishment of the kingdom, the death ofthe Son was a moral necessity, in the frame of mindto which Israel had come. It was a moral necessity,not a strategic, not a political; for Christ was noagent provocateur to Israel like Satan to Job. It was anact of judgment as well as of sacrifice. The historiccrime, unfated and free as it was, became the agentof the divine judgment; which again by its sacrificialacceptance became the atoning condition of the finaland universal Kingdom.

Jesus had come to feel that, in spite of His ownpreaching and that of His disciples, He was notreally affecting the public. They were not rising norripening to the Kingdom. There was none of thenational repentance that the Kingdom required for afoundation. The result of the mission of the seventy


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was a disappointment to His hope. It did not rousethe popular commotion and crisis which must bringthe Kingdom in. It did not seem to create as muchpublic furore as John had done. The people did notwake to the call. “The brand He flung went out.”All the more He would the fire were well kindled.It came home to Jesus that things must come toa head. To produce the crisis that must make theKingdom He must die. He must so present Hisclaim that death became inevitable unless it wasreceived; and so die that the death both judgedthe nation and atoned to its God. The Elijah hadbeen killed in John—so must the greater than Elijahin Jesus, whose course was so greatly affected by 84John’s death. Only thus could He be revealed as theSon of man—by a resurrection that took its wholemoral meaning from the atoning judgment effectedby His criminal death. As a great statesman, in fullview of the situation and its crisis, might commit apeople to war, so He would force the whole nationinto the valley of decision for Israel’s death or life,into the great Πείρασμος which was so terrible thatHe prayed in Gethsemane, and made His disciplespray, it might even yet be spared to Him and them.For He quite expected they would share His fate.“Wake, and pray that ye enter not into the awfulcrisis.” “Lead us not into the crisis; but, crisis ornone, deliver us from the Evil One.” The dyingwhich He had before pressed on His flock is nowconcentrated in Himself, and He speaks less of theirobligation to surrender life than of His own purpose



to do so. His magnificent impatience would not letHim rest. How does He move? Does He set abouta new effort to educate the people, as if it were amodern political issue? He was no such man. Hewas the man of the soul’s last alternative, of theLord’s controversy, of the eternal polemic, wherecompromise is at last unknown. Campaign givesway to crisis. The issue could not but be hardened.The dilemma must be sharpened—redemption orruin, world mastery or downfall for this people. Thefulness of the charged time had come to explosion.The public choice that would not answer the Gospelgrace must answer the Gospel judgment, untonational salvation or damnation. The national guiltremained; it must be removed or fixed for ever byputting the nation on a final and eternal hazard.“They will reverence the Son.” Farther even Godcould not go than His Son, and to send Him wastherefore to face a fearful risk. The great stroke, wascalled for to precipitate the Kingdom, to carry homethe judgment which marks the Kingdom. If men85would not take it home, and if to the divine eye itwas hopeless that they should, at His kindling word,then let it come in the self-judgment of public doom.Behind this parable is a Jesus who was coming tothe conclusion that they did not reverence the Son,and that His death must be the instrument of thegreat tribulation which transferred the kingdomfrom national to universal hands. But universal itmust be, either through Israel’s life or over Israel’scorpse. And of Israel’s faith and life He was now all


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but hopeless. Before Messiah could come with thekingdom in unmistakeable glory He must go outin such a death as should be the doom of an Israelintractable, rebellious, and antichrist. It would be ajudgment then not for Israel but on Israel—and, bysympathy and solidarity alas! upon the good as wellas on the bad, and chiefly upon Him, the holiest andmost loving of all.

But judgment so far, judgment working on menas doom, was only negative. It had its positiveaction Godward, as sacrifice, as righteousnessrealised and offered in satisfying response to a holyGod, as the atonement which the suffering of theculprits could never be. Nay more, the moral powerthus to judge and atone was so great and divinethat it was creative (though all this development ofthe judgment does not lie directly within the fourcorners of the parable). The crisis is, still more thanjudgment, a time of redemption and reconciliationand reconstitution in a new creation—it is the dayof the Lord. With the remnant of His people, as withHis Son, God is well pleased, now that holiness isestablished and calamity sanctified in crucial andfinal judgment. The remnant will make a new anddenationalised Israel. Christ’s death thus bringsboth the judgment and the reconciliation, and bothHe must sympathetically share. It is a sacrifice—-and not only to a historic necessity but, in Christ’sfaith, to the purpose, the method, the will, of God; to 86views of His which are, indeed, God’s own thoughts



and acts;2 to whose note all history moves, and toHis goal. If Jesus expected His speedy return in theMessianic glory, that would be only one aspect ofthe kenotic limitation of His knowledge of timesand seasons which He Himself admitted, and whichneed not trouble any who realise that such limitationwas self-imposed.

In this passage of Christ’s teaching, then, do wenot have His mature idea of His central place, andthe central place of His judgment-death, in the pro-gramme of His Gospel? Have we not some hint of apsychological explanation of His death? Have wenot something like a policy and a purpose, whichseems missing in some views of the end? And havewe not one theological enough to explain the soci-ety founded on it, and the history flowing from it,which are theological or nothing? We have some an-swer to the questions, Why did He deliberately courtfailure by going to Jerusalem? Why did He use lan-guage so passionate and so irritating? That languagehas been to many a problem and to many a snare.They have thought that it justified them in a like ex-plosive tone amid their own society. They did notsee that Christ was contemplating what was not intheir purpose—the final divine crisis of a nation witha history that stood for God against the world inthe soul’s final and eternal issue. Facing Him, Israelstood before its own soul, to either hail or scorn itsown destiny. Their idea is reform, which comes by

2 This of course men like Schweitzer would not admit.

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compromise, His was decision, which needs a sharpdilemma. For purposes of mere reform violent de-nunciation and provocation are out of place. Theold prophet who faced an end of existing things inthe issue of such good and evil as mean God or noGod had other methods and speech than the modern 87politician, whose business it is to mend things. Andthe sons of the prophets would do well to bear thedifference in mind. As a politician the prophet, withthe prophet’s tension, is out of place.

We have here, then, one answer to such questionsthat deserves much attention. Christ courted the riskbecause a crisis must be forced. His failure, shouldHe fail, was essential for the judgment of those whoshould make Him fail. They would fail then and notGod, they would fail their own God, and judgmentcould not but come. It was essential for their con-founding and the release of the kingdom from suchhands. It was essential for the release of the king-dom for Humanity, one is tempted in these days tosay; but it is more Christian to say for the whole pur-pose of God with man. There was always the chance,of course, that, in thus forcing the crisis, He mightmake the heads of the nation realise the gravity ofthe situation, and stop before they made the final re-fusal. They might recoil from the crime they cameso near with a horror which would make a moralrevolution, and which might still put a shocked andsaved Israel at the head of God’s Kingdom in theworld. Their moral freedom always left that chance.So that He did not go to be their Fate; but still to be



their Doom, if they would have it so.All this may construe the mind of Christ on

the lines of Jewish eschatology rather than of thePauline thought, but it was not foreign to oneeducated like Paul. And we may even find it easierin some ways to see how germane the Pauline in-terpretation is, and its development from judgmentof its latent atonement and regeneration. Jesus wasinvolved in the collapse of the temple He pulleddown. He was drawn into the circle of nationaldoom. The judgment began with the suffering anddeath of its prophet. He was the first victim of theawful process. But vicarious judgment, judgmentundeserved, on this holy and universal scale, is88

Atonement when it is positively put. It means anew relation to God. Paul’s theology of justificationis not alien to Christ’s conception of a sacrificialjudgment-death, which grew upon Him as the debtto God from public guilt, and as the prior conditionof a glorious and royal return with the Kingdom. Itbecomes easier to see how real, however latent, isthe connexion between the thought of Jesus on thematter and that of Paul, and how well Paul might becertain he “had the mind of Christ.”3 To be sure theinterpretation I have named of our Lord’s motive ismore or less of a construction. But it is constructionof data in Christ’s teaching under the principle of

3 1 Cor. ii. 16. Which certainly does not mean merelythe temper of Christ, but His thought, His programme, Hismethod, “thinking His thoughts after Him,” His theology.


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the Apostolic construction, the construction whichthe Apostles and the whole Church have held to beChrist’s own, the construction that Christ’s supremeand creative value is in His death and glory. I donot say the construction is made under the apostolicmethod. For it is the critical and historical treatmentof His words that is at work. But it comes outwith substantially the evangelical result, which isa great matter. Criticism here presents a Christacting as the Apostles interpreted His action—eschatologically, and therefore theologically. Thesimplest story—Mark’s—surely tells it so, like therest. Of course when criticism has scientificallydiscovered this, it may take the other step alreadymentioned—perhaps less scientific, when every-thing is considered. It may say that Mark must bea product of Paulinism, that already the real legacyof Jesus had been so edited and so varnished that“Mark has already lost all real grasp of the historiclife of Jesus” (Wrede). That is construction, and aswe may think inferior construction. I mean that the 89attempt to get back to a simpler Jesus behind thePauline or Petrine misconceptions of Mark is sucha construction. And it seems much less violent tospeak of Mark, with Dr. Burkitt, not as a product ofPaul, but as his anticipation.


Chapter IV

117CHRIST’S OFFERING OF HIS SOUL FOR SIN.

WHEN I speak here about the preaching of theCross of Christ I mean ultimately the Cross itselfas a preaching, as God’s “preachment” which gaveChristian preaching birth, made it inevitable, pro-longed itself in it, and provided its perpetual note.As God’s preaching of Himself in the Cross was anact, the act of giving Himself, so all true preachingof it is an act also, and more than speech only. It is adevoted act of the preacher’s personality, conveyingGod in His grace and self-donation. It is not merelyexhibiting Him. It is sacramental.

This Gospel is the answer to the prime religiousquestion of the soul. What is that question? It is onethat is roused chiefly by the Gospel itself. Nowhere,not even in Job, do we find our classic account ofthe great question stirred in the soul but in the NewTestament with its Gospel. And the question thereprovoked or sharpened by its proleptic answer is

70


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not, How shall man recall and realise his spiritualinstincts or his indelible sonship to the Father, sodeeply misunderstood but never broken? That isnot a just version of the question that dominatesthe New Testament, i.e., dominates the soul atclosest quarters with the Gospel., i.e. with God. Isit not this, How shall a man, how shall lost man, beright with God? How shall our conscience standbefore our Holy One, our Judge? That has been thestanding question of Israel. It was the ruling noteof the Apostles. They all answer the question withan atonement. And such is the point of view of theEvangelists. They wrote no biography of a prophet,but outlined the story of an atoning Redeemer. Truly 118the answer of the question was, Your Judge is yourFather in Jesus Christ. But it was not the Father thathad ousted the Judge. He was Father-Judge. He wasthe judging Father and the atoning Redeemer. TheHoly Father was Himself the Saviour in His Son,making far more sacrifice than He received, makingwhat He did receive, making it for man and to Hisown holy name. He was the Father who chose andsaved us in His grace rather than the Father whocreated and perfected us in His image. He is theFather of the will in us which responds to choicerather than of our nature that responds to charm.And we are sons by His adoption rather than by anydescent or continuity—by the adoption, to wit theRedemption. Otherwise we are but His offspring,not His sons. We are His offspring (like the heathen)by creation, but His children (like Israel) by His



choice; we are His sons in Christ and in His Gracealone. The gospel is the gospel of the Fatherhood inthe atoning Cross.

We cannot get away from this fact, this typeof Christianity, on any just or sympathetic inter-pretation of the New Testament. And we shouldremember that it becomes more pronounced inthe later parts of the New Testament (like John);which would not have been the case had the historybut crystallised on an idea of expiation and beenits created myth instead of its creative power (asDr. Andrews admirably expounds in the MarchEXPOSITOR). We may modernise the book’s messageas we will, and the way in which the book conveysit; but if we inquire what it actually, historicallywas, was it not as I have said? That gospel of oursonship in redemption and not creation, in thesecond creation and not the first, is bound up withthe New Testament version of Christ. We can, ofcourse, superannuate the New Testament in thisrespect to meet the modern consciousness, and wecan construct another Christ. But let us do it with119our eyes open as to what the New Testament says,and what it is we do. We cannot continue to havethe New Testament Christ without that gospel ofan atoning Christ. Without that we have but NewTestament data, to be severely sifted and freshlycombined in the interest of the humanist Christ nowemerging at last. We are dependent for our historicChrist not upon documents in the strict sense of theword, documents in the sense in which state papers


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are documents. We have only the accounts of deeplymoved disciples or apostles, who were under suchan impression from Christ that they welcomed astheir spokesman one who called Him “My Lordand my God.” For the character and teaching ofChrist we are quite dependent on such devotees,who concentrate on the new creation in His cross.So that the interpretation of Christ’s person bythis Cross is at least as integral a part of the NewTestament account as the character or teaching ofChrist is. It is solid with all the historic data. And itis far more dominant than the teaching. Are we thentreating the documents fairly if we fashion a Christentirely detached from the Christ who saturatesand dominates the only sources of knowledge wehave—the Christ of the Cross, and of the AtoningCross? If we evaporate all the water there is no moresea.

At any rate it is a great point gained for clear-ness if we recognise the fact that that revelation,whether final or not, has its central meaning onlyas redemption, and that the New Testament Christis an atoning and not merely an exhibitory Christ(whatever form we may give to a real propitiationin our modern theological crucible). In this light theprime question of the soul which the Cross answersis not the filial question of a child-heart simply tobe met by the mere revelation of a Father correctingour bewilderment; nor is that the question answeredin the discourses of Christ; but it is everywhere the 120moral question of an adult conscience, the question



of sinful man before his Judge, to be answered bya justification and a real redemption. The preacherwho does not recognise this must expect that hisinterpretation will much affect his gospel powerand his final result. It must make a tremendousdifference whether the prime relation of his messageis to God’s offspring or God’s prodigals, to moralminors or moral adults, to moral vagrants or moralrebels, to stray sheep or defiant wills; whether hiscentral appeal is to the lone and hungry heart, asin some great city, or to the evil conscience as in amoral Eternity; whether his note is pathos and pityor judgment and grace.

