PRINCETON, N. J BT 201 .A28 1898 Adamson, Thomas Studies of the mind in Christ AS^ SJftnxjS Ws Mm C' w 4 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/studiesofrnindinc00adam_0 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST BY THE SAME AUTHOR Second Edition now ready , price One Shilling, THE SPIRIT OF POWER: AS SET FORTH IN |j0ok nf i!)£ 3Uts 0f il)£ _ . iav /3ov\tjtcu, as expres¬ sive of the condition by which the knowledge was held ? He would be utterly unchristian in spirit who, having as mere man this knowledge by birth, personal attainment, or revelation, stated deliberately that he was under no obligation to communicate it save to whom he willed, or if he willed. It is impossible to look on the Christ in a light so unchristian. If we admit His words,— and they are most generally admitted to be part of the Gospels,—we can only hold that they express His belief that He had His knowledge by virtue of His own Divine 1 Matt. xi. 27. Christ’s divine knowledge 85 nature. Of course it may be said that immediately after these words He does begin to call men to Himself: “ Come unto Me all ye that labour.” But whilst that invitation proclaims the grace of His heart, and the graciousness of what He held to be the Father’s purpose, it comes from the uncontrolled goodness of His own will; it is grace, and has power, because it comes from the lips of One who could use the words which had just preceded. This fact is again brought out when Jesus argues with the Jews as to His being their Messiah. When He does so, and at a most critical time,—for the plain statement of the truth meant death,—He does not rest His Messi¬ anic claim on His being the Son of David, but on His being the Son of God. The Jews would have believed along the one line of proof ; He believed, nay, had arrived at His conviction, by the other. And it He looked on as alone right. They remarked that the Messiah was to be David’s Son; He pointed out that in the 110th Psalm David himself had called the Messiah, his son, Lord. And “ if David then calleth Him Lord, how is He his son ? ” 1 How here the evidence is not invali¬ dated, whatever Christ meant by His reference to the authorship; He puts the argument as one whose con¬ dition they accepted, and He did not dispute; so that its inference also was incumbent upon them. Lie does not say that He had attained, by means of this passage, His own knowledge of the fact about which He is speak¬ ing. He only indicates that they, in their present state of belief, are bound to accept it from this source. 1 Matt. xxii. 45. 86 STUDIES OF TIIE MIND IN CHRIST Hence it seems clear that for Christ Himself the con¬ sciousness of His person came first, the perception of His calling second. That by which He was sure of His Messianic vocation was not His Davidic descent (for there might have been many who could have claimed that qualification equally at least with Him) but his Divine Sonship. Perhaps it is right now to call attention to the fact that the introduction of such a line of thought into the conversation with Mcodemus does not seem, when one comes to think over it, out of place. The subject is not obtruded artificially, nor is it used as a means of humiliating one who was a teacher of Israel. Here, as ever, it is introduced for a practical and appropriate object, the one object which warranted it, viz. God’s purpose of grace in saving men. The very mention of the epourania is incidental in the account to that of the epigeia. The knowledge Christ had of His own person is referred to in order to explain the know¬ ledge He claimed in regard to this subject, which he was expounding. For the purposes of my argument I do not need to assume the genuineness of any verses after the sixteenth, or even of the sixteenth, seeing its truth is at least implied in the preceding ones. It is unnecessary for the present purpose to decide between those who, like Liicke, think the latter verses consist of John’s and Christ’s ideas intermingled, and those who, with Strauss, consider the whole to be a single piece, due either to Christ or to the author of the Fourth Gospel. I have rather to point out that it was not unnatural Christ’s divine knowledge 87 for Jesus in His early ministry to have spoken, any more than to have become aware, of such a subject. This knowledge constituted His call and object. He had nothing else to preach or to carry out. It was alike His message and His mission. And if He had it, why not speak it, especially to an honest, earnest inquirer, whose ripeness of spirit and trained intelligence were far ahead of his actual attainments ? Jesus might well infer that He was not likely to see this “ teacher of Israel ” soon again; He could easily perceive that in such a man the leaven would ferment till it had leavened the whole lump. He could not shut His eyes to the fact that it was of the very greatest importance for Him to gain such a follower in the Council, and for the man himself to be at some possible crisis possessed of full and clear information about the main points of his Saviour’s mission. The outcome justified Christ’s judg¬ ment and action in the matter. Nay, such a case does not stand alone. Almost as early Christ spake with equal plainness, if not with equal completeness, to the woman of Samaria, though her intellectual training was quite different; afterwards also, in like manner, to the man born blind in Jeru¬ salem, though he was wholly uneducated. To the one He said, 1 “ I that speak unto thee am He ”; to the other, adapting His way of putting the truth, as in the former case, to what was characteristic in the circum¬ stances, and to what must have struck the person, 2 “ Thou hast both seen Him, and He it is that speaketli with thee.” He had just declined to have anything to 1 John iv. 26. 2 John ix. 37. 88 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST do with the crowds in Jerusalem; but, as the result of that fully warranted it ever afterward, in Judaea and Galilee alike, so His speaking as He did to these three persons, in two cases at least as early as that refusal, is vindicated by its effects. Does it not seem very far fetched, then, to adopt the old Socinian explanations of such texts as “ Before Abraham was, I am,” 1 or “Glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was,” 2 and to say that they represent the predestin¬ ation of Christ ? To say of the latter verse, that it is the result of spiritual imagination in a moment of special exaltation, is dangerously like saying that the whole is the result of mere imagination. How can anyone avoid seeing that it is merely to strain language into unmeaning emptiness if one say that the Saviour called Himself the only begotten Son simply in order to bring out the greatness of the sacrifice God made in sending Him ? It involves sacrifice of the truth, if there were other such sons; it involves sacrifice of Christ’s veracity, if He did not know there were none such besides Him¬ self. The sacrifice demanded is greater than could be compensated for by any other. We should lose Christ much more surely the one way than the other. The Saviour could not have known Himself as the only begotten Son by mere separateness from other children of God whom He met; that was a conclusion far beyond the premises. He could have known it, as we shall see, and could have been warranted in teaching it, only by the knowledge of His own Godhead. How 1 John viii. 58. 2 John xvii. 5. Christ’s divine knowledge 89 absurd, then, to accept even so strained an interpreta¬ tion, when the admission has to be made that, “ it is not to be doubted that Jesus, by some admissions which point in that direction ” (personal pre-existence), “ gave him ” (the author of the Fourth Gospel), “ ground for that view ” ! Such reasonings, I confess, seem to me to verge on the disingenuous, and simply make clear the extreme difficulty of getting rid of such inconveniently plain texts. There is no resting-place logically between considering Jesus the vainest of men and regarding Him as the very Son of God. What strikes one in this connection is that Christ never introduced His Godhead except in a natural way, with a practical object. But for the needs of His mission, we should never have heard of it. He did not make the claim and say no more, leaving us in real ignorance and to mere wonder. He did. not even con¬ tent Himself by adding proof. He only mentioned the fact in connection with the aim of His grace. Specially He used it as the foundation of the epourania, as'the explanation of His presence and the vindication of His mission. He never gave a merely abstract statement of it. He never Jaunted it; though one feels it lay in the back¬ ground of His mind as the pre-supposition of His think¬ ing and the warrant of His aims. He never tried to press for faith in it; He knew how great the thing was, and how difficult to face. He knew that to gain faith in it was to get conviction of it, and that that was a result worth waiting for. His heart was not attracted by what it might bring of eclat. He rejoiced in what He was, 90 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST but only because by it He could bless men supremely. He seems to have been afraid of even the appearance of boasting or self-seeking in connection with it. If, as we have seen, this knowledge of heavenly things was one which was under no obligation or law but its own, then the law ruling it in Him was that of grace which ruled in the God whom He professed to reveal; for no sooner has He made the great claim of mutual know¬ ledge between Himself and the Father alone, followed by the almost greater claim of absoluteness in control¬ ling His communication of it, than at once He cries, as if impressed by the obligation to be practical, “ Come unto Me all ye that labour ; I will give you rest.” 1 No one is to be left free to imagine any selfishness, unwill¬ ingness, or partiality in Him. There was no vanity in His claim. He was not self-deceived any more than a deceiver. He was the Son of God, come from heaven, and by knowing that He knew Himself to be fitted for teaching the epourania. Accordingly we find that Christ never allowed Himself to be looked upon as standing in the ordinary line of spiritual teachers. He recognised the con¬ tinuity of religious work in the successive ages ; He declared that one sowed, and another reaped. Yet He looked on Himself as special and separate in this matter. He had not learned like others. He was different Himself, and so therefore was His knowledge. All others were but sent ; He Himself was the sender. “ I sent you ” He says, “ to reap that whereon ye have not laboured: others have laboured, and ye are entered 1 Matt. xi. 28. ( K Christ’s divine knowledge 91 into their labour.” 1 This was the testimony and view of John the Baptist. He looked on himself as the friend of the Bridegroom, who standeth and heareth. 2 And that testimony was expressly accepted by the Saviour when He said, 3 “ Can ye make the sons of the bride-chamber fast while the Bridegroom is with them ? But the days will come ; and when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from them, then will they fast in those days.” What could represent more emphatically the solitariness of Christ even when surrounded by those who were most sympathetic and appreciative ? As He conceived, His position and work gave importance to His presence and made it an occa¬ sion ; men could only rejoice in it. He looked on Himself as giving to His age its distinctive mark of privilege. He looked on His presence as making all the difference between past and present. “ Verily I say unto you,” are His words, 4 “ That many prophets and righteous men desired to see the things which ye see and saw them not; and to hear the things which ye hear, and heard them not.” He not merely modified the past; that every successive worker had done by the addition he made to the sum. He made a real advance, a new beginning. John the Baptist summed up an older era ; He inaugurated the new one. The law and the prophets were till John ; since John there had been introduced a new and unrestricted salvation, men entering the kingdom by force ; there had come greater privilege than ever before, for greater than John, 1 John iv. 37, 38. 2 John iii. 29. 3 Luke v. 34-36. 4 Matt. xiii. 17. 92 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST the greatest born of woman, is he that is but little in the kingdom of God. The new method was not the foolish one of putting a new piece on an old garment, or new wine into old skins. The new era brought its own new ways. It brought what was new in spirit, and needed new forms of its own. The emphasis Christ laid on His divinity was occa¬ sioned b} T the explanation and vindication it afforded of His position and work. He accounted for His presence by His mission, but recognised His mission by His person. The sympathies, tendencies, and ideas of His nature were not those of others; they were, like Himself, from above. To Him they represented the Father’s will. It was right and natural for Him to live by them. He bore witness to the truth 1 —the epourania as well as the epigeia; and He regarded His word on both as final. There is a kind of knowledge possessed by Christ whose contents at first sight we are apt to confuse with the epourania. For instance, it comes out when Christ says, 2 “ Verily, verily, I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing : for what things soever He doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner. For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth.” Here we find, not only that Christ considered it impossible there could be any divergence on His part as Son from the Father’s line of action, but that this was secured and carried out, so far as His human nature was concerned, by a revelation (as 1 John xviii. 37. 2 John v. 19. Christ’s divine knowledge 93 He recognised) continuously given from the Father. In that the Son received new and peculiar knowledge of the Father’s working. From the connection of the argument, however, in regard to the use of the Sabbath, it appears that the revelation referred to was that disclosed in general providence. There the Saviour saw the same grace and self-denial which He felt stirring in His own heart. And it became confirmatory, in its own sphere, of the message which lay deep in the heart of the epourania—God loved, and the Son of Man must be lifted up. But, as we see, this knowledge, though confirmatory of that other, came later. The earlier was native to His own person, the other was gradually communi¬ cated ; for it came to Him from without, as a revela¬ tion. The latter only supplemented the former. It was by the higher of these that Christ could say, “ The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing.” The Divine assurance that He could not be false to sonship was only confirmed by the discovery that the aims and methods of His working were ever those which He found His Father following. This latter was, I have no doubt, the usual assurance by which the Father guided and confirmed His Son— a moral assurance. By it the Saviour became sure of the great principles of action which were to pierce life and open out the future to Him. As we have already seen, He received also on special occasions a supernatural knowledge of certain facts, which was needful to supplement the knowledge these principles 94 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST supplied ; but of course that did not imply on His part any doubt regarding them. I think we begin now to see that what was remarkable in Christ was not omniscience, or the extent of His knowledge. Christ was not a human encyclopaedia, or a scholarly compendium of facts. His knowledge was limited. The remarkable thing in Him was the strain of grace, which was natural in His person, and was regulative for Him of the main line in life. The worth of His life depended, not on a miraculous knowledge constantly of what was right, but on the perfectly balanced power of doing what was right in any circumstances in which He found Himself, of acting with the same motives and perfectness as if in heaven still, of applying the same principles unerringly to the new circumstances in which He found Himself—limited though He was in human body and soul. I think it must be clear, too, that the Saviour’s Divine knowledge influenced Him in the gaining of all other knowledge. In the passage already quoted from the fifth chapter of John, we see how the innate consciousness of divinity, and what it implied, received confirmation from sources outside Himself. But as the epourania involved, besides a certain range of thoughts, a corresponding type of feelings and desires, of sympathies and aims, all alike expressive of Divine life, one can¬ not imagine any knowledge to have been acquired by Him without being thus shaped and coloured, or without needing to adapt itself to these. For these showed things to Him in their own light. They were the Christ’s divine knowledge 95 presuppositions without which He could not think, and apart from which He could not act. Things were repellent or attractive according to these. The judgment in Him of right and wrong, the ideas of life and duty, were the outcome of these feelings and conceptions. Here we have the secret of His holiness. The epourania became the standard of His conscience. They upheld aversion to sin and glad acceptance of all that served their own end. By the conscientious loyalty He maintained towards them came His wonderful experience and its worth. By this too came the perfectness of His acquired knowledge of moral principle, and His unfailing, unerring application of it, the harmony of epourania and epigeia, of human and Divine in Him, His perfect life and death. CHAPTER V Christ’s spiritual knowledge There is reason to Relieve, then, that Christ had a knowledge which was Divine, a knowledge belonging to Him by virtue of His connection with heaven. It was the endowment of His life and the equipment for His mission. It was His from first to last, and formed the regulative power under whose conditions He acquired human knowledge, as well as the guide by whose aid He led His life. We have seen that it did not imply omniscience ; its original amount was a very minimum of knowledge, perhaps not more than of Himself as Divine, though that was accompanied by a complete set of harmonious tastes and sympathies. But we must remember that His possession of this influenced all His other knowledge and His judgments. He believed that in the way men saw things they owed much to their nature. The view, not the thing, differed according to the person who looked. He said, “ I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; and ye also do the things which ye heard from your father. ... If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham. ... Ye are of your father 96 Christ’s spiritual knowledge 97 the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do.” 1 This caused Christ to feel His nature was His trust, and to recognise the epourania as His guide. To treat all by their light was for Christ all duty. He said, “ I can of Myself do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and My judgment is righteous; because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” 2 To be true to His nature was to be true to God; it was the guarantee to Himself of the correctness of His own action. By observing this method He kept the Father’s favour, and gained the object for which the Father had sent Him into the world; as is evident when He tells us, 3 “ He that sent Me is with Me: He hath not left Me alone, for I do always the things that are pleasing to Him.” And thus, too, came increase of knowledge. Adherence to the supremacy of the epourania was not only the test of correct knowledge and action, but the means by which the Father imparted a further revelation of fact in the experience of daily life. To Him that had was given. The revelation was, of course, a revelation because He had eyes to see it. The eyes of all others were blind, for their hearts were impure. Their thoughts of God were wrong, and their feelings regarding Him blunted or even perverted; but this pure heart had anointed eyes, for this was an anointed person, one so sympathetic that the Spirit could be given to Him without measure. 4 The complete knowledge of the epourania, and, coloured by 1 John viii. 38, 39, 44. 2 John v. 30. 3 John viii. 29. 4 John iii. 34. 7 98 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST it, the whole knowledge of the epigeia, came as the result of this loyalty, or of the abiding supremacy which they held in Him. How that was due to His Holy Spirit. He saw this revelation with an internal eye, as John indicates by the use of the word (SXe'rrrj. Of course, in speaking of this revelation 1 —this added knowledge, which came to His faithfulness—He could speak, and required to speak to the Jews merely of the Father, who was its source. To have spoken of the Holy Spirit, by means of whom it was communicated, would have been folly in the circumstances; so that in reading such passages as 2 “ When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself, but as the Father taught Me, I speak these things ” (where the things are evidently epourania); or, 3 “ The things which I heard from Him, these speak I unto the worldor, 4 “ The servant knoweth not what his lord doeth : but . . . all things that I heard from My Father I have made known unto you,” we must see the action of the Holy Spirit, and refer what is mentioned, not to the original endowment of epourania, but to the acquired store which the Spirit taught from the revelation sup¬ plied by the Father. There should be, therefore, no difficulty in allowing a real growth on Christ’s part in the knowledge of detail, both of the methods and facts of the epou¬ rania, and of course in the development and enlighten¬ ment of its associated sympathies correspondingly. That 1 John v. 19. 2 John viii. 28. 3 John viii. 26. 4 John xv. 15, viii. 38-40. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 99 is, in point of fact, what explains the utterance of the twelve years’ old child. For to be sure of His nature and calling was not, of course, to see its difficulties or to be qualified to meet them. Luke, 1 indeed, represents the Saviour as a boy of remarkable mental power, able beyond others and able beyond His years to grasp the relations in which facts stood to one another {cnjveaLsi). But that, of course, does not imply complete development of intellect or stagnancy of mental growth thereafter. For even if 'irXypovpievov crocpla 2 does not mean “ becoming full of wisdom,” but “ being filled with wisdom ” ( i.e . spiritual in¬ sight), the phrase must be understood in connection with the evangelist’s later statement that the child advanced in wisdom 3 ( TTpoe/coirrev ry crotyia). The statement of mental capacity and of spiritual ripeness must be explained by the same principle. What the intellect came to be is seen in the questions Jesus put to others. What the spiritual insight came to be we find set forth by Christ Himself, in a passage also contained in Luke, 4 where the Saviour compares Himself with Solomon, and speaks of Himself as greater than that king in the very characteristic for which the monarch was remarkable. When the Saviour came forth in the prime of manhood, His Father gave Him sure testimony that He had made no mistake in regard either to the fact of His calling or His fitness for it. God put His seal on His servant, and destined Him con¬ sciously to success. Certainly, from the moment of His baptism, Christ’s knowledge of the epourania was per¬ fectly clear and definite. His assurance of their reality was such that He had no hesitation in staking all on 1 Luke ii. 47. 2 Luke ii. 40. 3 Luke ii. 52. 4 Luke xi. 31. 100 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST them. Their detail, so far as He knew it, He revealed, of course, only as He found fitting. Though much of the detail of their working out continued to be revealed to Himself piecemeal, at such times and by such ways as the Father saw fit, the essentials were, from the first, quite clear and sure. Let us now turn to that other department of His knowledge which the Saviour called the epigeia. In it He included all that pertained to spiritual life, but was not contained in the epourania. In the third chapter of John He does not represent its contents as naturally inaccessible to men, or beyond the reach of their present powers; if these things are hid, they are hidden because of the prejudices of sin. So we are fairly entitled to infer that Christ reached the epigeia in the ordinary way, but, of course, under the influence of all that was contained for Him in the epourania — whether knowledge or sympathies. We may safely infer that He gained His knowledge of the spiritual condition and needs of men, humbly, painfully, gradually. With whatever knowledge endowed, it must have been for Him as man a new and ever new experience to realise that, according to its particulars. He learned what it meant as He lived among men and saw its working daily; just, as though He came with the Cross in His heart, He learned what it involved only as He went on, as He came near to it and faced it. It becomes clear, then, that in the matter of epigeia as of epourania, Christ first lived that which He taught. He entered on knowledge by action and experience. He felt His way into full light, sifting, testing, grasping, Christ’s spiritual knowledge 101 grouping, under loyalty to the Divine endowment and by the Holy Spirit. That was what enabled Him to speak with authority and not as the scribes, to oppose His solitary dictum to the received and unquestioned opinions of anti¬ quity. “ Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time . . . but I say unto you.” 1 His authority in spiritual matters rested, in fact, not on His being God, but on the ripe experience He had as perfect man, ever filled with the Spirit. It rested on a power which was acquired by accepting anything needed in carrying out and fulfill¬ ing, as was fit, all righteousness. Christ was Himself the model scribe of the kingdom, who brought out of His treasures “ things new and old.” 2 Christ sets forth by no means dimly His own obliga¬ tion to the Holy Spirit throughout all this process; although, as we have seen, He was not able, owing to the condition of His hearers, to make reference to it on all occasions where it would have been natural. And His testimony is amply upheld by the confirmatory statements of the evangelists. For example, after the Temptation we find 3 that “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and a fame went out concerning Him through all the region round about. And He taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all.” In the same chapter 4 we find that Jesus expressly chose and applied to Himself, in connection with the work of His Messianic calling, the prophetic passage where it is written, “ The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor . . . to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” 1 Matt. v. 21. 2 Matt. xiii. 52. 3 Luke iv. 14. 4 Luke iv. 18. 102 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Let us now examine the sources of Christ’s knowledge of the epigeia. We saw that the Father so used his Holy Spirit in the world in which His Son was placed, and the providence exercised toward Him, as to turn these into sources of information. The knowledge, it is true, was about God. “ My Father worketh hitherto and I work,” said Christ. But it was, after all, only confirmatory of the epourania. I have no doubt, however, that the epou- rania suggested other thoughts, and so became a source of similar importance for epigeia. Still the Saviour’s own perfect ideas of good and evil, and the supremacy of His own conscience, were the main origins of them, and formed the possession which the Spirit could enrich by a varied and extensive experience. It is absurd to say, like Baur, that Christ owed all His spiritual know¬ ledge to His perfect moral nature. That were to ignore His divinity, and the influence of the epourania. Yet the great importance of it cannot be overlooked. Aided by other sources it became a perfect guide. One of these, the Old Testament, is so prominent that the consideration of it must be reserved for treatment in a following chapter. Our Saviour on certain occasions shows Himself in the very process of deducing epigeia from epourania. Take, for instance, His assurance as to the safety of His people. See how He puts the matter. He says, 1 “ No one shall snatch them out of My hand.” That was His conviction ; but the reason for it, expressly added, is, “ My Father, which hath given them unto Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” 1 John x. 28, 29. