Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Jesus Christ

HE Christian religion, besides its natural and spiritual elements, has also an historical element. It believes that, in accordance with a Divine purpose, prophesied at the very dawn of human life, God was manifest in the flesh in the man Christ Jesus. The actual life of Jesus on earth is but the central part of a scheme which, in the belief of Christians, extends through all the ages. Our present object is merely to furnish a brief sketch of that life as it appears in the full light of history, without entering into the numberless collateral questions which it offers for consideration, a task which in these limits is obviously impossible.

I. The word Jesus is the form assumed in Latin by the Greek Iesous, which is the transliterated form of the Hebrew Jehoshua, Jeshua, or Joshua, meaning &ldquo;Jehovah is salvation.&rdquo; In one or other of its forms the name is found in many passages of the Old Testament. It was not, however, borne by any person who rose to historic eminence between the days of Joshua the son of Nun and the high priest Joshua who was the colleague of Zerubbabel at the return from the exile. The prominent position held by Joshua in the later prophetic books seems to have made the name popular. We find frequent traces of it after the exile. During the Hellenizing period, which excited so deep an indignation among patriotic Jews, many of the

bearers of the name preferred to adopt the purely Greek analogon Jason, and the name occurs in this form in the New Testament also. Later on it became one of the commonest Jewish names which we find in the New Testament, and again and again in Josephus. There is some reason for believing that the name of Bar Abbas was also &ldquo;Jesus,&rdquo; although it may have disappeared from the chief manuscripts, partly from feelings of reverence, partly from the mistaken fancy of Origen that we find no sinner among all those who had borne the name. But the name, though common, was meant to be deeply significant of the work for which Jesus was born into the world &mdash; namely, to save His people from their sins; and for this reason, in the account of the Annunciation, as given by St Luke (i. 31), His mother is expressly bidden to call her babe by this name.

On the other hand, the word Christ was not originally a name but a title. In the Gospels we scarcely ever read of Christ, but always of &ldquo;the Christ.&rdquo; It was only after the resurrection that the title gradually passed into a name, and &ldquo;Jesus Christ,&rdquo; or later still &ldquo;Christ Jesus,&rdquo; becomes one designation. The Greek word means &ldquo;anointed,&rdquo; and is a translation of the Hebrew &ldquo;Messiah.&rdquo; The coming Deliverer for whom the Jews had yearned for so many centuries was spoken of as the &ldquo;anointed one,&rdquo; with special reference to the prophecies of Isaiah (lxi. 1) and Daniel (ix. 24-26), which again referred backward to the language of the Psalms (ii. 2, xx. 6, xlv. 7). The anointing of Jesus was the special outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon Him, not only throughout His life (Acts x. 38), but specially at His baptism (John i. 32). Unction was the recognized mode of consecrating any one to the offices of priest (Ex. xxix. 29; Lev. iv. 3) and king (1 Sam. x. 1, xxiv. 6); and prophets were supposed to be anointed by God's grace for the fulfilment of their task (Isa. lxi. 1). The Messiah combined in His office the threefold dignity. He was a prophet to reveal (John vi. 14; Matt. xiii. 57; Luke xiii. 33, xxiv. 19), a king to reign and to judge (Luke xxiii. 2; Acts xvii. 7; 1 Cor. xv. 24; Rev. xv. 3), and a high priest to offer up the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. ii. 17 and passim).

Since these, however, were distinctively Jewish conceptions, it was natural that they should be but little understood by the Greeks and Romans. The word &ldquo;anointed&rdquo; conveyed to them no sacred conceptions, and it was restamped (surfrappé) by them into accordance with their own notions. They fancied that the real name of the founder of the new religion must be Chrestus or &ldquo;excellent,&rdquo; and they constantly spoke of the Christians as &ldquo;Chrestians.&rdquo; Suetonius says that the Jews were expelled from Rome by Claudius because they were raising seditions at the constant instigation of &ldquo;Chrestus&rdquo;; and he cared so little to inform himself on the subject that he made no distinction between Jews and Christians, and seems to have imagined that &ldquo;Chrestus&rdquo; was some leader of sedition then living at Rome. On the other hand the Christians in no wise objected to the mistaken designation. &ldquo;If you call us Christians,&rdquo; said Tertullian, &ldquo;you bear witness to the name of our master; if you call us &lsquo;Chrestians,&rsquo; you testify to the blamelessness of our lives.&rdquo;

II. The designation of &ldquo;the Christ&rdquo; given to Jesus shows that His followers saw in Him the long-promised Messiah of Judaism; and the rapidity with which the title developed into a name proves the strength and permanence

of this conviction. And this much at least is conceded by all, that Jesus more than fulfilled the conditions for which the Jews had hoped in the Deliverer of whom so many prophets had spoken, and that He fulfilled them in a manner transcendently wider, deeper, and more permanent than even the prophets had fully foreseen. Even the most advanced sceptic cannot deny that by His life and teaching He has altered the entire current of human history, and raised the standard of human morality. He was, says Renan, &ldquo;the individual who had made the species take the greatest step towards the divine.&rdquo; But as His life was passed and His work accomplished, not in a corner, but on the open stage and under the full light of a civilized epoch, it becomes a matter of great importance to estimate the value of the sources from which our knowledge of His life is derived. Those sources are (1) heathen, (2) Jewish, and (3) Christian.

1. The knowledge derivable from heathen sources, if much smaller than we could have desired, or a priori expected, is not smaller than is fully accounted for in the simple and unsophisticated narratives preserved for us by the evangelists and apostles. They show us that Christianity began from the most humble origin, and was regarded by the whole non-Christian world &mdash; alike Jewish and pagan &mdash; with unconcealed hatred, largely mingled with a contempt which ultimately passed into terror and exasperation. They faithfully record for us the obscure position, the extreme poverty, the persecuted lives, the unlearned training of the apostles, and the disdain to which they were on all sides subjected. The silence of contemporary Gentile and Jewish writers, which would be otherwise inexplicable, finds its undesigned explanation in the New Testament itself, which never attempts to conceal the contemptuous indignation of the Jewish aristocracy, and the lordly in difference of the higher Gentile authorities.

Accordingly, from heathen writers we do not learn a single new fact respecting Jesus Christ, while yet all that they do tell us, even when expressed in language of calumny and abhorrence, proves the historical reality of the facts which the Gospels record. If it be true that Napoleon once asked Herder whether Jesus ever lived at all, such a passing phase of incredulity is so perfectly unreasonable that it has long been abandoned even by the most destructive critics. Whether there ever existed any authentic census tables of Quirinius, or any official report of Pilate to the emperor Tiberius or not, Tacitus tells us with perfect accuracy that the founder of Christianity had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate, and that his religion, which Tacitus calls a &ldquo;deadly superstition,&rdquo; &ldquo;though crushed for a time, burst forth again, not only throughout Judæa, in which it sprung up, but even in Rome, the common reservoir for all the streams of wickedness and infamy.&rdquo; He further tells us that Nero diverted from himself the odium of the burning of Rome by charging the crime upon the Christians; and, though he implies that their fate was not undeserved because of their universal misanthropy, he yet honestly admits that they were not guilty of this crime of incendiarism, on pretence of which they were subjected to the most awful forms of martyrdom. It is clear that Tacitus, in common with all his contemporaries, confounded the Christians with the Jews, only regarding them as being Jews whose belief was more than usually abject. How little information could be expected from this eminent historian appears from the credulity with which he accepted

the most foolish legends and calumnies about the origin and early history even of the Jews. His contemporary Suetonius evidently held the same opinions. He seems to regard Nero as a public benefactor because he punished the Christians, &ldquo;a class of men of a strange and pestilent superstition.&rdquo; In his life of Claudius, as we have already seen, he ignorantly confuses Christ with some Chrestus whom he supposes to have been at that time living at Rome. From the younger Pliny, who wrote to the emperor Trajan for advice how to deal with Christians, we learn the valuable fact that they lived lives confessedly innocent, since he was unable to establish against them any crime beyond that of the belief which, like his contemporaries, he regarded as a perverse and extravagant superstition. We learn also from this celebrated letter that nothing could shake the allegiance of Christians to Christ, and that they were accustomed to meet early in the morning to celebrate Him as God with hymns of praise. Later in the 2d century the scoffer Lucian, in his Death of Peregrinus, and his Philopseudes, spoke with bitter sneers both of Christ and Christians. He alludes to the fact of the crucifixion of Christ, to His miracles, to the mutual love and help which prevailed among His followers, and their belief in Him as a divine person. Passing over the asserted allusions to Christ by Numenius, to His parables in Galerius, and to the earthquake at the crucifixion in Phlegon, we come to the &ldquo;True Word&rdquo; of Celsus the Platonist, towards the close of the second century. We only know this by the quotations and refutation of Origen, but it furnishes us with indisputable testimony that in his day the facts of the Gospels from first to last were current in the exact form in which we now possess them (see ). Thus, from the scanty notices of heathens even, we can derive a confirmation of the main external facts in the life of Christ: &mdash; His miracles, His parables, His crucifixion, His claim to divine honour, the devotion, innocence, heroic constancy, and mutual affection of His followers, and the progressive victories won by His religion in despite of overwhelming opposition alike physical and intellectual.