In every serious case of interpreting Paul the oldReformers were substantially right. There were gi-ants in those days. They did treat the New Testa-ment revelation thoroughly, whatever they did withits texture. They did understand the psychology ofsin and the action of mercy. What we do is doneupon their shoulders. What we must repudiate inthem is to be rejected on their own great lines. Tothis extent at least they were right, that what wascentral, if not always foremost, in Paul’s interpreta-tion of the Cross was its objective effect beyond man,and not merely its impressive effect upon man. Andthis was the perspective of Christ Himself.

The love which was to reconcile man was a lovethat began with a propitiation for man. John makesPaul very clear here. Herein is love—not that weloved, but that He loved, that is, gave His Son forour propitiation. The love in love is the provision

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not of blessing simply, but of atonement. For it hasmuch to do with the love beyond all love—God’slove of His own holy Self. If it was to propitiateneither man nor devil, what is left but His own holi-ness? We start with this. (I mean the Church must.I am not thinking of individuals, for fundamental 121theology is the trust properly, not of individuals, butof the corporate Church.) We cannot begin, as thesomewhat amateur Broad Church of the Victorianage used to do, by construing Paul in terms ofmodern liberalism—as if, for instance, the propi-tiation was God’s propitiation of us, or as if Paulhad before him the modern idea of Humanity, or asif the word “justify” in him meant “to make just”instead of “to declare just,” as if there were nothingforensic in his thought, but only an ethical idea. Thescientific interpretation of Paul permits only theforensic meaning, however ethical and exalted ournotion of the holy forum and its procedure may be.The mode of treatment is now changed. AdmittingPaul’s view, and the apostolic view, the view of ourdocuments, to be as I have said, the question askedis this. This objective and atoning Gospel so surelyPaul’s—is it the true halo of the Cross or a mere hazeupon it? Did Paul truly break up and transmit, likea prism, the pure light and mind of the heavenlyChrist as to His death? Do the Epistles contain atrue spectrum of the Cross? Or did they paint uponthe simple doctrine of Christ certain barbaric bandsof Judaism, which only obscure it while meant toadorn—as at a king’s coming the bunting hides or



disfigures a beautiful town? On such a vital matterdid Paul develop congenially the purpose of theChrist who lived in him and whose thoughts hethought? Or, being more mastered by the Zeitgeistthan by his hero, did he plant upon Jesus certaincurrent dreams of an ideal Christ? Or was he heredriven by stress of controversy into the falsehood ofextremes and the extravagance of harsh dilemmas?Was his thought on that atoning meaning of theCross which was at the centre of his faith Christthinking in him deep down where he lived his ownlife no more but Christ lived in him? Or was it an122idiosyncrasy? Or a syncretist infection from the airhe breathed? Need sin now preoccupy the Christianforeground as Paul made it do? Need sacrifice, inany atoning sense, any sense which involves a realobjective action on God? Was Christ’s propitiationbut God’s effort to propitiate man, impress him,and smooth a misunderstanding? Need we preachsacrifice in any but the altruistic and heroic senseit bears in the high humanitarian ethic of man andman? Jesus, it is urged, preached a righteousnessexceeding that of the Scribes and Pharisees in thename of a pure and direct Fatherhood; was thatsimplicity not confused, and turned into anotherrighteousness, by Paul’s sophisticated view of sacri-fice? By a righteousness exceeding that of Scribe andPharisee did He not mean that enlarged? Could Hemean another kind—Paul’s justification by faith inatoning grace? In views like Paul’s did not Judaismsurge back on Christianity and take its revenge on


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Christ? Was Paul not, by some historic irony, thesupreme agent of the Pharisaism he had left butcould not lose for choking the Gospel of Christ? Didhe not turn Christ from a prophet to a theologianwhen he changed Him from being the suprememedium of God’s mercy to being its only mediator,and turned Him from a prophet to a priest? Did henot erect on this perversion a whole Church, whichhas been to this day a large factor in the delay of theKingdom?

We are becoming familiar with such criticisms.They have much to make them plausible to thepublic. They are the more plausible because ofthe amount of truth they do possess. There isno doubt that the processes of Paul’s argumentare sometimes Judaic and irrelevant to us—as inthe well-known Hagar passage in Galatians. Hisdialectic is sometimes foreign to such logical habitsas we have. These criticisms are very old, but theyseem to the lay mind new and simple. And this isa democratic time when simplicity has become the 123test of truth, partly because it is easiest and winsmost votes. These views are bound to have vogue inan age when the mere public becomes the court ofreligious appeal, the agnostic press claims its placeas a critic of Christian truth, poetic love is used asthe Christian principle, and social comfort is madethe measure of Christian success. If the eternal Gloryof God cease to be the Holiness of His love, andman’s chief bane cease to be his sin against it, it mayreadily seem as if most that Paul stood for (beyond



his brilliant religious genius) was a confusion of thetruth as it appears to the rapid reader of the words ofJesus, or to the heart unacquainted with moral strifeor despair. Paul’s speculations may then appearas mischievous to the Church as the ecclesiasticalpolicy of Constantine or Hildebrand. There is nodoubt, if we treat sin only in the light of love, andnot in the light of Love’s Holiness and its Grace, ifby ethical Christianity we mean only a Christianityfor man’s conduct or affection and not supremelyfor God’s Holiness, then the Pauline Cross is eitheran offence or a folly as we may prefer to viewit. To the ordinary intelligence, predisposed toreligious sympathy, bred in a Christian atmosphere,sheltered from acute personal wickedness, secludedfrom close contact with moral wrecks and blights,unfamiliar with national perdition, social devilry,or racial godlessness, and therefore unawed byanything tragic in the moral life or desperate in thespiritual—to such a mind a view of the Cross whichat once taxes heaven, harrows hell, and changeseternity, may well seem overdone. It may wellseem then as if there were in Paul a new departure,pedantic, obscure, forced, and gratuitous, with nopoint of attachment in Jesus beyond a few darksayings about His death, perhaps imported, perhapsaltered, perhaps due to depression, but certainlyoverworked by the orthodox belief. It is a singularthing, but some of the views which do least justice124to the depth, and poignancy, and finality of theCross arise from its very success, from the peaceful


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air of the Christian home, where the children growin the Lord’s nurture, their ordered lives mature inthe virtues and graces, and they develop the mostlovable intelligence of everything Christian exceptthe crucial word to the fearless sinner, to the cyniciniquity, the broken heart, the damned conscience,the world-tragedy, and the soul’s despair. Buthere, as in textual criticism, the easier reading isthe more suspect. It is so in life generally. Alwayssuspect simple solutions of moral problems agesold. Distrust the bland note that says, “Believe me,dear friends, there is no need of so much pother. Itis really very plain. Let your own little child leadyou. See.” And then he proceeds to advertise hisadolescence in the question by domestic analogiesfor arguments or for revelations.

Much talk about the simplicity of our Lord’steaching is calculated to irritate the serious studentand sadden the forgiven saint; not only becauseit reduces Jesus to the level of a popular writer,with publishers for his apostles, and editors for hisoverseers, but because it suggests in the talker ateacher who has never really learned there whereto learn costs the uttermost farthing. The worstdogmatism is the dogmatism, bland or blunt, of theman who is anti-dogmatic from an incapacity togauge the difficulties or grasp the questions whichdogma does attempt to solve. The non-dogmatismof the pooh-pooh school is more unreal than thedogmatisms they denounce. Let us not idolisesimplicity, nor look for it in the wrong direction. For


what seems over our heads let us lift up our heads.Why, in most regions of His teaching Jesus hardlyever opened His mouth without offending Hispublic or puzzling His friends. No great teacher wasever more careless about being properly intelligible,or averting misunderstanding. No modern editorwould have printed Him. It is impossible for a125seer of paradox and a master of irony like Christ tobe simple in the sense in which the railway readermaking for his home demands it. Almost everythingHe said produced at first more bewilderment thanlight, till He had created the conscience which alonecould understand Him. The natural conscience,and with it the natural mind, had to be reborn forthe purpose. And when it was reborn it saw and ithailed the Pauline Cross. One of the worst fallaciesabout Christ is that He and His prime truths andeffects are among the great simplicities which needbut to be stated to go straight to the general heartand to wield the touch of nature that makes thewhole world kin. That is not so. The true responseto Him was not in the compass of flesh and blood.And what the common people heard so gladly fromChrist was what is always gladly heard—His attackson their hard taskmasters and religious humbugs,the Scribes and Pharisees. The context of Mark xii.37 shows this plainly. The gladness with which thecrowd heard Him there could not be because theyunderstood His argument. And certainly it wasnot because of any spiritual apprehension of greatDavid’s greater Son. But they saw gladly that the


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Scribes understood it all well enough to be worstedand silenced, and they were delighted. The commonpeople disliked their eminent religionists enough torejoice in their public discomfiture by a man on thestreet. But the more close He went to the great objectof His life the less He was understood, like manyof the disciples that have gone closest and deepestin the retracing of His thought since. The more Hewent to the heart of His Gospel the less He went tothe heart of His public, and the more His friendsforsook Him and fled.

Jesus, of course, neither taught nor had a theoryof His work, as Paul had it. He belonged, as I havesaid, to the class that sees and does things which 126the next class expounds and applies. And His placein our spiritual world is one which He compelsfrom us rather than expressly claims. His place inAthanasian thought was the natural and necessaryfruit in the then world of the Church He made—itwas that rather than the means of its making. Forthe creeds were rational hymns rather than mis-sionary gospels. They were exuberant confessionsrather than specifications. The actual Saviour of theChurch’s new nature and experience is the realitywhich theological science richly expounds, just ascosmic Nature is the reality that physical scienceso amply unfolds. And the method of each scienceis always presented by the nature of that which isits object. Now here the object of our faith is not,like nature, a mere object that we know, but thegreat Subject that knows us. The risen Christ taught



His apostles, and especially Paul, from heaven, andtaught them what as mere disciples on the other sideof the Cross they could not bear. Paul’s inspirationconsisted with the most mystic note of his life. Itwas not he who knew the great truths, but Christwho knew them in him. So the Spirit has led theChurch into more truth than is express in the Bible,in Paul, or John, or even in the character of Christ,but not into more than these contain. Doctrine hasnot been created (like life) so much as developed;and the development of doctrine has waited uponthe growth of faith. We believe more things than thefirst Church, though our faith and love be less. Wesee in Christ what it did not see, even if we realiseless. We may know more of the world, even of thepsychology or theology of the moral world, thanJesus Himself did, though we do not know what Hedid of the soul or of the Father—of whom indeedwe know nothing fontal or certain but what the Sonreveals. And Paul (so early) had thoughts of Christ’swork and person which we have nothing to showwere present to the earthly Christ’s own mind. But127it was from Christ he had them, whatever was thepsychology of their mediation to him.

But with these concessions I go on to one pleathat Christ’s words about the Son and the Fathersuggest. Christ did know that His relation to theFather was unique, and that His person and crosswere more deeply involved in His Gospel thansome of His words express. No fair criticism, nocriticism without a parti pris, can take out of His


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mouth that great crucial word of Matthew xi. 25-27.He knew, with a knowledge inexplicable to us, andto Himself needing no explanation, that God’s graceto man stood or fell with Him, with His religiousconsciousness and His practical work, in a way thatapplied to no other man. Further, it seems clearthat Jesus had in view a great and near crisis ofredemption in whatever form. We may criticise thedetails of the eschatological addresses, but the factpersists that He felt Himself to be in charge of thegreat and immediate crisis of God’s historic teleol-ogy. His very ethical teaching, as about revenge,rested on a faith in the nearness of the vengeanceof God. All His words are autobiographic of asoul that only came to its full self in the Cross. Hisconsciousness was Messianic, and therefore telic.His teaching associated His person and work withman’s great deliverance from his objective and finalfoe. His ethic had not simply a religious basis butan evangelical, dealing not simply with God butwith a holy God. It rested on deep on an atonement,a redemption, a new creature, and not merelyon a new ideal, or a fresh inspiration. Its sourceand authority are less in His precepts than in HisCross, and the new covenant and the new creationthere. It rested on a salvation whose final agentHe was, on a new creation corresponding to thenovelty, uniqueness, and miracle of His own royalperson and sacrifice. Israel should forgive because 128God in His Messiah was forgiving Israel. WhenHe forgives cases He only details to individuals



(as His Spirit now does) the collective salvationgathered, effected, and guaranteed in His personand its work. His ethic is not for the natural man,but for the saved, the man lifted from a centre inhis own egoism and planted with Christ in God. Itis not for the politics of the potsherds of the earthbut for the dealings of brothers in the kingdom ofGod, not for the nations but for the Church. It isfor a community that has found the internationalsecret in a supernational society, whose secret is themiracle of the supernatural life. It is founded on apresupposition of moral regeneration, and cannotcome but in its wake. Such ethic cannot thereforebe separated from its context in the Saviour whospoke it, the Kingdom He brought, and the powerHe gave. Nor can it be applied where His power isdisowned. It must have its context in the faith thatresponds, as in the Saviour who spoke. It is an ethicof the Kingdom, and it is for the world only as theworld comes to seek first the Kingdom. And Hepreached the Kingdom as a King who is too greatto boast of His reign. All which puts a great gulfbetween His preaching and ours, changing Himfrom our model to our Master, nay, to our Matter,and changing us from the partners of His deed tobe its product, from imitators of it to trophies andagents of its power.