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 103 In like manner, we see, from the assured knowledge He had of His Heavenly Father’s grace, that He had no diffi¬ culty in warranting the disciples’ confidence as to heaven. Theirs was the natural belief and was His own. “ In My Father’s house,” He says, 1 “ are many mansions : if it were not so, I would have told you.” When He says, 2 “ It is written in the Prophets, And they shall all be taught of God,” and adds: “ Every one that hath heard from the Father, and hath learned, cometh unto Me,” He lets us see that He is arriving by ordinary human processes at a truth otherwise hidden, and arguing from a position in the epourania. The same thing is seen even more clearly when He says, 3 “ If ye were of the world, the world would love its own : but because ye are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you ” ; or 4 “ I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for except ye believe that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.” There are many results which might have been attained in the same way. It was easy for Him to see as a deduction from His divinity that “ he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it ” ; 5 and, as an inference from His mission, that He was speaking to the Kosmos and not to His own nation, or even to His own age only ; 6 that He had many sheep which were not of the Jewish fold ; 7 and that His followers were the light and salt of the earth. 8 From the assurance of His Heavenly Father’s love, it was easy not only to see the same care exercised 1 John xiv. 2. 2 John vi. 45. 3 John xv. 19. 4 John viii. 24. 5 Matt. x. 39. 6 John iii. 17, ix. 5, xii. 47. 7 John x. 16. 8 Matt. v. 13, 14. 104 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST over the brute creation as over men, but to extend the application practically to the duty of a life of faith by men, and, first of all, by Himself. Nay, from this same root He derived His encouragement to, and so His ex¬ perience of God in prayer; for He rested that duty mainly on the character of God. “Ask and it shall be given you. ... For every one that asketh receiveth.” 1 Ye shall not be heard for your much asking, “for your Heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.” 2 “ If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him ? ” 3 In like manner the teaching set forth in the parable of the wicked husbandmen, 4 as to the Jewish Church, would have been impossible but for His concep¬ tion of the value of His own person; nor could the parable of the great supper 5 and its views have been possible but for the grace which He believed lay in the very heart of, and formed His mission. The action of the epourania in shaping the moral judgments of His conscience can be seen, for instance, when He has no hesitancy in saying, from what He knows of the God He reverences, “ Neither did this man sin, nor His parents,” 6 that he was born blind. On the other hand, the spiritual standard of right, which He found in His conscience, was most likely the origin of His exalted ideas of the Holy Father. He could reverence only the God who embodied its ideal. His appreciation of the moral law was instinctive ; His perception of its 1 Matt. vii. 7. 2 Matt. vi. 7, 8. 3 Matt. vii. 11. 4 Mark xii. 1 ff. 5 Luke xiv. 16 ff. 6 John ix. 3. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 105 absolute necessity, and His own submission to it, were unhesitating and absolute. “ I came not to destroy, but to fulfil,” 1 was the only position He could take up. To destroy the law was for Him with His nature impossible, and to fulfil it was, with His views, unavoidable. His conscience directed Him to make righteousness the rule of His life ; and He would have maintained it in that position even if its results had had no bearing upon us. He sets it up, therefore, as the standard for everyone. “ Except your righteousness,” He says, 2 “ shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The place He gave it in life is shown in His words, 3 “ Seek ye first His ” (God’s) “ kingdom and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” This explains, too, the anger roused in Him at the hypocrisy of the Phari¬ sees. And when one remembers how that represents only the open breach which all along really separated Him from them, one sees how much His pure conscience and the acccompanying conception of God in the epourania had to do with the fate He met. Their conscience was as far debased as His was developed; they were as far from righteousness as He was righteous. He saw that they had no appreciation of the law, were unlike it, and so made it void by their traditions. He understood why they laid “ heavy burdens and grievous to be borne” on others, yet would “ not move them with their finger ” ; 4 they had no sense of obligation to the law and its God; they sought the praise of men, not of God: “ All their works they do to be 1 Matt. v. 17. 2 Matt. v. 20. s Matt. vi. 33. 4 Matt, xxiii. 4. 106 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST seen of men.” 1 We are apt to wonder at the bitterness of His contempt for them, or to question the justice of the invectives He showered on them. But these were nothing more than the expression of His own moral intensity, and of the absolute supremacy in His life of His own earnest conscience. If the spirituality of the law in His conscience led Him up to the spirituality of God, the love of God, on the other hand, seems to have enabled Him to know the love which is in the heart of the law. The need of love to God and man came from belief in the Father’s love. Lovelessness meant in His eyes fruitlessness and formality. His conscience and love went straight towards judgment and mercy, which He saw to be the weighty matters of the law. His conviction that in time men would not, either in this mountain (Samaria), or in Jerusalem, worship the Father, 2 was the result of His assurance that the spiritual conscience in man, which was the counterpart of the spiritual God, would yet assert itself, in spite of all its degradation, that men made for God—for the living God—would not be able to endure formality for ever, and that when this faculty was en¬ lightened and its power awakened by His work, then men would worship the spiritual God in spirit and in truth. This was the source, too, in which He saw reflected as a duty, the heavenly grace of forbearance exercised by God, 3 and the necessity of extending forgiveness, if for¬ giveness were to be in turn hoped for by us, 4 ay, the 1 Matt, xxiii. 5. 3 Matt. vi. 12. 2 John iv. 21. 4 Mark xi. 26. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 107 God-like duty of forgiving, even a brother, till seventy times seven. 1 No special foreknowledge, but the gracious securities only which conscience afforded, enabled Him to say that “ whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward ” ; 2 or that allied passage, 3 “ Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me ”; for, in His eyes, life derived its worth from loyalty to conscience and clearness of moral vision. In the same way He reached that allied yet contrasted conclusion, 4 “ ye shall die in your sin ”; for the explanation of how it was reached is expressly add6d : “ I said therefore, ye shall die in your sins; for, except ye believe that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.” It hardly needs to be said now that our Saviour gained much of His knowledge by His experience and His intercourse with men. Already we have seen this in special cases, and as to particular truths. For instance, no one can doubt it was due to years of observation ere He came forth that, at the very beginning of His ministry, “ He needed not that anyone should bear witness concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man.” 5 Nay, one can imagine he sees the process at work in the child of twelve, when, after years of quick¬ eyed observation, and mere uniformity of result, the boy came to the temple, and not only listened, but asked questions at those who ought both to be best and to know most. In the same way He could commit Himself to 1 Matt, xviii. 22, 35. 2 Matt. x. 42. 3 Matt. xxv. 40. 4 John viii. 21. 5 John ii. 25. 108 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHKIST such a great truth as, “ Out of the heart come forth . . . . the things which defile,” 1 and act on it as abso¬ lute, applying it universally. By this means the case of those who did not come to the light opened out: “ They loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil.” 2 “Ye will not come to Me,” He says, “ that ye may have life.” 3 Of course there are other positions which naturally followed from these great inductive truths—among them the necessity of regeneration, or of conversion, and of becoming like little children, and the absolute need of the Holy Ghost as the power of God by which such effects might be produced. By this process Christ was doubtless shut up to many lesser, but by no means unimportant conclusions—for instance, the difficulty of saving the rich ; the fact that not those who appeared most righteous, or made the greatest profession, were the nearest to the kingdom ; that though the best of men must rely on Him, yet for Him to rely even on the best of them would be to rest on a bruised reed; that the best of men needed His salvation and prayers, and were safe only because of His work and faithfulness; that the work of saving was so really His, and His alone, as to be entirely His ; that even sympathy, watchfulness, appreciation, was hardly to be looked for from the most advanced. Finally, one cannot doubt that Christ learned much of positive holiness by His own experience. We may take the beatitudes as expressing His views of the funda¬ mental relations of spiritual life. Yet, if we reflect, 1 Matt. xv. 19. 2 John iii. 19. 3 John v. 40. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 109 we see that they were not glimpses of spiritual illumination, or a part of His Divine knowledge, or reminiscences, like echoes, out of a heavenly state. They belonged to earthly conditions, and came by earthly experience. They expressed the ripe conclusions of His own life. That the poor in spirit were heirs of the king¬ dom was not a fact gained by observation, but by His own experience of a dark, dependent humanity and its needs. Similarly, He who was the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with griefs; the preacher whose first word was repent, but who was despised and rejected; the poor workman, who knew that the trials of His lot were not its smallest blessings, and that “ Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life,” 1 had no difficulty in seeing that, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” His whole way of living, and His method of carrying through His work, was a continuous example of meekness, an unceasing self¬ obliteration of legitimate claims and personal rights. Its anticipations expressed themselves deliberately in the words,“ Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth .” 2 These anticipations were not in doubt; they had come by His own experience, and grown into con¬ victions, enabling Him to persevere in such a line of life. They pledged the future, for they filled the present. Experience of this bliss enabled Him to say, “ Come unto Me, for I am meek.” Moreover, had He ever found anything truer in His own experience than that those “ who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled ” ? 3 Did not His experience of it lead Him forth 2 Matt. v. 5. 3 Matt. v. 6. 1 John x. 17. 110 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST in whole-hearted devotion, and constrain Him to make the example of it the great aim of His life ? He dedi¬ cated Himself expressly and openly to that in the words, “ Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” By the very nature of the case, the saying, “ Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy,” 1 could hardly be a hope arising out of His own experience. Yet it was no less sure; for it is either a deduction from the fact that God could not be less morally magnanimous than man, or, as is more likely, from His perception that God could not save except under certain conditions, and could not therefore withhold salvation when these were complied with ; in either case the truth would be an inference from the epourania. The blessedness of the pure in heart, however, as possessing the vision of God, or the assur¬ ance of it, lets us see deep into His own experience, and its development under the blessed Spirit. The blessed¬ ness of the peacemakers, too, tells the tale of His heart, as the Son of God come to make peace through the blood of the Cross, and to give men His own peace. The blessedness of those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake was His first of all, and pre-eminently, for He was Lord in the kingdom of heaven and heir of its glory. Both for Him, and for others, there was not peace but a sword ; yet the firm conviction of what must come in the end was the hope which sustained Him, and which He proffered to them. “ Blessed are ye when men shall per¬ secute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake . . . : for great is your reward in heaven.” 2 In the same way He reached not merely the emblems 1 Matt. y. 7. 2 Matt. v. 11. Christ’s spiritual knowledge 111 used in His parables, but the truths they taught; it was His experience which had forced on Him, for instance, the truths taught by the sower, the drag-net, and the seed growing secretly. The impossibility of serving two masters might have been learned by observa¬ tion, but was rather the knowledge obtained by loyal obedience to a deep-seated instinct. When He said, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me,” 1 He spoke only what He Himself knew of the way He had already trodden. When He said, “ Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he is My brother, and sister, and mother,” 2 He stated nothing but the feeling which rose in His own heart naturally. The view that, “ It must needs be that the occasions ” (of stumbling) “ come ; but woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh ! ” 3 was a generalisation of His own experience, warranted by the life common to Himself and His people; whilst He who commanded His disciples to watch, and both taught and practised prayer, lived by these methods with a success visible in the moral victory of which His life was never vacant. From what we have seen there can be no doubt as to the remarkable nature of Christ’s conscience. It was a wonderful development, and a constantly paramount influence. It was fed and strengthened by the epourania. The facts found in that source became its standard and principles. Loyalty to them brought enlarged practical knowledge by the Holy Ghost. Experience of Himself and others both deepened and matured it. 1 Matt. xvi. 24. 2 Matt. xii. 50. 3 Matt, xviii. 7. 112 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST His ethical views were formed by great principles on spiritual lines. To Him the motive was everything, for good or evil. Every act was gauged according to its spirit and not its letter. Consequently, He could not help coming into violent contact with the opinions which prevailed in current religious life around Him. “ He that sweareth by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon; and he that sweareth by the temple, sweareth by it, and by Him that dwelleth therein; and he that sweareth by the heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by Him that sitteth thereon.” 1 Yet to His conscience He was loyal; and in His loyalty were created its perfectness and His worth. “ My judgment is right¬ eous,” He asserts ; “ because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me .” 2 “ How can ye believe,” He asks, “ which receive glory one of another, and the glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not ? ” 3 1 Matt xxiii. 20-22. 2 John v. 30. 3 John v. 44. CHAPTER VI Christ’s knowledge of the old testament We cannot tell what opportunities our Saviour had of gaining a knowledge of the Old Testament. It is quite likely that He never possessed a copy of that book, or even of any part of it. It is more than probable that He had to depend on the public reading of it, and the training which that gave, or on kindly opportunities, the record of which is now lost. Jesus Christ had no special facilities for a knowledge of the Word of God; yet He gives evidence of minute and extensive acquaintance with it. Enthusiasm and appreciation, longing and love, must have conquered all difficulties. Of course He quotes more largely from some of the books than from others, but that does not betray partiality for the former, or ignorance of the latter. For many, almost all, of the quotations are the result of circumstances. They were prompted rather by need than choice. They were directed against enemies, like the Tempter and the Pharisees. Apart from such considerations, however, there is ample evidence that Christ had an extensive knowledge of the Old Tes¬ tament. He quotes from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Q 113 114 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST 2 Chronicles, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Jonah, Zechariah, and Malachi. Moreover, possibly because He could not depend on a scroll, His references are often both minute and accurate. Sometimes, indeed, they are so general that one can hardly identify the passage represented; e.g. “ He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” 1 His language is, however, exceptionally exact, as a rule, and His know¬ ledge of the text unusually minute. He sometimes builds His argument on a single word, and even an idea expressed (without a word), by the mere form of the original, as when He argues from “ I am the God of Abraham,” 2 and brings out of it a meaning hitherto un¬ suspected, yet approved the moment it was shown. He forsakes the Hebrew and agrees with the Septuagint when it suits His meaning, and modifies even the version He is following, as when He says, “ This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me,” 3 etc. But when He quotes loosely, He evidently does so because He attaches no importance to the words of the particular passage. There is ample evidence that Christ’s knowledge of the Old Testament was thoughtful. It is natural for such parts of that book as relate to the manna and the brazen serpent, the Queen of Sheba and the Prophet Jonah, to catch the attention of even a hasty reader ; but Christ had an eye for small and seemingly unim¬ portant points, as we shall see, because He sought in them also the treasure of spiritual truth. Sometimes 1 John vii. 38. 2 Matt. xxii. 32. 3 Matt. xv. 8, 9. cheist’s knowledge of the old testament 115 the truth He taught was an inference from a passage which others would have passed by. Thus He had observed that, though in the time of the Prophet Elijah there were many widows in Israel needing help, God sent to one only, and her an outsider; and that though there were many lepers in Israel needing help when Elisha cured one Haaman, an outsider, He helped none of them. 1 The Saviour had been looking all round these facts in detail, and had seen the possibilities the} r involved. His keen spiritual instinct, as it read the passage, caught, in what others hastened past thought¬ lessly, a tone of emphasis, and found in it a spiritual truth. Thus we begin to see that Christ studied the Old Testament, not for the sake of procuring mere facts, but for spiritual principles. He wished not to tabulate, or even to store its contents, but to amalgamate them, to enrich and strengthen His soul by them. Ho doubt He obtained from it a history of the world’s past of which He was naturally ignorant; and in it He found, as we shall see, many things that related to Himself. It set a world of men and women before Him; it broadened and gave universal validity to His own experience of human beings; it was to Him a storehouse of spiritual stan¬ dards and aims and longings; by it His conscience opened and matured into full beauty. But what He sought was spiritual principle in the line of the epou- rania; He desired to find their working in worldly applications, and to see the way in which He Himself ought to carry them out. 1 Luke iv. 25-27. 116 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST This saved Christ from literalism, even when He was giving attention to minor points. He did not judge of the importance of any passage by the number of square inches which it occupied, or the number of words used in relating it. He judged of it according as it revealed spiritual truth, and sent that home to His own heart. He spoke violently against the traditionalists and for¬ malists, because the Book had proved so real a blessing to Himself. The fact is, the Old Testament opened out to the Saviour’s wondering eye a panoramic record of general principles, all of which appealed to Him, and showed the Jehovah of the Old Testament to be the God of His own conscience. His eye caught these in¬ stinctively, as if they had been veins of gold in the solid rock. Special truths found a place in His heart, and secured the retention in His mind of the passage or occasion in which they were found. All His sympathies and long¬ ings were satisfied with what He saw in these; they were the actings of His Heavenly Father, and showed the application of the epourania in the domain of earthly life. He saw the same righteousness, the same justice, the same holiness, the same mercy and truth and love, as He found in the epourania and in His own conscience. Therefore the God of the Book, the God of whom it spake and whom it revealed, made it attractive to Jesus. The Saviour found there Him who was His model, and was confirmed as to righteousness and duty. For instance, who can fail to mark, from the way in which Christ quotes it, all that such a text as, “ I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” 1 meant for Him ? It ran so clearly in 1 Hosea vi. 6. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 117 the line of the epourania, and applied them so deftly to men’s needs, that it was to Him the very essence of God’s will. He felt it expressed exactly His own whole¬ hearted desire. He felt that in it His God spake, the Father He saw in the epourania, one whom He could respect, and was bound to worship for His very worth. In the same way He was assured of the law of love as the secret of the commandments, and found it to be common ground in God’s heart with His own. Now, I think it was this habit of looking for great general principles in the Old Testament which must have enabled Jesus to grasp the unity of the Book. He found the same principles running through it with repeated and varied applications. The circumstances changed, but these, i.e. God, did not; consequently, the Old Testament became in our Saviour’s eyes a record of providence. The presence of God in histor} 7 meant for Him its continuity. The books became, not the isolated productions they would appear to most, but a succession of illustrative selections from a developing whole, which had to be read, each part in view of that, and of its general aim. By means of this, Christ was able not only to speak with clear ideas of the unity of history, but of its cumulative force. He was able not only to compare Himself with Solomon, 1 or Jerusalem with Nineveh, 2 or the towns of Galilee with the cities of the plain, 3 but to predict doom on His own generation for all the righteous blood shed from the time of Abel to Zechariah, 4 who was martyred in the latter 1 Matt. xii. 42. 2 Matt. xii. 41. 3 Matt. x. 15. 4 Matt, xxiii. 35. 118 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST part of the reign of Joash for reproving the wickedness of the people. Further, Christ unquestionably founded on a clear conception of the advance of history. This comes out by His comparison of the cities of the plain in Lot’s time with the Galilean towns of His own day. But it comes out even more strikingly in the exposure of the ignorant, unsympathetic position of the formalists whom He met. They decorated the tombs of the prophets, and said, If we had lived in their time, we would not have done as our fathers did. 1 But, as the Saviour remarked, by taking up such a position, they only showed that they were the children of those who had slain the prophets—not children in any mere external sense, but spiritually—true descendants in heart. For evidently they had no idea of what they owed to the intervening- generations, or that any position more advanced than their own might come to be held. They were self-righteous and blind, ignorant and fanatical, prejudiced and narrow as really as their fathers had been. And that they were soon to show in their treatment of One who was greater than all the prophets. They had not read the Book with spiritual appreciation. It had not led them to God. They could not go forward, for they were not led of God. To Christ the history which He saw in the Old Testament was full of movement, ay, of a definite movement, a tendency, a progress forwards to a clearly settled end. Providence, as the whole Book showed, had an aim, and one which was drawing near its fulfilment. 1 Matt, xxiii. 29, 30. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 119 One of the effects which the reading of the Book had on Christ was, that He found Himself able to see spiritual connections, and to predict spiritual developments, impossible to those who were spiritually blind and in heart dead. His use of the Old Testament shows that, as He read, He was always looking for the spiritual situation and its peculiarities. He thus read His surroundings, and the situation in His own time, after the light He obtained in it. He argued from the unchangeableness of God, and the constancy of His methods, to the way in which He would act. Circum¬ stances, though changing, neither blinded nor puzzled Him ; He gave all His attention to the principles they involved. Thus He must have seen in the entry of the Israelites into Canaan, not far from the spot where He was tempted, something which reminded Him that He was entering on His own ministry, and which suggested to Him a suitable passage with which to resist the Tempter. John the Baptist was for Him Elias, 1 because he came in the spirit and power of that prophet, though John had distinctly told the emissaries of the spiritual rulers from Jerusalem that he was not that man of old, whom he so resembled. 2 David’s transgression of the ceremonial law appealed to Him, 3 not because He was greater than David, but because the need was similar. In Jonah’s mission to unrepentant Nineveh He felt a premonition of His own in Israel, 4 and in the brazen serpent He saw a foreshadowing of what the end must come to be. 5 1 Matt. xvii. 11, 12. 2 John i. 21-25. 3 Matt. xii. 3. 4 Matt. xii. 39. 5 John iii. 14. 120 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Christ goes the length of making this the basis, if not the very essence, of prophecy. The possibility of prophesying arises out of the fact that God always acts in the same way, when there is repeated, whether in the same form or not, the same situation. Thus Jesus takes a quotation from Isaiah, 1 slightly modifying the version of the Septuagint, “ This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me ; but in vain do they worship Me, teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.” 2 Now, undoubtedly, the only reference which was in the prophet’s mind was to the people of his own day and land. Their trust in Jehovah had become nothing better than formal, and was no longer such as could save them from the surrounding nations. But, as Christ saw, the spiritual situation had repeated itself, and even more emphatically; consequently He appropriated the warning given then, feeling warranted, because it was more applicable, and because God intended it to belong to His time by pre-eminence. In the same way we find Him appropriating to His own position what the writer in the Psalms thought of in connection only with himself. He claims, on this principle, that verse, “ He that eateth My bread lifted up his heel against Me.” 3 In fact, we find Him choosing fragments of passages and piecing them together after His own will, but with unerring instinct. For example, by the union of two Old Testament passages, 4 breathing the same spirit, He creates the passage, “ It is written, My house shall be called 1 Matt. xv. 8. 2 Isa. xxix. 13. 3 John xiii. 18; Ps. xli. 9. 4 Matt. xxi. 13; Isa. lvi. 7; Jer. vii. 11. chkist’s knowledge of the old testament 121 a house of prayer, but ye make it a den of robbers.” So He chooses parts out of psalms, which otherwise would hardly be reckoned appropriate to Him, as if anything in the experience of a true Israelite might find its final and ripe fulfilment in Himself. He was all unconscious of arbitrariness; for He felt Himself vindicated spiritually. Reading the Old Testament continuously, as the record of God’s presence in the world, made the Saviour clear that a definite purpose had been present from the first. As He found, the object was that very one which was dearest to His own heart, and was the aim and rule of His life. He saw that the attributes of God in the history always showed themselves in a balanced relation to one another; they appeared in due proportion, because they inhered in, and were exercised by, God. Their combination thus always implied some phase of grace. All the history was an example of grace on God’s part. But the object of grace had made itself clearer in the course of the ages—for instance, in the notable saying, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” 1 So that Jesus not only felt Himself in deepest sympathy with the movement, or even in the line of it, but in its very focus, filling the position in connection with it which He most desired. He found Himself to be claimed by, and put into relation to, the whole. The Father needed, had prepared for, had predicted, His coming to be the people’s Messiah and the world’s Saviour. The endowment which He had of epourania by His heavenly origin met itself here from the other side face 1 Hosea vi. 6. 