2. From Jewish writers we can glean similar confirmation of the gospel story. Philo indeed is silent. The legends preserved by Eusebius &mdash; that Philo had met St Peter in Rome during his mission to the emperor Caius, and that in his book on the contemplative life he is describing not the life of the Essenes and Therapeutæ, but those of the Christian church in Alexandria founded by St Mark &mdash; are valueless. It is extremely probable that Philo had scarcely heard either of Christ or of the Christians. He died after 40 A.D., but at that period Christianity had hardly emerged into the recognition claimed by prominent historical phenomena. The writings of Philo are valuable, not for any light which they throw on the gospel histories, but for the evidence which they afford of prevalent modes of thought and phraseology, in which some even of the apostles shared. When, however, we turn to Josephus, we find in his writings, as now extant, no less than three allusions to events in the gospel history. It cannot be decided with certainty whether two of these passages are genuine as they now stand, but modern opinion tends to the view that in each of the actual allusions to Jesus there is a genuine basis with later Christian interpolations. The passage in which

he speaks of the preaching and execution of John the Baptist is not disputed, and it is very important as showing that Josephus must have been perfectly well acquainted with the facts of Christ's life, and that he has passed them over, in his usual unscrupulous way, with a reticence due only to dislike or perplexity. For in speaking of St John's preaching he deliberately, and it must be feared dishonestly, excludes the Messianic element from which it derived its main power and significance. In another passage he mentions with strong disapproval the judicial murder by the younger Annas of James the Just, &ldquo;the brother of Jesus, called the Christ.&rdquo; The passage was early tampered with by Christian interpolators who wished to make it a more emphatic testimony in favour of Christ, but in its present form its genuineness is undisputed. Respecting the third passage, in which Josephus speaks directly of Jesus, the only question is whether it be partly or entirely spurious. Placing in brackets the words which are undoubtedly interpolated, it runs as follows: &mdash;

"At this time appeared a certain Jesus, a wise man [if indeed He may be called a man, for He was a worker of miracles, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with joy], and He drew to himself many Jews [and many also of the Greeks. This was the Christ]. And when at the instigation of our chief men Pilate condemned Him to the cross, those who had first loved Him did not fall away. [For He appeared to them alive again on the third day, according as the holy prophets had declared this and countless other marvels of Him.] To this day the sect of Christians, called after Him, still exists. ""

That Josephus wrote the whole passage as it now stands no sane critic can believe. Vespasian, not Jesus, was the Messiah of the &ldquo;ambiguous oracle&rdquo; of that apostate Jew. There are, however, two reasons which are alone sufficient to prove that the whole passage is spurious, one that it was unknown to Origen and the earlier fathers, the other that its place in the text is uncertain. It is now found after the historian's notices of Pilate, but the remarks of Eusebius show that in his time it was found before them. We must conclude then that Josephus preserved a politic silence respecting Christ and the Christians, confining himself to remote allusions; and this was quite possible, because he was writing mainly for Greeks and Romans who were profoundly ignorant of the whole subject. That Josephus knew a great deal more than he chose to say is evident. There is reason to suspect that his account of his own juvenile precocity before the leading teachers of his nation is borrowed from the Gospels, and that his account of his shipwreck on the journey to Rome is not uncoloured by the facts of St Paul's shipwreck about that very time. But the most striking indication of his hostile reticence is found in the chapter of his Antiquities which follows the supposed allusion to Jesus. He there breaks his narrative in the most arbitrary manner to drag in a disgusting story of a trick played by the priests of Isis on a Roman lady; and no one who is acquainted with the Jewish calumnies about the incarnation can doubt that in this story we have an oblique and malignant anticipation of the falsehood which ultimately took form in the Talmud and the anti-Christian writings of the later Jews.

From other Jewish sources not a single fact about Jesus can be gleaned. In the unexpurgated editions of the

Talmud there are about twenty allusions to Christ and the Christians characterized by intense hatred. He is usually spoken of indirectly as &ldquo;that man,&rdquo; &ldquo;the Nazarene,&rdquo; &ldquo;the fool,&rdquo; &ldquo;Absalom,&rdquo; &ldquo;the hung,&rdquo; &ldquo;the son of Stada,&rdquo; &ldquo;the son of Pandera.&rdquo; Many allusions to Him are veiled in cryptographs of which the key is in the possession of but few. All the grossest fictions respecting him &mdash; that He was a seducer (mesîth) who had learned magic in Egypt, and had been excommunicated by Rabbi Joshua ben Perachia in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (nearly a century before His birth!), and that He was crucified at Lydda, because no one, during forty days, came forward to give any evidence in His favour &mdash; are collected in a miserable Jewish tract called the Toldoth Jeshu, which may be consigned to oblivion, because even the Jews now regard it with contempt and shame. It is, however, remarkable that from these intensely embittered Jewish sources we derive an absolute confirmation of Christ's stay in Egypt, of His Davidic descent, of His miracles, of His disciples, of His excommunication by the Sanhedrin, of His crucifixion on the evening before the Passover, and even of His innocence, &mdash; for not a single crime but that of working miracles by magic, and claiming divine honour, is, even in these sources, laid to His charge. And thus even from pagan and Jewish enemies we derive all that we want and all that we could expect in the recognition of the historic personality of Christ, and of the chief facts in His outward life.

3. If we had nothing to help us but these allusions, the two great facts of Christianity and Christendom would be an inexplicable enigma. In the Christian sources of information all becomes intelligible. Of these we may dismiss for practical purposes all but the New Testament. From the fathers we derive surprisingly little. A few sayings &mdash; of which some are very dubious, and of which the most valuable are only variations of those in the Gospels &mdash; and one or two highly uncertain incidents, are all that we can glean from them. The Apocryphal Gospels help us still less. They are for the most part heavy fictions, the inventions of an indiscriminate curiosity, often grossly heretical, abounding in coarsely-conceived and even pernicious miracles, and dwelling chiefly on imaginary details of the nativity, the infancy, or the last scenes. Their chief value is to set forth by contrast the immeasurable superiority of the canonical Gospels, by showing us what these also might have been if they had been the products of human invention. But it is not the Gospels alone on which we have to depend. We have four works of which the authenticity has never even been assailed by any serious writer, namely, St Paul's four epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians. These may truly be regarded as a fifth Gospel, of which the testimony is all the more valuable because it is undesigned and incidental. It is also earlier than that of any Gospel, and is the testimony of one whose personality stands forth with absolute clearness in the light of history. Further than this, it is the

testimony of a man of commanding intellect, and of the highest Jewish culture, who, after the death of Christ, was converted from the most bitter hostility to the most intense devotion, and who bears his witness within twenty-five years of the events respecting which he speaks. And yet, if we had the epistles of St Paul alone, we could find a contemporary testimony to almost every single fact of primary importance in the life of Christ, &mdash; His birth of the seed of David, His poverty, His Messiahship, His moral teaching, His proclamation of the kingdom of God, His calling of the apostles, His supernatural power, His divine claims, His betrayal, His founding of the Last Supper, His passion, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and repeated appearances. If we add the testimony of the other epistles, we have further testimonies to almost every fact of importance in the Gospels, as we have also in the catholic epistles and in the Revelation of St John.

It is, however, from the Gospels that our fullest light is derived. They are not, and do not profess to be, full biographies written for the gratification of curiosity, but they preserve for us all that is necessary to explain the origin of Christianity in the life of its Founder. In the first three Gospels, called Synoptic, we have sketches of the life and teaching of Christ of which the latest was probably written within forty years of the crucifixion. No one has ever denied that the representation of Christ in these three Gospels is essentially the same. The view of Him presented in the Fourth Gospel, which was not published till towards the close of the 1st century, is more subjective. It is the spiritual Gospel, the Gospel for the church, and even those critics who deny its Johannine authorship admit its value as a very ancient document written by a Jewish Christian of extraordinary genius who had access to the most valuable sources of contemporary information.

III. Since, then, it may be regarded as a truth for which the close investigations of historical criticism have only secured more universal admission that the life of Jesus was a life of which the main outlines are historically certain, we must now glance at its chronology and duration.

It must be admitted that we cannot demonstrate the exact year of the nativity, but critics of all schools are verging more and more towards the acceptance of 4 B.C. as the probable year of Christ's birth. Our present era was fixed (525 A.D.) by a learned Scythian, Dionysius Exiguus, who was an abbot at Rome, and died about 550; but it is now admitted to be erroneous by at least four years. Many methods have been adopted to arrive at the true date; but all attempts to fix it by the enrolment of Quirinius, the order of the Jewish courses of priests, the consulships mentioned by Tertullian, and the extremely remarkable astronomical conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in Pisces in the spring of A.U.C. 748, have led to nothing but highly dubious results. We are left with two data which furnish us with an approximation to the accurate date. One of these is the death of Herod the Great. Josephus tells us that he died thirty-seven years after he had been declared king by the Romans. Now this took place A.U.C. 714, and therefore by the Jewish mode of reckoning the year from Nisan to Nisan, and counting fractional parts of a year as a whole year &mdash; he must have died between 4 B.C and 3 B.C. Further, we know that there was an eclipse of the moon on March 12, 4 B.C., on which night Herod ordered some Jewish rabbis to be burnt

for urging their pupils to destroy his golden eagle, and that he was dead before the passover which took place on April 12, 4 B.C. Christ must therefore have been born before February, 4 B.C. Again, St Luke tells us that John the Baptist began to preach in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and as the reign of Tiberius was usually reckoned in the provinces from the date of his association with Augustus in the empire, this gives us A.U.C. 780 for the baptism of John, at which period Jesus was about thirty years old. As to the day and month of the nativity it is certain that they can never be recovered; they were absolutely unknown to the early fathers, and there is scarcely one month in the year which has not been fixed upon as probable by modern critics. The date now observed &mdash; December 25 &mdash; cannot be traced further back than the middle of the 4th century, but was adopted by St Jerome, St Augustine, Orosius, and Sulpicius Severus, and in the East by St Chrysostom and St Gregory of Nyssa. If 4 B.C. be accepted as the date for the nativity, which has most probability in its favour, the question of the date of the crucifixion depends mainly on that of the duration of the ministry. Now on this point the data of the evangelists have been disturbed by a prevalent early tradition that Christ's public ministry only lasted one year, and by another tradition that Jesus did not die till the age of fifty. The first of these notions is a mistaken inference drawn by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and other fathers, as also by the Valentinians, from Luke iv. 15; and it was by no means universal even in early days, for Irenseus says that Christ taught for three years. The other notion was a mistaken inference from John viii. 57. That both views are mistakes appears from the positive testimony of St Luke that Jesus was about thirty years old when he began His ministry, and from the clear indications given by St John (ii. 13, vi. 4, xi. 55) that there were at least three passovers during the public ministry. On other grounds it is probable that there was one passover during the ministry which our Lord did not attend; and if so, we see the grounds for the ancient tradition that His public preaching lasted upwards of three years, and that Jesus died at the age of thirty-three. He died during the reign of Tiberius, the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, the tetrarchate of Antipas, and the high priesthood of Joseph Caiaphas. Now Tiberius died on March 16, 37 A.D., and Pilate ceased to be procurator before, and Caiaphas to be high priest immediately after, the passover of 36 A.D.; the date therefore cannot be later than 35 A.D. We may set aside dubious considerations derived from the allusion to an eclipse and earthquake by the pagan historian Phlegon, and may regard it as highly probable that the crucifixion took place at the passover of March 30 A.D.