This feature it is—His unique value for the cen-tral moral crisis of the race—which emerges in Hissayings about His death and His victory. They areall the less negligible because few. They are flashes

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of the central fire. They are hill tops and outcropswhich reveal, as they emerge, the continuous andsubstantial strata, parts of which often dipped belowHis own consciousness in His self-humiliation—assome of the great mystics had but half a dozenof the great and rapt experiences which opened 129Eternity and settled and coloured their life. Suchreferences by Christ are few, also, partly because ofthe density of perception in those round Him. Hewas chilled by their reception, and He could notdevelop such a subject in such an atmosphere. Fromthe time He began to speak of His death (I have said)an estrangement set in between His disciples andHimself. Misgiving grew into suspicion, and endedin desertion. Who so quick to feel that alienation asHe? And who so likely to answer that frost by theinevitable reserve as the man who was carried so farin the other direction by Peter’s great confession?He was driven in on Himself. He could not expandand enlarge on such a subject to their growingmood. Even the tender passion of the supper leftthem with but an ill-understood hint whose verbalform is uncertain. He could not say the mightyword because of their unbelief; or rather their wrongbelief, their belief in Israel rather than in Grace,in country rather than God, in a patriotic morethan a gracious God. “We trusted that it was Hewho should have restored the lead of the world toIsrael.” At the deep end He was even cast back fromwords of His own upon passages from the liturgyof Israel, from the Psalms. So far did His reticence



go. Every preacher knows that it is not only fruitlessbut impossible to press the sacred core of the Crosson the social democracy as such, on the politicalmind, the parliamentary horizon, on an audience ofmen totally preoccupied with earthly ideals or evensocial reforms—whatever be the personal esteemin which the speaker is held. Nothing is so hardas public prayer with a mixed congregation. AndI shall have to indicate that some reserve on ourpart about the Cross may be suggested to us in theinterests of the best evangelisation.

Those few words of Christ about His deathare not pathetic fallacies of His weak moments.130They well form His soul’s centre. They are firstprinciples, the outlook of the strong foundations ofHis Eternal World. They are not fanciful aspects ofHis work sicklied by hours of depression. They arenot gleams of it at a rare angle, caught, shaped, andthen dropped, like the fine relic of some lyric mood.They are the sparse self-revelations of a mighty soulrapt in a crushing task. They are forced from Hissilent depths only by a rare and solemn conjunction.They are less heard than overheard, not didactic likethe feet-washing but sacramental like the supper.They are not lessons, but agonies, not suggestionsbut groans. They do not flow from Him, they arewrung. They convey Himself more than His truth,His heartbreak rather than His discourse. They areof the utterances that are deep deeds rather thanstrong words. They are preludes or facets of the onedeed of that Cross through which at last His whole


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person poured as in a narrow gorge and gate ofhell ere it broke broad into the Kingdom of Heaven;where the fountains of His great deep were brokenup to submerge the old evil world and float the new.The act of the Cross, thus presaged and preluded,was the real founding of the New Covenant, thetrue Kingdom, and the New Humanity—the NewCovenant whose establishment meant more forHim, and was more directly His work, than eventhe founding of the Church. His work was evan-gelical before it was pentecostal. Lighted up by theResurrection the Cross threw into the backgroundfor the apostles all eschatological dreams about afoundation only in the Messiah’s return for a neweffort of a more imposing kind. This return whenit came could only be a fruit of the Cross’s victory,and not the repair of its misfortune. The Cross wasthe last of Christ’s miracles, as the Supper was thelast of His parables (for the Resurrection was but theobverse of the same act). It gathered up His whole 131vocation to overcome the world, and it drew on Hiswhole divine person which reconstituted it. Sucha life as Christ’s inward and unutterable life withthe Holy Father could in such a world only flowerin a deed and a death like this; and it could onlyreach us so, and by no mere statement from His lips,and no mere impression from His discourse. YetHis death is only what it is by crowning such a lifeand such discourse. To separate the one from theother is a mediæval mistake. It destroys not only thesymmetry of Christ but His moral perfection, the



spiritual unity of His person in its total obedience tothe Father’s holy will.

To make His soul an offering for sin is the great-est use that we can make of it. It is the greatest useto which we can turn the deeper knowledge we winfrom modern scholarship of the inner life of Jesus,or the more intimate glimpses of His psychology, orthe more vivid sense of His talk. This all sets outthe wealth of the saving sacrifice. And so to use itprevents even that solemn knowledge from remain-ing but knowledge and becoming stale as it growsfamiliar. There is no such justice done to the mindof Christ, there is no such seal and appropriationof His life, as when we realise the creative deathin it all; when we use our new sense of His soul toenhance the greatness of its constant outpouringunto death, and to magnify the propitiation wehave therein for our sin. It was the offered soulthat was the sacrifice, and not the mere demise. Itwas such a mighty soul,—the unspeakable richesof Christ—self-offered in holy obedience that wasthe propitiation, the satisfaction, the thing in whichthe holy Father was well pleased to the uttermost.The greater the dimensions, and the power, andthe sanctity of that living self, so much the greaterwas its self-sacrifice, so much more its value to holyGod. The supreme worth of it all was its valueto the Father, its value there for our impotent and132evil souls. He made an offering of His soul (as thevariant translation says), and poured it out untodeath. It is impossible for us to think that Jesus did


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not know Isaiah liii. And it is equally impossible tobelieve that, knowing it, such a soul as His, movingto such a doom, would not come to be engrossedwith that of all the passages in the Bible on whichHe fed His faith. The scanty allusion may be dueto several causes—some historical, like the entireabsence from His public of any such idea in thechapter as a suffering Messiah; others more or lesspsychological, both in Him and His. Chiefly, per-haps (as I have said) it is due to His reticence on anexperience which concerned that inmost life (withinthe inner) which we are not allowed to reach; to Hisreserve on an experience so deep and unspeakable,so foreign and unintelligible to those round Him.But to one thing it could not be due. It could notbe due to such motives in Him as lead some to-dayto blunt the edge and soften the point of certainphrases in the Isaian passage that carry the prophetbeyond ideas of mere martyrdom or sacrifice. Itcould not be due to a deliberate aversion of Jesusto the expiatory idea, to a distaste and avoidanceof certain phrases and thoughts most characteristicof that passage in the Old Testament which camenearest of all to reveal an atoning function and aredeeming act in Israel’s soul and Saviour.

“He made His soul an offering for sin.” If wewere free to treat His grief and death as literaturewould treat it, and as preaching treats it perhaps toooften—if we treated it Hellenically and æsthetically,His passion might appear as the greatest of all thetragedies which exhibit the heroic will as rising


against woe, but overborne in its noble protestby inhuman Fate. And who will say that such anelement is not in it? But that is not the note ofeither gospel or epistle in connexion with the deathof Christ. There is no trace of such a view, which,133however valuable, here is rather a modern antique.There is more in the New Testament conception ofChrist’s death than tragedy, even as, by virtue ofit, we are more than heroes and conquerors. Thereis no mistake about the suffering, even to agony;but Christ’s attitude to it is neither the hero’s northe martyr’s. He neither storms nor strives againstit. He does not let it break on His constancy as abroken wave. He is not simply fearless as the ruinsmites Him. Nor, on the other hand, is it a case ofloving resignation alone. He was never so much inaction as in His passion, nor so mighty. He suffersand dies because He wills it so. He wills the grief,He accepts it, He bears, transmutes, fertilises, andperfects it. He went down not defiantly, but withall His broken heart and soul and its power withGod. He made His suffering soul an offering toHis holy Father. He did not merely commend Hissoul to God’s hands, but He offered it up, and Hehallowed in the act God’s holy name and purpose.It was no mere godly end, but the victory in whichthe faith of the world-Soul overcame the world forthe Father. He took the doom in holy love, andabove all in the love of the holy. Never did suchlove and sorrow meet—I do not mean so much, butof such a holy kind. It was all a part and climax


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of His long, holy, saving obedience. It was enoughfor Him that God required it of Him. He had notheodicy. He did not ask God to justify His demand.“Even so, Holy Father, so it hath scorned good inThy sight.” We do not traffic in theodicics when weare crucified with Christ. And we are far beyondpoetry or art. He was reconciled to the Cross—asthe disciples, reconciled by it, had come to be beforethey could give the account of it they do. He (andthey in His wake) found it neither a bane nor anarrest, neither a martyrdom of His love nor an objectlesson of God’s, but a propitiation. Love may notmorally make sacrifice just to exhibit itself, may not 134cast itself from the pinnacle of the temple, withoutmeeting a real need, or doing a real objective serviceand duty which raises sacrifice above suicide. Andthe moral achievement in the sacrifice of Christ wasone that met with active and entire holiness the holyOne’s supreme need of such propitiation. But in theSon it was God’s self-propitiation, in which He didnot merely serve man æsthetically by a supreme andimpressive spectacle of love’s sacrifice, but reallydid something—His holy Self took away the sin ofthe whole world. It was a positive will and work ofGodhead. Christ’s deed was the supreme obedienceof the Son’s loving soul to the holy Father, and socomplete that in His work the Father worked, andour Maker was our Redeemer. The suffering was notdespised and defied, but made an offering to God.It was hallowed, not in itself but in the obedienceof it, as the will of God for our expiation, and His



dark sure way for our redemption. It was all doneunder God’s will, to which the soul of Jesus was aperpetual oblation, and one by death consummatedfor ever in an obedience that did not fail even in theshadow of God’s judgment, when, in a last crisis,the Son was denied the Father’s power, communion,or aid. To obey and trust a God with His face hiddenand His hand stayed, to accept in loving faith sucha will of God, was, for the Son of God, the heightof all obedience, trust, and love. Life had no higherservice for man to offer, and death could give nogreater worship or honour to God. Only it wasnot a mere arbitrary sacrifice and lesson of love,chosen without a moral necessity in its form, andmerely because it was extreme and impressive. Thatcomes too near the egoisms of self-mortification orof suicide to advertise a cause. It was required andprescribed by a holy God. And it was a service, joy,satisfaction, and atonement to the eternal holiness135which made for Jesus the keynote of fatherhood,the divine thing in love, and the spring of ourredemption. “Thou art our Holy One, therefore weshall not die.” All this seems to me as latent in theSynoptics as it is explicit elsewhere.

A word must be said on this moral perspective,to clear the way for much that follows.

In a discussion like this, concerned with life’s ac-tive powers, everything depends on the point fromwhich we start—whether it is a dynamic point and areal source, and if so what is the nature of the influ-ence that it exerts. When this is applied to the case


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in our hand it means that all depends whether webegin our approach from the divine holiness or thedivine love—in so far as these are distinguishable.

Now this is a question which some would answeroffhand by, asking, Where did Christ begin? But,simple as this looks, it is not so obvious as Simpli-cissimus thinks. Do we mean the beginning of Hisministry with its shining face or the foundation ofHis work in His broken heart? Do we have the foun-dation of His gospel expressed at the opening of Hiscareer? Was its distinctive note struck there? Or didany great change in His note take place at a point ofthat career?

As a matter of fact we must begin where Christended, and read every other gift by His last andgreatest.

Was there not a stage when He began to speak ofa death which did not seem inevitable at first, andto tune His message to that note? Was there not apoint where He passed from a more sanguine faithto one of shadow and even gloom—the more idyl-lic dawn deepening to the tragic close, and the senseof miraculous power from God trembling down bydisillusion to the sense of still greater power withGod? That there was some great change of the kindin His ministry it is not easy to deny, however westate it. Do we state it rightly if we say that in the 136former stage He was preoccupied with God’s givinglove, but in the second, as the moral foe was mea-sured and the conflict deepened; with the demandof the holiness in that love? Was there a point where



He took up His cross, and forsook all that love sodearly means for that which it so dearly costs? Wasthe morning sun covered in the evening blast? Didnot His preaching to the crowd of a radiant Father-hood pass, with His experience of His public and Hisproblem, into the preaching to Israel of a judgingFatherhood, and then into His own meeting of thejudgment? Did not His note change, as his work be-came more national, corporate, and racial, from thegenial to the judicial? The Cross, in which He was allgathered up, became (as the Church has found it) therevelation of God’s exigent holiness—only a revela-tion thereof by the way in which His love, equallydivine, met it. He began with a love meeting love,and a response in joy; He ended with a love meet-ing holiness and its reaction on sin. So that the con-ception of a genial Fatherhood (if there at all) goesback not to the Synoptics (which it can only do bytreating the passion as an incidental calamity andnot as a deliberate mission), but only to the first andbriefest part of the Synoptics. For the shadow ofthe Cross fell early on this rapt, swift and piercingspirit. I keep pointing out that it was the holiness inGod’s love, its demand rather than its benediction,that engrossed Him as He moved to His end. Thelove within Him was revealed less in the way Hegreeted the love without than in the answer He madeto the holiness above. Yet always in such a way thatHis love, first and last, was God’s love. God in Christends by meeting for us His own prime demand. Thelove that fills our needs is the love which first hal-

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lows His name. The love that blesses is at its deeperheart the love that atones. 137

We begin therefore where Christ ended. Wejudge the early stages of revelation by the last. Thatis the rule of spiritual evolution. And must wenot apply it to the revelation in Christ, if it tookplace as a real life under historic and psychologicalconditions?

And does it not stand to reason, to sacred rea-son? The prime thing in God is His holiness. FromHis holiness flows His love. We are apt to merge Hisholiness in His love. Or we think of it as a shield,or a stay, or a tonic of His love, or a preventive ofits misuse. But surely holiness must be first with aGod of love, and the first charge on love’s revela-tion. We shall not miss the love if we seek first theholiness; but are we so sure of the holiness when weseek first the love? The present state of the Church’sfaith may answer that question. Love is the outgo-ing movement which brings and gives—what? Loveis sacrifice—for what? What does God love in Him-self? Has the gift in God’s love not absolute moralvalue? What makes love divine—its pathos or itsethos, its amount as passion, or its quality as holy?Were He not the Holy what would the worth be ofthe love that gave us life? Would it be more than in-stinct raised to infinity? Must God not first be (if wewill speak so) the perfect and holy life before He cangive it? What can God’s love give at last but fellow-ship of His absolute and blessed holiness and Hisself-sufficiency of goodness? His love is precious as



His holy life in the outgoing—which must be therefirst in being. The wealth must first be there whichlove bestows. The motive matter in His love is Hisblessed and holy life, which would be less than holyif it did not go out to plant itself in command ev-erywhere, and especially where it was challengedmost. It is the absolute power and wealth of His ho-liness that goes out in love to fill our poverty in both.Our salvation was not wrung from His holiness norbought. It flowed from it. In our redemption He hal-138lowed His own name. He owed it to Himself. “I donot this for your sake, but for My holy name whichye have profaned.” In His love He gave the Self thatmakes Him what He is eternally, and is in Himselfand of Himself. His holiness was able to make Hisown propitiation, which was so willing in His love. Ifthe sin thus atoned is the worst thing in man, the ho-liness that makes it sin is the first thing in God. Anddid not Christ regard it so? Or are we reading intoHis thought of God more than His faith contained orHis words conveyed?