122 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST to face, saw in God what it had been sure was in God, and found itself confirmed and satisfied. This supplied Jesus with the application He should make to His own day of the cumulative power in his¬ tory. The responsibility of His own age over preced¬ ing generations was the result of the advance made, and of the predictions fulfilled, by His own presence. Many prophets and righteous men of old had desired to see what those round Him saw, and w T ere not permitted. 1 So that again it becomes evident that Jesus did not recognise His Sonship by His Messiahship, after He was called forth to work, or even had been for some time at work. JSTo doubt the Old Testament mark of Messiah¬ ship was the possession of the Spirit; and at the very beginning of His ministry 2 Jesus pointed to that as the sign by which the Jews, like the Baptist, might be sure of Him. 3 But it does not follow that He recognised Himself by this means. As w r e have seen, He says 4 that His Messianic calling is vindicated not by His Davidic descent but by His Divine origin. We can hardly therefore imagine that the recognition of Himself as Son of God came by the information which the Old Testament supplied as to the Spirit, even though the possession of the Spirit was His qualification for being the Messiah, or the mark in the eves of others that He was it. We have already seen the overwhelming sense of responsibility which our Saviour in His weak humanity sometimes felt by reason of the burdensome sense of His 1 Matt. xiii. 17. 3 John i. 38. 2 Luke iv. 18. 4 Matt. xxii. 41 if. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 123 great mission. And we have seen that in special crises God gave Him guidance and assurance by means of in¬ formation purely supernatural. But God gave Him in the Old Testament—as He evidently believed—a store of material which He dared not neglect, as it was in¬ valuable in giving Him glimpses of His future, sufficient at least to enable Him to carry out the work He had undertaken. There can be no doubt that Jesus studied the Word, not for His own spiritual enlightenment merely, but in order to know the facts which had been predicted about Himself. These were like landmarks, or finger¬ posts to Him. In His view, it could not be but that the Scriptures must be fulfilled. He not only expected the things He found predicted, He set Himself expressly to bring them to pass at the right time. For instance, He faced death consciously, as predicted of Him, when He raised Lazarus; and He entered Jerusalem on an ass’s colt because of the view He held of a passage in the Old Testament. The promises of the Spirit to the Messiah He appropriated and relied on ; 1 and He stamped His people with the same sign, again from the same source, 2 “ They shall all be taught of God.” In John the Baptist, as His Elias-like forerunner, He saw the fulfilment of Malachi’s prophecy, and came forth. 3 But specially He searched the Old Testament to form a spiritual history of His own future, according to the forebodings of the epourania. Possibly from the use of Scripture He made up His mind—as appears early in His ministry—that it was most suitable He should 1 Isa. lxi. 6. 2 Isa. liv. 13. 3 Mai. iv. 5, 6 ; Luke i. 17 ; Matt. iv. 12, 18. 124 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST die at a passover season. That feast very probably attracted His eye, because in His death there was fulfilled the emblem of the rite, and by it the reality spoken of was given. Undoubtedly some of the events by which He was able to control His death became known to Him then. He not only saw the fact of His death by means of the uplifted serpent of brass, He must have come to know its method by such Scriptures as John quotes, or by such a text as “ They pierced My hands and My feet.” 1 He knew of His betrayal and His treatment by professed friends from the Psalmist’s words, “ He that eateth My bread lifted up his heel against Me,” 2 and by the prophet’s prediction, “ I will smite the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered abroad.” 3 He understood from the first, or at least expected the treat¬ ment He received, by the expression, “ They hated Me without a cause,” 4 whilst its end was not hidden, because of the evangelical prophet’s announcement, “ He was numbered with the transgressors.” 5 He knew of His formal trial and sentence from the same source, 6 and of His rejection by the rulers of His own people, for He was “ the stone which the builders rejected.” 7 His mind was full of the detail of His death beforehand. He spoke of the place, of the scribes and chief priests as its source, and the Gentiles as the means they used, and of its accompaniments—mocking, spitting, scourging— with as much clearness as of His resurrection. 8 So, too, He seems to have taken particular interest in locating 1 John xix. 37 ; Ps. xxii. 16. 2 John xiii. 18 ; Ps. xli. 9. 3 Matt. xxvi. 31 ; Zech. xiii. 7. 4 John xv. 25 ; Ps. lxix. 4, 5. 5 Luke xxii. 37 ; Isa. liii. 12. 6 Isa. liii. 8 ; Mark x. 33. 7 Matt. xxi. 42 ; Ps. cxviii. 22. 8 Matt. xx. 18 ; Mark x. 33. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 125 the facts as they came near. He says, for instance, 1 “ All ye shall be offended in Me this night: for it is written , I will smite the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad.” When He says He is being “numbered with the transgressors,” 2 He adds the reason, “ For this which is written must be fulfilled in Me; for that which concerneth Me hath fulfilment,” 3 i.e., His humiliation had reached its lowest stage. When He points to the bitter hatred of His enemies, He does not base it on the radical opposition of good and evil, but on the prediction, “They hated Me without a cause.” 4 Strauss rightly enough remarks that as Jesus Himself in His announcement of His sufferings expressly appealed to the Old Testament, the prophecies of which concerning Himself must be fulfilled at all points, the orthodox view ought not to despise this help, but must give to its explanation the modification, that Jesus, continually occupied with the prophecies of the Old Testament, may have drawn these particulars out of them by the aid of the Holy Spirit which dwelt in Him. Yet we must be careful. One cannot imagine that Christ on the Cross, in order to retain the outer and literal fulfilment of any prophecy, said, “ I thirst.” 5 The other expressions as He hangs dying are all instinc¬ tive embodiments of real feeling. Old Testament forms were natural, because the Saviour’s mind was so steeped in the language and thought of the Book that they came without reflection to Him, and sprang up as the most fitting. The intensity of His emotions at the time 1 Matt. xxvi. 31. 2 Isa. liii. 12. 3 Luke xxii. 37. 4 John xv. 25 ; Ps. lxix. 4. 5 John xix. 28. 126 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST when He cried with a loud voice, prohibit the possibility of calculation on His part. When He cried, “ I thirst,” the Crucified One was thinking of the relief He would soon have in the presence and favour of God. The Psalmist’s longing for God, the living God, was in Christ’s hour of desertion His deepest longing also. Yet, all unconsciously and without intention on His part, the Saviour’s words led to the fulfilment of a pro¬ phecy He had not been thinking of when they gave Him vinegar to drink. 1 Whilst, as a rule, the quotations which Jesus makes from the Old Testament are accurate, even in their letter, one feels that they are never wrenched from their con¬ text, but are unusually accurate and true in spirit. One feels they are quoted by a person who has grasped the spiritual situation, and in such a matter never makes a mistake; who feels, and is sure that He Himself never makes a mistake. Besides that, one is struck by this: they are the quotations of one who has no interest to gain by them but what is practical, for whom the present is real and the wellbeing of men overwhelming. Israel’s situation at entering the promised land pointed to His own. He saw His own fate in that of “ the servant of God.” Elijah’s day and mission pointed to His own. The hardened people of Jeremiah’s time represented those of His own day. The responsibilities entailed by Noah and Lot heightened the effect of that which His own presence involved. Now, this is what explains the aptness of Christ’s quotations. What He adduced was spoken readily, 1 Matt, xxvii. 34 ; Ps. lxix. 21. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 127 because it applied appropriately. His knowledge was not of mere detail, a confused mass of lumber, over¬ laying and cumbering, and capable only of a haphazard use, but masterly and of principle; one that found its illustrations readily; a knowledge of fact by con¬ science and judgment, rather than from mere memory, imparted by the Spirit’s teaching and not man’s. The facts He had learned from the Old Testament had been gained under the guidance and were seen in the light of the epourania; and so they had passed into, and become illustrations of, the spiritual principles which filled Him. Thus it came to pass that even when ques¬ tioned suddenly, His immediate and apt reply sometimes led far further than anyone had ever imagined. For instance, what hints and possibilities must have been clear to Him who, in the phrase “ I am the God of Abraham,” saw rather the faithfulness of God than of His servant, and made it a guarantee of eternal life ; who solved the question of heavenly relationships with the remark “ they are as angels in heaven,” 1 i.e. stand in direct relation to God as if by separate creation, and not to one another as by descent; and who added the comment, “Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.” 2 Satan, in his use of Scripture, could not for a moment stand before Christ, any more than could the Sadducees or scribes. The devil’s quotations suited his own purpose, but they were not apt; they did not really apply. Therefore Christ’s honesty and earnest¬ ness, His spiritual instinct against all falsity and sham, recoiled from them. He felt they could not be right, 1 Mark xii. 25. 2 Matt. xxii. 29. 128 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST when they were contrary to the spirit of the Book, or of its God and His epourania. Their spirit savoured of earth, not of heaven. When Satan quoted incom¬ pletely, Christ felt the sentiment was rendered untrue to the context 1 from which it had been torn. The promise quoted was not true as Satan quoted it. It was true of and was made to Him only who abode under the shadow of the Almighty; it was not true for or made to him who acted in self-confidence, or placed himself under the patronage and guidance of the Evil One. Christ felt the chill of falsity in it at once, and knew there was error in it somewhere. He shrank from it just as from the pharisaic use of Corban. One does not wonder, accordingly, to find that Christ never twisted Scripture to His own ends, or attempted to allegorise it. He did not need to do so; its letter required no twisting, for it yielded its truth willingly. The methods He followed were in spirit correct, and are such as the educated conscience of the world approves to this day. But nothing strikes one more forcibly than this, that whilst Christ valued Scripture thus highly, He did not feel Himself tied down to it. He made it a starting not a resting place. Its authority He considered ab¬ solute, but not final. He got much from it, but He brought more to it. For Him His own conscience, in which the epourania became, through the Holy Spirit, the rule of His human life, was supreme and final. * He used the Old Testament to see how its principles worked: He quoted the Book to teach these, and show what they 1 Ps. xci. 11, 12. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 129 involved, because for both Satan and the people it, rather than He, was the undeniable authority. Ye search the Scriptures, He says; but the necessity was for others rather than Himself. “ These are they,” He says, “ which bear witness of Me,” i.e. exist for Me, and do service for My sake. Thus He quotes the letter of the text freely, according to the Hebrew, or Greek, or a version of His own. He is more careful of His end than of His means; He acts with perfect freedom, as if quite sure of Himself and of the accuracy of His methods. When He alters the meaning, He makes a real advance, and creates a real improvement. Thus, from the quotation out of Deuter¬ onomy above referred to, 1 “ Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” He elicits the fact that not even the things which God produces by His word, wonderful though these be, are the things essential to life, or on which it depends. For the case of the Jews in the wilderness, who were fed with manna, went no further. But He turned the history round so as to show that the Word of God, being expressive of His will, is all- important, and that man, who is a spiritual being, depends, and was intended to be nourished on it, rather than on what it creates. But all this freedom in the handling of Scripture comes partly from a skill, the result of the sure insight He had into its spirit, and partly from a lordliness over it, shown by His perfect fulfilment of its demands. Christ not only set Himself against the mere literalism of the Pharisees, He denounced the perverted and 1 Dent. viii. 3 ; Luke iv. 4 ; Matt. iv. 4. 9 130 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST partial views they held about the Scripture. They neither knew the Scripture nor the power of God. They seemed to think that everything began with Moses, and even ended with him too. They forgot, when convenient, that earlier than he, and in covenant with God, had been Abraham. They were blind to the fact that conscience was fitted to be a more complete directory for man than the law. They did not see that the law was only a device, an expedient,—tempor¬ ary and imperfect,—which the circumstances of the people had necessitated. They did not know that it was not what God had desired to give, but only such as the people could receive. They had no conception that it had come in the interests of conscience—dulled and blunted—to quicken, rouse, and educate; that it had not been given to supplant conscience, to render it unnecessary or to dwarf it, but to supplement and bring it again to its royal place and its unerring activities. As Christ conceived, the ceremonial part of the law existed for the moral. It had been given for the good of man, and for no other end. Its abuse, as He held, began the moment it clashed with the natural moral law of conscience. That David and Abimelech should have taken the show bread, which it was not lawful but for the priests to eat, was, He thought, lawful, because right; it was defensible; aay, it was in the circumstances obligatory, because warrantable; it fell, indeed, under the ban of the ceremonial law, but the will of God was more absolute; and His will, lying at the base of all natural duty, was expressed in the great principle, “ I desire mercy, Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 131 and not sacrifice.” David was the spiritual man of the Old Testament, as well as God’s representative in the theocracy of his day, and he showed no hesitancy in the matter. David had not acted selfishly, but rightly; he had seen the law was never intended to hurt, but always to help men; that it was made for man, and not man for it. Similarly, in dealing with the Sabbath question, which stood on the borders of the ceremonial and moral departments in the law, Christ solved difficulties by running all cases up to general principles; and He did that on this point by bringing in the earlier dispensation where it had been at first introduced. The priests, as He pointed out, 1 performed sacrifices which were purely ceremonial, and violated the Sabbath; they performed circumcision on the Sabbath, 2 lest the matter should be unduly delayed. They broke the sanctity of the day, yet were not blamed. No one thought they had done wrong in these matters. Consequently the observance of the day was not such as the Pharisees demanded; the priests themselves supplied instances to the contrary. If they had understood the very theory they thus exemplified, they would have seen that it lay in this—the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 3 The law of Moses had been useful, but only as an adaptation. It was an attempt to help feeble consciences to work out the detail of duty. In the matter of marriage, as Christ pointed out, Moses had granted divorce, merely because of the sinful elements which 1 Matt. xii. 5. 2 John vii. 22. 3 Mark ii. 27. 132 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST entered into their experience. He gave it, as Christ said, only “ for your hardness of heart: but from the beginning it hath not been so/’ 1 God had made them at first male and female, and “ For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife : and they twain shall become one flesh.” 2 In all this Christ let us see how the knowledge of moral principle as absolute, and the power of applying it unerringly by methods of conscience, was not only the perfect way of life, but His own way. Yet, as one observes, He did not undervalue the law. He only objected to it being put in a place and taxed with a work for which it was unfit and never intended, and because it would then be unfairly blamed for the failure. That He found its use for Him¬ self, as a starting-point and treasury, is clear by the enthusiastic way in which He speaks of it. In its own domain it was absolute, and for its own purpose perfect. “ It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall ” ; 3 and “ Whosoever shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” 4 As He pointed out in regard to those who had only received the law as an external thing, the privilege conferred, even in that, was so great that the Old Testament, God Himself, had said of them, “ I said, Ye are gods.” 5 It is impossible to miss the respect, and esteem, and hope He had for the young man who believed he had kept all the law. But as little is it 1 Matt. xix. 8. 2 Gen. ii. 24 ; Matt. xix. 5. a Luke xvi. 17. 4 Matt. v. 19. 5 John x. 34. Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 133 possible to miss the emphasis with which He enunciated His answer to the lawyer’s question, 1 Which is the great commandment in the law ? Perfect love to God, said He; with a second, which is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The former questioner looked at the commands, the Saviour emphasised to the latter their spirit. Though the wrong spirit looked at the bare detail, and was satisfied with that, partial and poor, no man who had its spirit could afford or dare to despise any part of it. He only was perfect in it who had risen above its details, so as to fulfil them all instinctively and gladly, under the promptings of the law in His conscience. The emphasis which Christ placed on the second part of the law was the novelty. No Jew thought the second equal to the first. Only He did who saw in the great principle, “ I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” both God’s wish and man’s duty. He applied its admission under the first table, to secure its presence as the explana¬ tion of the second. How could murder be prevented but by preventing first hatred, and malice, and contempt of one’s brother ? The popular view of the Old Testa¬ ment teaching on the subject, arising out of the defective training of the people, was that wrong against one’s neighbour needs atonement; but the law as Christ felt it inculcated by conscience, was that wrong done me by my neighbour I will not feel to be such, hating him as an enemy, but will look on it as an opportunity of doing him good, and of his need of being redeemed from his evil through my love of him. This law of love, by which the Saviour appreciated and 1 Matt. xxii. 36 IT. 134 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST used yet rose above the law, made Him its master. Men who knew nothing of the law in its spirit suspected He wished to destroy it; they did not see that He did more than that, fulfilling and superseding it, that He gave it its rightful honour, although He refused to give it His own. In fulfilling it He gave it its due, but also showed Himself as to conscience and moral life larger than it; He supplanted it by being what was both more perfect and more practical. In Himself He was its substitute by being its superior and by showing its object attained. His conscience owed much to it, but the fulfilment He gave it was all His own. What we have already seen has made clear that Christ studied the Old Testament for practical ends, as an aid to His own soul, as a guide in regard to man and to God, and as a help to Himself in the accomplishment of His mission. These were the points of overwhelm¬ ing importance to Him. His whole being was con¬ centrated on the attaining of them. He had neither time nor taste for any other. Specially abstract points, if they ever occurred to Him, seem to have been in His eyes of no moment. They were merely things of earth, which had no bearing on His duty as a man or as the Saviour. The difficulties and apparent contradictions which, then as now, lay scattered over the face of the Old Testament, were probably not unnoticed by Him; for there is plenty of evidence that He was an acute reader. But He seems to have felt them as little as the hard matters in His own sayings, which seem strange to us, such as: “ All that which the Father giveth Me shall come unto Me, and him that cometh to Me I will Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 135 in no wise cast out.” They certainly did not affect His faith in the Book itself. Either He had a more complete theory of inspiration than we have, or, as is more likely, a more perfect knowledge of the God spoken of. Eor Him the Book was a whole, the record of God’s gracious purpose. It was not a collection of scattered books, differing in their authority. For Him the proof of its authority lay in the God it represented consistently and unerringly throughout the fluctuations of history, and in the purpose it set forth as developing and ripening under that God’s hand. His conscience and its epourania recognised therein the God of heaven, the God of grace. The way in which He quoted from Genesis about the male and female , 1 and from the Psalms as to Himself , 2 is clear enough evidence that His attention was fixed on central verities and moral situations, and that in accepting the Book He was acting not blindly or according to the habit of the Jews, who relied mainly on external testimony, but on internal evidence. And He, of all others, was calculated to use that delicate method infallibly: He assuredly was warranted in its use. I presume, then, that Christ had no critical methods or intellectual tests to apply to Scripture, but rather that He used His general intelligence, and those spiritual instincts in which He has ever been unequalled, and even unapproached. When the spirit in Him rang response to that which spake to Him in the passage, He needed to inquire no further. His conscience approved; He had only to follow. He used the Book just as any good and intelligent man would. His quota- 1 Matt. xix. 4. ; Gen. i. 27, ii. 24. 2 Ps. cx. ; Matt. xxii. 44. 136 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CUEIST tions from it are as different from those of His contempo¬ raries, even from those of the apostles, notwithstanding that they were influenced in this too by Him, as He Himself was different from them. As nothing in the Book, then, had interest for Him but the presence of God and the growth of His spiritual purpose, we must believe that in speaking of the author¬ ship of any part He does so in a merely general way, taking the title as in the scroll. There is no reason to doubt His belief of the point; only, if He were proved to be in error on it, that would certainly neither discredit Him nor the Book. It would prove no more than the falsity of the tradition which He had not been led to doubt, or as to which, if He at all doubted, He imagined He could not obtain absolute proof. It would militate no more against Him than does His mistake as to the barren fig tree; for in both cases He had presumptive evidence in His favour to begin with, evidence sufficient on this point to warrant His acceptance of the Book for further purposes. If He spoke of Moses or David, the reference must be looked on as made for the purposes of identification in regard to the passage; that is, of course, if the reference be not hypothetical merely, or based admittedly on popular opinion as an argumentum ad hominem. The authority of the earlier dispensation did not consist in its record being due to Moses, but in its being the earlier dispensation. The appropriateness of a psalm to His case lay not in its being uttered by David, but in its being applicable to Himself pre¬ eminently. The question of authorship, as I imagine, never came before Him; at least there is no evidence Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 137 that it did. If it did, He cannot have thought His views on the question to be of any moral value to us, for they have not been recorded. The question is one of literary interest, and did not in His eyes affect the history of the dispensation of God’s grace. In His view, then, this Book was the essential history of the world, because it unveiled the God of the world, the God He Himself knew. In the same way it need trouble no one if, for instance, it should ever be proved that our Saviour misnamed Zachariah son of Barachiah, who was slain “ between the sanctuary and the altar.” 1 It matters little whether or no Christ referred to Zechariah the son of Jehoiada , 2 intending to represent the line from Abel in Genesis to this man in one of the latest books of the Old Testament, but erring in His remembrance of one of the proper names at the moment of quotation, or quoting some alternative name of the man’s father. It is indifferent whether He referred, if not to that Zechariah, then to Zechariah the prophet, whom our version calls the son of Berechiah (the difference in vowels is unessential), either confusing him with the former man, or having some means of identifying them, or knowing that they met the same fate. It matters nothing though He intended to refer to Zechariah the son of Baruch, slain in some such circumstances as He mentions, not very long before His own day. It is not necessary to explain the fault as that of the evangelist or a transcriber. We are not concerned to deny in our Saviour a mere lapse of memory. Weakness of mind is dependent often on physical 1 Matt, xxiii. 35. 2 2 Chron. xxiv. 20, 21. 