IV. The circumstances of the nativity are only related by St Matthew and St Luke, and by each of them in a manner so absolutely independent that facts known to the one may

have been unknown to the other. There is no difficulty in reconciling their fragmentary intimations if we suppose that Nazareth was the native place of Joseph and Mary, and that there the coining nativity was announced to the Virgin, but that the exigences of the enrolment undertaken by Quirinius for imperial purposes required Joseph to register his name at Bethlehem, the native town of David, from whom both he and, probably, his espoused wife were. descended.

V. It is not of course our object to narrate or even to touch upon all the events and teachings which occupy the four Gospels, but only to glance at their general bearing. The life of Jesus naturally falls into five epochs: &mdash; (1) the infancy and childhood; (2) the youth and early manhood; (3) the public ministry, including (4) the closing scenes and crucifixion, and (5) the resurrection and ascension. These epochs are well marked in the Gospels.

1. The two who alone preserve for us any details of the infancy and childhood are St Matthew and St Luke, and they relate four events. Of these the circumcision and the presentation in the temple present no difficulties. The circumcision, at which the name was always publicly given, took place on the eighth day after the birth, and was performed in the presence of the nearest friends. It illustrated the truths that Christ was &ldquo;born under the law&rdquo; which he came &ldquo;not to destroy but to fulfil.&rdquo; Thirty-three days after the circumcision was the purification in the temple, and St Luke tells us how the aged Simeon and Anna welcomed the infant Saviour with words of prophecy. The third event, the visit of the Magi, is known as the Epiphany or manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

The sequel of the story &mdash; Herod's jealousy and the massacre of the innocents &mdash; has been mainly doubted because it is not mentioned in Josephus. But there must have been hundreds of events of that day of which the Jewish historian has taken no notice, though they were far more sanguinary than the murder of a handful of infants in a little village. The act corresponds to the jealousy and cruelty which were the master passions of the Idumæan usurper, and, if Josephus here follows Nicolaus of Damascus, we may be quite sure that he would not have mentioned a fact so damaging to the character of his patron. There are, however, two allusions in Josephus, which, if they do not specifically indicate this event, yet may well allude to it, or at least show how consonant it was with Herod's impulses. Further, Macrobius speaks of &ldquo;the boys under two years of age (comp. Matt. ii. 16) whom Herod ordered to be slain in Syria,&rdquo; and, although he confuses this with the sentence upon Herod's sons, of whom Antipater was executed within five days of Herod's death, his words may well point to the murder of the children of Bethlehem. Thus, while this event is not recognizable in other histories, it meets with unexpected confirmations of its possibility from many quarters. That Joseph should have fled with Mary and the child into Egypt was exactly what would have been done by every Jew similarly circumstanced. Three days journey, as far as the Wady Rhinocolura, would have placed the fugitives beyond the reach of Herod's jurisdiction.

The sojourn of the holy family in Egypt was probably very short, nor indeed would there have been any temptation to stay a day longer than was necessary. Joseph's first intention was to return to Bethlehem when the news that Herod the Great was dead seemed to open the prospect of happier times. But when he was met on the way by the intelligence that Judæa had fallen by his father's

will to the share of the cruel Archelaus he was afraid to establish himself so near to the palace of that jealous tyrant, and &ldquo;retired&rdquo; (ἀνεχώρησεν) to the mountain seclusion of remote and despised Nazareth. How deep was the impression which these events had made on the memory of the people, and how little likely it was that a contemporary evangelist could fall into a mistake about them, is shown by the fact, which has only recently been noticed, that fully thirty years afterwards Jesus made the events which happened at the succession of Archelaus even in minute particulars the groundwork of a striking parable.

2. At Nazareth He who, even as a mere matter of history, was to influence for ever the entire development of human civilization grew up in extreme seclusion. A single anecdote and two or three incidental expressions comprise every glimpse of Him which we can obtain. We learn that &ldquo;He was subject to His parents&rdquo; at Nazareth; that &ldquo;He grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him&rdquo;; that &ldquo;He gradually advanced (προέκοπτε) in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.&rdquo; We further learn that He was not subjected to the training of any of the rabbinic schools. He had never learned that complicated system of oral tradition which was known by the Jews as &ldquo;letters.&rdquo; It is doubtful whether the schools which afterwards became common existed at this early period in country villages. Schools for infants are said to have been first founded by the son of Gamaliel, but possibly by this time the custom had begun of employing the scribes and lower officers of the synagogue (chazzanîm) to teach the boys of each village. We can trace proofs that Jesus was wonderfully familiar with the sights and sounds of nature, as well as with the habits of men of all classes, for He drew His illustrations in abundance from both sources. It is also certain that He knew both Greek and Aramaic, which were at that time universally spoken throughout Palestine; and there are slight indications that He was acquainted with Latin and with Hebrew, though the latter had now become a dead and learned language. We also find that He was acquainted with the then by no means common art of writing. It is certain that in His home He must, like other Jewish children, have learned first the Shema (Deut. vi. 4), then the Hallel (Psalms cxiv. to cxviii.), and then the Scriptures generally, to all parts of which, and especially to the Psalms and prophetic books, He constantly referred. The certainty that He never passed through the ordinary training of the learned classes nullifies the suggestion that any part of His wisdom was borrowed from such writers as Philo and such rabbis as Hillel and Shammai. His methods and His whole moral conception differ fundamentally from those of the Alexandrian philosopher and the Jerusalem Pharisees. His teachers, humanly speaking, were the books of God, &mdash; the books of Scripture, of nature, and of life, &mdash; and the voice of God within His soul.

At the age of twelve a Jewish boy was held to have finished the elementary stages of his education, and became a &ldquo;son of the law.&rdquo; At this age He was presented by His father in the synagogue, began to wear the phylacteries, learnt a trade for His own support, and &ldquo;advanced,&rdquo; as the Jews phrased it, from the study of the Scriptures to

that of the oral law. At this age Joseph and Mary took Jesus for the first time to Jerusalem, and there occurred the memorable incident of the temporary loss of Him by His mother and Joseph, and their discovery of Him in the Temple seated among the doctors, &ldquo;both hearing, and asking them questions.&rdquo; His answer to the astonished inquiry &ldquo;Why dost thou treat us thus?&rdquo; was, &ldquo;Why is it that ye looked for me?&rdquo;; &ldquo;Did ye not know that I must be in my Father's house?&rdquo; These are His first recorded words, and their beauty and simplicity give them such a stamp of truthfulness as no art could imitate. They are the first gleam of that character and personality which has transcended anything of which the world has had any experience during all the former or subsequent ages. The evangelists record no further particulars of these early years.

Of the remaining life of Jesus during the period between this visit to Jerusalem and His baptism one word alone remains to us. It is in the question, &ldquo;Is not this the carpenter?&rdquo; in Mark. vi. 3. It shows us that these eighteen years of youth and opening manhood were spent, not only in the obscurity of a despised provincial village, but also in the manual toils of a humble trade. It shows us that Jesus worked with His hands for His own support, and that of His mother and brethren. The fact is so entirely unlike anything which we should a priori have expected in the life of Him whom Christians adore as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, that we once more see the faithfulness of the narrators, who do not attempt to break by unauthorized inventions the deep silence of those long unknown years in which He consecrated the common lot of toil and poverty, and thereby showed the inherent dignity of manhood and the intrinsic sacredness of human life.

3. Before entering on the third epoch of the life of Jesus, &mdash; the baptism and public ministry, &mdash; we must pause for a moment to touch on the political and religious aspect of the world during the brief period of His Messianic activity.

Politically the world was passing through a bad epoch. Rome under the emperors, as she attained the zenith of her apparent power and splendour, sank almost to the nadir of her real degradation. The genius of Julius Cæsar, the astute policy of Augustus, could not delay the ever-deepening degeneracy which revealed itself in its worst colours in the reign of Tiberius. The condition of the Roman world during the later years of Tiberius, when he was hiding at Capreæ, the infamies of his sanguinary lust, was that condition of terror and despair which Tacitus has portrayed with such unequalled power. The words in which he describes the characteristics of a somewhat later period apply also to this; it was &ldquo;rich in disasters, terrible in battles, rent by seditions, savage even in its peace.&rdquo; The murder of princes, the outbreaks of rebellion and civil war, the prevalence of alarming rumours, the decimation of the noblest families by means of spies and informers, the conflagrations of temples and cities, the oppression of provinces by the greed and cruelty of legates and procurators, the horrible degradation of private morals, the awful tragedies of impurity and bloodshed which were enacted in various courts, the multiplications of banishments, even the terror of famines, storms, and earthquakes, combined to render

the early years of the Christian era a period of gloom and anguish throughout large portions of the Roman empire. Judæa was the scene of special miseries, because it groaned under the ruthless and hypocritic tyranny of Idumæan usurpers.

Meanwhile the religious condition of the world and of the nation was no less unsatisfactory. Throughout the Roman empire the belief in the popular mythology had died away, and, while a few of the noblest spirits took refuge in the hard and despairing dogmas of Stoicism, the mass of the people was plunged in practical atheism or abject superstition. Such religion as there was among the people usually took the form of Egyptian and Phrygian worships, which were often connected with the vilest immorality. In Judæa the dominant religion consisted in scrupulous devotion to the petty external ordinances of the oral law.