Chapter V

340MORAL FINALITY AND CERTAINTY IN THE

HOLINESS OF THE CROSS.

THE reason given by some who stake all on thepreaching or teaching of Jesus is that they find theremore than in any theology of His death to meet theirpersonal, subjective, and what they would call theirsimple religion. They do not always consider theneeds of a Church, nor the will of God for our greatbelief apart from personal edification. But evenfrom the personal point of view they are probablynot clear in their mind (never perhaps having raisedthe question) how or why this effect should flow tothem from the words of Jesus. Either (they mightsay) it is because these words “find” them, andcarry their own witness of their truth and powerin the pacifying, fortifying or exalting influence onthe soul—and then the standard of their effect issubjective as well as the experience. “Nothing buttruth could do me so much good,” they say. Or else

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it is because of the authority and force that breathe341in the words; from the personality of the Speaker.But, if they were further asked why that Speakershould be found so authoritative, and especiallywhy He should become at last the sovereign im-perative, they would fall back again probably onthe subjective impression He makes on them, ofwhich they can give no more account. And for theindividual that is quite good ground to take. Theissue, however, is more than individual and must bepressed. It presses itself. We cannot but ask at lastwhy He should become for the race the sovereignimperative, and more than the chief influence. Theanswer to that lies deeper than subjective impres-sion, and it becomes urgent as we widen our area ofconsideration to the scale of a Church and a race. Sobeing forced outside and beyond themselves somemay come to say that the authority of Jesus rests onthe authority for His divine nature of either a Bookor a Church. But each of these is a minor authority,because each is His creature, and is therefore reallyincapable of acting as an authority for His, or asmore than a witness of it. If, then, these fail them,if they are obliged to go deeper and directer for aconviction so vast, they might come to realise theweight of this—that they are themselves, as Chris-tians, the most immediate spiritual creation of theJesus who said these things, and His authority is thenew Creator’s; that they are His, not by the voucherof book or church, nor by the mere impression fromHis excellence upon the best that is in them, but by


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the redemption He achieved for them at their worst,and the regeneration He brought to pass in them.That is to say, the real source and guarantee of whatis most great and comfortable in His words liesneither in their nameless spell as spiritual truth, norin His as a spiritual hero and splendour; nor is it thewarrant of Bible or Church, which might extort an 342admission rather than create an experience of theirpower. No such things can give us an objectivityobjective and divine enough to be the real sourceof the permanent influence even of the propheticand preaching Christ on the world. Yet such anobjectivity we must have if the influence of Hisdoctrine on us is to be more than æsthetic, if it isto be religious in that deep and ethical sense of theword which transcends mere mood or manner, andassociates it with the reality of the conscience and itsregeneration to eternal life. That objectivity the NewTestament as a whole does find in the Speaker of thewords; but in something in Him which is more thanmajestic spell or moral dignity, something active andcreative, something which the Reformers describedas the testimony of the Holy Spirit, working not asan outward sponsor nor as a flashlight, but as theinward and intimate new life, the action in us of thevery power in which Christ offered Himself and rosefrom the dead—the Spirit of holiness (Rom. i. 4). Itfinds it in the Cross which is within Christ’s person,the work which meant most for Himself, always(however implicitly) at His core, and always, as Hetrod the long, dying way, rising to more conscious



command of His deepening soul, till He overcamethe world by it, and could no more be holden ofthe world’s death. It finds it in the priest within theprophet, the priest in the prophet’s mantle, in thesacrificial act which came to engross Him, whichdelivered the world from its last crisis of distress,and which put Him in control of the spiritual realm,the Kingdom of God, whether as seen or unseen,temporal or eternal, as history or as heaven. Hereemerges the distinction between an orthodox, apositive, and a liberal Christianity. Orthodoxy urgesthe necessity of a certain theological system forsalvation. Liberalism grounds faith on general ideasor sympathies native to man but roused by Christ,who gave them unique expression winged by His343great personality. While positive Christianity restsChristian faith on certain historic and saving facts,centring in the death and resurrection of Christ, asthe new creation of the race. The spiritual destiny ofthe race is the work of Christ’s atoning and creativedeath.

The work of Christ does not simply face us as alandscape or a heroism faces us for our appreciationand description. His words might so confront us,but not His work underlying them and rising bothto transcend them and suffuse them. It does not sim-ply stamp itself on us. It is not only impressive, butdynamic. It makes and unmakes us for its own re-sponse, it creates (it does not simply elicit) the powerto answer and understand itself. This we recognisewhen we say that our faith is not of ourselves, it is


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the gift of God by the Spirit. But we mostly mean thistoo vaguely, as if it were God’s gift by a second actof His Spirit distinct from the great, pregnant, andfontal gift of historic redemption in the Cross. Wetreat it as if it were a new departure and approach tous—that of the Spirit—forming another “dispensa-tion,” and, therefore, an arbitrary influence upon us;whereas it is a part or function of God’s one preg-nant deed and gift to us of Christ’s Cross, which hasa faith-creating power intrinsic to it as the completeand compendious act of redemption; for redemptionis really and at last faith-production. In this light theNew Testament belief, as the belief of the apostleswho were the first great products of the Cross, is theself-explication of the Cross, its exposition of itselfas the supreme act of the Holy Spirit wherein Christoffered Himself to God. The epistles especially areChrist in self-exposition. They are an autobiographyof His death. The substance of the apostolic mes-sage is the product of the work of the Spirit-filledChrist at its first, pure, potent, and normative source.The inspiration of the apostles means that the divine 344deed created its own atmosphere and its own au-thentic word by its very redeeming nature, by an ac-tion on men inevitable and reciprocal; as in a lyricthe thought or passion creates the one right form,and wears it not as a garment but as a body spiritualand immortal. We can say that Christ taught Paulfrom His exaltation, as He taught the disciples fromamid His humiliation; or that he was taught by theSpirit; or that it was the Cross explaining itself in the



faith of a great soul it had created anew. But, if theapostolic word of the Cross is in any sense the self-expression of the Cross, then it cannot be foreign tothe Saviour’s own word.

It is not as if we had to deal with two thingsalongside or confronting each other—Christ’s workof redemption and its response in the sum total ofits individual believers—two such things external toeach other, severed by time, and darkly joined onlyin a region at subliminal depths in the soul. If thatwere so, the deed of Christ would be featureless andimpotent, as it never was in His own consciousness.It would not create faith but only meet it. It wouldlose, above all, its nature and self-sufficiency of re-deeming power. Its redeeming principle and powerwould not be complete till our act of subjectiveappropriation—as its redeeming effect, of course,is not. But then our act of appropriation is also,in such a view, an incomplete thing. For it is acontributory work of ours, an act of our personality;and we can never be quite sure if we have done itfully or even adequately. That is to say, we havethe objective and the subjective parts of our religionso related that what we add to the one is takenfrom the other; owing to which view we have, onone side, deep believers in the Cross with a poorinsight into Christ’s character and discourse, and,on the other side, vivid devotees of these who seemlittle affected by the Redemption in His Cross. But,345if we are to treat the objective fact in our faith asreally full in itself of infinite power for us, it must


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be a fact like this. It must be such a paradoxicaland miraculous fact that the more it is outside thesoul and free of its variations so much the more itbecomes our subjective possession; as we are lostin it, we are full of it; we become (strange words!)the fulness of Him who already filleth all in all. Itis so fixed, deep and dominant in time that it isequally real and final for all time. The more it isindependent of the present and its distractions, as astorm-free fact of the past, so much the more is it thereal, eternal power for the present and its conflicts.But this is really and experimentally true only ofthe Christ of the redeeming and regenerating Cross.Apart from that experience all this is so intolerablydifficult and paradoxical, that it is easily dismissedas mannered and perverse. But the more we takestand on Christ’s Cross (or rather in it) the more wefind to prize in His own prior works or deeds in onedirection, and the more also we feel in commandof the deep, strange words and deeds of good menever since in the other. The more we find the Crossof Christ to be a finished act of reconciliation forus beyond our consciousness, so much the moredo we find it the ruling and growing experienceof our consciousness. Christ for us is the only true,effectual, and permanent condition of Christ, orindeed of the spiritual world, in us—meaning by usmankind, and not an elite of religious temperamentor culture. Here is the true and universal mysticism.The mysticism for the common man and all menis the mysticism of the conscience redeemed once


for all by Christ, the same yesterday and for ever.The faith that takes home to-day the work of Christin that far yesterday is not our contribution to it,not our “homologation” of it, but rather a presentcreation of it. The Cross of one Soul in Time becomesthe timeless power for every man. Christ’s work on346the Cross, therefore, and our faith in it are not twohemispheres which orb into the perfect star, anymore than the universe is a collocation of God andthe world. It is Christ’s death and resurrection thatwork on in us as our faith. Believing we rise withHim. We obey the same power which raised Himfrom the dead. Here again we have the testimoniumSancti Spiritus. Our overcoming of the world is afunction of His resurrection (as the obverse of Hisdeath). And our Christian mysticism is the sameChrist in us who was for us. It is the creation of anew man by the mystic yet active (not to say ethical)communion not of Him only but of His death andresurrection. This is the only source of a mysticismenergetic and not merely quietist, a mysticism whichis the fellowship of the divine Act rather than of thedivine Being. We do not sufficiently consider thatthe obedience of Christ was not simply to God’struth, as a prophet, nor to God’s will, as a saint, butto God’s saving work, which He did not merelydeclare nor reflect, but achieved and completed.The objective and the subjective, therefore, the pastand the present, are not in a contact where theone surface takes the imprint of the other, but ina polarity and a perichoresis, in which, however,


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the one pole is rather the creative source than thecomplement of the other. For such an order ofsubjective faith there is (even in Christ Himself)nothing objective with sufficient creative power butHis consummation as a complete and perfectingperson in the atoning redemption of the Cross, in theNew Covenant, and the creation of the new man. Inthis creative consummation all the discourse of Jesusis an organic underagent, speaking to us as neverman spoke because proceeding from such a personas man never was, and achieving such an eternal actof God as man never did, and never could do. 347

I desire to keep in view the Cross, the organiccrisis of Christ’s whole life, earthly and eternal, asGod’s one κήρυγμα, as the burthen, key, consumma-tion and purpose of Christ’s whole person and mis-sion, Who is “the Apostle of our confession.” Ourpreaching of that Gospel is not simply our true re-flection of Jesus, but a living function of that Crossitself. It is not mirrored in us but mediated. It isour witness viewed as His work, just as our faith isthe prolonged action of His resurrection (Eph. i. 19,20). It is that saving and finished act of God in Christreenacting itself sacramentally through the detail ofthe Church. We are not preaching Christ unless wepreach the Cross—either implicitly or pointedly—and the Cross not as a moral ideal, but as a historicact, as an objective deliverance and a subjective re-generation of man, something critical, decisive, pos-itive for all spiritual being in God or man. It is there,in the pointing of Christ’s person there, that we gain



the certainty of which criticism is apt to rob somewho stake their all upon the biography and the char-acter. It is there that we gain the certainty of His per-son and union with it, the finality of His work, andthe communion of His Holy Spirit.

And these are notes that the Church’s messagemust have if it is to survive, if it is to minister to thereal needs of the race’s soul, moralise the conscienceof society, and cease to linger as a tolerated tradition.Certainty and finality are the prime necessities whenthe conscience realises its actual case. It is not intel-lectual doubt that troubles us so much, it is religiousdoubt. It is not doubt about truths, or even facts,but about our soul—about our soul’s state and ourworld’s destiny. What is all the question raised byscience compared with the tragic doubt rising from aEuropean war which seems to knock the bottom outof a moral world; and yet that war is a less tragedythan the death of Christ.348

I found Him in the flowering of the fields,I found Him in the shining of the stars,But in His ways with men I found Him not.

It were well if we could turn all intellectual ques-tion into religious doubt. It would force the crisiswe need, and send multitudes of men into the valleyof decision. If men raised more searching questionabout their state before God, collective or individ-ual, and less about this or that problem, we shouldbe in a more hopeful way for the solution even ofthese problems. There are too many people work-


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ing on problems for the number that are concernedabout the soul and its task, whether in a man or anage. It might be well that people were less occupiedwith the problems of the text if they were more withthe problem of themselves and their kind. What weneed most is not intellectual certainty but evangeli-cal, not scientific history but history impressive, cre-ative, teleological. And that is why one turns awayfor a time, however gratefully, from the scholars tothe theologians, from the critics’ work upon the NewTestament to the believers work upon the Gospel.We must have footing from which to take our criti-cal work on the preaching of Jesus calmly, footing tolook down on it. And how can we do that if we areagitated every moment with the fear that our moralfoundation may give way, and we, and all our crit-ical apparatus, collapse? How can we pursue ourscientific treatment of the Gospels with mental quietand balance if we are momentarily threatened withthe loss of a Gospel, a Salvation, a Saviour, as its re-sult? How can we hopefully pursue anything, whenthe floor falls out of our civilisation in a Europeanwar caused by a Christian nation’s cynical negationof a world-conscience or a divine kingdom, unlesswe are founded on the divine victory in a moral strifemore mortal and awful still; which comes home to usin Christ’s Cross as a vaster tragedy and crisis than 349that through which we are living now? It is good, itis essential, that we be first established in history byGrace, and by the Grace of the historic Cross as thelast value in history.