138 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST infirmity ; that was as real in Him as limitation of mental faculty was when demanded by the conditions of His life. Forgetfulness of even a Bible fact, or mistake as to one, specially when it implied no consequence of spiritual import, is not more than ignorance of it to begin with, or the necessity of time in which to learn. He grew in knowledge even after He came forth, just as He had done in youth. His recorded quotations are made by memory and are not always literally accurate, even if true in their spirit. On the other hand, we must hold steadfastly to this, that the Saviour’s perception and appreciation of the truth He found in the Old Testament was unerring and perfect. His insight never failed ; whilst His results were so complete and orderly as to be not merely never at fault, but ever apt. He looked on the Book as the revelation of God, because it was the record of grace ; and His conscience had taught Him that nothing lay deeper than grace in the dealings of a loving and righteous God with men. The Bible was the record of this, the great central line of God’s working; it represented God’s in¬ most and most characteristic, God’s real, self. Christ saw Himself not only in the line, but even in the focus of it ; He found Himself not only in sympathy with all it said, but fulfilling all it longed for and pointed for¬ ward to. He accepted it, but did not need to submit Himself to it. He believed in it, yet criticised it as being Himself an authority, independent, and spiritually higher. He looked on it not as final but as instru¬ mental. He made it a means to God, but never a sub¬ stitute for Him. By it He saw the world’s past; by Christ’s knowledge of the old testament 139 it He saw the present state of Gocl’s purpose in the world; by it He saw much of the detail of His duty, personal and official; by it He saw the future indicated. By the use of it He saw God and knew man. By the aid of it He became what He was, and overcame as He did. CHAPTER VII THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE I have used this title, for want of a better, to represent the way in which Christ’s knowledge, though dealing with two different spheres, regarding one of which we may say His human nature had no direct means of information, was yet fused into an organic whole by connection with His personality. In order to see this, the first question which has to be answered is, How did Christ become conscious of Himself ? or, specially, How did He come to be aware of His own Godhead ? The question is not of theoretical interest only, it is of absolute importance. On it depends, as I have already hinted, the value of His own testimony as to Himself, of His teaching as a whole, and even of all His work. It is fundamental. It lies at the root of His knowledge of the epourania, as these again at that of the epigeia. Along with His original conception of good and evil, which gave Him His idea of the character of God, this is the feature essential to Him. His ideas on the epigeia demand this as well as that. Oat of this twin-root they spring. As to the explanation of His holding this view about Himself, there are two possibilities, and so two lines of no THE BOUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 141 theory. The first looks on His conception of His God¬ head as attained by mere human powers, possibly aided by circumstances ; the second looks on it as His instinct¬ ive and original possession, because of the unity of His person. When we examine the views of those who may best be classed in the former division, we find that they often really deal rather with Christ’s becoming conscious of His Messianic vocation than with His being conscious that He was the Son of God. For many of them the latter point is put aside, because they look on the Saviour’s Sonship as merely moral, that is, as the result of His singular similarity to God in respect of character. Still, their views will help us to understand the question. Of this—the former of the two classes—there are several types, higher and lower. In Keirn’s view, Christ arrived at the assurance of His calling by “ the develop¬ ment of the inner genius of His personality ”; and that was due to the influence of external stimulus afforded by influences both friendly and unfriendly. We may group Weiss and Wendt, Beyschlag and Baldensperger, as all agreeing (with variations) that the knowledge of His Messianic vocation arose in the natural spiritual character of Jesus. What confirmation was needed was supplied by outward extraordinary means— say the appearance of John the Baptist and the Baptism. Three of the four writers I have named expressly con¬ fess the weakness of any mere pyschological basis to reach the result by itself. “People,” Baldensperger says, “ may handle the thing as they will, but it was a 142 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST matter of the purest impossibility for Christ to have arrived at the idea of His Messianicity by any, even the deepest, operation of thought.” We may thus take it for granted that the weakness of Weiss’ position, that our Saviour inferred His Messianicity even before Baptism from the fact of His being in spiritual character quite unlike others, has been found untenable and that the view is departed from. To supplement and strengthen the position, the appearance of the Baptist and the wonders of the Baptism are usually adduced; these are said to have determined the knowledge. Wendt argues from Christ’s son-like sense of love towards the Father, to His conviction of the Father’s love for Him in response ; and he sees by these two events the way in which that general impression was made special, and Christ was led to believe that He was the specially favoured of God, the Messiah, the “ Son of God ” in an Old Testament sense. But Baldensperger, whilst not denying a certain amount of truth in the former part of this theory,—that all arose in the spiritual character of Christ,—and whilst adopting, to a certain extent at least, the latter part of it, as imparting some degree of assurance to the mind of Christ about His calling, yet thinks that a very important link has been neglected. He draws attention to the Messianic hopes of Christ’s time, and thinks that a soul so spiritual can¬ not but have been deeply affected by these. He is of opinion that, because of the intense desire which Christ must have felt to aid in the accomplishment of them, He offered Himself to the Baptist, and was made so clear at least as to God’s will in the matter, that He felt THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 143 entitled to come forth. Baldensperger considers that, spite of this, doubts were not expelled altogether from the mind of Christ, and holds that the event so little affected the range of the Saviour’s Messianic conceptions that it not only permitted expansion and advance, but even radical change in the views which He held of the most fundamental points as to His kingdom. Events clarified and spiritualised these. Late in His Galilean ministry He became clear as to the necessity of His death. The necessity for that simply meant this—He had found He did not create, and saw He could not in the circumstances create, the kingdom He desired; then, as He could not believe it impossible, He looked on it as to come after (not necessarily by) His death. This led to the idea that by death He would go to heaven; and going there as one in will with God seemed to Him to imply that He had come thence and belonged there. So Baldensperger understands by the title, “ Son of God,” simply the Messianic vocation of the Saviour, the idea of which struck Him in the Baptism. By the title, “ Son of Man,” he thinks Christ represented His connection with heaven, and that He adopted it only in connection with, or because of, His coming death. Beyschlag adopts the same starting - point in the character of Jesus, and sees in His sinlessness the sign of a sonship which, if moral and not different from that of the saints, is yet different from theirs in this, that it is original and not imparted. This he associates with some idea of supernatural connection, such as would be implied in pre-existence with God as the ideal man. 144 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST But lie thinks that Christ only became conscious of His calling at, and by means of, the Baptism. Others adopt still different ideas as to the way in which the consciousness was imparted to Christ. Gess, for instance, postulates the possibility of a consciousness of His divinity in Christ from the first because He possessed its nature; but that author considers it would have remained latent except for the inheritance which, as a Jew, Jesus had out of the past, and the aid afforded in that connection by the use of the Old Testament. Whilst Llicke not only admits the latent possibility spoken of, but postulates the power of the Holy Spirit as that by which the result was elicited. Dr. Bruce, hold¬ ing, of course, the divinity of our Lord, thinks that Christ became conscious of His Messianic vocation from within, not indeed by a deduction from the holiness of char¬ acter which He marked in Himself, but by the Messianic charism of the Holy Spirit, and by the impulses of love and of Divine grace associated therewith, which He found rising within Him. The other class of explanation, which seems the more natural to adopt, is that the unity of His person secured, as a natural fact in the experience of the humanity of the Son of God, a consciousness of His divinity, more or less explicit from the beginning. With this may perhaps be associated such views as those of H. Schmidt: that— as in Baldensperger’s opinion—the consciousness of Son- ship and of Messianic vocation went together; but that they rose some time before the Baptism and without any power except what was internal and personal to Christ Himself. THE BOUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 145 Let me state some reasons for assuming this position. Speaking generally, it seems that what may be called the external explanation is in all its forms, even the highest, quite inadequate to reach its conclusion. One cannot even imagine that any person who was a real man, though He was not merely man but as truly God, could ever by means external to Himself have attained warrantably to the conviction that He was God, the only begotten Son of God. The insufficiency of all purely psychological data is confessed, as we have seen, by Baldensperger. On the other hand, the outer influ¬ ences which are postulated must not be ordinary only but extraordinary, to secure the rise of, and warrant some such idea as that of the Messianic Sonship, or the con¬ ception, derived from the Old Testament, of Himself as the beloved and specially called of God! Whether the work of the Holy Spirit—who of course must not be identified with Christ, but however closely in union with, and constantly possessed by Him, must be regarded as a distinct person—whether His work could make any real difference in the matter, we shall come to see. Before going into the investigation of the subject, let us notice first of all two main, or at least general thoughts, which may be helpful. The former of these two is this, that if the Son of God was conscious in His Divine nature that He had become human also, and if that knowledge was the result, not of His omniscience as God, but of the vital union which had taken place in Him between the two natures, then there seems to be no good reason for denying to Him in His humanity the corresponding consciousness of being Divine. The io 146 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST latter of the two thoughts to be referred to at this stage as in some degree helpful, is one I have already hinted at—that whilst all the other facts included in the epou- rania may be regarded as acquisitions on Christ’s part, and perhaps ought so to be regarded—while such a view does no violence to His statement in the third chapter of John, that only He who had the heavenly life, and came from above, could know these things, the exclusion of this self-consciousness on His part from a position at once original and fundamental, the removing of it to a later stage, would render impossible the other ideas which found on and imply it. Very vague is the explanation of this matter which is expressed in such phrases as “ latent consciousness ” or “ the possibility of knowledge.” The former seems to point to a knowledge which lay in the dark of un¬ consciousness, and required some means to lift it into light. The latter seems to point rather to a knowledge which did not originate in but came to the person. The former of these has, along with some peculiar to itself, all the difficulties attending the theory which explains this point by the union of the two natures in the one person. For the knowledge is supposed to be there, but not in consciousness. It does not need to be created, only awakened. The latter of these two theories makes the creating of this knowledge a possibility, seeing that the fact represented by it exists; but it makes the knowledge come by other causes than the fact itself. Both theories combine in making Christ dependent for the conscious knowledge, i.e. really the knowledge itself, on external causes; but the one more absolutely, the THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 147 other less so. Without such aids, and without them very specially, Christ would have remained ignorant that He was God. Now, of all the means adduced for this explanation, the noblest and most natural is undoubtedly the Holy Spirit. He is allied to the Saviour most closely, and on Him, in a very peculiar sense, our Lord depended for much of the knowledge which He had even as man. Yet it is not clear how, if there was no knowledge in Christ of His own Godhead, even the Holy Spirit could by any means make the fact known to Him. To one so really human as Christ, the teaching of the Holy Spirit could have given no absolute security on such a point. We have only to remember that the Holy Spirit is so unseen in His working that a human being can know His presence only by His power, and His working by its results. A person can only be sure he is not deceiving himself by the absolute necessity of presupposing such a presence to explain something spiritual which has taken place. How then could any¬ one, who was real man as to His experience, even though He were God-man as to His nature, feel authorised to believe, or gain sufficient evidence to assure Him, that He might accept as true the idea which had risen in Him as to His own Godhead, backed up though that were by goodness and love, and confirmed by miracle either to or by Him ? The immensity of the assumption, the slenderness and unreliability, especially of the direct evidence, and the a priori improbability of the thing, have all to be remembered. We know how easy it is for anyone to mistake the working of the Spirit. And even if in this Christ was not as we are, we have to 148 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST remember that we are not concerned with what in Him was moral, where we are unlike, but with what in Him was intellectual, where we resemble one another. Though He felt warranted to postulate the presence of the Spirit as the enlightener of His manhood in its conviction of moral duty even infallibly, He had no right to extend the conviction, and gives no sign that He thought He had. He had no reason—according to this argument—ex¬ cept the suggestions of outside sources, to apply the explanation to this matter, so as to raise the idea to a higher level than mere imagination, or suppose it any¬ thing else than a case in which the wish has been father to the thought. This leads me on, of course, to consider the occasions which the Holy Spirit is said to have used as means for creating this conviction in our Lord. These are sometimes represented as being the contemplation of His own character, or the fact of His sinlessness, or miracu¬ lous occurrences which connected themselves with Him. Baldensperger admits psychological inference to be in¬ sufficient for reaching the result. Study by the Saviour of His own character, consciousness of His own love or sinlessness, could not have warranted it. More was needed even for the knowledge of Messianic calling, and of the special Divine favour which was reckoned to be associated with it. Baldensperger lays the basis of the process in the psychological consciousness of the lad, but thinks the Baptism with its great miracle was needed to reach the conclusion. Naturally, the question depends on what we consider to be the conclusion—whether mere Messianic calling or Divine Sonship. We need have little THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 149 hesitancy in admitting the effect of the Baptism to be sufficient for the former, even if we deny it to be suffi¬ cient for the latter. It appears that the more we examine the matter the more it seems as if Jesus had not attained to the belief in His own Godhead by a mere process of deduction from facts the very greatest—as, for instance, the Baptism. Naturally, the Baptism and its attendant miracle produced impression ; but the impression, even if it were that of transcendent privilege in a general way, could not have become that of Godhead definitely without the aid of some intellectual process. Whilst, however, the former seems not only legitimate but real, the latter seems to be unlikely and unauthorised. Even if the words “ Thou art My beloved Son ” conveyed information of a special kind, the information must have been meant for some¬ one other than the Saviour; for He was able to use the same idea when twelve years old. The Baptism was, as Baldensperger points out, very important, so far as its influence on Christ’s consciousness was concerned—speci¬ ally the second part of it, the testimony. That author is right in emphasising the impression it produced, whether he be right or wrong in asserting that only Christ’s world of feeling, and not His range of Messianic views or landmarks was affected. And he is right in setting it at the beginning of the first part, as the Transfiguration at that of the second part of Christ’s ministry. Again he is right in saying that the voices from heaven have always direct reference to the person, and only indirect bearing on the thing; just as Dr. Bruce speaks in regard to both the Baptism and the Transfiguration, 150 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST as assuring Christ of what He had thought about Him¬ self, i.e. confirming belief by impression. It does not seem, then, as if either of the two events was meant, for neither of them was fitted, to communicate spiritual knowledge to Christ. They seem to have been in the circumstances much more fitted to impart, what He needed far more than that—namely, those impressions which are transformed in the human heart into spiritual strength. They were to Him what a sacrament is to us. The one event was as useless to Christ for attain¬ ing the knowledge of His mission, as the other for disclosing His fast-approaching death. In both cases He was aware clearly of these facts at an earlier date. Shortly before the latter of them He had taken His death home to Himself in public. In the former He by no means obscurely hinted at consciousness of His mission in coming to be baptized; nay, He stated plainly the conviction He entertained of His Divine calling, and, as I think, stated even more than that, by the resoluteness, even the authority, with which He opposed the will of the authorised prophet of the age, who had recognised Him—saying to John, “ Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” In overcoming John’s scruples He showed, I imagine, both what He thought of Himself and of His calling. But we may take the second of these instances in illustration of the first. For whilst the Transfiguration, with its testimony so like that of the Baptism, was given, just as the Baptism was, in answer to prayer, or at least whilst the Saviour prayed, the prayer offered can scarcely have been for information, especially such THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 151 information as was contained in the message which came as answer from heaven, for it was nothing more than that of the Baptism, though accompanied by the fellowship of two men. Now, even if the lad of twelve had not understood His own words, it is not denied that the man of thirty saw clearly what those spoken at His baptism implied. The repetition of them must have had another object than the imparting of knowledge merely. If the object was impression and strength rather than knowledge and guidance, then all becomes clear. Now it is more likely that the same testimony should have served the same end twice, when confessedly that was what the circumstances demanded, than that it should have been suited for and served two different ends on different occasions—knowledge at the Baptism and impression at the Transfiguration. On no other theory, too, can the sending of Moses and Elias be understood. No one can imagine that these saints, just because they were in glory, could tell the Son of God what He did not know, or what He could not have received by more natural and equally efficient means. They came because their sympathy was needed, and because in them as escaping, or practically escaping, death, there was a foretaste of the result of His own work. The Transfiguration was meant to steady and support the Saviour’s human frailty in the reaction which naturally overtook Him after He had openly undertaken what we have every reason to believe was the most trying part of His work, when He not only felt Him¬ self committed to dying, but was aware He was entering into the shadow of His death. 152 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST In this light, then, the Baptism also must be viewed. It conveyed impression rather than knowledge. What it meant becomes clear by means of the Temptation. These two events are connected, as anyone can see by noticing that the one is treated as the outcome of the other. Now when Satan said, “ If Thou be the Son of God,”—whether that in his lips, and to Christ’s mind, implied divinity or merely Messianic calling—he did not intend to insinuate any doubt of the matter into the Saviour’s mind, but to get the Saviour, on that pretext and in that faith, to act along wrong lines. He meant, by the admission he made, to obscure the wrongness of his alluring suggestion, to blind the Saviour as to the right way of carrying out His calling, and to cause it thereby to fail. For in baptism the Saviour undertook all that was needed for the salvation of guilty men. Death was included; though whether He saw that or not at the time makes no difference, so far as the present pur¬ pose is concerned. He gave Himself up to it, whatever it implied. The question was, when it led to personal suffering, was He prepared to adhere to it, to accept that ? The temptation was to seek the glory by an easier way than God’s, to break off from His helpless Messianic position, using His power rather for Himself than for men, for Himself in preference to them. The devil’s temptations were concerned altogether with trying to draw the Saviour off the line of action which His whole-hearted submission to God and acceptance of His lot with its duties involved. They tested not His knowledge, but rather His fitness and prepara¬ tion spiritually, as the person whom God had called THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 153 to serve. What was brought out was indirectly His clear view of the principle He must act by in His new posi¬ tion, and directly His loyalty to it. The Temptation showed the impression which the Baptism had produced. The result of it was seen in Christ’s spiritual strength. The baptism with the Spirit came as the reward of sub¬ mitting to baptism with water. The one was the con¬ secration, which followed the other, the dedication. That which came second expressed to the Saviour the approbation of His Father on that which first He had done in faith, indicating the acceptance of His person with all His service. It pledged God to aid Him with all that His weak humanity needed to carry through the work. The Temptation only showed how real the Baptism was and how suitably the Baptism, as the preparation of Him who had devoted Himself, had prefaced the great work. It seems impossible, then, to accept the conclusion that any outer occurrence, even miraculous like the Baptism, in spite of all it meant and brought to Christ, could have conveyed information as to Divine Sonship —especially if He was quite ignorant of that — or could have given Him such information as implied assurance on the point. The mere descent of a dove — or anything like it — supposing it to have been symbolical, even definitely and recognisedly symbolical, could have given no help in illustrating a phrase so generally used in a vague sense as was that one, “ Son of God.” In fact, to think that the Saviour leaped into an assurance of His Godhead by some ecstatic, unintelligent process in connection with a momentary 154 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST state of religious feeling, is as absurd as to imagine He reached it by some method of mere intellectual deduction from concurrent signs: it is to start in the line which ends in Beyschlag’s habit of explaining away the assumption of real divinity as nothing better than imagination, though the pious imagination of a very good person, who was in some way, which cannot be made intelligible, Divine. After what has been said, there is hardly any need' to refer to the idea that Christ came to know Himself by thinking on Himself as He developed. His extraordinary gifts, if they impressed Him, certainly could not have warranted Him in believing in His own Godhead (Strauss); nor could His inner genius (Keim), any more than His religious relation to the Father (Wendt). At twelve years old His statement as to Himself is sufficiently definite. It is more than generic or ethical. Strauss confesses that the passage demands a larger meaning. He says, “ One might be inclined to under¬ stand the designation of rov 7rarpb<; generally as imply¬ ing that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden not only by the addition of the pronoun yov —the above sense requiring i)ficbv (as in Matt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words—a decided indication that they must have had a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah was mo? Seov in a peculiar sense.” And if one feels forced, as I think one is, to put emphasis on the My Father of Christ’s, in THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 155 contrast to the Thy Father of His mother’s words, we cannot help inferring, as was noted in a previous chapter, that Christ, who had been left in darkness as to His real origin, then revealed His knowledge of it, and astonished them, as much as afterwards He astonished the Jews, who showed what they understood Him to mean by the words, when they said He made God His own (lSlov) Father; says John the evangelist, 1 “making Himself equal with God.” As confirmatory evidence, I might adduce the admission made by Keim “ that there frequently occurs in Christ’s mouth, whilst in Galilee, the exclusive appropriation of God as His Father, whereby He immedi¬ ately declares Himself to be the Son. ... He uses it of Himself alone, where it might be easily used of others.” How this unique relation is one, the knowledge of which could never have been reached by any speciality of His own love. Ho doubt His love was very special; but it was not more true, though it was more perfect than that, say, of His own mother, or Simeon, or Anna, or Elisabeth. It could never warrant Him in speaking of pre-existence, or calling Himself the only begotten Son. Just as little could the conviction, or, if it may be so called, the consciousness of His own sinlessness, give any effective warrant for the belief in His own Godhead. With Schmidt I am inclined to lay special stress on the fact that Christ’s Messianic calling could not possibly be known to Him as a deduction from His peculiar spiritual condition, but came to Him in immediate connection with the consciousness He had of His own being. If Christ’s knowledge of His own sinlessness depended on 1 John v. 18. 156 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST His experience, it may have been a belief even rising to a conviction, but even that conviction was by no means sufficient to warrant Him in believing He was the Son of God. The facts of sinlessness may have borne a large part of the proof for others, but they could never be adequate for Himself. For no amount of fancied, or, as people say, conscious sinlessness—that is, unconsciousness of sin—can warrant the inference that there is no sin. Many who are evidently enough sinful are quite unconscious of it, and even will not be con¬ vinced of it. And though that was not the case with the Saviour, still no mere experience of sinlessness in the past, because of conscious and continuing love of God, could ever warrant the inference that sin was impossible to any extent in the future, and then that such sinless¬ ness implied divinity. However, our Saviour claimed not merely that He knew of no sin on His own part, but that He knew He had never sinned. He expressly asked, 1 “ Which of you convicteth Me of sin ? ” and sin cannot, with any straightforwardness, be there taken to mean only error in teaching, as Wendt suggests. Hay, more: He speaks as if a certain line—sinlessness— were the only one possible to Him; but He speaks of His assurance in regard to that as rising not out of His experience of the past, which had been always hitherto sinless, but out of the knowledge of His person as Divine and not only human. Evidently He rests on the ethical unity of His person when, in such passages as those following, He states that for Him He is sure sin is impossible: “I can of Myself do nothing”; “ Ye shall 1 John viii. 46. THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 15 7 know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as the Father taught Me, I speak these things.” 1 So when He says, 2 “As I hear, I judge,” He adds, “and My judgment is righteous; because ” (not I hear, for they could not understand that, but because) “ I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” Similarly, He says, 3 “ All that which the Father giveth Me shall come unto Me,” and then, in vindication of the position He was thus placed in, and to show His hearty appreciation of the purpose of the God of grace, adds, “ and him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out,” with the following explanation: “ For I am come down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me,” which is interpreted by His own words in the next verse: “ This is the will of Him that sent Me, that of all that which He hath given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day: for this is the will of My Father, that everyone that beholdeth the Son, and believeth on Him, should have eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” As confirmatory of all this, we notice that, whilst Christ looks on repentance as the emphatic and im¬ mediate duty of everyone, he not only ignores but expressly repudiates the necessity of it for Himself. He was more than unconscious of sin; He was conscious He had never sinned, and that He had a special power by which His purity was guaranteed. Mere unconscious¬ ness of sin would have meant presumption and weak¬ ness, whilst the knowledge of His Godhead enabled 1 John v. 30, viii. 28. 2 John v. 30. 3 John vi. 37-40. 