Thus at the epoch of Christ's birth the heathen world had sunk into practical atheism, and the Jewish world was deeply corroded by formalism and hypocrisy. In the heathen world religion had almost ceased to exist; in the Jewish world it was tainted at its source.

It was no doubt due to the darkness of the religious and political horizon, and to the sense of despair and weariness which was prevalent in the hearts alike of Jews and Gentiles, that the Messianic hope, fostered by generations of prophets, gained a powerful hold on the hearts of all sincere Israelites, and even found its expression in secular literature. Virgil, Tacitus, and Suetonius, no less than Joseph us, show that the thoughts of the civilized world were turned to the East in expectation of some great deliverer. But the character of their hope was utterly mistaken. Overlooking the prophetic passages which told of a suffering Messiah, a servant of Jehovah, who should bear the sorrows of His people, the Jews were anticipating the advent of some temporal sovereign who would rule their enemies with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel, while He raised Israel to the summit of earthly prosperity and luxury. The Messiah, the son of David, was to be a conquering warrior, which accounts for the grossly unspiritual conceptions which induced one party to represent Herod as the promised Messiah, and which enabled Josephus to pretend that he found a fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies in the elevation to the empire of Vespasian, the bourgeois soldier who had crushed his country under the iron heel of the Roman legionaries.

At this time of extreme trouble and expectation the Baptist began his preaching. It was confessedly preparatory. The coming of the Messiah was always declared to depend on the &ldquo;righteousness&rdquo; of the nation, that is &mdash; in ordinary Jewish phraseology &mdash; their rigid observance of the Mosaic law. But John saw that what was needful was morality, not legalism, and his cry &ldquo;Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,&rdquo; was explained to each of the great classes which applied to him for advice by practical directions as to their daily duties. John created an intense though transitory impression by his dress and appearance, which recalled the memory of ancient prophets, and specially of Elijah, and still more by the burning sincerity and reality of a style of teaching which presented so strong a contrast to the ordinary teaching of the scribes. He adopted the rigid seclusion and asceticism of the Essenes, and his language rang with denunciations clothed in the imagery of the desert. Refusing all the titles which the people wished to force upon him, he described himself as &ldquo;a voice of one crying in the wilderness,&rdquo; and announced the coming of one greater than himself, who would found

the kingdom which he only announced. The submission to the simple rite of baptism, a rite already familiar to the Jews in the admission of proselytes, was the only sign of the acceptance of his mission which he required; and the multitudes were so deeply moved by his preaching that they thronged to be baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins. It was in order to receive this baptism, and to ratify the mission of the great forerunner, that Jesus left the deep provincial seclusion in which He had hitherto lived. The stainless personality of his Kinsman overawed the bold and mighty spirit of the desert preacher. He shrank from baptizing one in whom he at once recognized that &ldquo;royalty of inward happiness,&rdquo; and purity of sinless life, which he could not himself claim. Jesus, however, though He had no sins to confess, bade John to baptize Him, &ldquo;for thus it becometh us,&rdquo; He said, &ldquo;to fulfil all righteousness.&rdquo; He received the baptism, as a representative of the people whom He came to save, as a beautiful symbol of moral purification, and as the fit inauguration of a ministry which came not to destroy the law but to fulfil. And during the baptism John saw the overshadowing radiance and heard the voice from heaven which revealed to him that the promised Messiah had now come, and that this Messiah was the Son of God.

After this great crisis, which finally closed the private period of the life of Jesus, He was &ldquo;driven&rdquo; by the spirit into the wilderness for His mysterious temptation. The details of what occurred could of course only have been derived from what He Himself made known to His apostles. What is clear is that in that region of Quarantania, in the desert of Jericho, He was divinely strengthened for this mission by victoriously wrestling with every suggestion of the powers of evil which could have altered the character of His work. Although this was not His only temptation, it was evidently the most deadly. The first temptation appealed subtly and powerfully to the exhaustion of His physical nature; the second to spiritual pride, as it would have been manifested by an unwarranted challenge of the providence of God; the third to unhallowed personal ambition. In the two greatest temptations of His life &mdash; in the wilderness and at Gethsemane &mdash; He was tempted both positively and negatively, &mdash; positively by allurements to a lower line of action, and negatively by the seductive pleas which would have drawn Him aside from the path of suffering. But He won the perfect victory because temptation never passed into even the thought of sin, but was so wrestled with and overcome that it made no determining impression upon His heart.

After this victory over the power of evil, Jesus returned to the fords of Jordan. It will not of course be possible or needful to dwell on the narratives of His ministry in all their details; but, since these narratives are confessedly fragmentary, we shall endeavour to furnish from the four Gospels in rapid outline a sketch of the general events of His ministry before touching upon its eternal significance. The events described in the Gospels are often grouped together by subjective considerations, and it was the evident object of St John to dwell preponderantly on the Judæan ministry, and on those discourses which brought out the deeper and more mysterious side of the being of Christ, while the Synoptists chiefly describe the work in Galilee, and preserve what may be called the more exoteric discourses. The combination of these disintegrated records into one harmonious and consecutive whole is a task which can never be accomplished with absolute certainty; but it is possible, without a single arbitrary conjecture, to construct a continuous narrative which shall simply follow the indication of our authorities without doing violence to them

in any instance. In this scheme the ministry of Christ falls into the following epochs: &mdash; (1) the early scenes, narrated by St John alone, until the beginning of the public preaching in Galilee; (2) the Galilæan ministry till the murder of the Baptist; (3) the period of decided opposition; (4) the period of flight and peril until the final farewell to Galilee; (5) from the great journey to Jerusalem till the retirement to Ephraim; (6) from this retirement to the Passover; (7) the last supper, passion, trial, and crucifixion; (8) the resurrection and ascension.

(1) The scenes of the first period are related by St John with a beauty and simplicity which can only be called idyllic. He tells us how the Baptist, on the banks of the Jordan, saw Jesus pass by, and exclaimed, in language of deep significance, &ldquo;Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!&rdquo; Whether the prominent thought in the Baptist's mind was the paschal lamb, or the lamb of morning and evening sacrifice, or the lamb which Isaiah and Jeremiah had used as an emblem of patient and suffering innocence, it is clear that in the spirit of prophecy he saw in Jesus one who was predestined to a life of sorrows which should be for the salvation of the world. The next day the Baptist repeated the same emphatic testimony in the presence of two Galilaean youths. St Andrew and St John, who were so deeply impressed by it that they followed Jesus, saw Him in the place where He was then dwelling, and became His first disciples. Andrew then brought to Jesus his brother Simon, who also recognized in Him the promised Messiah. Three days afterwards Jesus called Philip, another young fisherman of Galilee, who in his turn brought to Jesus his friend Nathanael, the guileless Israelite who is known in the Gospels as Bartholomew, or the son of Tholmai. Accompanied by these pure and warmhearted young men, and also by His mother, Jesus was a guest at the simple wedding-feast of Cana in Galilee, at which He first displayed His possession of supernatural power by turning the water into wine. Then, after a brief stay at Capernaum, He went to the Passover at Jerusalem. His first visit to the temple as a recognized teacher was signalized by an authoritative Messianic act. He cleansed the temple of its mean and desecrating traffic, although neither priests nor Pharisees nor the Roman authorities had ever taken a step in that direction. When His right to act thus was challenged, He answered in mysterious words, of which the meaning was not thoroughly understood till long afterwards, &ldquo;Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up&rdquo; &mdash; speaking of the spiritual temple of His body. The words created so deep an impression that after being distorted both in form and meaning they formed one of the chief charges against Him at His trial. Even at this early phase of His work Jesus touched the heart and won the secret allegiance of Nicodemus, with whom He held at night the memorable discourse on the new birth. But He was met from the first by such signs of opposition that He went with His disciples into Judæa, and there allowed them to baptize. The work of the Baptist was not yet over, and, until it was, Jesus both permitted the disciples to adopt the symbol of purification which had been used by His forerunner, and Him self similarly preached &ldquo;Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.&rdquo; Some Jew raised a discussion with the disciples of John about purification, and they in their perplexity and jealousy applied to their great master with the complaint that his ministry was being eclipsed by that of Him whom he had baptized beyond Jordan. John, with noble self-suppression, pointed out that he must

thenceforth decrease; and shortly after this time he was thrown into prison by Herod Antipas. In consequence of this event Jesus withdrew into Galilee. He chose the route through Samaria, and it was to a poor frail woman by Jacob's well that He seems first to have distinctly revealed His Messiahship. His acceptance of the invitation of the Samaritans to stay a few days with them was a rebuke to the spirit of fanatical hatred and exclusiveness, which in that day so filled the minds of His countrymen that they regarded any intercourse with Samaritans as involving pollution.

(2) Although Jesus was aware that a prophet is often least known in his own country and among his own kindred, He made His way, preaching as He went in various synagogues, direct to Nazareth. There, in the synagogue, He read aloud part of Isaiah lxi., and amid deep silence applied it to Himself. But He had not proceeded far when the spell of His divine teaching was broken by the pride and ignorance of the Nazarenes, who began to murmur among themselves about His humble birth and occupation, and to demand that He should do some deed of power among them. It was on His reminding them that Elijah and Elisha had wrought their miracles of healing upon strangers that they rose in fury, and dragged Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built. Something, however, in the majesty of His bearing seems to have created in their minds a supernatural awe, so that, as on later occasions, He was able &ldquo;to pass through the midst of them, and go on His way.&rdquo; To the place of His birth He seems never to have returned.