It is only the experience of the Gospel that givesus the true point of command for the Gospels,whether it command all history for us or not. It isonly the epistles that give us the proper ποῦ στῶ forthe evangelists. It is only the apostolic Church thathas all the conditions for fertile criticism, it is not theState schools. It is only a Christ that we can verifyin our personal experience that makes us free todeal with those portions of the record which are nolonger matter of experience, as also with the judg-ments in history that appal experience. It is only theChrist of the indubitable Cross and its new creationof history that equips us with the certainty whichcan calmly discuss the challenge of the miracles,or the spectacle of public and Christian Antichristlet loose on a world more ready to admire Christ’steaching than to owe itself to that Cross. We shallapproach the historical evidence for the resurrectionof Christ with an essential factor in the verdict ifwe come from the experience of communion withthe risen Christ, and if we know (as Paul knew inEphesians) our faith amid a world-wreck to be thecontinued action of that resurrection and not merelyits effect. This is why the preacher might be reservedabout critical results or apologetical solutions till hehas secured the evangelical solution in continuitywith the Church’s inmost life of Redemption. It ishis work, it is the true method of the Church, toapproach the gospels through the Gospel; just asChristianity judges the world altogether not by itshistory but by Eternity, not by the progress dis-

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cernible in its career, but by a standard for progressitself, and one revealed by another world whichinvades it in the Cross. It is this construction of theneed of the hour that has turned the attention of 350some away (by comparison) from New Testamentcriticism to the New Testament Gospel and thetheology which is its truth and power. It is thesense of the time’s spiritual need that makes someregret to see a preacher claiming rational freedombefore he has realised spiritual, and discussing (oremitting) from his pulpit either critical results oreirenical optimisms before he has established hisflock in that personal experience of redemptionwhich so secures the heart and mind in advance thatit assures criticism of its full Christian liberty.

Finality and certainty, I venture to repeat, areprime necessities of religion when the conscienceis fully roused to its actual case. And they are theChurch’s monopoly, by virtue, not of an apprecia-tion of the preaching Jesus (which is much shared bythe natural world), but of the Church’s creation bythe most supernatural and anti-mundane thing thatever happened—the Cross of Christ as interpretedby Himself in His Spirit. The Church is equipped, byGod’s gift, with such a self-interpretation of Christin His climax of death as supplies that certaintyand finality. These form a demand unmet by anyview of that Cross which reduces its prime pur-pose to impression instead of either atonement orregeneration—to its action on us, whether morally



or emotionally, whether in producing repentanceor producing affection. If its chief object was tostir these, it is one that does not seem to have beenpresent to Christ’s mind as His passion came to itscrisis, when He was engrossed with God and withaction on Him. But also such impressionism doesnot give us a fixed point of confidence within thespiritual universe. It may waft us on a course butit does not anchor us behind the veil. It does notmoor us there amid the variations and misgivings ofour experience—our failures in ethic, our falsities inlove, our poverty of contrition. We need something351more than a preached, prophetic, or even dramaticassurance of forgiveness if we have really felt guilt’scrushing load or sin’s benumbing sting, and tastedthe need for redemption on the serious, searching,universal scale of God’s Holiness. We need a re-generation. We need the actual judgment of sin,which is the creative reaction of holiness upon it.And we need the actual and final (though not thepenal) satisfaction of holy God, a satisfaction bysanctity and not by suffering, by obedience and notby a victim. Our conscience would demand thaton His behalf, even did He make no such demandhistorically. To meet our case we must have morethan an impressive revelation of a love strongerthan death by its passion. We need to realise a lovestronger than sin by its holiness, love engaged inthe very act of destroying sin as holiness alone cando; we need, to see and realise the destruction ofsin by the establishment of the holy kingdom amid


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earth’s career. If the Cross was not the establishmentof this kingdom it was no fit close to a historic lifewhich had the kingdom for its burthen and task.And the death of Christ was then no essential part ofthe Gospel He preached. But all Christ’s teachingsabout the Kingdom were only facets of His act ofthe Cross, which founded it where nothing canbe shaken—on the holiness of God and what thatholiness both required and gave. Roused, melted, orcrushed by His words we need more than a presentGod for a help in time of trouble; we need a Goddoing eternal and historic justice to what is the mostperfect and real thing in the universe, and our ownlast interest there—to the holiness of His own love,which we have so deeply wronged. The effect onus of the mere spectacle of Christ carries us beyondspectacle. We need there an act of judgment andnot merely of exhibition, of reparation and not mereconfession. We need a confession so full and perfectas to be reparation—the full confession of the Holy 352by the Holy amid the conditions of universal sin.For the purposes of the Kingdom Christ preached.We need more than a God made mortal flesh; andwhat we are offered in Christ is God made sin for us.Our preaching is so often without due ethical nerveor result because the Church is too much detachedfrom the Kingdom and its word; it is becoming toomuch a revelation of love and too little a revelationof judgment, and of judgment sure and saving atlast, because securely come and spiritually completealready. It must not be a question of a judgment to



come, but a certainty of a judgment come once forall, and working immanently to effect always.

If any man sin it is not enough for our conscience,on the scale on which Christ viewed conscience, thatwe have a Father pitiful and patient in the knowl-edge that we are but frail dust. We have more thanthat in Christ’s consciousness of Himself, His mis-sion, and His power. It is said (1 John ii. 1) that inour sin we have an Advocate with the Father, per-fectly righteous; Who by His very sanctity is not sim-ply a skilled pleader but a merciful and faithful HighPriest; nay, who is a judgment-laden Propitiation;and therein so perfect and holy as to be a perpet-ual joy and full satisfaction to the holy God over allthe horror and tragedy of human sin; a delightsomePropitiation, on the whole scale of that sin also, thewhole scale of history and of the world; nay, one onthe scale of God, since in all Christ does He is nomere bystander or third person with good offices be-tween God and man, but the Father’s Eternal Son;so that the propitiation is in and from God Himself;God makes it, and it is the first charge upon His ini-tiative and re-creative love (1 John iv. 10).

But when all that is said are we moving awayfrom the historic Christ to an apostolic fancy? Willit be pleaded that this tremendous New Testament353conception, which no true penitent can rehearsewithout an emotion deeper than tears, really deflectsand minishes the true greatness of Christ’s offeredsoul? Is it anything but the mind of Jesus thepreacher made explicit in minds to whom by His


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Cross He had become Christ the Gospel?A Cross whose purpose was exhausted in such

moral effect on us as is associated with the preach-ing of Jesus might convince us that our guilt wasput behind God’s back; would it convince us thatfrom there it would never look out upon us again?For an absolute confidence, we need to know thatit was surmounted and destroyed for good and all.Its ceasing to press on us at any time would give usno surety that it had therefore ceased to be; and if itdid not cease to be it might still rise up against us.God’s work on sin, Christ’s work, is not perfect ifHe only remove its reproach in us; the sin has to beundone, especially as guilt. He must exert His holymight in a final judgment not only of silence but ofruin on it. It must be more than covered, it must beextinguished; else it might lift its head and hide thegrace it could not kill. And this destruction of sinwas brought about in its judgment on the Cross—its judgment and destruction as a world-power byChrist when He set up in history an eternal holiness.

But shall we go farther than by Christ, and stillbe true to the Word of Jesus? Shall we speak ofsin’s judgment in Christ? Shall we go beyond thejudgment Christ inflicted on sin, and speak of itsjudgment inflicted on Christ, of sin’s condemnationin Him, in the awful warfare in His moral person-ality? This is a question to which I must return.For it is of no small moment to the complexion ofa preached Gospel, and to the Church’s commandof its message, whatever individuals may think or


feel. But I will leave the matter at this stage withthe observation that, while great care is needed in354the way we put it, the full tragedy, as well as thefull glory, of the situation is not realised till we viewChrist in some due way as “made sin for us,” not asthe judge alone but as the victim of judgment, withthe chastisement of our peace upon Him.

The destruction of human sin and the satisfactionof a holy God on the Cross make a moral act ornothing; and a moral act in a deeper sense than anypreaching of a facultative forgiveness could be, evenby Jesus. Being the creation of God’s Kingdom, itis not a fiat nor a tour de force, but a moral conquestwithin the Eternity immanent in Time. The unholything is destroyed by the condensed moral energyof the Holy One, in a conflict wherein a thousandyears are as one day. It was where the Fall was—inthe timeless conscience within history—that thedecisive battle was fought and won; just as I havesaid that progress within time can only be measuredby standards that look in imperiously from eternity.And it is the conscience that understands that vic-tory, and gives the great response to it. Christianityis no mere moralism; but in its most mystic depth itis more of an ethos than a pathos, a moral re-creationmore even than a revelation of kindness. Did themessage of Jesus reveal chiefly love’s affection orits holiness? Surely it is a conscience more troubledabout God’s holiness than even its own shame,lovelessness, or doom that understands the last


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word on such a matter as the Cross of the Preacherof the Holy Father. It is the holy sorrow of theforgiven, the mature repentance and regenerationof the sanctified, that places us in the most vitalcontact with the loving work of the Redeemer. Itis the holy that appreciate the Holy One, and theconditions of His love. But I mean the holy of theswift and piercing conscience, the holy of the pas-sionate and tragic soul, the holy who are forgiven 355ranch—it is they rather than those white flowers ofthe blameless life, the angelic purity, and the mysticmood; it is regenerate Launcelot more than nobleArthur. Our public life, which has suffered fromthe ineffectiveness both of a commercial orthodoxyand a sentimental liberalism, needs to be braced bya more subtly ethical grasp of the moral source ofour race’s Redemption. Back to Christ must meanback more searchingly with the human conscienceto the Cross, and back, therefore, to the primacyin revelation of the holy. The conscience of theWest owes most to the Christian Cross. And nowthat that conscience publicly collapses and needsreconstruction for God’s Kingdom, it is back to theCross the Church must go, and to the Kingdom’smoral foundation there, if she is to be the true andeffective international. Man can be morally remadealways and only by his Redeemer. There is no regen-eration apart from redemption, and no redemptionapart from regeneration. And the reconstructors arenot the educational ethicists but the regenerativepreachers, the true gospellers to a conscience that



needs life more than light. They need not lay downan ethic of social progress, nor prescribe businessprecepts, nor agitate economic programmes. Butthey must go into the wilderness and preach theCross in a way that for a time may please neitherhard orthodoxy nor mild liberalism. But it shouldcompel both to a new sense of moral holiness, ofloving repentance, and of such righteousness, publicand private, as cannot but flow from that spring atthe heart of things. If the Cross, as the crisis of God’sconscience, were as much the source of the publicconscience as it is the centre of public sentiment,man should be well within the Kingdom of God.If the fellowship of the Resurrection were as muchthe partnership of the Saviour’s holy and creativeenergy as it is of a still and detached piety, the new356heavens would break up through a vernal earth.Our every act of faith would be a function of thatResurrection. And Christian men would then find itpossible to guide the gathering of their wealth withthe same Christian principle as so often guides itsdistribution when it has been gained. We shouldspend ourselves as christianly in the getting as in thegiving. Whereas the giving is often much wastedbecause of the taint that is on it from the getting. It isvery inadequate because of the wounds the gettinghas made either on the getters or the losers.

The aggressive Church must incessantly renewits strength and refine its quality at such a Crossas fits the Saviour’s invincible sense of holy powerover the world’s evil, a sense which meets us even


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in the opening chapters of Mark. It must gather itsstrength at the Cross taken with soul-seriousness,and with the moral realism that loses no whit eitherof God’s grace or man’s devilry. That region is theChristian’s native air; for it is the climate in whichJesus not only began but went to His death and rosefrom it to be the providence of His own Salvation,and to expound from heaven that holy victory toits chief trophies in the apostles. We can, of course,bore the world with talk of the Cross—as we may astranger with vernacular talk, or tales of our nativeland. The public has been thus bored with it. Andwe can do nothing with people we bore. But whenthe Church is bored with the Cross (and not withthe preacher), when it is bored with an AtoningCross, even if it prize a sacrificial, it is losing itscreative source and its Holy Ghost, and ceasingto be a Church. It may be said the Church neveris bored with the true Cross—only with men whowould bore people whatever they talked about,or with notions too old to be talked about. Is thatquite certain? Are there no Churches that dislikethe preaching of an atoning Cross, even by the mostvivid voice, as mere theology? Have there never 357been preachers who have lost the Cross in preciousthings like sympathy, sentiment, idealism, and thelike, divorced from eternal things like repentance,forgiveness, and regeneration by the Holy Ghost?The most impressive preacher will make no stand-ing Church unless he have a secret deeper thanimpression. And that is the secret of regeneration,



stored in the new creating Cross, whose chief value,even for its effect on man, is its value to the Godwho engrossed the whole thought and sacrificeof the dying Jesus. Impressive preaching makesan audience, but it is regenerative preaching thatmakes a Church. And regenerative preaching findsthe chief value of all that Christ said in what He did,and did unto God.

To many it has been and is a great trouble, whenthey considered the action of Christianity on theworld, to have to own the slow progress madeby the Church, and even the imperfect machineryleft us by Christ for covering the world with trueChristians. They are bewildered to note that theGospel of the Cross does not do more to realisethe teaching of Jesus. But while we sympathisewith the passion, we may correct its impatience,which has at times done something to delay itsown goal by increasing the machinery at the costof the soul. Whole Churches may make this falsechoice by a greater interest in the increase of agen-cies or adornment of fabrics than in the religiouseducation or care of their ministry. And to correctour impatience and comfort our longing we mayask ourselves if we have duly measured either thenature or the size of the problem. We may take thehistoric hint that God’s ways are perhaps not ourways, nor His thoughts ours in such matters. Whenwe perceive the slowness and the groping of theChurch’s action in history we may cherish a doubtwhether the speed and success which are our eager

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desire really correspond to the supreme purpose 358and method of Christ and His Salvation. And it mayoccur to us, if we really believe that Christ is alwayshaving His perfect work, to infer that some otherpurpose ruled Him and His mission at last besides aswift ingathering of men or nations, and a promptestablishment of the Kingdom on earth. We may goaside for a little to realise in Him when He reachedHis Cross another object, far less palpable but farmore powerful, taking precedence of His effect onthe world, and regarding rather His effect on God.If His supreme work was one directed to God ratherthan man, the pace of its influence on man must waitupon the manner of its action on God. Its catholicitymust wait on its holiness (whereas the Church isalways sacrificing its sanctity to its success). If itwent first to deal with a holy God, it achieved amoral task as much greater than any task of historyas God is greater than man. But moral progress isthe slowest of all, by the call it makes on the soul’sfreedom, and the curb it lays on its egoism. Byhow much the greater, therefore, the gospel is asa moral achievement within the soul’s eternity, byso much the more it must linger in the progress oftime. We may find both consolation and patiencein the remembrance that, however it fail with men,its success with God was complete and final. And itwill go the faster with history the more deeply weenter into the moral secret of its effect in heaven.Man finds himself as he is found in God. And it isthe victory in Eternity that prescribes the conduct of



the campaign in Time.