158 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Him to know He could not have sinned, and to assert without pride that He had not. What but this same reason enabled Christ to speak as He did of His own positive perfection of life ? “I know Him,” 1 He says, and so could add, “ I keep His word.” No mere experience, even of perfectness, and assurance that He pleased God, could without this have enabled Him to say, “ The prince of the world cometh, and he hath nothing in Me,” 2 or “ I have overcome the world.” 3 For Christ to have made assertions like these, without anything as their ground but experience,— though an experience the most remarkable and pure,— would have been to speak of a likelihood only more or less probable, and would have showed on His part, even if it were warranted by the result, an ambition, not to say a presumption quite separate from the mind which was in Him who thought equality with God no object of ambition, not a thing to be snatched at but to be bestowed and held because of worth. To quote Dr. Bruce, “ I said that no explanation of the Christ-con- sciousness of Jesus could be accepted which did not respect His humility. For this reason I hesitated to regard the sense of sinlessness as the origin of that consciousness, and preferred to find it in the Messianic charism of love.” If that be true of the attainment of the knowledge of His vocation, how much more so of the knowledge regarding His person. We are now in a position to see how, on the other hand, Christ’s claim of sinlessness was bound to carry weight with others as the proof of His divinity. They 1 Jolm viii. 55. 2 John xiv. 30. 3 John xvi. 33. THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 159 saw no sin in Him; they heard a good man, backed up by the testimony of the Old Testament, of John the Baptist, of miracles, and of words of grace which appealed to the conscience—they heard Him claim, not only un¬ consciousness of sin, such as they could well believe, but sinlessness, which they could not have imagined. They were not entitled to disbelieve Him, when everything pointed to the truth of His assertion; and they could only explain it as He did, by accepting His statement of the way by which He had arrived at the belief, namely, that of His real and conscious Godhead. As Dr. Bruce has said, “ The inference from the spotless life to the Messianic vocation is just, but it seems one more appropriate for us to draw than for Jesus.” It is immaterial, comparatively, as to when this know¬ ledge came to Him, if only we accept the fact that it came by the internal constitution of His person, and not by any gift external to it. If it came according to the internal constitution of His person, it came, one must believe, according to the possibilities of a human soul and its consciousness; early therefore, and perhaps gradually, at least as regards clearness of content or fulness of meaning. Certainly no one can imagine that first of all Christ’s consciousness was prophetic only, and then, say by the Baptism, Messianic. If anyone should now ask me how Christ became con¬ scious of Godhead, I answer that the question is not fair. For a merely human person to conceive how it was is as impossible as for a lower animal to imagine the way in which a man recognises his humanity. What warrants the possibility of that which I have written in this chapter 160 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST is just the fact that it does not deal with how the recog¬ nition took place, but rather occupies itself with the impossibility of the thing from mere human effort, and deals with the results which flowed from it as a fact. I cannot see that any amount of external evidence given to one who, though God-man, was yet truly man in all His faculties, could enable Him to arrive at the knowledge of His Godhead. I cannot see how, with a true personal assumption of human nature, He could lack this knowledge as soon as it was possible to Him. I cannot see how without it He could draw that distinc¬ tion between epourania and epigeia in respect of their accessibility to men, which John sets before us in the third chapter of his Gospel, and otherwise I can find no explanation of Christ’s conscious sinlessness, or of His claim to perpetual intercourse with and pleasing of the Father. Let us begin now by acknowledging that Christ’s acquaintance with the epourania was miraculous; what¬ ever these included, they were the most extraordinary thing connected with Him, and were His most treasured possession. In all else He may have been like us; in these He was peculiar and divine. From them flowed all that is unique in His life ; and they in turn all pro¬ ceeded out of the miracle of His own self-consciousness, the knowledge He had that He was the Son of God. That could have been given in no other way than as a direct result—the direct result of the Incarnation. As a person, He could not lack it. The knowledge that He was God was as natural in His human mind, as in ours THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 161 is the knowledge that we are men. It was His because He was what He was. What the intellectual contents of the epourania were, we shall have occasion immediately to see. They depended at anyrate on this great fundamental position of which I have been speaking. But we must not for¬ get that the epourania were not intellectual only. In the endowment of our Saviour’s nature there was more than the self-consciousness of His Godhead; there was, accompanying that, an original trend of His whole nature in harmony with this, its great and original feature. In it, or as part of its result, one sees tendency of will, aims, tastes, desires—all equally unique. He says of His own will: “ I am come down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” His argument as to the difference between Himself and the unbelieving Jews in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, proceeds on the assumption that His tastes and tendencies are different from those of ordinary or sinful men. How this great nebulous mass of impulses must get the very highest place in determining the action and life-work of Christ. Its importance is only second to His conscious¬ ness of the great fundamental fact of His existence as God and not man only. The actual amount which should be included in the epourania is of secondary importance. They, as things referring to the heavenly life and known only to one who was filled with it, are things inaccessible to men. Yet it does not follow that even Christ’s knowledge of them all was immediate and original, like that of His own Godhead. Of it He could not fail; it was the n 162 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHEIST direct result of His person. The other facts He may have reached, probably did reach, gradually. Some of them are composite; yet, even if they came later, and at different times, they were still epourania, not only because they referred to the otherwise unknown heavenly sphere of life, but because they were reached by Him in virtue of the knowledge He had of His own personality. They may have all been gained by inference; and if that were possible, it is not legitimate for us to postulate any higher method of attainment. Yet, even if reached thus, they remain the revelation of one who knew them because He was at once Divine and holy. If one includes in the epourania, as John seems to do, at least these three great points—the love of God, the atonement of the Son, and the coming judgment, one has three great central positions which will illustrate sufficiently what is meant. The love of the Father might very well be reached by means of the standard put in the Saviour’s perfect con¬ science. If the latter had a clear idea of and absolute devotion to the distinction between right and wrong, then the God it could worship it must be able to respect; God must embody its standard and realise its ideal, must live and love that. The God of righteousness and love was thus clear to Christ. From that there was but a step to the con¬ ception of the God of grace. He who was sure God was the God of love had no difficulty in finding the explanation of His own presence among sinful men, specially when all the feelings of His nature prompted Him to undertake that to which His intelligence directed Him. The idea of a judgment was doubtless begotten by His conscience, but the putting of Himself as Saviour into connection with THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 163 it, as test and judge, is only the natural consequence of the view He took of Himself as intended to carry out the Father’s desire. If our Saviour used the Old Testament to confirm His beliefs, and to fill up detail of facts relating to the epourania, is it absurd to suppose that these points I have been touching on were reached as I have indicated ? Of course I do not wish to dog¬ matise on such a point, for it is not essential to my argument. The result of the admission of it is just this, that, except for the perfection of His holy human nature, our Saviour differed in knowledge from us, whom He had to save, only in the consciousness He had of His own divinity. And that, so far from giving Him advan¬ tage in doing what He was called to do, only burdened Him with the tremendous sense of responsibility implied in the fact, that what He was doing He was doing for our salvation. Thus we see that, when our Saviour speaks of the glory He had with the Father before the world was, of the Father’s love, of His coming to do the Father’s will, of His having been anointed and sent of God, or of His having been (or being) in the bosom of the Father, He speaks not by remembrance, or by direct knowledge, but by an assurance equally clear to His faith, and as firm, though arrived at by human and indirect ways. The knowledge He had as to Himself was the one supernatural endowment separating Him from all around. On the other hand, it is important for us to be clear that this knowledge of His own person, which was not a mere reminiscence of the past, should be regarded as a direct consciousness of the present. It was not the 164 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST remembrance of a thing once revealed, or the adherence to a conviction once reached, but a present com¬ munication. It was not remembrance or belief, but direct consciousness. It was the result, the immediate influence of His Divine personality in the human nature which had been taken. As to the religious emotions and promptings accord¬ ant with His divinity, which I have already spoken of as finding their place in His human nature, if we believe that the second person of the Trinity sub¬ mitted to be enlightened, and strengthened, and guided by the Holy Ghost, we must also infer that these dis¬ positions, found in His helpless human nature, were communicated not by His own Divine self-assertion, but by the third person of the Trinity; because human nature is, by its weakness and peculiar receptivity, fitted for, and has need of, the Holy Spirit. The result He wrought in Christ’s emotional and moral nature was not unnatural and unintelligible, but without violation of the limits of humanity, and through the agency of Christ’s knowledge of right and wrong and of His divinity. Thus it was that this emotional life, which was fitted to accompany and develop the consciousness and the range of the epourania round which it circled, was given, and had to be preserved by the Holy Spirit. Of course without care it could not be preserved. It needed to be esteemed and treated as a responsible gift. Acceptance of and obedience to such impulses implied loyalty of heart to the epourania and so to God; they involved the fulfilment of God’s will, and the gaining of His approbation. The epourania needed, as they became THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 165 clear, to be accepted as final by the Saviour’s conscience, and to be enthroned as the ruling principles of His life —to be obeyed at all costs. Hay, as the epourania looked upward first of all, Christ needed to accept them as all that was necessary for Him in His humanity meantime to know of heaven. He needed humbly to believe that what was withheld was inappropriate, and would have been cumbersome or disordering. But as whatever suited Him and was true for Him was true for all men, as He and they were under the same God, nay, because what was given not only suited Him as human and them as men, but came home to Him in His humanity, it was just what they needed too, and what they might receive in the same way as He had done. And the possession of it by Himself as His great blessing, the possession of it by Him alone as His peculiar treasure, implied the obligation to make it clear to men, because it was their great need. The knowledge of the epourania was more to Him than the revelation of the unseen world or the standard of His own life ; it was the gift to be handed on to men, as that intended for them by God. This w T as what the Saviour needed to see and to keep continually before Him; and that depended on the loyalty of His will in receiving and obeying the enlighten¬ ment or impulse of the Holy Spirit. For that He needed faith. Only by faith could He regard the epourania as a sufficient revelation of God, and of that higher sphere where God was, which, however He might be related to it, did not fall within the limits of His human consciousness. Only by faith could He set up the 166 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST epourania as the standard, of all truth and the rule for all duty. He needed faith and faith always, if He were to be true to Himself and to God; if He were to resist everything hostile to, or inconsistent with, His treasure of first principles. He needed either to act by its instincts or to refer consciously to its dictates. But, as is evident, the point at which His faith found root was that of His own self-conscious Godhead, authenticating the decision of His natural conscience about good and evil; and the means by which His faith was upheld, or loyalty to Himself and to God preserved, was the constant presence of the gracious Holy Spirit. By His faith, then, He recognised God, and filled both the world above and around, without as well as within Himself, with that glorious presence. Hence arises both the possibility of temptation and the possibility of victory. The difficulty occasioned by such texts as “ What shall I say ? Father, save Me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour: ” 1 and “ If it be possible, let this cup pass away from Me ; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt,” 2 is clear on their surface. One cannot help asking oneself, how was it possible for Him, with all His knowledge of the epourania, to forget, one might almost say, His Godhead ? I think, however, we find help upon this point, if we keep in view the great principle that this knowledge in Him was not a memory, but an immediate communication; not brought out of a heavenly past, but received by listening in the earthly present. Thus the knowledge could be more or less 2 Matt. xxvi. 39. 1 John xii. 27. THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 167 clear as He fixed His attention on it, or as it was obscured for the time by other things which intruded. This seems, in fact, to have been the case on these occasions. The temptation was to separate between the epourania, which were God’s will or Christ’s standard, and His nature with its desires, as that which should, by the Holy Spirit, be always subject and conformed thereto. The possibility of temporary unconsciousness in regard to the epourania arises out of the fact that the know¬ ledge of them, however early it came, came gradually and increasingly. Under attention and thought they came to stand out clearly before Him, and to reveal all that was in their heart. He knew them, but (just as in the case of the rest of the information He possessed), remembered them as His attention was directed to them. In fact, Mark’s description of the agony in the garden, which states that the Saviour was “ amazed ,” 1 seems to imply the intrusion of some¬ thing on which surprise concentrated all His powers, and which shut out, for the moment, every other con¬ sideration. In neither case was the separation of His nature from the supremacy of the epourania tolerated by Him for a moment. The prayer, “ if it be possible,” was the prayer of right instinct, though also of a weak and surprised humanity. The admission, “ not as I will, but as Thou wilt,” was the prayer of the balanced and self-conscious self, which had conquered the surprise. The impulse of the temptation made Him swing as a pendulum does, but in that very moment conscience asserted itself, and its supremacy 1 Mark xiv. 33. 168 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST was acknowledged by faith. The deliberate decision was in favour of the epourania, cost what that might. Faith gave the epourania power over the natural and sinless instincts of humanity, and the spirit was able to lead the weak flesh in the path of duty. Of course I do not forget that these passages speak of the epourania which were acquired and not original in His knowledge, especially of the need of His death for men. It is easy to see how He could be uncon¬ scious of that for a moment; but it is important to see that there is only an implied forgetfulness of His Godhead in the forgetfulness of His purpose on earth. Still, if that was clear to Himself, and its implications were known only step by step, as His human nature could grasp what was conveyed, there is little difficulty in seeing that even here, for the time, the intrusive element hid, if not the fact itself, yet that in the fact which gave it pre-eminence and weight. The two sayings have this value also, in that they show how very natural and real was the experience of Him who knew Himself to be God, how that knowledge never saved Him from aught, how very little it helped, and how heavily it burdened Him. We thus arrive at the conclusion that the knowledge of the epourania and of the epigeia was fused into a homogeneous mass in the person of Christ by faith. Faith represented the supremacy of conscience, or of God’s will. The value of the Saviour’s life depended on the maintenance of that unity. He had to live a life of faith. The keystone of His life is His faith. We can go on now to see Christ’s world, and how THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 169 it looked in His eyes. The Saviour had to do with a universe which presented itself to Him as having two halves. But in both He saw the same God—the God of grace, who had sent Him, and whom, with all His soul, He felt worthy of all His worship. The epigeia, as we saw, became, as well as the epourania, the guarantee of God to Him. The latter suited His nature, otherwise poor and dark; they formed the standard of, and supplied the impulses needed in it. The former was just the application of the other to all the new developing circumstances of life. Heavenly and earthly things alike enshrined and revealed, and were controlled by, the God of grace. Christ’s view thus reflects His own personality. He could not separate the God of the epourania from the God of the epigeia, the God of grace from the God of providence. Hay, in the two spheres, the same God acted, He saw, by the same principles. As that God was known in the one, so He could be calculated on to act in the other. Earthly affairs were fresh illustrations of the truth of the epourania. Any¬ thing proved the beginning of an avenue which led up to God. The sower, the mote and the beam, ravening wolves and timid sheep, salt and light, pearls and swine, leaven and mustard seed, each became a starting-point which ended with God; for He was the centre of the universe, and it could not be even thought of apart from Him. God faced Christ everywhere; a broad or a narrow way, fishers at work, straining at a gnat, the needle’s eye, the camel, wine skins and their patches—anything in all the world pointed up 170 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST to God when this world was only the entrance hall of the other. We can see now that the rest of Christ’s knowledge, like that which He set Himself to gain from the Old Testament, was a knowledge of principles rather than of details, and one which could give suitable place to facts, otherwise seemingly isolated. Christ ranged worldly things, whatever other aspects they might have, according as they affected His work. His knowledge was no loose, rolling, unformed set of ideas, but a connected whole, a filled-up system, which represented Himself, and bore the stamp of His own personality. The variety observed in His teaching is, as in the case of nature, produced by the application of a few general principles—mercy, holiness, love, righteousness, justice, faithfulness. These He used according to the instincts of His Spirit-filled nature, and the standard of the epourania in His conscience. He applied them fearlessly, sure of the result. For Him they were not separate entities, to be balanced by a deliberate judgment, but a unity, seen balanced in the God of grace, with whom He felt Himself at one. They were the elaborations of perfect love, and expressed fully His own feelings. He calculated on them not less surely than on physical laws. He was convinced that not one jot or tittle of the law could pass till it was fulfilled; for it was God’s, and part of His grace. The man who taught another to break one of the least of these commandments was least in the kingdom of God, seeing that he had a very imperfect knowledge of this fundamental view of Him who was its head. THE BOUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 171 As this knowledge was the teaching of His con¬ science, which He knew to be absolute, and the experi¬ ence of His heart, it was to Christ authoritative. We saw already that it superseded what even Moses had taught. By it He vindicated healing on the Sabbath day; by it He condemned divorce; and by it He represented God’s views—“ a man better than a sheep,” or “ I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” Thus Jesus was different from all around by the peculiar set of ideas which filled Him. John the Baptist was distinct from Him just as Pilate, or Herod, or any of the Pharisees was. His nature and tastes and views, His aims and standards and ways were of heaven, whilst theirs were only of the earth. He never regarded petty conventionalities, just as He never showed worldliness of taste; He never used strained literalisms, just as He never felt sensuality of desire. He always saw principles which enshrined God. These kept His heart. This explains to us, also, how Christ seemed to see things with two separate eyes; to have His eyes fixed on both hemispheres of His universe at once; to understand their mutual relations as they lay alongside one another, bathed in the same light; to think of things with a double-lobed brain. He seemed to stand with a foot in each world, so that men saw quite differently what appeared only natural to Him. They felt that His feet were on the earth, but that His head pierced the clouds. They felt themselves outdistanced by His ideas, even when they saw into them. The more they saw into them, the less they felt they had exhausted them or 172 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST comprehended Him. Though He hated death because of its connection with sin, and even feared it, yet He saw it was in a very real way for Him just a going home to His Father, and to others a mere falling asleep. So He illustrated the spiritual resurrection of the soul by the final one of the body, and compared His own death to the sowing of a grain of wheat. To Him life was a day, and for men death was a night. He was constantly using words with what seems extraordinary subtlety, yet in a way which is the natural outcome of His way of looking at things: the words temple, born, lifted up, water, thirst, eat, harvest, meat, bread, father, good, sleep, wash, world, are all employed thus. In the same manner we find Christ able to create parallelisms between the principles of the two hemis¬ pheres—the epourania and the epigeia—to see them in line, and apply the one to the explanation of the other. We shall see this more fully yet; but mean¬ time we may take a few cases appropriate to His view of Himself. For instance, we see the ear that is God- ward and the mouth that is manward in the expression “ As I hear I judge .” 1 That remarkable saying, or rather twin-saying , 2 “All that which the Father giveth Me shall come unto Me: and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out,” is explained by the faith which recognised in the epourania a revelation to be trusted fully, and yet did not forget the obligation to act by it. The words, “ No man can come unto Me, except the Father which sent Me draw him ,” 3 indicate a deep sense of present helplessness; yet the words 1 John v. 30. 2 John vi. 37. 3 John vi. 44. THE BOUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 173 which follow, “ And I will raise him up in the last day,” are, in this view of them, quite natural, though they breathe the utmost assurance as to the future. In the same way we come by Christ’s own words to understand the place which He believed Himself to hold in the process of salvation. He compares it with that of the Father thus: “As the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself.” 1 He represents Himself as to us the object of faith, in the same way that the Father is to Him, if we would live a right life; He says , 2 “ As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth Me, he also shall live because of .Me.” He represents the knowledge He has of the Father—that which lay embedded in the epourania and formed the basis of His faith—as corres¬ ponding exactly with the knowledge we must have of Himself; He says , 3 “ I am the Good Shepherd, and I know Mine own, and Mine own know Me, even as the Father knoweth Me and I know the Father.” We must take the way to Him that He took toward the Father, if we would abide in His love; He says , 4 “ If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love; even as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.” Then He and His people are to stand toward the Father on one footing: “ They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world ”; 5 they are fit to act as He Himself did in the Father’s name by faith: “ As Thou didst send Me into the world, even so sent I 1 John v. 26. 4 John xv. 10. 2 John vi. 57. 3 John x. 14. 5 John xvii. 16. 174 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST them into the world; ” 1 and they have power to act even more effectively: “ He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to the Father.” 2 The outcome of the whole is their perfect union with Him, like His with God: “ I pray that they may all be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee; that they also may be in us. . . . And the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given unto them; that they may be one, as we are one: I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one.” 3 May we not say now, however, that if Christ’s teach¬ ing bore in its peculiar views the stamp of His person¬ ality, it no less reveals its identity by the form in which it is expressed ? For anyone to think that he has explained its shape by the supposition that Jesus had a poetical mind, is to show a poor insight into the Saviour’s being, and small appreciation of what He taught. Poetical He was, but He was poetical because of His far-reaching views and the truth of His opinions, the completeness and roundedness of His ideas, and the appreciation He had of the details of life, through seeing these in connec¬ tion with its great principles, and as illustrations of its great problems. He was certainly no mere poet, how¬ ever truly He was a poet. He was religious man and philosopher, practical reformer and Saviour as well. The illustrations He used were natural to Him; they were simply the result of the way in which He saw things. They came from knowledge, not fancy; they were revelations even more than illustrations; they were 1 John xvii. 18. 2 John xiv. 12. 3 John xvii. 21-23. THE BOUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 175 woven into the web, not embroidered on the surface; they embodied real truth and set forth principles; they were not created for the occasion, or intended to serve a momentary purpose; they have permanent validity, and so teach even to this day; they embodied not His view simply, but abiding fact. His illustrations were not imported into His teaching artificially from without, like Chinese lanterns hung all over a Christmas tree. Matter and form came from the same source; the one fits the other, as the skin does the flesh. By that fact men not only saw things as He did, but came to see them by the same way. That, again, made Him the teacher He was. He was able to speak freshly on metaphysical points, and make subtleties simple. Moral distinctions became as clear as concrete illustrations or living word-pictures. He did not begin to use illustrations for the first time when He judged it expedient to begin to speak in parables . 