From this time His home, so far as He could in any sense be said to have a home, was at the bright little city of Capernaum on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, to which, perhaps in consequence of the churlishness of the Nazarenes, His mother and brethren also migrated. At this point begins the period of His brightest activity, the year which was in a pre-eminent sense &ldquo;the acceptable year of the Lord.&rdquo; The scene of that ministry was mainly the beautiful and populous plain of Gennesaret through which passed &ldquo;the way of the sea,&rdquo; the great caravan road which led to Damascus. It was the manufacturing district of Palestine, thronged by men of all nationalities, and therefore pre-eminently suited for the proclamation of the kingdom. At the same time it was a scene of infinite charm, and the opportunities of sailing from place to place, and of earning a livelihood, which were afforded by the inland lake, rendered it specially appropriate. On the way to Capernaum Jesus healed by His word the son of the courtier of Herod, who in consequence believed with his whole house. Much of the brief story of the Gospels is made up of the records of single days which stood out with marked prominence. One such day was the first Sabbath at Capernaum. Christ began with a sermon in the synagogue, during which He wrought one of His great exorcisms on a raving demoniac who was present in the audience. Retiring to the house of Peter, He healed Peter's mother-in-law of a fever, and at sunset, when the Sabbath ended, wrought many cures upon a multitude of sufferers. The fame of this day rang even to Syria, and, finding that even temporary seclusion was now impossible, Jesus went from village to village preaching the kingdom of God. It was at this time that He preached to the multitude from Peter's boat, and after the miraculous draught of fishes called Andrew, Peter, and the sons of Zebedee to a closer and

more unremitting discipleship. Matthew the publican was the next to &ldquo;leave all&rdquo; and follow Christ. The choice of the full number of twelve to be apostles took place just before the sermon on the mount, and nothing can more decisively show the wisdom and insight of Jesus than the fact that among the twelve were characters so opposite as a zealot and a publican. Judas, the &ldquo;man of Kerioth,&rdquo; was probably the only Judæan in the little band of Galilæans. The great discourse known as the Sermon on the Mount was delivered primarily to the disciples, but was intended also for the multitude. The hill by the Galilæan lake was the Sinai of the new dispensation, but it was a mount not of terrors but of beatitudes. The sermon first sketched the character of the citizens of the new kingdom both absolutely and relatively. It proceeded to sketch the new law in contrast, both general and special, with the old. The last great section of it was occupied with the characteristics of the new life &mdash; its devotion, its duties, and its dangers. It ended with the contrast between doers and mere hearers. The grandeur, originality, independence, and authoritative tone of the sermon, with its vivid illustrations and divine idealism, produced a very deep and wide impression. The inauguration of the doctrine was followed by deeds of mercy and power. From this time He was constantly surrounded by thronging multitudes, and was constantly appealed to for miracles of compassion. We are told in quick succession of the healing of a leper by a touch, of the centurion's servant by a word, and the raising from the dead of the widow's son at Nain; and so incessant was His activity that His mother and His brethren began to be alarmed. Soon after the miracle at Nain He received the deputation from John the Baptist, then in his gloomy prison at Machærus, to ask whether He were indeed the Messiah. He bade the messengers take back no other answer than the works which they had witnessed or heard, and pre-eminent among them was the preaching the gospel to the poor. It was after their departure that He pronounced the unequalled eulogy on John as the greatest of the prophets, while yet &ldquo;the least in the kingdom of heaven&rdquo; was, in spiritual privileges, greater than He. It was in this discourse that He contrasted the glad and natural geniality of His own example &mdash; as one who came &ldquo;eating and drinking&rdquo; &mdash; with the asceticism and gloom of the Baptist. He never refused the invitations even of the Pharisees, and it was at the banquet of a Pharisee named Simon that He accepted the pathetic devotion of the &ldquo;woman that was a sinner&rdquo; (whom Christian tradition persistently identifies with Mary of Magdala), and rebuked the haughty and untender formalism of His host. His life during this period, as He wandered about Gennesaret and its vicinity, preaching to rejoicing crowds, was a life of poverty, toil, and simplicity, but it was also a life of exalted joy from the rapturous gratitude of the people and the faith which enabled Him to work many deeds of mercy among them. Of one episode of the period many details are preserved. After one of the missionary tours in Galilee, Jesus, finding Himself surrounded by a vast throng, began for the first time to preach to them in those parables which were the most characteristic form of His subsequent teaching, and which had the additional advantage of testing the moral and spiritual qualities of His hearers. He began with the parable of the sower, and this method of instruction naturally stimulated to such an extent the eagerness of His hearers that He was kept teaching till evening came. A second ill-judged attempt of His mother and brethren to control His proceedings probably combined with the sense of deep

to create a desire for brief rest and retirement, and He urged His disciples to a hasty departure to the lonelier eastern shores of the lake. During the sail of about 6 miles there rose one of the violent sudden storms to which the Sea of Galilee is specially liable. He was sleeping on the leather cushion of the steersman the deep sleep of fatigue, which not even the waves now dashing into the boat could disturb. The disciples woke Him in wild alarm, and the calm majesty with which He hushed the storm made an indelible impression on their minds. No sooner had they landed on the other side than they were met by a naked and raving maniac, whose dwelling was in the tombs which are still visible on the neighbouring hillsides. Jesus healed him, and (as we are told in a narrative which evidently touches on things entirely beyond our cognizance) suffered the demons to enter into a herd of swine hard by, which immediately rushed violently over a steep place into the sea. The semi-heathen inhabitants of the district, alarmed by His presence, and vexed at the loss of their swine, entreated Him to depart out of their coasts. He granted their evil petition, but left the healed demoniac to lead them to a better frame of mind. The people on the other side recognized the sail of His returning vessel, and were waiting in multitudes to meet Him. While preaching to them in a house at Capernaum, the friends of a paralytic, who had been unable to get near Him for the press, let down the sick man through the roof in front of Him, and He healed him, exciting some murmurs from the Scribes, who had already begun to watch Him with suspicion, by first using the formula &ldquo;Thy sins are forgiven thee.&rdquo; From the house He adjourned to the shore, and after another brief time of teaching there went to the farewell feast which Matthew gave to the &ldquo;publicans and sinners&rdquo; who had been his friends. The Pharisees, afraid as yet to find fault with Him directly, asked the disciples in great displeasure why their Master ate with publicans and sinners, whose very touch they regarded as a pollution. The answer of Jesus was given in the memorable quotation, to which He more than once referred, &ldquo;Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice.&rdquo; He answered the inquiry of St John's disciples about fasting by pointing out to them that the glad initiation of the marriage feast of the kingdom of heaven was no time for fasting, and that the embodiment of a new spirit in old form was like putting new wine in worn skins, or a new patch on an old garment. It seems to have been immediately after the banquet that He received the heartrending appeal of Jairus that He would come and heal his little daughter. On the way He healed the woman with the issue who secretly touched the fringe of His garment. By the time He reached the house of Jairus the little maid was dead, and His three most chosen disciples &mdash; Peter, James, and John &mdash; were alone admitted with the father and mother to witness this second instance in which He recalled the dead to life.

It was probably at this point of the ministry that there occurred the visit to that unnamed feast at Jerusalem, which was almost certainly the Feast of Purim. Perhaps with a view to this absence from Galilee He sent out the twelve, two and two, to preach and perform works of mercy in His name, sending them &ldquo;like lambs among wolves,&rdquo; and bidding them set the example of the most absolute contentment and simplicity. During His visit to Jerusalem,

where &mdash; as we learn from St John, whose facts are incidentally confirmed by allusions in the Synoptists &mdash; He had many friends and followers, He healed the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda, and excited the bitter enmity of the Jews by deliberately ignoring the exaggerated minutiæ of the traditional law which made them regard it as a heinous crime to carry even the smallest burden on the Sabbath. The simple command to the healed man to take up the mat on which he lay and walk aroused the Jews to fury; and from that incident, as St John expressly tells us, the overt persecution of Jesus began. He seems to have been summoned before some committee of the Sanhedrin, but on this occasion they did not dare to punish His violation of their traditions, and on the contrary had to listen in unavailing wrath, not only to His irresistible defence of what He had done on the Sabbath, but to Divine claims which they declared to be blasphemy. They did not dare to touch Him, knowing His power with the people, but from that day the leading authorities of Jerusalem seem to have determined on His death, and their hostility was so bitter and persistent that He left Jerusalem without waiting for the approaching Passover.

(3) It was from this moment that the period of determined opposition began. Hitherto the local Pharisees and Scribes of Galilee might disapprove and murmur, but they had not dared to set themselves in distinct and public antagonism against Him. They were now encouraged to do so by the fact that the leading authorities of the capital had repudiated His claims. The high priests and Pharisees even sent some of their number to act as spies upon His words and actions, and see how they might contrive occasions for His ruin. He returned to Galilee with the full knowledge that His human day was beginning to fade into evening, and that the sentence of violent death hung over Him. It was at this solemn time that the murder of John thrilled men's hearts with horror. Jesus retired with the disciples to a desert plain near the town at the northern end of the lake known as Bethsaida Julias, which was in the dominion of the milder Philip, and beyond the jurisdiction of the blood-stained Antipas. Even to this retirement, however, the multitude followed Him, and here it was that, moved with deep compassion, He fed the five thousand with five barley loaves and two small fishes. Then urging the departure of His disciples by boat to Capernaum, He dismissed the multitude in the gathering dusk, and at last fled from thence to the top of a neighbouring hill where He spent the night in prayer. During the night a terrible storm arose, and He came to His disciples walking upon the sea, and rescued St Peter as with a half faith he endeavoured to meet Him on the water. The next day at Capernaum He uttered that memorable discourse about Himself as the bread of life, and the necessity of &ldquo;eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking His blood,&rdquo; which was expressly designed to dissipate idle chiliastic and material delusions, and to test the sincerity of a spiritual faith. The discourse created deep discontent, and from that time many forsook Him. He even foresaw that one of His chosen apostles was &ldquo;a devil&rdquo;; but Peter spoke the conviction of the rest in the noble words, &ldquo;Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.&rdquo;

But henceforth opposition became more marked and more fearless. It had already been stirred up in the hearts of all Jewish formalists by His claiming to forgive sins, by His disapproval of asceticism, by His intercourse with publicans and sinners. It gathered force from His consistent depreciation of the petty traditional superstitions which had degraded the Sabbath from a delight and a blessing into a mere fetish of servitude. When the incident at Bethesda had attracted the notice of the Sanhedrin, the