Nothing does more than the new social con-science to withdraw interest from the atoning andapostolic value of the Cross of Christ, and to confineattention to its sacrificial and altruist worth—to turnit from being the source of the world’s new creationto be but the centre of the world’s moral scene, or359the summit of its moral ideal. It is forgotten that theatoning Cross (with its voucher of the Resurrection)became the source of the greatest moral Society theworld has ever known, or can know, in the ChristianChurch.

Truly, to touch the nerve of the social sore wemust pierce to the social conscience. But we do nottouch the moral reality of the race and its consciencetill we come into real relation with that which fulfilsall righteousness, with goodness universal and abso-lute, with the holy, with the holy judgment and jus-tification in Christ’s Cross. There is no moral futurefor a society in which Christ is but the prophet ofsocial righteousness, and His Cross but a prophet’sreward.

It is the Christian belief that nothing but Chris-tian love can save the world. But could the teach-ing, or even the example, of Christ produce it onthat saving scale, and work the radical change on hu-man egoism? Christian love grows out of Christianfaith—it cannot take the place of faith. And faith ismarked, first or last, by two things Jesus never lostfrom sight—by wonder and repentance; wonder be-


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fore the miracle of grace, and repentance before itsholiness. It is faith in a holy God’s strange Graceto His enemies, and not in His natural affection forHis offspring, nor in anything common equally tothe just and the unjust. And in a world like thisthe Grace of God is not the Grace of a just and holyGod unless it pass to us through an atoning, judg-ing, and justifying Cross. If God is the holy one thatChrist revealed Him to be, could He be duly metand owned by a cross that was no more than theheight of that self-sacrifice and service which Jesustaught? Surely as it is holy love, so it is holy Gracethat is the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ—Grace thatfulfils and satisfies all righteousness, i.e., the abso-lute holiness of God. Such is the God and Grace of 360Christ, of Paul, of Luther. And it is between this holy,judging, atoning God, both of Epistle and Gospel—it is between that God and no God that the worldhas at last to choose. Let us deal as patiently andconcessively with individuals as we may. It is notalways kind or wise to force individuals on sharpdilemmas—especially young and raw minds, whosefaith is being made out of love, whereas at the firstlove grew out of faith. That change means some dif-ference in treatment. The tyro must be led on andbuilt up from where we can begin with him. Butwe are occupied at the moment with society ratherthan the individual, with the trust and message ofthe Church, and not with the piety of its membersor catechumens. And between the Gospel and So-ciety it comes to be a great Armageddon, forcing us



on the final and founding position which makes theChurch what it is. That final position is not a halfwayhouse. It is an absolute and eternal alternative. Itis the human soul’s last dilemma. Christ does forcethe last stand and the last verdict of the consciencefor Himself or for His enemies. On the way manywho are not against Him are for Him, but at the endthose who are not for Him are against Him. Whenwe come there, to the last great battle, the choice isnarrow but vast, brief but yet endless, and as straitas it is sublime. It is really a choice between the Re-deeming God and no God that the world has to face.Nay, can we avoid going the full length with moralthoroughness and saying that it is a choice betweenthe crucified, atoning God and no God? It is not be-tween mere Fatherhood and Atheism; it is betweenRedemption and Atheism. If God has revealed Him-self as Redeemer, nothing but such a Christ can saveus from Atheism. The protection from Atheism isnot Deism, but boldly a Trinity of salvation. It iswith the Gospel, not simply of a loving God, but of agracious, an atoning and redeeming God, providing361His own propitiation, that the Church is charged tothe world. The loving, liberating God is not explicitenough. He is not concrete enough. He is not inti-mate nor even relevant to the world’s moral case. Hedoes not meet the sharp dilemma, last despair, andworld-tragedy of the soul. The God in Christ was nota liberator nor an ameliorator, but an absolute andeternal Saviour, and not from the world simply butfrom perdition. He is the Creator, in the moral crisis


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of the Cross, of a holy Kingdom; and only if we placethe act of such a God at faith’s centre (as the NewTestament does) can we do for Society the most vitaland fontal service of moralising its religion. The truesocial ethic is at last evangelical. It is the explicationin practical detail of that adjustment of sin to sanc-tity, of man’s conscience and God’s, which was doneonce for all, fontally and creatively, in the Cross ofour religion. I speak here of the great world-Gospelin the charge of the great world-Church. Of course,individuals going out with that Gospel have largediscretion for their own idiosyncrasy, and for partic-ular cases. And the Church has to do it justice by theexercise of much discretion always, and due knowl-edge of the facts, deadly or divine. But what makesthe Church the Church is its message to the world—and this message at last of a historic salvation andKingdom once for all. Its only power with the worldis a Gospel which in the long run leaves no choiceor compromise between the Redeemer God in Christand the no God, or the æsthetic God of civilisation.If society reject Redemption it is choosing moral re-lapse, however it may try to stand still or to softenits own fall.

The movement of human thought and progressdoes us this service—it forces us by a process ofexhaustion on the God reconciling by a judgmentin Christ’s atoning Cross. The Judaistic God hasbeen tried and failed. The Hellenic God is a dead 362God, a lovely and melancholy shade. The God ofmere retributory wrath and distributive justice is



gone—as has his antithesis, the humanistic God ofmere benevolence and kindly love. The God of merefatherhood fails a conscience stern with itself, failseven the heart that outgrows domestic interests,and certainly cannot keep a church alive. And theGod of the stoic moralist has retired—the God of thestoic moralist Who just lets us reap, by an ethicalNemesis, what we sow, and rewards us by a reflextariff, according to our works. The unknown God,to whom science has been paying the worship ofnescience—He is as good as gone. The God is gonewho is never at home to callers, however vigilantHe is of His victims. And by all such failures, in themoral pressure of life and the growing tragedy ofhistory, where a sea of brother’s blood now criethfrom the ground, we are shut up to Christ, to theblood of Christ, speaking better things, and to theGod and Father of Christ redeeming upon HisCross. The atoning Christ of the long procession ofcatholic faith and sanctity cannot be in such conflictwith the prophetic Christ of the Gospels as we areasked to believe. A Christ thus rent could not haveproduced even the Christianity we see. And thecontrast is less the more seriously we take suchwords as love, mercy, or holiness. At their richestthey are flushed with the blood of Christ. If wepierce Christ’s mind, we must come out in Paul,who said of himself, “Our thoughts are Christ’sthoughts” (1 Cor. ii. 16); or in John, for whom thefirst gift of the first love was not a mere boon but apropitiation (1 John iv. 10). Christ’s God, and Paul’s,

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and John’s, and Peter’s survives alone, facing withdue seriousness and sanctity the god of the period,or the polytheism of the distraught age. There aremany that have gone on to lose their God becausethey began by losing the Cross as more than aheroism. Can it be otherwise at last if it be true that 363God’s real self-donation is in His propitiating andredeeming love? There are some, still Christian, thatlose their God by living in their piety, more than inChrist’s grace. We can all lose our God by ceasingto find and read Him for ourselves at His moralrendezvous in a Cross more holy than even heroicor pathetic. Would the moral mind of the public bewhere it is now, would the Church itself be capableso often of the moral density which lays it open tothe cynicism of the world, if so many Christians hadnot softened the Cross and lost the Saviour of theirconscience in their culture of the heart? It is possibleto cast out devils in Christ’s name, be the best ofSamaritans, be very impressive, tender, and mystic,and do many wonders, and yet never know Himas He strove and died to be known. It is possibleto care for Him and yet care little for that for whichHe cared most. It is as possible to lose the true Godin general benevolence as it is to lose benevolenceitself in selfish spirituality. It is possible to be fullof domestic affection and to be a public Satan. Wehave gained much from humanitarian love andmystic spell; but, unbased on Christian faith, andprinciple, and power, it goes down before the haste,taste, worldliness, and selfishness of civilisation,



like the gentle Peruvians before Spain. It is unequalto the problem of history. A cultured Christianityof fatherhood leaves a Church without the moralpower that should keep nationality from being aninhuman egotism and a world curse.

What is around us at this moment is all a parable,nay, a sample, of the moral debacle that civilisation,progress, enterprise must come to, unless from itssoul it worship a self-revealing, man-redeeming,holy and gracious God in Christ. Progress andliberty are much, but righteousness and peace areworlds more; that is, if at the centre of our Chris-364tian religion we have also the eternal victory andstandard of moral power—if we have the insight toknow that the moral principle hallowed and securedin the atoning Cross goes far beyond the practicalethic or religious prospects of the individual, and isidentical with the principle on which the universesubsists and the foundations of the moral worldare laid. This is what the Church preaches as theGospel of Christ—the moral and spiritual crisis ofthe universe. Is it really a different word from thatwhich was in the mouth of Jesus, as the lever to liftthe wise, able, efficient, and progressive world outof its moral wreck or ineptitude on to the rails of theKingdom of God, of a holy, judging, saving God?

There are at least three features, not to say foun-dations, of a religion of Atonement on the ethicalplane. First the supremacy of conscience, or thehegemony of the moral, in human affairs. Second,and by consequence, the absoluteness and finality


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of the holy in matters pertaining to God. The firstquestion to be put to every theology concerns itsjustice to the holiness of God’s love. And, third,the human tragedy as the site of revelation. Thatis to say, we shall look for the normative actionand decisive revelation of God where we need itmost—in the region of life’s collisions, crises, doomsand despairs rather than in the region of its law,order, and happy evolution. Revelation is moredramatic than rational. And war touches its nervemore than peace.

If we come with these requirements the only an-swer is the apostolic.

Were they the features of the mind, message, andmission of Jesus?

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445IN WHAT SENSE DID JESUS PREACH THE GOSPEL?

THE second question that faced us in connexionwith Christ as preacher was the somewhat strangeinquiry, Did He preach the Gospel?

To that there can surely be but one answer atlast—unless the Evangelists have painted out theGospel with Apostolic theology. The Gospel of merebenignant fatherhood, of the natural man magnifiedand infinitely good, Jesus did not preach, but theGospel of a holy gracious fatherhood in a Kingdomfounded and opened by Himself alone He did. Hedid not preach a natural sonship spiritualised, buta sonship based upon God’s holy will and graciouschoice rather than upon mere continuity of nature.Israel was God’s son, not as a sample of the nationsbut as elect from them. And Christ’s word, so based,was a sonship of grace and redemption rather thana childship by creation. It was a new and greatercreation, a second creation with the first but as its

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prelude. A sonship of faith and repentance, oneconferred and not inborn, was His ruling thought,as it was Paul’s, who struck Christ’s true note in themetaphor of adoption. We have not two Gospels.Paul took seriously and developed Christ’s funda-mental principle of grace—to every man this penny,as a gift and not a wage; and the faith he found sofundamental was its response. Jesus preached agospel of grace calling for faith rather than of lovecalling for love. He intended love, but He did notask for it. But He asked for faith, sure that faith inHim must work into love. 446

Still, in the precise form in which Paul preachedthe Gospel Jesus did not preach it. He did far morethan that, I have said. He brought it, He achieved it.He provided the act and fact which Paul expounded,which He expounded in Paul. His preaching of theGospel would have been felt to lack fulness by alistener bred in our modern evangelical schools.And indeed it would not have satisfied Paul, as itdid not save Peter, John, or Judas from their fall. Forin the interval had not the Cross come and gone?Would Christ’s own teaching have had the sameform had He preached after the Cross instead ofbefore? Was the preaching of Paul not in substancethe posthumous preaching of Christ Himself? ToPaul, I say, would not Christ’s preaching in theSynoptics have savoured of those limitations of thefleshly Christ that belonged to His humiliation, andwere dissolved in the full Christ, dead and risenby the Spirit of holiness, and superseding within



him his own personal life and thought? It is certainthat the burthen of the parable of the Prodigal isnot the Gospel which Paul, with all the Church, putἐν πρῶτοις—that Christ was delivered for our sinsaccording to the Scriptures. But is it not also certainthat the parable contains less the marrow of theGospel than a prime aspect of it for a purpose, thatit was apologetic in its occasion—not addressed topoor prodigals, but to carping Scribes and Pharisees;that it has nothing of God’s seeking love nor of theevangelical providence which corners a man intomercy; that its historical centre of gravity is not theprodigal but his brother, and its eye was on the elderson rather than the younger; and that it was meantless as a gospel than as a defence, or a rebuke?The younger son forms the large foreground of thepicture, but not its key. Christ spoke in the parablethe Gospel of the Father’s pitying love, forgivingthe penitent but not seeking the lost; but that wasall that the occasion required. He had enough to447say at other times about seeking and saving thelost—indeed in the same group of parables. Andthat element is what culminated, out of all Hislife-prelude, in the Cross. What He enacted therewas the Gospel of a grace not merely receiving andblessing but at great cost redeeming. And aboutthat He said little. He said least about what filledand taxed Him most—as the way of such men is.Such men do the things which kindle others toadmire, worship, explain, or enforce. They do thingswhich compel their explanation in the very report


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of them, and which cannot be reported withoutbeing enforced in the act. There is a fulness whichoverflows into speech; and there is a fulness whichis poured only into action. The latter is the fulness ofdivine strength; and it was Christ’s. “The eloquenceof inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiorsis in action,” says Donne. The fulness of Godheadcan utter itself only in a deed, and neither in a truthnor an emotion. One is tempted sometimes to thinkthat all the tragedy of the Church and its divisionsis due to the central fatal fallacy that the matterof revelation is truth. It is the most inveterate ofall the errors and heresies. It is quite shallow andmisleading to point to parables such as that of theprodigal, in proof of the non-atoning character of theGospel. We might as easily, by the same reference,deny either the Father’s seeking love or the actionof a Holy Spirit, or many other central elements ofexperienced faith. In the greatest work of Christthe parables were adjuncts and expedients. TheCross showed how powerless they were to avertthe doom. They were in a sense by-products. Ihave ventured to call them facets of the cross and itskingdom. Like most of His other words they lay lessin the route of Christ’s action on the whole world,than in the course of His direct and “occasional”contact with Israel, in the junctures between Hispeople and Himself. And they were so conditioned, 448and so narrowed. Their truth was not only coloured,but measured to their occasion. In their reservelay some of the secret of such effect as they had.