1 He thought through them, for He saw by them. When the disciples said, “ How speakest Thou plainly, and speakest no proverb,” 2 they simply showed how unlike they were to Him. What made all clear to Him, in whom were the epourania, left them still dark. When He said, “ The hour cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but shall tell you plainly of the Father ,” 3 He meant that they should not always see in the partial and fragmentary way, in which His full-orbed spiritual knowledge had been gained, slowly and as from beneath, 1 Liddell and Scott point out that the Fourth Gospel uses 7rapoi/zhi (a proverb) in the same sense as the synoptists employ irapa^oXif] (a parable). 2 John xvi. 29. 3 John xvi. 25. 176 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST but as He Himself could now see, with perfect vision, and with the assurance that all centred in the Father. Men were in fact prosaic, because incomplete in knowledge, and unattractive for the want of a heart with distinctive personality. Christ’s views were fresh and suggestive, revealed great principles, and ran along main lines of thought, any one of which led up to God. But now I go on to point out that Christ's knowledge was not only a complete thing, a system, but a living system, moving easily with Himself, fitting His grasp for use, because it was part of Himself and part of His own experience. Christ was never at fault; He never erred, He never hesitated, not even in difficult situations, where two great moral principles presented opposing claims and seemed to clash. He answered the comment of Judas on Mary’s prodigality as readily as the devil’s quotations at the Temptation. Observance of the Sab¬ bath, divorce, and the relations of the sexes after death, presented no difficulties to Him. He judged men, too, unhesitatingly, just as He gauged their arguments. He felt the spirit of the men as easily as He saw the outcome of their opinions. He perceived when Satan spoke by Peter, and how the Pharisees had simply put themselves in His hand when they pleaded that, if they had lived in the days of their fathers, they would not have been partakers with them in the evil that was done. He could judge and expose the quibbles as to Corban, oaths, and suchlike, as well as see the cumulative power of guilt throughout the successive generations of the people. He was able to THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 177 judge questioners by the ring of their words, true or false. He saw whether statements lay along the lines of truth, or fell athwart and obscured their vistas ; whether they pointed steadily to God or wandered aimlessly. Nicodemus He answered; the man born blind in Jeru¬ salem He sought out and revealed Himself to; the rich young man was, He felt, kept back by riches, hence He demanded the sacrifice of them; to those who were trying Him in the end He answered nothing, for He saw their wrongdoing was conscious. You see now that Jesus had only to follow out that which thus presented itself to Him in its own way, to be loyal to Himself and to His circumstances, as the expression of God’s will. That meant doing right, moving forward with perfect balance yet with absolute freedom. By observing it He called men to Him or sent them away, ever aptly. He observed circumstances, it is true; His life would have been absurd else; but always His judgment rested on principle. Though His judgment about men and things was limited in its range and natural in its methods, still it was so gathered round the central and original position which dominated it all, it was so clear in its lines and orderly and rounded in its details, that in no circumstance was He at fault either as to Himself or as to others. He hid Himself, or travelled, or gave Himself up to death ; He reproved, or encouraged, or absolved, always with an appreciation of the position most unerring and clear, because He was true to Himself. As I have already said, Christ’s conception of the epou- rania, and His personal loyalty to them, rendered it impera¬ tive that He should impose them on all others likewise. 12 178 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST It is very interesting to observe that Christ expressly says His knowledge of the importance of the epourania forced Him to preach them. Consequently, as Keim and Baldensperger both observe, the Saviour undertook His public ministry not of His own initiative, but under severe inner compulsion. The Saviour’s testimony in the matter was, “ I spake not from Myself; but the Father which sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life eternal: the things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I speak .” 1 He pointed to them as forming the basis of His own judgments: “ I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you: howbeit He that sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these speak I unto the world.” 2 They formed, He said, His gift, and were the privilege of those who received them. “ No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth : but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known unto you .” 3 The constant and first care of Christ was to keep clear the avenues between Himself and God, to preserve the right relation to God, by which the revelation of the Divine perfectness was clear. His next aim was always to get men to look up these, and see God as He did; to see the epourania as expressive of God, and the epigeia as unlocked and glorious because of them. He felt that His mission, His duty, was to be the revealer of God. For that end the epourania were His treasure 2 John viii. 26. 3 John xv. 15. 1 John xii. 49. THE ROUNDEDNESS OF CHRIST’S KNOWLEDGE 179 and His trust. He was always looking for or trying to create faith in them, that is, in the God whose heart they represented; the presence of faith gave Him a free hand and rendered Him effective ; the absence of it rendered His presence useless and His will powerless. No one can fail to see how the centurion of Capernaum or the Syro-Phoenician woman gladdened Him, and how the people at Nazareth grieved Him. He encouraged the people, when things seemed to contradict this faith ; for He knew they might sooner rely on the unchange¬ ableness of God than on the things that seemed to hide Him, or that distorted what was seen of Him. “ Pray,” He says, “ for your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.” 1 “ Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you .” 2 When the leper in the beginning of the Saviour’s ministry cried out, “If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean ,” 3 he got a very different answer from that given at a later period to the man who brought his demon-possessed son to be healed; yet both were answered suitably, with a view to creating in them right faith. To men without faith His life was an enigma, His spirit unintelligible; His views were a mere chaos of words, His miracles mere wonders, appealing to the senses without rousing spiritual appreciation. For this reason He refrained from merely healing as many people as possible. His cures, or His refusals to cure, were intended equally to be the occasion of seeking for God. Better that many should remain unhealed, if perchance in their distress they might yet be made to cry to God, than that a great 1 Matt. vi. 32. 2 Matt. vi. 33. 3 Mark i. 40. 180 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST host of healed men, full of boisterous energy and possessed by absurd, earthly, enthusiastic ideas as to Him, ignorant of God and unchanged in heart, should fill the country. To His disciples He looked for faith; it was the test that they were in their right place near Him, qualified to benefit by their advantages. For else they could not see God come near in Him—His God of grace, the God of the epourania ; and they could not have been able to fulfil the conditions required of those He thus kept near Him—“ If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” The training His disciples got in the warm atmosphere which surrounded His person was just the acquisition of His habit of ranging by faith all ideas along the lines that led fitly up to God. God was unknown, and the world narrowed, confused, anarchical, for the want of that way of seeing all. The lack was vital, and it was for Him to remedy it. As He Himself said in the end, He had come to bear witness to this. In view of it, He could say with assurance, pointing to Himself, “ I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” 1 “ He that believeth . . . hath passed out of death into life . 2 He was sure that demonstration and proof would come to all who honestly lent themselves to this life and gave it fair trial; for if a man had “ faith even as a grain of mustard seed,” he had got a true glimpse of God, had a principle or rather a power by which to guide his life— the only one fit to embrace and to account for all it contains and concerns, whether heavenly or earthly. 1 John xiv. 6. 2 John v. 24. CHAPTER VIII Christ’s knowledge of the future When we looked at Christ’s knowledge of the men and things around Him we found that the mass of it was gained by Him just as by other men. We saw that it was bounded by an ignorance akin, except in a few cases, to that which marks mankind. So that now we need not be surprised if He did not know things which lay in front, far or near, unless according to His extra¬ ordinary but natural power, or by a knowledge of certain points through information such as might have been given to any prophet. As in the case of His know¬ ledge of men and things, so in regard to His knowledge of the future—much of what we should be at first sight inclined to assign to supernatural sources, resolves itself into the results of what must have been merely human. We may conclude, then, that in this department our Saviour saw and knew by the same powers, and with the same characteristics, as we have already observed in connection with the working of His human mind. There are one or two passages which seem to bear on this subject, but must first be set aside as inapplicable. The others which are relevant will then be found to separate themselves readily into groups. 181 182 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST For instance, when Christ said to His disciples, “Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come ,” 1 He uttered, as we have already seen, a mere statement of fact; He offered only a presentment of the magnitude of the task appointed, and of the shortness of the opportunity for it, but not anything which had reference beyond the occasion. In the same way we find it said, “ Jesus therefore, know¬ ing all the things that were coming upon Him, went forth .” 2 That does not mean that Jesus knew, apart from what He had found in the Old Testament, all the detail of His death. It implies that He was expecting His death and controlling the main circumstances connected with it; that He was not taken aback when the traitor came— having hindered him till the right moment; that He was looking for the man, because He knew the deed was near; that He was quite aware of what the rabble and the torch flare implied, as He saw that what had been divinely appointed was about to take place. He had been watching, not to foil the traitor’s will, but to carry out God’s purpose. Care and observation were required. As He Himself had said, “ Know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through.” 3 His touching words in the garden, “ What! could ye not watch with Me one hour ,” 4 show that this was a necessity of His life to its very end. 1 Matt. x. 23. 3 Matt. xxiv. 43. 2 John xviii. 4. 4 Matt, xxvi. 40. Christ’s knowledge of the future 183 These and suchlike passages being set aside, I may repeat, before speaking on the various groups into which this department of Christ’s knowledge arranges itself, that the same principles are found operative in it as we have found to be, from His constitution and position, characteristic of the knowledge He had in other depart¬ ments. In that is the key to the subject. As we know, Christ’s knowledge was all gained, and His views were held under the supremacy of the principles con¬ tained in the epourania. Here likewise, then, faith in Him assumed the unity of history, and not of creation only; He saw God shining along its lines, and shining the more clearly as time went on. We have seen that when Christ quoted the Old Testament, He used it to illustrate God’s will, and to picture Him by means of His great moral attributes. He dropped all that was local or pass¬ ing in each case, saw immediately the remainder which was essential, and fixed it as a permanent possession for meeting the need of His own day. To Him history was the robe of God, and therefore a constant repetition of positions really similar, a kaleidoscopic combining of a few truths, as the facts varied in which they were to be embodied. We know how aptly He gauged the spirit of those around Him, and gave expression to it by quoting from Isaiah the words , 1 “ Ye hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me; but in vain do they worship Me, teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.” No one can fail to see the insight by which He notes that His position is like that of Noah 1 Isa. xxix. 13 ; Matt. xv. 8 ; Mark vii. 6. 184 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST unci Lot, 1 summing up an age and foretelling the catas¬ trophe of its end, or by which He recognises that He is the reality which is prefigured in the use of the brazen serpent. 2 In fact, to Christ prophecy was nothing more than the assertion and the repeated illustration of principles still ready to show themselves in actual operation when the circumstances warranted. The past illustrated the present to Him and made it intelligible, and the future was guaranteed by them both. In all there must ever be the same God, wise and good. So when His disciples asked Him as to the blind man, 3 whether the explanation of this congenital blindness were that the man or his parents had sinned, He replied unhesitatingly, piercing the unknown past as well as the unseen future by His answer, “Neither; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” Simi¬ larly, when He said that the Father judges no man, 4 but “ hath given all judgment unto the Son,” He added as the reason for it, His being “ the Son of Man ”; 5 and so He interpreted the future by the present, seeing in what He was the moral guarantee of that which lay necessarily afar off. You remember also how, because of this ethical view of history, the Saviour had no difficulty in assuming to Himself the ideal experience of every right-minded Jew, and even of the nation itself, as the servant of God. He did this, alike in regard to salvation through suffering, and in regard to judgment on sin. What, however, pointed forward to Him and His own day, was also carried 1 Matt. xxiv. 37 ff.; Luke xvii. 26 ff. 2 John iii. 14. 3 John ix. 3. 4 John v. 22. 5 John v. 27. Christ’s knowledge of the future 185 forward by Him beyond His own day, to be fulfilled by Him in a second day, so far as it was unfulfilled in the first. Thus, as to the future, He was guided by what He saw in the past. But He was ignorant, and content to be ignorant of its detail, just as in the case of the epourania, if the ignorance did not hamper Him or affect His work. The moral content of the future, as of the present and the past, was all-important to Him. However, He had never any doubt as to the moral aspects of life. He saw God, not in nature around only, but in the pathway of providence in front, and waiting at its end. So His view of the future was prophetic, because it was ethical or vital. And thus, as death seemed to him sleep, as the spiritual foreshadowed and guaranteed the bodily resurrection, as He found in God’s aim by Israel a foreshadowing of His own duty, so we find Him seeing His first and second advent as if in line, and thinking of the things to come according to the spiritual principle they embody. Let us now look at the cases in which the Saviour shows knowledge of the future, and see if we can ascertain how it was arrived at. When classified accord¬ ing to their objects, these passages consist of those on the judgment, on rewards, on the fate of His followers, on the Church, and on the coming and work of the Holy Spirit. Along with these come the predictions relative to His death and resurrection, and, in fine, one or two cases mainly referring to His own second coming, which are peculiar in their difficulty but not in their nature. The fact of judgment was, I think, in the case of Jesus, a moral certainty not supernaturally attained. 186 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST In this way He seems to put it when He says , 1 “ The good man out of his good treasure bringeth forth good tilings, and the evil man out of his evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” The way in which His mind wrought on the subject comes out in the very form of the expression , 2 “ Shall not God avenge His elect, which cry unto Him day and night ? . . . I say unto you that He will avenge them speedily,” for there is implied in these words an appeal to conscience, and there is clear the implication of an answer which conscience will seal. Of course, on the other hand, the fact that judgment would be by Himself had a supernatural element in it; for it rested on the fact of His own importance. As He said , 3 “ This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent; ” “ He that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him; ” 4 and, “ If I had not come, they had not had sin .” 5 He tells us expressly that the Father hath committed all judgment to the Son, because He is the Son of Man ; 6 that is, not only because He is sympathetic and qualified to judge, but because He has come forth to seek and to save. He is not only fit to judge, He has the right to judge. The detail which is connected with all this, as the filling in of the picture—His coming, for instance, in His Father’s glory and with the holy angels—is nothing 1 Matt. xii. 35-37. 2 Luke xviii. 7. 3 John vi. 29. 4 John iii. 36. 5 John xv. 22. 6 John v. 27. Christ’s knowledge of the future 187 more than the necessary and natural inference from the fact of judgment “ because He is the Son of Man.” The details of judgment are, in fact, largely, if not wholly, deduced from His moral knowledge; they form part of an idealised description—the only one possible to our appreciation, and fully representative of the facts, whether the only one possible to Him or not. For instance, we find Him reasoning as to what the end must be, in such a passage as 1 “For judgment came I into this world,”— explained by the words,—“ that they which see not may see, and that they which see may become blind.” He saw the same principle at work through successive generations till the end: “ The last state of that man becometh worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this evil generation ,” 2 said He ; and again, “ There¬ fore say I unto you, the kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof .” 3 But though such a descrip¬ tion as “ Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me ,” 4 is purely an ideal, embodying a moral principle, yet it is a concise and accurate picture, calculated to impress the truth deeply, and to influence. Accordingly, when we pass the border line, and are brought face to face, not with what occurs in the judg¬ ment, but in the other world, we may take it for granted that the same method of pictorial idealism and practical ethical realism is followed. As truly as the parable of the drag-net represents a terrible moral truth, which 1 John ix. 39-41. 2 Matt. xii. 4o. 3 Matt. xxi. 43. 4 Matt. xxv. 31 If. 188 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST we understand in this world and see even now, so truly do the conceptions of the sheep and goats, of the outer darkness, and of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and of fire in the world to come. The teaching is not less real that it is pictorial; its emblems have reality as regards moral meaning; their meaning is only the more terrible because mere literal interpretation and physical reference do not exhaust it. We must regard the duration of future punishment in the same manner as the fact. Christ could look on it in no other aspect than lengthwise, stretching out in front of Him. Life after death presented itself of neces¬ sity as everlasting on both its lines. Still, the Saviour rested His assurance of its condition, not on how the thing appeared, but on the moral certitude of the greatness of His own person and mission. “ This,” He says, “ is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness .” 1 He looked on Himself as closing men into their aeon of responsibility, w T ith much greater gravity than did Noah and Lot. So too, when we go on to consider the rewards of the kingdom, we find that they are rewards really; that is, they are suitable to the taste and merit of those who can appreciate them and have aimed at them. The bliss of the blessed is the natural result of their spiritual condition. The beatitudes, for instance, express this in its simplest form. On the other hand, it is fittingly promised, “ There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for My sake, and for the gospel’s sake, but he shall 1 John iii. 19. Christ’s knowledge of the future 189 receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life .” 1 And so when Peter asked Jesus , 2 “ Lo, we have left all and followed Thee ; what then shall we have?” Jesus said to him, “Verily I say unto you, that ye which have followed Me ” (in the work of regenerating Israel), “ in the regeneration, . . . also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” It is absurd to say that this was the result of Christ’s initial, narrow-minded exclusiveness as a Jew ; the saying is a pictorial presentment of the suitableness of the reward, and of the fact that it is one which the re¬ cipient will value as real. When the ambitious among the Saviour’s disciples desired to sit in the highest place in His kingdom, He expanded the simple principle, that he who would become greatest must become like a little child, or be servant of all. He showed Himself to be the embodiment of it, but declined to decide about others and the coveted honour. He could do no more than state the conditions, “ Are ye able to drink the cup that I am about to drink ? ” 3 “ It is not Mine to give, but it is for them for whom it hath been prepared of My Father ” ( i.e . those fitted for it). From the same principles Christ arrived at the fate which must await His followers. Nay, He let us see the process going on in His own mind. He deduced their fate from His own. He declared that, if He were really their Master, the similarity of their character and His own would secure that they could not be treated 2 Matt. xix. 27-29. 8 Matt. xx. 22, 23. 1 Mark x. 29. 190 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST differently. “ If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household ?” 1 “ Ye shall be hated of all men for My name’s sake .” 2 “ Because ye are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you .” 3 Having announced His own death, He immediately added, as the rule for all, “ Whosoever would save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it .” 4 About His Church He reasoned from the same principle. What He knew of its future He knew by means of His knowledge of the powers at work to produce and to hinder it. He saw its future as He saw that of the kingdom of God, when He compared the spread of that to leaven, and its final growth to the growth of the mustard plant. When Peter made his great confession in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew , 5 Christ burst forth in joyful recognition of the advance which had been made, exclaiming, Thou art Peter (irerpos) ; not Simon only, but hewn from the great block or mass, 7 rerpa\ made so by having had revealed to thee, not of flesh and blood but of the Father in heaven, who alone knows the Son, the great fact confessed as a sure conviction; and on this 7 rerpa (solid mass—the confession), not on the 7rerpo? (a mere splint or boulder), I will build My Church, so that the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. The assurance expressed is manifestly general and comprehensive, for it is based on spiritual and moral, that is, general grounds. Christ had seen 1 Matt. x. 25. 2 Matt. x. 22. 3 John xv. 19. 4 Matt. xvi. 25. 5 Matt. xvi. 16. Christ’s knowledge of the future 191 that the basis, the one foundation of all His own know¬ ledge, the most profound belief and the regulative fact of His own experience, that which opened out to His human soul the Godhead and its heaven, had become, by purely human methods, the intelligent conviction of an ordinary man, when kept near Himself and under the power of the Holy Ghost. By that all became possible. The man had become essentially one with Him in His view of God and of the needs of men; he could appre¬ ciate God’s aim, at least partially, and lend himself to the gaining of it. This first case argued the possi¬ bility of innumerable others in due time. He Himself as the leaven from above had begun to work in the mass. When He saw faith springing up within this ignorant, earthly man, and beheld a replica of His own perfect being in process of creation, He traced a guarantee for a spiritual succession of which He did not know the limits: “ First the blade, then the ear ” : 1 “ he knoweth not how.” 2 We shall see that from the first moment Jesus appears in public, thoughts of His death, and it as not common but peculiar, were present to Him. How the thought arose and took this particular character, we have already seen in connection with the development of the epourania. In the Temptation the allurement was the escape from death on the Cross. In the first official visit to Jerusalem the matter is stated in language sufficiently clear, yet studiously prophetic, i.e. so as to be recognis¬ able only after the event. In this light, John says, he saw it when the Holy Spirit had come. “ When there - 2 Mark iv. 27. 1 Mark iv. 28. 192 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST fore He was raised, His disciples remembered,” is this apostle’s explanation. When the Saviour was not under the immediate gloom of the Cross, the thought of resur¬ rection seems to have been the natural companion of the expectation as to His death. This faith in His speedy and special resurrection most probably rested on the assurance that of Him, not only Divine but well¬ pleasing, it was much more true than of any Old Testament saint, that “ Thou wilt not leave My soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption.” 1 We must now look at a few passages concerning the Saviour’s view of the coming of His kingdom and of the judgment day. Their interest is peculiar, for their difficulties are exceptional. They do not belong to the simple class which, even at a glance, show they merely follow out and embody some moral principle. They seem at first sight to impugn Christ’s accuracy, and to represent Him as in a state of confusion about the great events of the future, notably about these two great points—the coming of His kingdom and of judgment. Some would explain the difficulty by reminding us of what is quite true, namely, that to Christ His first and second coming were in line; that, indifferently, the coming of His kingdom at Pentecost and at the general resurrec¬ tion expressed the same idea; that for Him the impending judgment on Jerusalem was at once sign and pledge of the universal one which is to close the earth’s cycle. Now these are undoubted truths; but whether they be available as explanations, or whether they are wholly 1 Ps. xvi. 10. Christ’s knowledge of the future 193 satisfactory as such by themselves, is a point only to be determined by the inspection of each case in the text and not by general considerations, however true these may be. We read that Jesus said , 1 “ Shall not God avenge His elect, which cry to Him day and night, and He is long- suffering over them ? I say unto you that He will avenge them speedily. Howbeit when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth ? ” How, the very way in which this is expressed makes it plain that the whole is simply the result of ethical conviction. How¬ ever, when we look into the first half of the statement, we find that Christ is using two measures of time when speaking of the judgment which is to come on the oppressors of God’s elect. The one is such as men might use; the other is more suitable to God or to Himself. The elect, judging as men do, find the delay trying; they cry day and night. Jesus, looking at the thing from God’s point of view and by faith,—perfect, as even the elect are not,—proclaims justice speedily. The statement was not made as to the class in His own age, but in all ages. Delay is the characteristic of judgment in men’s eyes. But even if the end be not soon it is speedy ; it comes as quickly as possible, and without any unnecessary delay; and this is all that can be said. This double¬ sided way of seeing things is, as we have already found, characteristic often of Christ’s thought. When we turn to the second part of the statement we find that it does not seem to express anything more than a great law which follows from the first part, this 1 Luke xviii. 7, 8. 