Pharisaic spies from Jerusalem especially watched His Sabbath proceedings. Again and again their hatred was kindled on this point. Now they indignantly challenged the conduct of the hungry disciples for plucking ears of corn and rubbing them in their hands on the Sabbath day; on another occasion they attacked Him for healing on the Sabbath day the man with the withered hand, and later on for healing the bowed woman, and the blind man at Jerusalem. On each of these occasions He exposed with irresistible demonstration their inconsistency and hypocrisy, but thereby only deepened their anger against Him. On other occasions He came into violent collision with their whole system of traditional ceremonialism by pouring contempt on their superfluous and meaningless ablutions, by showing how comparatively meaningless was their scrupulosity about clean and unclean meats, and generally by denouncing the spirit which had led them to place the cumbrous pettinesses of their oral law above the word of God and the inmost spirit of all true religion. The rage of His Pharisaic opponents culminated on one day of open and final rapture between Himself and the spies of the Sanhedrin. Finding Him standing in silent prayer, the disciples had asked Him to teach them to pray, and in reply He had taught them &ldquo;the Lord's prayer,&rdquo; and told them, in such accents as man had never heard before, about the fatherhood of God, and the consequent efficacy of prayer. Shortly afterwards He had wrought one of His most marvellous cures upon a poor wretch who was at once blind, dumb, and mad. The Pharisees felt bound to check the astonished admiration which this act had once more excited, and with impotent and stupid malignity had tried to teach their followers that He cast out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. This blasphemous folly had drawn down upon their heads words of rebuke more intense and stern than they had ever heard. Such words, addressed to men accustomed to unbounded admiration as infallible teachers, aroused them to the deadliest hostility, and they soon found a weapon of annoyance and injury by demanding on every possible occasion that &ldquo;sign from heaven&rdquo; which Jesus always refused to give. Their exacerbation seems to have alarmed His mother and brethren into the third of their ill-timed interferences, which Jesus had once more to check by declaring that the day had now come on which human relationships were as nothing compared to the spiritual. The time for the mid-day meal had now arrived, and Jesus accepted, though it seems to have been given in no good spirit, the invitation of a Pharisee to break bread in his house. On entering He at once sat down at table, since it was but a brief and trivial meal, perhaps of bread and fruits, and the multitude were waiting outside to hear the word of God. Instantly He recognized that He was alone in the midst of enemies, and, moved to deep indignation by their hypocrisy and baseness, He delivered a terrible denunciation of the whole system and religion of the legalists and Pharisees. The feast broke up in confusion, and the guests began to surround Jesus with vehement, taunting, and threatening demonstrations. Passing from amongst them He found the multitude actually treading on each other in their haste and eagerness, and perhaps it was to their presence that He owed His safety. He preached to them a sermon, characterized throughout by the deep emotions by which His spirit had been agitated, of which the main topic was the awful peril of hypocrisy and greed; and then &mdash; as though some solemn agony had passed over His spirit &mdash; He warned them of the signs of the times, and of the awful consequences of rejecting His teaching.

(4) With that day of conflict ended the second and darker stage of His work in Galilee. The remainder of His life

was mainly passed in flight, in peril, and in concealment, only broken by brief occasional appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem. He departed from Capernaum, and went into the heathen region of Tyre and Sidon. But few particulars of this period are recorded. Somewhere in those regions He tested the strong faith of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and healed her demoniac daughter. From Tyre and Sidon He wandered southwards again, keeping mainly to the eastward and less inhabited region, only now and then healing a sufferer, but gradually attracting crowds once more. Somewhere on the Peræan side of the lake He fed the four thousand. After this period of wandering and absence He once more sailed to Magdala, but was met immediately by the ominous conjunction of Herodians and Pharisees with their hostile demand for a sign. Turning away from them, He uttered His last sad farewell and prophecy to the cities in which He had laboured, and once more journeyed northwards. During this journey they came near to Cæsarea Philippi, and, after standing in silent prayer, He asked His disciples &ldquo;Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?&rdquo; The sorrowful confession had to be made that, though they recognized Him as a prophet, they had not recognized Him as the Messiah. Then came the momentous question, which was to test how much of His task was accomplished in the hearts of those apostles whose training had now for some time been His principal work, &ldquo;But whom say ye that I am?&rdquo; Then it was that Peter won the immortal glory of giving that which has thenceforth been the answer of all the Christian world, &ldquo;Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.&rdquo; That answer is the inauguration, in human convictions, of Christianity and of Christendom; and it was rewarded by the promise of the power of the keys, and the power to bind and loose, and the foundation of the Christian church upon a rock. Whatever may be the difficulties of the passage, we see that Jesus meant to confer on His church the teaching power of which the key was the symbol, the power of legislative action indicated by binding and loosing, and the prophetic insight on which depended the ability to absolve in God's name. But to obviate all delusions He at once revealed to them the dark abyss of suffering down which He had first to tread; and, as though to prove how little claim His words gave to sacerdotal usurpations, He proceeded to rebuke in the sternest words the presumption of Peter, who ventured to set aside His predictions as to His coming sufferings and death. It was six days after this that He took the three most chosen apostles with Him up the snowy slopes of Hermon, where they witnessed the transfiguration, as though to strengthen their faith in the dark hours to come. On descending the hill, He healed the demoniac boy whom the apostles had vainly tried to help, and built on this exorcism the lesson of faith which He was never weary of inculcating on His followers. Having now reached the northern limit of the Holy Land, He turned His footsteps southwards by the most secluded paths, omitting no opportunity to train the apostles, now teaching them humility by the example of a little child, and now warning them by significant parables of the need of self-sacrifice and of the spirit of forgiveness.

(5) At the ensuing Feast of Tabernacles we find Him once more at Jerusalem, where He appeared suddenly in the temple. St John records His teachings, drawn from the various incidents of the feast, and also the divided opinions of the people, and the almost unanimous opposition of the ruling classes. This visit to the Holy City was marked by the incident of the woman taken in adultery, in which He showed such sovereign wisdom and tenderness, and by the Sabbatarian disputes which arose from the healing of the blind man. On one occasion Jesus had to leave the temple amid a burst of fury in which the Jews threatened

to stone Him, and when He left Jerusalem it was under the direct ban of excommunication. Under these circumstances He returned for one more brief visit to Galilee. The news which He received of the murder of some Galilæans in the temple by Pilate, and of Herod's designs against His safety, show how surrounded by perils was His human life. But He now calmly ended His work in Galilee by the mission of seventy disciples to prepare for His great last journey southwards. His words of farewell to the cities which had rejected Him were full of sadness and solemnity, as He started from the land which had refused His mission to the city in which He was to be crucified.

We now enter on the last great phase of His work, the incidents of His final journey and the close of His ministry. First He was refused shelter by the rude villagers of Engannim, and had to change his route. Next came, the healing of the ten lepers, of whom but one showed gratitude, and he was a Samaritan. The Sabbath healings of the bowed woman and of the man with the dropsy are the two chief miracles of the journey, during which He also delivered many most memorable discourses, and some of His divinest parables &mdash; such as those of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son. So we trace His steps to the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany, and to Jerusalem, which He visited at the Feast of the Dedication. His appearance in the temple was always the signal for the fiercest opposition of Sadducees and Pharisees, who watched with jealousy and hatred the eagerness of the multitude to hear Him. After serious conflicts He retired to the other Bethany, beyond Jordan. Among the few recorded incidents of His stay in Peræa are the attempts to entangle Him with Herod and the Jewish schools by questions about divorce, the beautiful scene of blessing the little children, and the discourse about riches on the occasion of the test which He applied to the rich young ruler who &ldquo;made the great refusal.&rdquo; The death of Lazarus summoned Him to Bethany, and the most signal miracle which He there wrought by raising Lazarus from the dead excited such notice that the Sanhedrin now met under the presidency of Caiaphas, and came to the deliberate conclusion that they must put Him to death, lest the populace should raise tumults on His behalf which might precipitate the final intervention of Rome in the affairs of their nation. But, as His time was not yet come, Jesus avoided the peril of public arrest or private assassination by retiring to an obscure village called Ephraim, on the edge of the wilderness.

(6) He did not leave Ephraim till He could join the great caravan of Galilæan pilgrims with whom He could proceed in safety to His last passover. His apostles, both from His own warnings and from the visible grandeur of His transfiguration of self-sacrifice, were well aware that a crisis of His career had now arrived; and nothing can show more clearly the mistaken character of their Messianic hopes than the fact that, though He now distinctly told them the crowning horror that He should be crucified, the sons of Zebedee came with their mother Salome to beg for places at His right hand and His left in His kingdom. Jesus made their ambitious request a theme for rich and solemn teachings on the beatitude of suffering for the cause of God and man. As they approached Jericho, accompanied by excited multitudes, He healed the blind Bartimæus, and in Jericho He excited the murmurs of the crowd by accepting the hospitality of the publican Zacchæus. On the road between Jericho and Bethany He delivered the parable of the pounds. He arrived at Bethany probably on Friday, Nisan 8, A.U.C. 783 (March 31, 30 A.D.), six days before the passover, and before the sunset had begun the Sabbath hours. The Sabbath was spent in quiet. In the evening Martha and Mary gave him a banquet in the house of Simon the leper, at which Mary, in her devotion and