They were so effective because they were made toconverge so upon the situation, and speak to theissue of the moment. But His great world-missionand Gospel Christ enacted and did not illustrate(unless we treat the Supper as a parable instead ofa gift). His love was always more of a deed and apower than a word or a passion. It was an energyand quality of His will. At its height on the Crossit was the silent deed of obedience to God, or ofdestruction to Satan. And all the Church’s upwardhistory and thought, all the deeper moralisation ofthe world, is but giving tongue to this eternal Act ofholiness by the renewal of the Holy Ghost.

Christ did not preach the Gospel in the sense ofthe word that has almost become slang. He becamea Gospel to preach. He was God’s Apostle, as Paulwas His. God was in Christ reconciling, as Paulat the heart of His apostolate lived not, but Christlived in Him. The prime interest in the case of bothmen was their occupant not their audience, themessage and not the impression, fidelity to Godand not favour with men, the Gospel and not theChurch, the revelation rather than the inspiration,and the inspiration more than the success. It is amost surprising thing that Paul should have viewedthe destruction (not to say annihilation) of the greatmass of his contemporaries with so little concern.It is mainly explicable by the fact that his first andengrossing concern was with Christ, and not withman, as Christ’s was with God. He could not see forthe glory of that light. This is the secret of Christ’s

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power with man—His preoccupation with God.And Paul’s preoccupation by Christ is the reasonwhy he has done more for man in Christ’s namethan any other believer. Can we always do the dutyof the hour, and especially of the great crucial hour, 449by direct sympathy, by simply putting ourselves inour opponent’s place? Is there not a duty to Godand right, for which we must not indeed hardenour heart to others, but must still confess that theyare beyond us and our responsibility, and committhem to the judgment of the same God as we haveto serve by neglecting or resisting them? We cannever do most for man by obsession with man. Paulwas filled by a Christ whose sphere was Humanity,and in whose hand were all the generations. Christwas made unto Him eternal redemption. His realpassion was not the modern social passion of savingmen from misfortune, but the moral passion ofsaving them for Christ. His ideal was not manglorified in Christ, but Christ glorified in man.And the long result of his apostolate shows howsound this principle of his preaching was, howhumanitarian, and how effectual in the end if notat the first. We should have to spend less care andthought on the art of getting at the people if wespent more of both on the Gospel, the Christ, forwhom we want them. And we should save ourGospel from much religious debasement and futility.Missions are seriously threatened because we havebeen trying to do more for souls than for Christ, andunderstanding them better than we do the Gospel.



We can do less by winning people for Christ than bycarrying home to them a Christ Who wins them. Ifwe thought less of saving men and more of savingChrist among men, more men would be saved; forthe saved would be better and mightier men. It isour Gospel, our Christ, that tells in the end morethan our preaching.

I have placed Paul’s relation to Christ in analogywith Christ’s relation to God—“I in you, as theFather in Me.” And I have spoken about Paul’spreoccupation with Christ. This leads me to amplifya remark already made about Christ’s preoccupa-tion with God, and especially so in the crisis of450the Cross. According to the account it was notman’s case that Christ felt to be the first chargeupon Him but God’s. He went to His death not,primarily, because man needed it, but because Goddid, because of the divine δεῖ. Deeply as He felt thewounds of men, He felt more deeply their wound toGod. Pitifully, freely, as He healed men’s wounds,He healed the wound to the Holy one still more.Whether He preached the Kingdom, or suffered forit, it was as the Kingdom established the holiness ofGod. He did not die to satisfy divine justice in theretributory, penal sense; for the fulness and powerof His deed was in its perfect obedience and notin its deep agony. But in that perfect obedienceHe did die to honour and delight the holy Name,that in the holy Son and all His believing train theholy Father might come to His own and be wellpleased for ever. The essence of the sacrifice was


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that response and obedience of the Holy to theHoly which we call prayer; an eternal communion,sacrifice, and intercession. And in Christ’s world ofprayer as of thought it was always that interest ofholiness, of love’s absolute righteousness, that camefirst. On the very front of His prayer the Father’sdesecrated name had to be hallowed by its practicalconfession in a perfect holiness of response, beforethe Kingdom should come either in earth or heaven.And that is the nature of Atonement—the practicalhallowing of God’s name in Humanity by the Son ofGod and in the sight of God. It was not so much thedivine confession of our sin as it was the confessionwhich sin had killed—the practical confession, fromthe sinner’s side, and on the scale of the race, of theholy judgment of God, as the conscience of the Holyalone could measure it and own it.

It is plausibly put forward that much of the insis-tence on an Atonement seems to give the holy lawan existence and a claim outside God which Jesus 451never recognised, and which did not leave God freeto be His gracious self till it was satisfied. But suchAtonement is not in the New Testament anywhere,nor does it flow from its Gospel, to which it does nohonour. It would make the divine task easier andmeaner than it really was. Had God been but a Kingor a Judge, sitting beside a law He guarded but didnot make, a law over Him, a law He was responsi-ble to and for, the situation would have been sim-pler and slighter. He could then perhaps have found



means, easy to a divine intelligence, to compromisewith the law, or get round it. But God’s holy law isHis own holy nature, the principle of His own holyheart, the life action and norm of His moral person-ality, with no source or authority outside Himself,and no claim He could even wish to ignore or evade.To tamper with it would have been to deny His ownsoul. He loves it as He must love Himself, or Hisother self, His very Son, His Holy One, dearer toHim than all men and all prodigals. A wound tothat holy law of His Being is a stab to His own heartat least as keen and urgent as any love or pity Hemight feel to men. Nor could the passion for men ofthe God that Christ preached be satisfied till He sawon their side (or in their Head and Surety) a holinesslike His own, and not merely a merit deserving holi-ness. For all His love is holy love, if Christ representit as truly as He does man. The question, therefore,is not one of God’s coercion by a law which is to Himas Fate was to Zeus. Nor is it a question of a strug-gle between justice and love. The crisis was no suchstrain, but one more severe. It was between love andlove. He loved His own holiness, especially in itscounterpart in His Holy Son; and He loved His un-holy sons of men. And His Grace in Atonement isthe secret of His doing justice to both in a judgmentby Godhead provided, by Godhead borne and byGodhead understood. It is beyond us what manner452of love the Father hath bestowed on us that we mightbe called Sons of God. He so loved the world, in amanner so unique, that He gave His Son as a propi-


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tiation, as a critical, supreme, and historic exercise ofthat satisfaction wherein Father and Son ever delightin each other’s holy person and are well pleased eachwith the other’s sublime Act. Christ’s incarnation ofGodhead was really His supreme, perfect, and joyfulpreoccupation with a holy God.

It was, therefore, even in the record, an objectiveredemption that engaged Him. He was above allengaged with God, and with what God needed fromHim. He was doing for man something more thanHe did directly on man. Redemption is action in thehighest sense; that is, it is real action on spiritualreality. This was the case with the forgiveness thatChrist exercised in His lifetime. It was an act thatdrew on His divine power more severely than thehealing did. It had been easier to cure the paralyticthan forgive him. Forgiveness was an act dealingwith a power and an enemy outside man moredeeply than His exorcisms did. It is remarkable, butthe exorcisms seem to receive in the Synoptics moreattention than the raisings from the dead—possiblybecause they indicate Christ’s power over, not onlyHades, but Hell, not only over the dead but over themore deadly demons; because they invade Satan’sseat rather than the abode of souls, the citadelof the power that grace had to cope with.1 Andperhaps we may pause a moment here to observe

1 In the Fourth Gospel there are no exorcisms, and the con-flict with Satan is prominent. Though of course there is theraising of Lazarus.


on the function of the miracles in general that, in theSynoptics at least, they were not done to convince.They were not there chiefly as evidence, as preach-ing. They were refused when asked as evidence.And they were not done to impress; for Christ wasno thaumaturgist. But they were done as divine453blessings, to glorify God by giving positive relief toindividual need. They seem to have been movedoften by irrepressible pity, though it always waitedon the Father’s will. They were even forbidden tobe published, for fear of an impression that wouldnot suit Christ’s larger purpose. And they remainedgood in their effects when the impression faded—asmere gratitude and wonder do fade. “Where are thenine?”

I have already hinted that love which dies withno other object than to show love or create an ef-fect is morally unreal, and could not therefore reflectChrist’s view of His own death. It is stagey love. Ifit die, not in the course of duty to God but in theway of a device with men, not in rendering a posi-tive service or averting a real peril but as a powerfulspectacle, not to deal with an objective crisis but toexhibit a subjective volume of passion, if it die but toimpress its love and provide an effective proof of it,then it is more or less acting. It is saltless sacrifice. Itis more or less gratuitous, more or less of a pose, and,to that extent, loses in moral result and even tendsto hypocrisy. The lady who threw her glove amongthe lions simply that her knight for her glory might


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exhibit his love, deserved the contempt with whichhe flung it in her face. This defect is what impairsthe so-called “moral theory” of Atonement, in so faras account is had only of its effects upon man, as apublic tribute to the moral order,2 or as a moving ex-hibition to man of love, pity, and sacrifice. It was allthat, but chiefly in course of another object than that. 454It was solving a practical problem in the destructionof sin by the erection of a final Kingdom of holinessso universal that no room was left for sin; and thusit delighted in perfect worship the person of a HolyFather. It was all that the moral theory suggests, butit was so indirectly, in the course of a real redemp-tion of man, not merely from his own ignorance orslowness of heart, but from some objective and fatalpower or position, and through a conflict man couldappropriate but not comprehend. It is one thing toshow love by suicide, and exhibit conviction by actsof striking advertisement in the way of martyrdom.And it may be a very poor theatrical thing, whichdoes no more at best than show conviction, and atworst indulges a morbid egotism. But it is quite an-other thing to meet death in the course of a real ser-

2 We do not escape the unreality on the Grotian line of mak-ing Christ’s death an exhibition by God rather than His actualeffectuation of the moral order of the world, by treating thecross as a warning that that order cannot be tampered withrather than as the crucial establishment of the holy Kingdom.The holy law cannot be honoured, by negative penalty, but onlyby its taking such positive and perfect effect in holiness as theconditions of sin prescribe.



vice to love, or a duty to Righteousness. It is thechief vice of Anselm’s theory of Christ’s work that hemakes it something gratuitous, something not owedby Christ to God, not springing out of their eternalrelation, instead of something required and ordainedby God. It is therefore not ethical—not a voluntaryobedience, but a voluntary device, and one more ar-bitrary and gratuitous even than voluntary.

Christ does not seem to have been exercised as toa duly ingenious and original scheme of service withwhich to delight God. Nor was He much concernedat His end with any impression His death might,make on men. That may be one reason why our datafor the psychology of the Passion are so scanty. Norwas He cheered by the thought of what the travail ofHis soul would win through ages and ages of soulsimpressed by it and reconciled. That might have re-duced His suffering to the light affliction of a mo-ment. But he was too full of what His death mightmean to God’s sovereignty for that. God would setHim right with men if He gave Himself to set things455right with God. He sought first the sovereignty ofholiness, and all men are added to Him. In so faras He was sustained at the last it was not by the vi-sion of what He would be for the feelings of men,but by the faith of what He was for the requirementsof God. The Cross is the great sermon in history,Christ’s supreme and mostly silent κήρυγμα, because,though addressed to men, it was far more offered toGod. Christ in His death preached to men only be-cause He was wholly offered to God.


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Again we are warned of the true condition of thepreacher’s education, and of his success. He willsucceed with men, (in the proper sense, as a min-ister of the Word and of the Church) in proportion ashe aims less at attracting and impressing them, andmore at hallowing the cross with them. If he is moreconcerned with impressing men, even for good, thanhe is about the truth, reality, and power of his gospel,he is on the slope at whose foot the bones bleach ofso many pulpit actors, prophets of a temperament,and æsthetic idols. It would be with a pang of dis-tress, if we saw gifted and earnest preachers morebent on ingathering than on revealing, on circulationthan education, more influential than sacramental,palpably straining to win and hold the public, court-ing the magnates and wooing the press, and all thetime losing in weighty sanctity and sound judgmentby their loss of preoccupation with the Cross itself,giving up its propitiation to God in the desire to pro-pitiate men, or sacrificing its deep power to mere lib-erality or fascination.

