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 of work, and as expressing the conviction, stamped upon His mind by the facts, "that it was in accordance with higher laws that the word of God should have to reckon with defeats as well as victories." Accordingly he adopts in the main the explanation which the Evangelist gives in Mark iv. 13-20. The parable of the seed growing secretly is turned to account in favour of the "present" Kingdom of God.

Julicher has an incomparable power of striking fire out of every one of the parables, but the flame is of a different colour from that which it showed when Jesus pronounced the parables before the enchanted multitude. The problem posed by Johannes Weiss in connexion with the teaching of Jesus is treated by Julicher only so far as it has direct interest for the creative independence of his own religious thought.

Alongside of the parabolic discourses of Mark iv. we have now to place, as a newly discovered problem, the discourse at the sending out of the Twelve in Matt. x. Up to the time of Johannes Weiss it had been possible to rest content with transplanting the gloomy sayings regarding persecutions to the last period of Jesus' life; but now there was the further difficulty to be met that while so hasty a proclamation of the Kingdom of God is quite reconcilable with an exclusively eschatological character of the preaching of the Kingdom, the moment this is at all minimised it becomes unintelligible, not to mention the fact that in this case nothing can be made of the saying about the immediate coming of the Son of Man in Matt. x. 23. As though he felt the stern eye of old Reimarus upon him, Bousset hastens in a footnote to throw overboard the whole report of the mission of the Twelve as an "obscure and unintelligible tradition." Not content with that, he adds: "Perhaps the whole narrative is merely an expansion of some direction about missionising given by Jesus to the disciples in view of a later time." Before, it was only the discourse which was unhistorical; now it is the whole account of the mission-at least if we may assume that here, as is usual with theologians of all times, the author's real opinion is expressed in the footnote, and his most cherished opinion of all introduced with "perhaps." But how much historical material will remain to modern theologians in the Gospels if they are forced to abandon it wholesale from their objection to pure eschatology? If all the pronouncements of this kind to which the representatives of the Marcan hypothesis have committed themselves were collected together, they would make a book which would be much more damaging even than that of Wrede's which dropped a bomb into their midst.

A third problem is offered by the saying in Matt. xi. 12, about "the violent" who, since the time of John the Baptist, "take the Kingdom of Heaven by force," which raises fresh difficulties for the