gratitude, broke the alabaster of precious ointment over His head and feet, and so awoke the deadly avarice of Judas that he seems on that very evening to have communed with the Jewish priests for the paltry blood-money of thirty pieces of silver (less than £4) for which he was willing to betray Him. On the morning of Palm Sunday Jesus made His triumphant entry into Jerusalem amid the palm-waving throngs, who shouted &ldquo;Hosanna to the son of David,&rdquo; and at the point of the road where the city first bursts upon the view He paused to weep over it and prophesy its doom. After once more cleansing the temple, and protecting from the anger of the priests and Pharisees the children who still shouted Hosanna, He spoke to Philip about the Greeks, (probably from Edessa) who wished to see Him, and, strengthened by a voice from heaven, spent the rest of the clay in teaching. At evening He retired for safety with the twelve outside the city walls in the direction of Bethany. On the Monday morning, as He went to Jerusalem, He pronounced the symbolic doom upon the fig-tree which had only leaves. On entering the temple He was met by a formidable deputation of priests, scribes, and rabbis, who demanded &ldquo;by what authority He was acting,&rdquo; &mdash; a question which He declined to answer until they proved their right to ask it, by giving a definite opinion respecting the baptism of John. Their confession of inability to do this was so marked a proof of their incompetence to claim the function of religious teachers, that He refused to meet their challenge. The day may be called &ldquo;a day of parables,&rdquo; for during His teaching He spoke the parables of the two sons, the rebellious husbandmen, the builders and the corner stone, and the marriage of the king's son. These parables were so obviously aimed at the hypocrisy, malevolence, and presumption of the Jewish authorities that fear alone restrained them from immediately seizing Him. At evening He again retired from the city. The next day, the Tuesday in Passion week, may be called the day of temptations, for it was marked by three deliberate attempts to undermine His authority by involving Him in some difficulty either with the rulers or the people. In the morning walk to Jerusalem He taught to His disciples a lesson of faith from the withered fig-tree. In the temple He was first met by the plot of the Herodians and Pharisees to embroil Him either with the Romans or the populace by a question as to the lawfulness of paying tribute, then by a piece of poor casuistry on the part of the Sadducees concerning the resurrection, then by the question of a Scribe as to the great commandment of the law. In each instance the divine and ready wisdom of His answers not only entirely defeated the stratagems of the Sanhedrists, but showed His immeasurable superiority to them in knowledge and insight. Then, to prove how easily He might have turned the tables on them, had He desired their humiliation, He exposed their complete ignorance respecting the very subject on which they claimed the fullest knowledge by reducing them to a confession of their inability to explain why David in the spirit had given the name of Lord to the Messiah who was to be his son. And then, knowing that the time had come when their degradation of religion into a mere tyranny and semblance should be set forth, He delivered the terrible denunciation which, with its eightfold &ldquo;Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,&rdquo; was intended to leave them utterly inexcusable. The Jewish authorities felt that this was a final rupture, that they must now, at all costs, bring about His immediate death.

Before He left the temple for ever He taught the lesson of true charity as illustrated by the widow's mite, and then went and sat on the green slopes of the Mount of Olives. There He pronounced to His disciples that great eschatological discourse which was suggested by their admiration of the temple buildings, destined so soon to sink in blood

and ashes. In the cool of evening they walked to Bethany, perhaps at the very time that Judas was arranging with the priests the final details of His betrayal and arrest. The Wednesday was spent in deep retirement at Bethany, and not a single word or incident is recorded on that day. On the Thursday morning He woke never to sleep again.

(7) On the evening of Thursday Jesus went with His disciples to Jerusalem to keep that quasi-paschal feast at which He instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. Even then the apostles had jealousies about precedence, and it was to cure them of their fatal tendency to selfish pride and ambition that He washed the disciples feet. During the supper He first indicated to John, and through him to Peter, that He knew who the traitor was. He clearly told them that this was the last meal which He should eat with them, and bade them henceforth &ldquo;eat bread and drink wine&rdquo; in sacramental memory of Him. It was after Judas had gone forth into the night that He began those last discourses preserved for us by St John alone, which are so &ldquo;rarely mixed of sadness and joys, and studded with mysteries as with emeralds.&rdquo; There is a matchless beauty and tenderness in the records of His gentle words of warning and help to Peter, Thomas, Philip, and Jude, and of that familiar intercourse with his dearest followers, whose sinking spirits He sustained by the promise of the Comforter. Then they sang a hymn, probably the Psalm known to the Jews as the Great Hallel, and in the darkness walked to the olive garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus passed through His hour of mysterious agony and passion, while even His most beloved apostles could not watch with Him. Then torches suddenly flashed upon the night as the traitor, accompanied by priests and their servants, and Levites of the temple guard, and Roman soldiers, made their way across the valley of the Kidron to the slope of Olivet on which the garden lay. There Judas betrayed Him with a kiss; and, in spite of the supernatural awe which His presence inspired even into His enemies, He resigned Himself into their hands, rebuked the rash blow of Peter, and by one last act of mercy healed the slight wound of Malchus. &ldquo;Then all His disciples forsook Him and fled.&rdquo;

(&alpha;) He was taken first to the astute and aged Annas, who was regarded as high priest de jure, though not de facto. From this time forward it was the priestly party &mdash; the Sadducees, not the Pharisees &mdash; who were almost exclusively responsible for His death. On His refusal to plead before this disorderly midnight tribunal, He was struck on the mouth; and, failing to extort anything from Him, Annas sent Him bound across the courtyard to his son-in-law Caiaphas, the de facto high priest.

(&beta;) It was still night, and here took place the second irregular and illegal trial, before His worst enemies among the priests and Sadducees. The false witnesses who endeavoured to convict Him of having threatened to destroy the temple failed, and He preserved unbroken silence until Caiaphas adjured Him by the living God to tell them whether He was the Messiah, the Son of God. In answer to this appeal He said &ldquo;I am,&rdquo; and told them that they should see His return hereafter in the clouds. Then Caiaphas rent his robes with the cry of blasphemy, and this committee of the Sanhedrin declared Him &ldquo;guilty of death.&rdquo;

(&gamma;) After this second examination Jesus was remanded to the guardroom until break of day, before which time the whole Sanhedrin could not meet. As He was led past the brazier in the courtyard, His one glance broke into penitence the heart of His backsliding apostle, who had just denied Him with oaths. As He waited, He was insulted by the coarse derision and brutal violence of the priestly menials. When the Sanhedrin met, they once more entirely failed to fix any charge upon Him, until He renewed in their presence His claim to be the Son of God. He was

then formally condemned to death, and underwent a second derision at the hands of the assembled elders. It was after this condemnation that remorse seized the dark soul of Judas. He flung down the blood-money before his tempters, and with an agonized confession of guilt rushed out to his terrible suicide.

At this period the Jews had lost all legal right to put any one to death, and they were further anxious to avoid personal responsibility, and danger of vengeance from the followers of Jesus, by handing Him over for execution to the Roman procurator. Accordingly they led Him bound to Pilate in imposing procession. They were, however, mistaken in supposing that Pilate would crucify Jesus at their bare word without seeing whether He was guilty; and, as they could not enter the Herodian palace, in which the Gentile ruler lived, without pollution, which would have prevented them from partaking in the passover that evening, Pilate went out to them. In every line of the brief colloquy which ensued we trace the haughty contempt of the Roman, and the burning hatred of the Jews. Failing to arrive at any definite charge, Pilate questioned Jesus alone inside the prætorium, and after a brief examination came out to the Jews with the declaration of complete acquittal.

In the wild clamour which ensued he caught the word Galilee, and, understanding that Jesus had chiefly taught in Galilee, eagerly seized the opportunity of getting rid of the matter by sending Him to Herod. But before Herod as before Pilate Jesus retained His majestic silence, and, unable to condemn Him, Herod contented himself with arraying Him in a white festive robe, setting Him at nought with his myrmidons, and sending Him back with a second practical acquittal to the procurator.

Then, in three stages, began the third and most agonizing phase of the public trial. Pilate, seated on his bema upon the marble pavement, declared that, as His innocence was now certain, He would merely scourge and dismiss Him. It was a disgraceful proposal, due partly to his desire to save the life of one whom he saw to be innocent, but dictated by fear of a new riot. Further than this, the warning of his wife, and the awful majesty of the sufferer, had created a strong presentiment in Pilate's mind. But his actions were practically controlled by the past guilt which made him tremble at the thought of the complaints which Jews, Samaritans, and Galileans could alike prefer against him. He did not therefore venture to refuse the cry of the mob &mdash; hounded on as they were by the priests and Sanhedrists &mdash; for the passover boon of having a prisoner liberated to them; and he vainly tried to induce them to ask for the liberation of Jesus. They demanded the rebel and murderer Bar Abbas, and began to shout for the crucifixion of Jesus. Bar Abbas was set free, and Jesus underwent the horrible Roman scourging, which was followed by the ruthless mockery of the soldiers, who arrayed Him in an old crimson robe and placed a crown of thorns on His head, and a reed in his hand as a sceptre, and so paid Him mock homage as a king of the Jews.

When He came forth after this hour of agony, Pilate made one more appeal to their compassion in the words &ldquo;Behold the man!&rdquo; and on hearing that He claimed to be &ldquo;a Son of God&rdquo; &mdash; for since the charge of treason had broken down, the priests now substituted for it a charge of blasphemy &mdash; he became still more alarmed, and once more questioned Jesus in a private interview. For some time Jesus would not speak. When He did, it was to say that He regarded Pilate as less guilty than the Jews. As Pilate led Him forth, and saw Him stand before that shameful yelling multitude in His majesty of solemn woe, he broke forth into the involuntary exclamation, &ldquo;Behold your King!&rdquo; That word raised among the multitude some

very ominous allusions to Cæsar, and Pilate, after publicly washing his hands, in token that he was innocent of this death, pronounced the fatal order for His crucifixion.