13 194 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST namely, that the outcome of all God’s dealing with the world, whether waiting or avenging, is nevertheless of no ultimate and saving good to it. The uselessness alike of patience and of punishment even when persevered in, authorises the end; the summing up in the general judgment, and the second coming in order to it, become possible. We find, then, in this passage, that Christ combined general laws and particular facts to attain His conclusion. They lay together in His mind by the practical interest which bound them together for Him, namely, the salva¬ tion of men. Providence and judgment interested Him as they affected salvation. The elect were interested in judgment and personal right, Christ in salvation and the good of the world. He had no thought of immediate judgment; He knew it would come as soon as possible; but He saw that, in order to authorise it, all possible means in the interest of salvation must be employed, whether these actually secured it or not. In another place we find that Jesus added and spake a parable , 1 “ Because He was nigh to Jerusalem ” (and so to His end), “ and because His disciples supposed that the kingdom of God was immediately to appear,” apart from, or at least before, His death. He wished to remove their ideas of immediate outward glory, and to prevent them from being altogether cast down or faithless when His death occurred. The parable of the pounds, which He then spoke, had reference to the increase of responsi¬ bility which was to lead up to His coming again and to the judgment. By it He diverted their attention from 1 Luke xix. 11 ff. Christ’s knowledge of the future 195 glory, because it was far off; and directed it to responsi¬ bility, because that was near. Yet this expression of His knowledge on such a subject was only elicited incident¬ ally by their evident ignorance regarding it. We are now, therefore, in a position to look at the difficult saying , 1 “ Verily I say unto you, there be some of them that stand here, which shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His king¬ dom.” For we have found that whilst Christ saw His own presence meant judgment, and cumulative judgment, on His own people and generation, He saw also that there lay a long process beyond that, after which alone could it be possible for Him to come and judge mankind. Now, can it have been that at this period, slightly earlier than the other, when He was fully convinced of coming death, and hoped for the accompanying resurrection, can it be that He thought the final glory of His kingdom would burst forth, say with the latter, or just after that ? Though I have emphasised the growth of our Saviour’s views, as well as of His nature and faculties, I do not think there is any reason whatever to infer any advance in this matter at that time. For, to begin with, Christ says nothing of the glory of His kingdom. He speaks of His kingdom ; and it did come—begin to come, at least—with His resurrection and at Pentecost. One might even say that it had come by the time He was speaking, and daily thereafter came more clearly. “ If I by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come upon you.” 2 But at Pentecost the kingdom came, as Mark says, “ with power.” 3 The warrantable- 1 Matt. xvi. 28. 2 Matt. xii. 28. 8 Mark ix. i. 196 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST ness of this interpretation is fully borne out, for we find Christ repeatedly taking this progressive view of His kingdom. So it is that He says , 1 “ Henceforth ” {air apn, , or as in Luke 2 it is interpreted by diro rov vvv) not “ hereafter,” as in our ordinary version, “ ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The kingdom coming in power, as Mark puts the matter, interprets for us “ The Son of Man coming in His kingdom,” as Matthew puts it. Perhaps the most difficult passage of all is that 3 in which we find that the disciples came to their Master after He had foretold the destruction of the temple, asking Him, as He sat on the Mount of Olives, “ Tell us, when shall these things be ? and what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world ? ” At the first glance it is apparent that here we have not one query but several; and that although a definite point started the request, it broadened itself out to comprehend three. The disciples evidently embraced the opportunity as a pretext for getting light upon their perplexed views in regard to the future. By their question they asked about several great events—about the temple’s downcome, Christ’s coming, and the final judgment. The form of their question shows their ignorance and confusion ; for them the destruction of the temple might have been connected with the last judgment, and it might have been near, even in their own day. One feels here, that though the things asked by the disciples are clear enough, yet these were not distinct in their minds. They followed the method 1 Matt. xxvi. 64. 2 Luke xxii. 69. 3 Matt. xxiv. 3. Christ’s knowledge of the future 197 of those who are in mental confusion, and are afraid of omitting any necessary part of that which they see looming but vaguely. They repeated the phrases in the hope of expressing themselves adequately, even if it were at haphazard, in order to get a satisfactory answer. But though they felt their ignorance, they did not look upon Christ as either vague or confused in His knowledge of the subject. Naturally, His answer was such as fitted them and their need. The answer He gave to them is that which is recorded. Of course He did not answer them according to the letter, but, as always, according to the spirit of their request. He did not confine Himself to the single point which had given rise to the subject, but dealt with the various points they had mentioned, and aimed at giving them the information they sought on these, so far as was possible to Him and suitable to them. Let us remember, in looking at His answer, what we have seen from other passages, that Christ knew the end to be far off, though He expected wrath on His own generation; that He expected a speedy beginning of His kingdom, and a great spread of world-wide preaching ere the end could come. Let us remember that all the interest He had in the great train of events thus indicated was just as they influenced salvation. The disciples had enumerated three distinct points in their question. Christ keeps the three clear in His reply. First of all He warns them that the end—that is not His own end, of course, but the end of the world—“ is not yet ” ; and, stretching out before Him, He sees two long lines of activity, one hostile and persecuting, the other 198 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST patient and preaching ; both of which prepare for the end. After these, “ then shall the end come.” Having warned them thus of the long ages which must elapse ere the end could come, and having cleared the ground of any misconception on this great point, He turns back to their present need,—the need which they of that generation would soon meet,—their difficulty connected with the temple’s downfall. On this point, because it lies closer to their time and affects them more directly, He becomes, after the prophetic manner, more explicit and detailed. He gives them the sign by which the tribulation, which is connected with it, could be known to be at hand. He points to the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, which shall be seated in the holy place. Still, He takes the precaution of expressly warning them that they are not to look on this sign as immediately preceding, or indeed as being in any way connected with, the coming of the Son of Man ; for that event there will be no warning whatsoever, only a great and prolonged preparation composed of changes greater far than the fall of the temple—changes in which the whole established order of things will give way, and physical powers will become secondary. At the end of an indefinitely long period of such change the coming of the Son of Man and the end are to be. No sign shall herald Him; His coming shall be the sign of the end: then “ shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.” The effect of His coming is to be great mourn¬ ing over all the earth, but salvation to the elect. We are not concerned with what was meant by the sign of the Son of Man,—whether Christ the dethroner of adverse Christ’s knowledge of the future 199 powers and enthroned in their stead, or something by which He might be recognised,—for neither were they concerned with it. Nor are we concerned with the order and relations of the sign and the various events gathered together as happening at the end. Clearly, what is men¬ tioned, apart from the destruction of Jerusalem in their own time, was intended just to give them a sufficient view of the ground covered by all the rest of the question. For us the interest lies in this, that He separated the two things—the one which was near, and the one which was far—from each other. In fact, if we remember that, though the one was reached by the assurance He had of the responsibility His presence brought on His own generation, the other was the embodiment rather of a great moral principle; and if we remember that, though the first in its detail was (as we saw, p. 46 ) a matter of special supernatural revelation, the other was but a general and ideal description, we shall have little diffi¬ culty in seeing that it was impossible for the Saviour to have confused the two things. The rest of the passage must, of course, be interpreted in view of what had preceded. The persons who had heard that would certainly in its light understand what followed. Thus, when Christ went on to say, that as the young fig-tree leaves foretold summer, “ even so ye also, when ye see all these things, know ye that He (or it) is nigh, even at the doors : verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away till all these things be accomplished,” He spoke as an intelligent man, who did not contradict Himself on such plain and impressive points at once, and to intelligent people, unable to fail 200 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST in understanding His words after what they had heard. “ All these things ” must, therefore, be those which He had just said would be fulfilled in the experience of that generation. Whence we find that He had returned again after His digression, and had begun to speak of their own day, and what affected them, rather than the end of the world, in which they were but indirectly in¬ terested. As if eager to ensure the impossibility of being misunderstood, He tells them, in contrast to the foregoing, and in reference to the other thing of which He had spoken at their request—“ but of that hour ” (not “ these things,” as in verse 34—not what followed on the presence of the abomination seated in the temple, but what succeeds the sudden appearing of the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, unheralded save by a long pre¬ paratory process), “ of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.” For, whatever the sign be of that coming, it shall not warn men any more than God’s judgment in the days of Noah. All shall go on as usual till too late. One shall be taken and another left, though they lived and worked together ; for the one watched for the Son, the other did not. As we have seen, the two facts, though in line, repre¬ sented different things to Christ; they were attained by very different means, and so it was impossible for Him to have confused them. The information He had as to the one was much fuller than as to the other. He had special information of the details of the nearer. Symbols, large and vague but impressive, were enough to set forth that which lay further off. The knowledge as to the one Christ’s knowledge of the future 201 came by special revelation, was given supernaturally for a special purpose, was impossible to Him otherwise. The other He saw as an embodiment of general moral principle, crossed by the knowledge given in the eponrania as to His own spiritual importance. He saw the one as a step near at hand in, the other as the completion afar of, the great moral process His presence originated. CHAPTER IX Christ’s self-guidance One thing we may take for granted, I think—that Christ’s aim was unselfish, and its methods correspond¬ ingly spiritual. His aim was unlike that of other men. He showed it as early as twelve years old, when He said, “ Wist ye not that I must be in My .Father’s house \ ” and from it He never departed. He could say without any boasting, “ I have meat to eat that ye know not of.” It was no exaggeration for Him to say, “ My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work.” He made up His mind that “ man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro¬ ceeded out of the mouth of God,” 1 and He remained true to His ideal. From the first His aim was to fulfil all righteousness, whatever that might entail. In this aim and its associated methods, the distinc¬ tion between the life of Christ and that of all others is found. He who was filled with the Spirit and loyal to the epourania was different from others, and was forced into separation from them. Xow in that loyalty and opposition is found the power that moulded 1 Matt. iv. 4. 202 Christ’s self-guidance 203 His life and forced it to take the shape into which it developed. Christ’s views and acts and words were not those of ordinary men; for He felt a sense of duty to God, rather than of relation to men. The obligation to preserve the trust of His own personality inviolable was for Him para¬ mount. God’s claims on Him were more than men’s; so He felt Himself more closely allied to the great end of His life, than to the persons and duties of any earthly house¬ hold. “ Who is My mother ? and who are My brethren ? ” He asked: “ whosoever shall do the will of My Lather which is in heaven.” 1 Loyalty to His nature and its conscience was the method by which He hoped to gain that end. The reason for His earthly existence was the absolute rule for its guidance. The spirituality of Christ was that which roused the opposition and hatred of even the religious world of His day. He was quite unworldly; He never showed any trace of selfishness. He never sought wealth; He died a poor man ; His only legacies were His robe and His mother. So far as we know, He never had been any richer; for, as Judas lets us see incidentally, the bag was kept empty by a generosity that was systematically beneficent; the Master lived in a loving dependence which sought only that which was needful. In the spirit of His own description, “ the Son of Man had not where to lay His head.” He never sought the help of riches, though it was latterly given to Him unsought. His hardest words were spoken of, and sometimes to, rich men. In the same way He sought no aid from human influence; 1 Matt. xii. 48-50. 204 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST He accepted not the witness of men. In fact, the influential men of His land were arrayed against Him, Pharisees and Sadducees being combined, and Herod and Pilate being made friends for the occasion. If He had had ambitions, however, they might have been easily gratified without such aid. We may fancy that the devil’s temptations, had they been yielded to, would have been mere deceptions, yet royalty was once and again within the grasp of Christ. Galilee might have been in its enthusiasm easily led up to Jerusalem, and the proclamation of a national Messiah would have rallied all ranks. Peraean enthusiasm, even that of Jerusalem in the end and to the last day, might have been diverted by Him to such an object easily, through a few judicious admissions. But He who refused to interfere in such unspiritual matters as the dividing of an inheritance among brethren, had in His mind and heart a kingdom not of this world. His rule was not to be based on the unstable foundation of popular enthusiasm. He sought the praise of God and not of men. His was to be a kingdom that should never be moved. Christ could not lower His aim or alter His methods to please anyone. He could not be other than Himself. He could not change; the only question was whether others would. For, as we have seen, the Saviour’s deep convictions of truth filled Him with a sense of His duty in laying on all other men what He felt Himself bound to obey. He came to call sinners. He preached the gospel of repentance and of the kingdom; and one of the signs of the Spirit in Him was, that to the poor the gospel was preached. When Capernaum crowds Christ’s self-guidance 205 would have kept Him to themselves, the remark made to those who informed Him of that desire was, “ I must preach the good tidings of the kingdom of God to the other cities also: for therefore was I sent ”; 1 and, it is added, “ He was preaching in the synagogues of Galilee.” Immense popularity fell at times to the lot of Jesus. But that did not mark real favour; it only accentuated the opposition and hatred which met Him, and tended to force His life into its final shape. This influence was at work all through His ministry. As early as His first official visit to the capital, His miracles created a sensa¬ tion, and, even some time after that, the surge of it was distinctly and unexpectedly felt by Him in Galilee. During His Galilean and Peraean ministries, the difficulty was to avoid rather than to gain popularity. If He healed a leper He enjoined silence; and yet so much the more did the man trumpet abroad the news. If He healed a deaf and dumb man, He took him aside from the crowd for privacy whilst He did it, and forbade the man to enter the village again; yet it could not be hid. The effect of the raising of the widow of Hands son was wide and deep ; it spread even beyond Galilee, and reached John in prison. Multitudes thronged Him, till He had to leave the land for the lake; they followed Him from city to city, outside the cities into desert places, up mountains, and across the lake. They lingered with Him to the very verge of human endurance. Pharisees came as eagerly and regularly as did publicans. In like manner, Peraean crowds thronged Him and trod one on another. In 1 Luke iv. 42-44. 206 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Jerusalem He was always the great centre of discussion and interest at the feasts, even to the end, just as He had been in the desert of Jordan at the beginning of His ministry, where He had made more disciples than John, and became a marked man even for the metropolis. Now, though this popularity, which as anyone can see at a glance He did not seek, which came on Him in the course of His work as something incidental, which was thrust on Him all unwilling, seeing that He found it rather a hindrance than a help in His work—though this popularity was not that which roused the tide of opposition to Him as a person with a mission, yet un¬ doubtedly it coloured the whole course of His life. It accentuated the position. It made the antagonism and hatred of the ecclesiastical rulers towards Him more bitter and more pronounced. The opposition was, of course, based really on His spiritual aims and methods. But His popularity seemed to attest their success, and the loss of power by those who opposed Him. “ If we let Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him ”; 1 and “ Behold, how ye prevail nothing; lo, the world is gone after Him,” 2 was the private ad¬ mission of His enemies, even when the end was easily in sight. As early as His first official visit to the temple, opposition of the keenest kind was aroused by His spiritual views of that edifice and of its uses, and by His refusal to give any sign of His authority. When His second visit came, the opposition was quite open. “ Bor this cause,” it is said, 3 “ the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only 1 John xi. 48. 2 John xii. 19. 3 John v. 18. Christ’s self-guidance 207 brake the Sabbath, but also called God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.” The Pharisees were filled with madness at Him, early in His Galilean ministry, because He healed on the Sabbath day, 1 so that they communed with one another, what they might do to Him. When, at a later date, He visited Jerusalem, the crowds recognised Him as the person who had been doomed before: “Some of them of Jerusalem said, is not this He whom they seek to kill ? ” 2 He Himself asserted that their hatred was due to the difference of nature in Him and in them. “ He that is of God heareth the words of God.” 3 “ Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do.” 4 In Peraea the earlier policy, and the cruder, was to provoke Him by saying many things, and then try to catch Plim in His words. 5 Later, they changed their tactics, and took to warning Him against Herod, 6 or even to inviting Him, as if a friend, to share their hospitality. 7 Before the resurrection of Lazarus initiated the final stage of his Master’s life, the disciples could foresee what going into Judaea must mean, just as really as Jesus did. “ The Jews were but now” (John viii. 59) “seeking to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again ? ” they asked; and then Thomas added, “ Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” 8 But Jesus could not resist the sense of duty He felt toward His dead friend. So, finally, the high priest’s voice gave the keynote which commanded the universal approbation of the rulers, expressing the tacit desire of 1 Luke vi. 11. 4 John viii. 44. 7 Luke xiv. 1. 2 John vii. 25. 5 Luke xi. 54. 3 John viii. 47. 6 Luke xiii. 31. 8 John xi. 8, 16. 208 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST some of them and the unformed thought of many—“ it is expedient that one man should die for the people.” Thus, though the popularity of Jesus did not flow from His spirituality, but only arose as something incidental in the pursuit of His aims, it became the means of bringing His life to a crisis, and was the occasion of giving expression to that hatred of Himself and of His spirituality which had marked the treatment accorded Him from the first. He had to accept the results of His popularity and not of His spirituality only, though the former was quite out of keeping with His work. He had to try to carry out His work, notwithstanding His popularity and its consequences. The problem for us is to see how Christ guided Himself in the attempt to carry out His spiritual aims, notwith¬ standing the opposition He encountered and the barriers with which men thus hemmed Him in. It would not have been unnatural to expect that, when He found the body of the pecrple unsympathetic, and the rulers frankly opposed to all spirituality, He would have taken active measures to promote a crusade against the latter, even though He had needed to throw Himself into the arms of the former. But He did not. So far from that, He relied not even on Himself, much less on mere men for success. He looked to God ; He lived by faith. Through faith He chose His line of life; but for that reason it was not new to Him ; He had lived by it in private, and knew it to be right. He never hesitated about its being the method by which He ought to act, though now the action was official. He believed that God, who had placed Him where He was to do a definite work, would not fail Him Christ’s self-guidance 209 in showing how it should be carried out. He felt the weakness of His own manhood ; He saw in those around Him the unreliability of human nature. Instead of seeking the help of men He fled from it. They needed help; they were not fit to give it. He relied on God. Stranger still, so far from relying on them in His opposition to prevailing unspirituality, He did not even set Himself out as its professed antagonist; that is, He did not turn His whole life directly to that as His main end, though He took opportunities of showing indubitably His feelings about it. He did not seek to destroy error by the embroilment of human arguing, for that would have left the heart unconvinced and unchanged, and would have rendered the spirit more embittered ; He sought to spiritualise men by attractive and clear presentation of the truth. It does not need to be said that He did not shrink from controversy, or at times stop short of stern denunciation, when these were thrust on Him, and when enemies could not injure His work through them. Even though His denunciations were scathing, His holiness was perfect. He could engage in controversy with sure success and without harm to His own spirit; yet He clung to this other and more spiritual method as His choice. His great desire was to create spirituality ; consequently opposition was much more that of others against Him than of Him against others. Yet the strangest thing of all was, that the following out of such an aim by faith, as its congenial method, seemed to tie His hands, and to render Him apparently helpless. He was forced by it to lead a passive, waiting life, instead of dashing out into the eager fray. He H 210 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST distrusted even His own humanity, and relied on God alone. He felt that for Him to live simply as God desired would be for Him to do the work desired by God. He, then, who came to call sinners to repentance, yet lived according to the prophecy which had been uttered about Him so long before, that He should not cry aloud or make His voice to be heard in the streets. The guiding feature which lay at the root of all Christ’s conduct of life was His belief in the reality and exactness of providence. God had sent Him to serve, and God would not allow Him to fail in the service, if He did only what God showed Him to be right. God not only spoke in His conscience and from the Old Testament, God showed Himself beckoning or frowning in all the detail of ordinary life. Hence His belief was that His Father would supply Him with what was necessary for carrying out His life’s work, whether the need were physical or spiritual; for Him there was nothing but to remain loyal and willing, hearty and sympathetic. He must not allow any other object to distract and engross His attention ; He must watch for this one, and preserve the submission of His will in the carrying of it out. He believed that what providence presented to Him would bring about God’s will, if treated with perfect, unswerving principle of moral righteousness, if treated according to His own eternal nature and the promptings of His new one, which had been supplied Him as being harmonious. His first duty was to pre¬ serve intact the nature which had been entrusted to Him; God could not require it to be violated. His work in it was not to do simply what He Himself might please, or Christ’s self-guidance 211 as much good of a general kind as He could, but what God wished. His work in healing, for instance, was not to heal as many as possible, seeking out all the cases available, and following them up in an ever-widening circle till Galilee and perhaps all Judaea was, for the time being, an absolutely healthy land. His work was to heal only such as God designed. On the same principle, it was not for Him to occupy Himself with the outer Gentile world, but to follow this limiting rule of right life among His own people, along its peculiar channels, and within their fitting restraints. It was for Him to watch what God might send. Men came on the various tides of life and influence which flowed around Him,— uncontrollable, and even unrecognised,—and were cast up before Him as wreckage is on the shore by the waves. To these God gave Him a duty according to His powers. To discharge it perfectly was His responsibility. It was not for Him to take the initiative in opposing the spiritual rulers as John the Baptist had done. It was for Him to wait and accept such opportunities as God gave of creating spirituality till further and more direct ones were opened up. If we read the Gospels carefully we find that the great mass of Christ’s life was not determined or shaped by Himself, any more than a child’s birth is by the child, but in the providence of God by the action of others. The Saviour was not like a stake stuck in the ground immovably, or like an axle regulating the move¬ ments of others round Him by His own will, but like a buoy moored firmly to a rock, both responding to and moving freely among all the currents, yet never carried 212 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST away from His own point of attachment, namely, the consciousness of His own divinity and of His calling. Providence led Him hither and thither, and He followed. Affairs drove Him here and there, and He went. But always He moved that He might do God’s will, and always without selfish aim, with the powers of His whole being at the service of those with whom He was brought into contact. His sole aim was to do as God wished, and gain God’s ends. For that He waited and watched ; for that He lived and suffered. He would take no step forward, engage in nothing, without clear light on this point, that there might be no mistake on His part in word or deed because of any self-confidence. Thus our Saviour’s life, however full of activity, was filled up with what found its initiative in God and its means in men ; and His path was that of the just, shining more and more unto the perfect day. Let us see the wonder and simplicity of His method. As I have said, Christ did not pursue the people who were to be affected by Him either in their spirit or their body; He simply waited for them. He recognised that within His human limits He was not fitted to cope personally with all ; just as He had felt that He was not fit to deal with any till His powers were ripe. He looked on Himself as intended to deal only with certain persons, who were the chosen means of affecting others. The guidance given He recognised, and believed they might recognise also. It is unmistakable that He did not control the appearance of His forerunner, and that He did not court, perhaps even anticipate, John’s confession of Him— Christ’s self-guidance 213 either that made to Himself alone or that made before the Baptist’s own followers . 