If the Church lose its supreme interest in thesupremely objective and atoning value of the Crossof Christ it is not progress but relapse; it falls backinto some form of Judaism; and it ceases in so farto be a Church, and begins the descent to a meregroup. It is not a gain of effect but a loss of it at last.We are then reverting to the position of the disciples 456previous to the Cross, when they were but spiritualminors, who could understand a prophet from Godbut not an advocate with the Father. Disciples,



they were indeed, but Christ’s catechumens morethan His apostles, and not protected from beingHis traitors. They had truly much then that wecovet now, but not enough for their task or theirsoul. What had they? They were full of ardour forthe Kingdom. They went preaching it at Christ’scommand with great success. They saw (thoughdimly) what the good of old had only desired tolook into. They had opened to them many mysteriesof the Kingdom. They possessed miraculous power,and in Christ’s name did many wonderful works.They returned from a mission campaign with areport that felt more radiant to them than it seemedto Him. The demons were subject to them. Theyowned it was not they that spake but the Spirit inthem. They received new authority of binding andloosing. They were the salt of the earth, and thelight of the world. But all these and such thingsalone would not have made them apostles, as theydid not give their campaign permanent value. Theywere but disciples and prentices still. At the mostthey were but prophets, or sons of the prophets.And they were liable to the prophetic collapse. JohnBaptist, the greatest of prophets by Christ’s ownseal, lost his faith in Him at last, under the vaststrain that a Messiah making for the Cross put onit. The disciples fell, after all they had had as Hiscompanions and done as His missionaries. Theyforsook Him and fled. They betrayed and deniedthe Name they had used with such effect, andwhich had made such a strong impression upon

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them. Impression is not faith, precious as it is forits birth, and it can never do its work. I have saidthat a careful study of the Gospel notes that anestrangement of the disciples set in from the time 457when Jesus began to teach them about His deceaseat Jerusalem. They began to suspect Him. WasHe a faineant Messiah? So that their desertion anddenial in the crisis were but the last of a series. Theimpression faded as a power—as mere impressionsdo, as the moral or ideal popularity of Christ at thepresent hour will do in due course (if it has not doneso in the war). The temptation mastered them, asusual, because it had been prepared for by a seriesof misgivings and a growing detachment. Theyfell because they really in heart sacrificed Christ toPharisaism; they sacrificed faith to efficiency, theCross to Church prosperity, and religious insight toreligious success. It may well scare the most piousand active of us, and shock the Churches worsethan the war. What for Christ was the crown ofall His saving purpose and His perfect pleasingof God seemed to these disciples but the depth ofHis miscalculation, ineptitude, and failure. Theyhad only a bustling sense of spiritual values, thevalue of a Gospel to a Church as a going concern.They had more belief in God for a Church thanin a Church for God. He was more tutelar thansovereign. (Is this the secret of the present debacleof Christian civilisation?) Their Church, their Israel,was more real to them than its God. They had nointerest in what was really for their Master the crisis



that gathered all, the judgment that settled all, thevictory that saved all, the end that crowned all.

Had Christ left them there they would havebeen, for all they had heard of His preaching, amongthose who, in His name, had cast out devils, anddone many mighty works, but at the last wererepelled and disowned. “I never knew you.” Theyloved with zeal, but with no insight, not accordingto knowledge. They had not the insight of holiness.They had the impressions that exalt, but not thefaith that changes men. They were stamped but notannealed. And the Kingdom of God does not find458its account in love or pity without faith, without themoral vision of the evangelical insight into the holy;it does not stand in any love or, pity which stumblesat the Cross and our redemption by the holinessthere. These sympathies, fair and precious as theyare, are apt at last to be dyes without a mordant, andthe colours fade, and the Churches flag. A Churchwithout an atoning, redeeming, recreating Cross isnot only an extinct volcano; it exhibits the tragedyof a saint’s failure. Christ had to love, honour, andobey the holiness of God’s love on the Cross beforeHe could do anything to inspire men with love, asHe cared for love. He died unto God before Hedied unto us, else our preaching of Him would beof no final avail. He was a holy offering to Godbefore He became the saving influence on man. NoChristian dies to show how a Christian can die. Nordid Christ. We all die because it is the will of God. Itis that call we obey. And so with Christ. Only with


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Him it was willingly. And it was for the World. Itwas the greatest service of His willing life.

But for Christ’s death, which all the Apostlesfound after their recovery to be an atoning death,and not a martyr’s—but for His death, and theresurrection light upon it, they would have beenscattered. They could not have impressed the world.All the stir would have been but one more fruitlessmovement in Judea, and this revival would havesubsided like the rest. And the Church will fail tochange the world, in the long run, if it is no morethan philanthropist, ethical, sympathetic, ideal,ardent for the social millennium, and the admireror imitator of Christ; if it is more full of concern forChrist than of Christ’s concern for God. It will failif it is more full of man’s work for Christ than ofChrist’s work for man; if it is always looking for theimpression on men, either of Christ’s work or of our 459own in His name; in a word, if it work more reallyand freely than it worships. Both work and prayerbegin with the thankful praise of a soul no longer itsown. Peter at Cæsarea swept round quickly from ahierophant into a Satan, and finally he denied. Hespoke naturally, loyally, in his great confession—yetwhat must he hear immediately on the back of it!He loved Christ, he had a splendid gleam, but hehad not grasped the Gospel. He confessed a Son ofGod in so far as that is possible without believingin a crucified Saviour, that is, in a Saviour saving onthe Cross. He was but an organ of the Spirit, a reedplayed on by the wind, an Aeolian soul; he was not



yet an apostolic personality, not yet a new creaturein Christ. He did not measure either Christ orhimself. His belief in the Son of the living God didnot preserve him, did not give him the final secret.He found it easier to acknowledge an Incarnationthan to realise an Atonement—as most Christianpeople do, especially in the cultured classes. Theyconfess Christ more than they appropriate Him. Itis but a Chalcedonian piety. It is but the Catholic,the infra-ethical stage of faith. It has not reachedits Reformation. It begins with Christ and makesroom for the Cross, instead of beginning with theCross and arriving at Christ. Peter was not reallyand finally a changed and settled man, he did notreally believe in the Son of God, till he believed,through his fall and redemption, in the Christ who(in his own words) bare our sins in His own bodyon the tree. And we may further note that it wasonly the effect of Christ’s atoning death on him thatanswered Christ’s own prayer for him that Satanmight not have him. Even Christ’s own prayer didnot avail except as prolonged into His death. Ifexception should be taken to the phrase that wehave an Advocate with the Father as being foreignto the mind of Jesus, there is at least no doubt that460Jesus prayed for His disciples. And what was Hisprayer worth? The cross tells us; which was theconsummation of it all, the prayer which crowned,secured and sealed all the rest. The Atonement isthe one effective prayer, the standing intercession,for all the world. And we may note that it was an


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ardent Peter, a loving Peter, a bold, aggressive Peter,an eminently Christian Peter as most would countChristianity in our Churches to-day, who came sonear hell that nothing but Christ’s death could keephim out of it.

It is its grasp of this objective reality that keepsthe Church the Church, that lifts the sect into aChurch again, and saves it from deliquescence intothe religious group. The action and effect of thewhole Church is lamed whomever we lose a primefaith in the objective value of the work of Christ,with its action direct on the spiritual world, andreflex on man. We invert things if we make it directon man and, through its far-flung effect on man,reflex on God. The mistake is one that affects usin various ways, and especially does it scatter andfritter the Church’s energy. If we lay all our stresson the moral effect of the Cross on man we shallsuccumb at last to the immense variety and urgencyof human need. We shall be more distracted bythe manifold tensions of the moral situation therethan collected for its command at the source ofmoral power. Most of our merely ardent powerwill be lost by leakage over the plexus of wires thatconvey it to such a multitude of souls, each withthe diverse needs of the longing heart rather thanthe one need of the sinful conscience. The mistakeis apt also to generate the note of blandishment. Ihave often indicated how we suffer in moral poweron the large scale by detaching from the Cross of


Grace the idea of judgment. Our effect on the worldsuffers from an excessive eagerness to win it byavoiding what is to it an unwelcome note. In many461cases we hasten even to coax it. And the worlditself despises that note. The root of such haste isunfaith (or loss of a faith with a moral nerve), andimpatience; whereof the end is religious unreality,hollowness, and collapse. It is hard for such a loveto be without hypocrisy. We long to advance fasterthan we can move our supplies or reserves. Ourenergy is ahead of our resource, and faith becomesfeigned, worked up rather than worked out. Therehave been vehement utterances where the speakerseemed trying to browbeat himself into belief. Andthere is religious work and lusty crusading, wherethe worker seeks in activity an anodyne to the acheof an ebbing creed or a gnawing soul. “Will do,shall know,” is interpreted as if he who will doanything should come to know everything. Thereare churches that seem to live in an atmosphere ofaffable bustle, where all is heart and nothing is soul,where men decay and worship dies. There is anactivity which is an index of more vigour than faith,more haste than speed, more work than power. Itis sometimes more inspired by the business passionof efficiency than the Christian passion of fidelity oradoration. Its aim is to make the concern go ratherthan to compass the Righteousness of God. Wewant to advance faster than faith can, faster thanis compatible with the moral genius of the Cross,and the law of its permanent progress. We occupy


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more than we can hold. If we take in new groundwe have to resort to such devices to accomplish itthat the tone of religion suffers and the love or carefor Christian truth. And the preacher, as he is oftenthe chief of sinners in this respect, is also the chiefof sufferers. And so we may lose more in spiritualquality than we gain in Church extension. In God’sname we may thwart God’s will. Faith, ceasing tobe communion, becomes mere occupation, and the 462Church a scene of beneficent bustle, from which theSpirit flees. Religious progress outruns moral, andthus it ceases to be spiritual in the Christian sense,in any but a vague pious sense. Before long thegoing power flags, the petrol gives out on a desert.Missions but stagger along sublimi anhelitu. Moralprogress must always share the slowness of moralprinciples; and these are not like fire in the heather.They do not run over the world like a scientificidea or a new invention, which has no friction orantagonism to meet in human nature. Yet the Cross,either as Jesus preached it or effected it, spreadsonly in moral progress, in the health of the moralsoul. I do not mean in its wake, in the train of moralprogress, but in that spirit, in a conscience washedin pure water. “Since the Reformation at least thereis no satisfying religious ethic whose pulse is not thedoctrine of justification by faith.”

In all this I trust I have not lost sight of my lead-ing light—that the Church’s Gospel of Christ is notforeign to the synoptic mind of Jesus. For the Church



could never have come to be what it has been inand for the active world had its central creed of anatoning cross been in violent and gratuitous colli-sion with its Lord’s conception of His supreme work.Such a conflict in the cause would have wrecked theeffect. The existing divisions in the Church have notbeen due to that issue, which is comparatively re-cent. Nor can the Church hope to go on and per-fect its moral mastery of the world for the Kingdomif the gulf widen between its catholic message andthe Saviour’s intent. Behind all the teaching of Je-sus throbs His experience. This the Church realisesnow as never before. And in His experience we findmuch more than a sense of God’s benignity, or evenHis sacrificial effort, in the face of human sin. And463that more, what is it? Is it not that element which theEpistles found coming to a head in the Cross as thepropitiation for the sin of the whole world?

When we press the death of Christ as the organicgoal of His life we are resisting the fallacy whichstarts with the life and teaching to interpret thedeath, instead of beginning with the Cross, as theNew Testament does, and viewing everything fromit. This error leads us to treat the cross as a fateand not a work—as the unhappy fate of Christ theProphet instead of the glorious function of Christthe Priest; and even if we do not regard it as a meremartyrdom we come to take it as but the supremeobject lesson of a life devoted to teaching at oncethe goodness and the severity of God. In any casewe miss the supremely moral idea of Christ as


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our atoning sacrifice to a holy God, an idea whichcame to take the ruling place in His mind as Histeaching retired, and His crisis became more raptand severe. The ransom passage cannot really beexplained away into any lower sense, especially asit is sustained by the words of the supper aboutthe New Covenant in His blood (even if we drop“for the remission of sins” as a gloss of the Spiritrather than a record of the words). Such referencesare few and brief, but they are slit windows thatopen a world, and reveal the true perspective forcedupon His mind. They show us that He felt in thecross something unique, something which for us isless drawn from the record of His life than reflectedback upon His life as its true light and inwardness.And one historic consideration offers itself in thisconnexion which I may briefly name. It was uponits infliction of the Cross that Israel was brokenrather than upon its contempt of Christ’s personand word. It was by thus ending His life rather thanby merely ignoring or opposing it that the nationfell. That, and not their belittling of His message,was the unforgiveable sin, that and not their dulness 464to His moral note or His personal spell. It wasthe cross that judged Israel, the murder and notthe neglect. Jesus doomed His people in an agony,not for refusing the word and spirit of His life, butfor compassing His death, He being what He wasfor their God. “This is the heir, come let us killHim.” That was what led to the closing down ofthe vineyard and the ruin of its staff. It was not



for slaying another prophet, but for executing theirKing—no herald of Salvation but the Saviour. It wasnot just a worse crime than before against a finerword, but it was the crime in all their crimes. Now atlength might Israel say to God, “Against Thee, Theeonly have I sinned.” The killing of Christ was thepractical head of the unforgiveable sin against theSpirit of God; for it identified Jesus with the Satanwhom it was God’s first business to destroy, andtherefore the first business of His people. The killingof the Son was done in the Father’s name. It madeGod slay His perfect Messiah, since it was done as aservice to God. That is their God was Christ’s devil.His relatives indeed put down His new way of life,with all its beneficence, to madness, i.e., to demonicpossession, but they did not hate or kill Him. Theysought to take care of Him. Besides, they were not inthe position of the responsible leaders of a people’sreligion, who should have been experts of the HolySpirit, whereas His relatives were bound to Himrather by the ties of the Son of Man. To speak againstthe loving Son of Man was pardonable, but for theministers of God to speak against the Holy Spirit ofGod was not. A sin against sanctity is less venialthan a sin against love. In the chosen leaders of thechosen people of the Holy One, in the ministers ofthe Church always, sin is a more serious thing thanit is in others; and what would not be fatal to anindividual is deadly to a community or to its chiefs.

This carried to a head was the awful and uniquething which made Israel’s final judgment. It gave the465


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Apostles, indeed, the Atonement. It gave the worldits priest. Our reconciliation is a regicide peace. Butit gave Israel its doom. It is a great irony. And thesuggestion is that the uniqueness and finality of Is-rael’s mortal crime against its King means (when weregard it positively instead of negatively) the sameuniqueness and finality about His priesthood in thatdeed. For it was His deed too. If He had not laidHis life down no man could have taken it from Him.He became the priest that only the divine King couldbe. The unforgiveableness of their sin means the in-comparability of His death. “They slew” not a saintbut “the Holy One and the Just.” Such a crime madesuch a death like no other in its effect on the eter-nal and invincible holiness of both God and man. Itwas not superior to all other deaths in its impressivedegree, but quite different in its kind, function, andplace.

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