Jesus was then clad in His own garments and led forth with two robbers to be crucified. As He was unable to bear the weight of His cross, Simon of Cyrene was impressed for that service. On His way Jesus gently consoled the weeping daughters of Jerusalem, and, when they reached the fatal spot of Golgotha, He refused the stupefying potion which was offered to Him, and prayed for His murderers even as they drove the nails through His hands. Pilate managed to insult the Jews by putting over the cross the title &ldquo;The King of the Jews,&rdquo; in three languages, which thus in the presence of the vast passover multitude testified to the truth. On the cross Jesus hung for three hours in agony. The soldiers parted His garments, and cast lots for His seamless robe. The mob, the priests, even the crucified malefactors, joined in taunting Him. But He answered not. After His prayer for His murderers He only spoke to promise paradise to the penitent robber; to assign His mother to the care of the beloved disciple; to quote in the lowest depth of His agony the first words of the 22d Psalm; to give vent to the sole expression of physical anguish which He uttered, &ldquo;I thirst&rdquo;; to commend His spirit into His Father's hands; and lastly, in the one victorious word Τετέλεσται, &ldquo;it is finished,&rdquo; to end His work on earth. The bearing of Jesus on the cross, together with the circumstances which accompanied the crucifixion &mdash; the darkness, earthquake, and rending of the temple veil &mdash; produced a deep impression even on the mind of the heathen centurion. They so powerfully affected the multitude that they returned to Jerusalem wailing and beating on their breasts, at once with a feeling of guilt and a presentiment of future retribution.

(8) At evening the soldiers despatched the two crucified robbers by breaking their legs, in order that their bodies might be removed before the passover. But they found Jesus already dead, and the certainty of His death was assured by one of the soldiers driving his spear into the region of the heart, whence came out blood and water. As very little time was left before the sunset marked the beginning of the Sabbath, and rendered labour impossible, the body of Jesus was hastily buried by Nicodemus and by Joseph of Arimathæa, who had obtained the requisite permission. They wrapped it in fine linen and spices, and laid it in the rockhewn garden-grave of Joseph, rolling a great stone to the aperture, which was further guarded by soldiers sent by the Jews to prevent its removal for purposes of fraud. This was on Friday evening. Very early on the morning of Sunday, while it was yet dark, the two Marys were met at the sepulchre by a vision of angels which announced His resurrection. Of that resurrection, in spite of their original doubts and misgivings, the whole body of the disciples became unalterably convinced, and on their unalterable conviction, and the subsequent witness of history to the blessed truth of their doctrines, has rested in great measure the belief of the Christian church. Uniting the contemporary testimony of St Paul, who must have been in personal communication with many of the five hundred witnesses to whose evidence he appeals, with those of the Gospels, we find ten recorded appearances: &mdash; (1) to Mary Magdalene (John xx. 17); (2) to other women (Matt, xxviii. 9, 10); (3) to Peter (Luke xxiv. 3i; 1 Cor. xv. 5); (4) to the two disciples on their way to Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 13-32); (5) to the ten apostles. All these appearances occurred on the first Easter day. On the following Sunday Jesus appeared (6) to the eleven apostles, Thomas having been absent on the previous occasion. He further appeared (7) to seven apostles by the Sea of Galilee (John xxi. 1-24);

(8) to more than five hundred at once on a mountain in Galilee; (9) to James (1 Cor. xv. 3, 8); and (10) at the ascension. These appearances continued for forty days. On the last occasion Jesus led His disciples towards Bethany, gave them His last command, blessed them, and as He blessed them passed away, and &ldquo;a cloud received Him out of their sight.&rdquo;

VI. Such, in briefest outline, are the main recorded events of the life of Jesus Christ on earth. It only remains to say a few words concerning His person and His work, regarded here in their historical rather than in their theological aspect.

As regards His person, Christians who accept the New Testament as the record of inspired teaching, and who believe it to be evidenced, not only by inward and super natural revelation, but also by the subsequent history of the church and the world, believe that Jesus Christ was (in the words of what is probably a very ancient Christian hymn quoted by St Paul) the only begotten Son of God, &ldquo;manifest in the flesh, justified by the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory&rdquo;; and as a part of this belief they hold that, just as Adam the first man was not born but created, so the second Adam, who came to redeem our nature, was not born by ordinary generation but was &ldquo;incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.&rdquo; But even those who do not accept this faith see in Jesus a unique and sinless personality, one with whom no other human being can even distantly be compared, either in His character, His teaching, or the results which He accomplished by His brief ministry. He taught but for three years, and not continuously even during them. He accepted the most ordinary customs of the teachers of His day. He wore no broad phylacteries like the Pharisees; He was not emaciated with asceticism like the Essenes; He preached the kingdom of God, not, as John had done, between the gloomy precipices of the wilderness, but from the homely platform of the synagogue, to give the Midrash when the Torah had been read. He appeared before the people, not in the hairy mantle of a prophet, but &ldquo;in the ordinary dress of a Jewish man, at the four ends of which the customary tassels were not wanting.&rdquo; He came &ldquo;eating and drinking&rdquo;; He had no human learning; His rank was but that of a village carpenter; He checked all political excitement; He directed that respect should be paid to all the recognized rulers, whether heathen or Jewish, and even to the religious teachers of the nation; He was obedient to the Mosaic law; His followers were &ldquo;unlearned and ignorant men&rdquo; chosen from the humblest of the people. Yet He has, as a simple matter of fact, altered the whole current of the stream of history; He closed all the history of the past, and inaugurated all the history of the future, and all the most brilliant and civilized nations of the world worship Him as God. Kant testifies to His ideal perfection. Hegel saw in Him the union of the human and the divine. Even the most advanced of sceptics do Him homage. Spinoza spoke of Him as the truest symbol of heavenly wisdom. The beauty and grandeur of His life overawed even the flippant soul of Voltaire. &ldquo;Between Him and whoever else in the world,&rdquo; said Napoleon I. at St Helena, &ldquo;there is no possible term of comparison.&rdquo; &ldquo;If the life and death of Socrates are

those of a sage,&rdquo; said Rousseau, &ldquo;the life and death of Jesus are those of a God.&rdquo; &ldquo;He is,&rdquo; says Strauss, &ldquo;the highest object we can possibly imagine with respect to religion, the Being without whose presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible.&rdquo; &ldquo;The Christ of the Gospels,&rdquo; says Renan, &ldquo;is the most beautiful incarnation of God in the most beautiful of forms. His beauty is eternal; His reign will never end.&rdquo; John Stuart Mill spoke of Him as &ldquo;a man charged with a special, express, and unique com mission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.&rdquo;

The transcendent power of His personality, which is betokened in such expressions as those quoted above, is due, not only to His devotion and self-sacrifice, but to His absolute sinlessness. This constitutes the unique character of His individuality. He alone of mankind has claimed to be sinless, and has had the claim granted by unanimous consent both in His lifetime and in subsequent ages. He alone among men has never even been assailed by the breath of moral calumny, and never even in His most sacred utterances and prayers betrayed the faintest consciousness of any evil as present in His soul. He therefore alone has furnished mankind with a perfect ideal; and, though no saint has ever even distantly attained to the perfectness of that ideal, yet those who have done so in greatest measure have always said that they have done so solely by the aid of His grace, and the imitation of His example.

Nor was His teaching less unique than His personality. It was marked by a tone of sovereign authority; &ldquo;Ye have heard that it was said &mdash; but I say unto you.&rdquo; In this it was the very opposite to the teaching of His own day and of centuries afterwards, which relied exclusively upon precedent. It was also marked by absolute originality. The test of its originality is the world's acceptance of it as specifically His. Isolated fragments of it may be compared with truths uttered by others; but it stands alone in its breadth and in its power, in its absence of narrow exclusiveness and scholastic system and abstract speculation. It was fresh, simple, natural, abounding in illustrations at once the most beautiful and the most intelligible, drawn from all the common sights and sounds of nature, and all the daily incidents and objects of social and domestic life. It flowed forth without reserve to all and on every fitting occasion, &mdash; on the road, on the hillside, on the lake, or by the lonely well, or at the banquet whether of the Pharisee or the publican. Expressed in the form of parables, it has seized the imagination of mankind with a force and tenacity which is not distantly approached even by the sacred writers, and even when not directly parabolic it was so full of picturesqueness and directness that there is not one recorded sentence of it which has not been treasured up in the memory of mankind. His utterances not only rival and surpass all that preceded and all that has followed them, but &ldquo;they complement all beginnings.&rdquo; Sometimes they consist of short suggestive sayings (gnomes), full of depth, yet free from all affectation or obscurity, which make even what is most mysterious and spiritual humanly perceptible, throwing over it the glamour both of poetry and of a longing presentiment, and incessantly enticing man towards something yet higher. There is never in them a lurking fallacy nor a superfluous word, but all is &ldquo;vivacity, nature, intelligibility, directly enlightening grace,&rdquo; intended only to convince and to save. And while such was the

form of His teaching, its force was even more remarkable. It is all centred in the two great truths of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; from the former springs every truth of theology, from the latter every application of morals. Judaism had sunk into a religion of hatreds; the one message of Jesus was love. In this He differs even from John the Baptist and the prophets. &ldquo;Their emblem is the storms, His the sun.&rdquo;

Once more, &mdash; as regards, the work of Jesus, the Christian believer contemplates it in that aspect in which it is presented by St Paul as a work of atonement, the redemption of a guilty race; but even apart from this the mere historical student must admit that Christ elevated both the individual and the race as none have ever done before or since. His doctrine purified the world from the loathly degradation of lust and luxury into which society had fallen. By convincing men of the inherent dignity of manhood, He added to the value of human life. He made holiness a common possession. Heathen morality had reached its loftiest point in the Stoic philosophy; but Stoicism was scornful, ineffectual, despairing, and Christ gave a moral system infinitely more perfect, more hopeful, and more tender to all mankind. To Him is alone due the Christian significance of such words as charity, humility, and humanity. He first taught the sacredness of the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost. He has inspired the aims of the noblest culture, while at the same time He has restored the souls of men, and made the care of the moral and spiritual being the supreme end of life. The gradual emancipation of the world from the tyrannies of sensuality, cruelty, and serfdom has been won step after step from His principles. The supremacy of the spiritual, the solidarity of nations, the universality of God's love, the essential equality of all men in His sight, are but a few of the great and fruitful conceptions which have sprung directly from His teaching, and which still have an unexhausted force, to bring about, in ever-increasing measure, the amelioration of the world.