1 He trusted God for the one and for the other, as indications of the Divine will, and as such He accepted them. Till the forerunner came He remained subject and waiting at Nazareth, and when he came forth, He waited still for the same guidance as had been given before. He followed no different method of life during His ministry from that which He had pursued ere it began. In His active ministry His life was moulded largely by those who came to Him. He seems to have admitted the claim to help of all who were brought under His notice, and to have been ruled by the conviction that He possessed earthly existence in order to gain in them God’s spiritual ends. Their coming was in His view the expression of God’s will in regard to them. He expected that God had prepared them ere He brought them. As His power, His life was not His own but for others, He seemed to lie open to the four winds of heaven. He felt the appeal of all with whom He was brought into con¬ tact. He was laid under contribution by them all. The “ universality ” of the gospel He preached He first of all Himself practised. All the Father had given would come, and the men who came were to be in no wise cast out. Nicodemus comes to Him out of all the excited crowds of the great city, a pre¬ pared heart otherwise lost, hopelessly lost among the people. The woman of Samaria comes to Him, and soon He has more than human guidance to inform Him that He is right in dealing with her as a chosen one whom 1 John i. 22-31. 214 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST God has sent to receive His best gifts. In the same way God sent to Him a Jairus or a Syro-Phoenician woman, a centurion or a leper, a crowd or an individual, sick people or an inquirer. When the need made its appear¬ ance it made its appeal, and He was ready to meet that. In some cases there was bodily incapacity without thought of relief, as in the man at the pool of Bethesda; in others there was no word of appeal or capacity for it, though there was at least capacity for faith, as in the paralytic man who was borne of four ; yet again, there might be no word of appeal though there was spiritual need, as in Zacchaeus; and still again, there might be both bodily and spiritual need though without any expression of the faith already existing, as in the case of a woman with an infirmity of eighteen years’ standing whom Jesus healed in a Galilean synagogue. The details of the cases were incidental. He accepted the persons as they came; He had no choice; Pie was in their power. The blessing that was needed could even be snatched without warning or permission, as in the case of the woman whom Jesus healed of the issue of blood. The same rule held good about His teaching as in the case of His practical help. He never attempted to tell all He knew, or even all that His hearers needed, but only what they could bear. He considered their state and spoke to them, having no desire to glorify Himself but only to help them. His first disciples had come unsought at John’s suggestion. He let them go as freely as they had come. They might return, bringing friends with them; but that He did not know, and had to wait for. Even false-hearted ones like Judas, or the Christ’s self-guidance 215 multitudes fed by Him, but turned away by His saying that His flesh was meat indeed and His blood drink indeed, even they had to be borne with, and, if watched, had yet to receive the same attention as others, till events discovered their real character. Both good and bad had to be allowed to grow together until the harvest. What I wish, then, to bring out is more than that Christ was practical, and desired to help those around Him. I wish to emphasise that in a very real sense He did not choose those around Him; rather they chose Him and came, or God had chosen and brought them. If providence guided the fit persons to Christ, Christ found that He was supplied in the same way with the fit means of recognising them and dealing with them. Faith looked in this also for the hand of God. In such cases of providential need the Saviour found providential aid from what might be called authenticated or reliable sources, sources suggested and approved by the Word or His conscience. Christ guided Himself, when He had no other light as to duty, by means of what might be called authenti¬ cated persons or things. As He was guided providentially in the aiding of others, so others were providentially made aids to Him. To begin with, one cannot fail to mark that, as her child, He thus looked on and obeyed His mother. He was subject even to Joseph. I have no doubt His mother’s appeal in connection with the marriage in Cana was regarded by Him as more than the expression of a desire which He could gratify; it was a suggestion at least, because it came by one who had been an authority; and though it came by human 216 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST means, yet it came providentially, because it came with the consecration of love. Thus He regarded it in the light rather of an opportunity from God than of direction from her. Even clearer than this case, and without the attendant difficulties which obscure it, is the influence of the manner in which He looked on John the Baptist. No one can read the Gospels in even a hasty way without seeing clearly that from first to last Christ looked on the events of this man’s life as so many landmarks, like those He found in the Old Testa¬ ment as to Himself. He waited for John’s coming forth; He saw in him His forerunner Elias. He did not take upon Himself to supersede God’s authorised worker, but waited till God saw fit to remove him. Then He began His more extended and direct ministry, yet only at the point where the Baptist had stopped. Proximity to John’s person was the means He adopted when He was in difficulty, either about beginning His work after the Temptation, or after His first visit to Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple. He refused to enter into competition with John; He gave way to the prophet in what was the forerunner’s special work. When John was cast into prison Christ seems to have felt as if His hands were set free; and when John was executed He seems to have felt that, if they thus had treated the servant, much more would they thus also deal with the master, and that now the way was clear for His own death. John’s death represented to Jesus the possibility of His own death coming near. As we saw in an earlier chapter, He evidently thought Himself warranted by more than human knowledge to look on Christ’s self-guidance 217 the death of His loved friend Lazarus as an authenti¬ cated source of light, a kind of signpost on the way toward death. Of course love prompted Him, just as it prompted Him in the case of His mother at Cana, of which I have spoken; but love in Lazarus made Lazarus, like her, a sign to the Saviour’s love. In like manner Christ saw what was meant by the love of His spiritually - minded friend Mary, when she anointed Him, to show her dissent from the increas¬ ing bitterness of His enemies, and her increasing appreciation of Himself. Her love said plainly that He who was giving Himself was entitled to the best. By reading the spirit of her act He was confirmed as to His own future. It can scarcely be doubted that Moses and Elias were sent, as well as the angels at the Temptation and agony, because they had special significance for Him. Their presence meant confirmation and guidance. Nay, Christ’s disciples ought to have possessed the same signi¬ ficance. And to a certain extent they did; but they were unreliable. Even when they were means of guid¬ ance, it was on their part unwittingly; for instance, they brought to the Saviour’s notice the blind man of Jerusalem who sat at the roadside. They had one aim roused in them by what was presented; He had quite another. He saw by their suggestion the hand of God pointing to His duty, and affording a providential opening to Him as really as in the case of Lazarus’ death. In fact, I think He looked on the priestly rulers in this light too, though their ideas and aims were so unlike His own. When they came to Him in the temple , 1 He 1 Matt. xxi. 23. 218 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST felt by their question that the crisis had come, and met them frankly in their official capacity, with a plain statement of their hopeless opposition and prejudice. They came to Him officially as He was teaching in the temple, and in a body asked the question for which they had expressly come—the decisive ques¬ tion as to His authority. He looked on their question as the opportunity of formally bringing out the falsity of their spirit, and so of adding the last item to the long list of grudges they had against Him in order to doom. Nay, I think that He even traced the hand of God in the fact that they sought His death; for that meant His death was not accidental or incidental, but had the meanings of both sacrifice and protest. And Judas’ action seems to have been a guide to Him also; He avoided the people and Herod, not Judas and the priests. However, one cannot fail to be impressed by this in addition, that Christ not only guided Himself by persons who seemed authenticated, but by things and places which appeared to Him in the same light. If we may judge by the use He made of them, the great Jewish feasts must have been thus seen by Him. Time and again they made providential claim on Him, as on every Jew, and revealed opportunity for His work. That He did not go up simply for the feasts themselves is clear by these facts : He went up seldom, or at least irregularly; when He went up He did not occupy Himself in the way usual on the occasions, but treated them as great representative, and professedly religious, gatherings in which to work; He did not come up at the beginning CHRIST’S SELF-GUIDANCE 219 of them when He came, or go away just when they ended, but adapted His coming and going for His own purpose. Still, their occurrence at certain times seems to have suggested to Him what He considered appropriate lines of action. The first official journey He took to Jerusalem becomes natural thus. Whither rather than to that town should He with His claim have gone ? His second visit, which was quiet and without disciples, suggested itself, no doubt, as a fitting way of employing the time whilst John still held the field and prepared the people; it was a way of co-operating with John to mellow and ripen the city, so far roused by the forerunner’s ministry. His third visit came when the work in Galilee was done and He was free; but it preceded His Persean ministry, and so gave Him an opportunity of seeing the state of opinion and feeling in regard to Himself among high and low. Thus, in the middle of His Perrean ministry, He made a hasty run up to see if the same impressions still existed, or perhaps to bring them to a head. Yet these feasts were more than mere conveniences for testing opinion ; they were solemn opportunities given of dealing with the nation and its representatives, of creating and ripening the public opinion, and not merely of observing it. A clearer instance of the action of the same principle may be seen in the otherwise difficult case of the barren fig tree. That tree was to Christ an authenticated object, for in the distance He saw it bore its leaves. That was a natural authentication. But it failed, not He. He expected; but, though He was mistaken, He was entitled to expect. It put Him in the wrong when 220 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST really He was right. He would have been misrepresented through it, if He had not dealt with it as He did. Clearest of all, of course, is the case of the Old Testament. It was in His eyes the great source of authenticated guidance. That it was the Book of the theocracy was much; that it appealed to, and rang harmony with, His own being was everything. It was His trusted guide, both in moral principle and in detailed facts. But the same rule holds good in regard to places as to things. Take the synagogues of His native land. They had grown up since the close of the Old Testament, yet their purpose authenticated them, or rather, the honest, needy hearts which had come into them by faith did so. We find Him in them specially on the Sabbath day, and we are told that it was His custom to go into them . 1 The worshippers seemed in His eyes to have special claim on Him. Thus, though frowning faces surrounded Him, He could not help Himself; He was even compelled to take the initiative unsolicited . 2 Though hostile hearts laid traps for Him, He came still, and acted as if they had been unknown . 3 Frequently the person in need seems to have been there before Christ Himself, or at least to have declared himself only after Christ had begun to speak, and when He could not well avoid acting as need demanded . 4 At anyrate, Christ did not hesitate to declare Himself in the synagogues even officially, in spite of danger . 5 1 Mark vi. 2 ; Luke iv. 16. 2 Luke xiii. 12 ; Mark i. 23. 3 Luke vi. 7; Matt. xii. 10. 4 Mark iii. 1; Luke xiii. 10, 11. 5 Luke iv. 16 ; Matt. xiii. 54. Christ’s self-guidance 221 In like manner, the temple seems to have been the terminus of all His Jerusalem journeys. In it His acts were official, and He dealt there with the nation. That the rulers felt it to be so is clear by the way in which they came, as we have already seen, after the second cleansing of the temple, to ask Him there the authority by which He did these things. His earliest visit to it meant evidently more of privilege than He had ever enjoyed, though the persons connected with it, and the possibilities apparent in them, seem to have suppressed in Him for the time being reflection about the associations connected with it, or to have left such ideas present only as a vague sub-consciousness, which manifested itself in a ground-swell of excitement. When He went to the city He was sure, and as soon as possible, to direct His steps toward it. 1 His two cleansings of it were intended to make clear to the rulers that He wished to set the worship spiritually right, and that He held to His purpose, even if He failed to get their aid. We find Him waiting in its sacred precincts—the porches specially—as in an official inquiry room open to all comers. 2 What happened there was sent of God; the rulers’ question was official and national, the children’s praises were nothing less than the fulfilling of Old Testament prophecy. The same principle holds good, too, in the case of Jerusalem itself. It was specially loved. The Saviour’s words, 3 “ 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen 1 John vii. 2, 14. 2 Mark xi. 27 ; Luke xx. 1. 3 Luke xiii. 34, cp. xix. 41. 222 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST gathereth her own brood,” must have had a real mean¬ ing. The affection of His heart, as well as His sense of its importance as a place, must have made it a special object of regard. Though He recognised that it could not be that a prophet could perish out of Jerusalem— the slayer of the prophets and stoner of them that were sent unto her—His command about the gospel, after all was done, was, “ beginning at Jerusalem.” Galilee, too, had a special significance for Him. What He argued from it failed, not because He was mistaken, but because, as with the fig tree, other causes were at work. 1 So had Judaea. Though His heart and feelings were far too large to be limited by it, the land had a first place for Him. He touched on Samaria and Syro- Phcenicia, but only by accident—as it were for a moment and through stress of circumstances. He evidently tried to cover the whole country, yet only it, by His preaching. If, humanly, He could not expect to do more, it had the first claim. Jerusalem was ever His first object and Galilee second, but the whole land was at least remem¬ bered. The long accredited people, and the fact of His own birth, designated the locality, and, in a way, the range of His life-work. But perhaps the most remarkable use made by Christ of such authenticated persons and places, is His constant tendency, when in doubt, when He has lost the track, so to speak, to hark back to the last place where He met God, or at least was acknowledged by Him. Thus we find Him coming to John and the region of His baptism, after He sees the state of feeling in Jerusalem by means 1 John iv. 43. Christ’s self-guidance 223 of His first visit. Yet, though He seems to copy John, He does not attach Himself to the prophet. He only remains in the district till His Father makes His way out of it clear again. For there, still earlier, He had done nothing but wait, and God had opened up His way by sending to Him unsought disciples who had been followers of the Baptist. So He returned to Cana when He found the rest of Galilee unsuitable. This is what John means when he says, 1 “ Therefore Jesus came again unto Cana of Galilee, where He made the water wine. And,” he adds, to show the effect of that step as well as its reason, and so to vindicate it, that “ a certain nobleman of Capernaum ” was thus able to find the Saviour, and to become the nucleus of the Church in that town. By His return from Syro-Phoenicia to His headquarters at Capernaum He had His way opened up for going to Jerusalem and for leaving Galilee, because there His work was finished. When His visits failed in Galilee, and Capernaum was exhausted, He still visited Nazareth a second time, as if unwilling to close His ministry in the north with such a curse resting over the place of His boyhood as the rejection of Him at its beginning implied. And in the same way He constantly repaired to Bethany, where He found those whom God had given Him, for comfort and sympathy and rest. This all brings out the great fact that Christ did not venture to move unless He believed God was with Him. Because of this, life cost Him constant care and thought. Only by such means was He able to see God’s hand; only by them was He able to guide Himself amid all 1 John iv. 46. 224 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST the forces which were at work in the current of events where God had placed Him. He met whom God pleased, and helped them; He went where God indicated, and acted as He believed God wished. Now, such a rule of life as this may seem too vague for efficiency, and He who adopted it may be considered by some to have been fanciful or even presumptuous. But we must remember that, as yet, only its two main lines of application have been mentioned and none of those limitations which He who adopted it saw must be also taken as qualifying it. That the principle itself was not absolute and positive is clear from the frequent unre¬ liableness of the disciples as authenticated persons (Peter, the anger of John, “ so said they all,” their jealousy of John and James, their reference to the man in Jerusalem who had been born blind, their reference to the tower in Siloam, etc.), from Christ’s irregular observance of the feasts, and His peculiar use of those which He attended, and from the intrusion of the Gentiles within the prac¬ tical restraints of His ministry. The question is, how could He, with such exceptions, put implicit confidence in its guidance ? I reply, by seeing clearly the limita¬ tions within which it held good, or rather the facts that limited and marked its application. We find that Christ recognised certain aids as given Him for the practical use of this principle. In the authenticated sources, whether they were persons, places, occasions, or the Word, God gave Him a true aid. The help He got from them may be called natural; but if in His desire to have every available aid to enable Him to bear the crushing sense of responsibility which some- Christ’s self-guidance 225 times, at least, came on Him, if, after all, there rested heavily upon His soul the fear lest, through weakness, ignorance, or mistake on His part, the Scripture should fail of fulfilment and men of salvation, is it unnatural to understand the supernatural knowledge imparted or the recognition given at certain crises as intended also to help Him ? At His baptism He entered on His work with a sense of its greatness and of His own weakness. And in His agony in the garden, as He entered on the pathway of the Cross, what was given came evidently as the result of desire and prayer. If other occasions equally supernatural do not show the same expression of desire preceding them, at least they cannot have lacked this object. They came to lift the burdensome¬ ness of His responsibility in regard to some step He was being led on to ; for instance, in connection with the close of the Temptation and the beginning of His ministry, in connection with the decision to enter Jerusalem in triumph and to celebrate the Last Supper. But more searching and farther reaching, yet more abiding and usual, was the other test for understanding the limits within which His system might with safety be applied, namely, the test of faith in those (authenticated or not), with whom He was brought into contact. For by it He was enabled to see whether there was oppor¬ tunity for Him to work and capacity for receiving what He had to give. With it everything was possible by Him ; without it, nothing. The faith might be great or small, able only to say, “ Help mine unbelief,” or able to extort His word of wonder, “ Great is thy faith.” The bruised reed He would not break; for He knew that the 15 226 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST faith which enabled Him to perform physical cures might be raised to that which could receive healing of the soul. And He had no wish to do the one without hope at least of the other. His power of helping was, therefore, determined in every case, not by what He could do but they could receive. He tried to find and rouse the faith of those brought to Him in God’s providence ; and in accordance with what He found He felt compelled to act. He had no option in the matter ; the result belonged of right to their faith. “ According to thy faith be it done unto thee,” 1 was all He could say. Each one got what he could receive, if not all Christ could have given. The Saviour seems to have felt the need of this regulative test, not only because He found authenti¬ cated persons and places might fail or mislead uninten¬ tionally, but because He found they might prove false or mislead intentionally. The case might be very different from such an innocent one as that of the barren fig tree, or such a harmless one as His own mistaken application of the general principle, that a prophet has no honour in his own country ; it might be such a terrible one as the surrender to the devil’s purpose of what ought to be in God’s hand. Christ found, at the very outset of His career, that the Messianic purpose in His heart, and the new purpose of the Spirit in Him, must be protected against such a fate. He saw that even the Scripture might be employed falsely, not only in the devil’s mouth, but in the mouth of such authorised expositors as scribes and priests. In fact, all the authenticated sources might be twisted, or even lend 1 Matt. ix. 29. Christ’s self-guidance 227 themselves to this method. They were, therefore, in some ways, as much a means of trial as of help to Him. The help they gave at least involved real testing, and came only to His proven worth. One sees this in His mother when she would have continued to treat Him as only her son; or in the Pharisees, when they came to Him with friendly professions during the great Persean journey ; or in the rulers, by questions more or less cap¬ tious and difficult; or in the people, as they sought a sign from heaven, or lent themselves to merely secular though Messianic movements. So disciples like John and Peter lent themselves really, if unwittingly, to Satan’s ends, and revealed the wrongness of these by the want of that faith which was the only method of life tolerated by anyone possessed of the epou- rania. In fact, nothing but the power which enabled Christ by constant watchfulness to protect Himself enabled Him as the Good Shepherd to watch over them. “ Satan asked to have you that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not.” 1 His brethren lent themselves to the same process when they tried to get Him to declare Himself and do miracles publicly at the feast in Jerusalem. 2 He knew, and understood, and watched Judas and Caiaphas by this same test. The method of Christ’s life was thus intensely trying. The constant need of faith and of perfect self-control rendered it terribly difficult. His method was unworldly, but it needed for success a highly trained and fully developed equipment in the person, as well as extra- 1 Luke xxii. 32. 2 John vii. 3 ff. 228 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST ordinary watchfulness in practice. Simple as it looks, the sensitiveness and submissiveness involved rendered it difficult to a degree, far more so than that human and more attractive method, which recommended the taking of law into one’s own hand, and attacking, as might seem best to one’s own self, the enemy’s position. Christ felt the enemy and the work were first and most of all God’s, and must be always treated as such. It is quite evident, then, that whatever self-restraint and submission and patience the life of faith implied for Christ was something different far from carelessness and easy-going security ; in fact, it was the very opposite of that. His conception of this method, however, was nothing fanciful, or ideal, or unpractical, although the method was so unusual. Nor was His conception of it abstract, obscure, or unintelligible. The whole was simply the result of believing actually in God as a real presence and power and friend, of the resolve to do nothing in life but what was according to His will. The scrupulous care which this method implied might not have suited men who desired mere worldly success, but it suited Christ because it was right and in accordance with His spiritual aim. True, it involved Him in trial and controversy, because it ran contrary to all the usual ways of life; but it exacted far more of Him by the constant tax it implied on His spiritual manhood. As I have already said, constant submission to God’s will had to be combined with constant and equally unprejudiced watchfulness for it; delicacy of perception and readiness of response to duty had to go hand in hand with sensi¬ tiveness to all imposture. Then the considerateness Christ’s self-guidance 229 needed in daily dealing with His disciples, say in an¬ nouncing His death, lest it should crush them by its unexpected terrors, and the firmness needed on His part to force them to listen, and to keep it ringing in their ears till they believed in it, as well as the balancing of parties all unchangeably hostile to Him, that the end might be prevented till the right time, and then might take place ; how delicate, difficult, trying it all was ! What constant care in view of popularity, what anxieties, all to be borne by faith and yielded up in prayer, as He considered what was best in the circumstances, and wondered which was the right path for Him to choose that He might come to the right end ! What matchless skill in reading human character He acquired thus, what marvellous power to meet in keen-edged debate fully prepared enemies, and what wonderful deftness in mapping out the way into which providence was leading Him. The outer difficulties of His life are only a pale reflection of His inner trials and correspondingly great strength. We can have some idea of it all by His prayerfulness. This shows us what the cost was. The Saviour felt deeply His need of God, for He saw the possibilities of a future He could not meet in His own strength. Mark Him when He is going to take a step forward, or about to enter on a new stage of His work. There is no special revelation to guide Him; then conscience must commit its decision to God. He must act in faith. So it was He felt Himself authorised to leave Capernaum, in order to evangelise the rest of Galilee; 1 so He was able to send away the multitudes, 1 Mark i. 38. 230 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST who would fain have made Him king; 1 so He was guided to choose His apostles, as the evangelising of the land became plainly more than He was fit for personally ; 2 and so He could accept His death, and proclaim it as a thing now rising full orbed above the horizon. 3 What a character was developed, and with what perfect strength ! Humility and submission and patience all went hand in hand with conscientiousness and self-denial and intel¬ lectual perception. But, with all these difficulties and limitations, this method, which produced such a character in Him and such results by Him, had its compensations. He relied on and submitted Himself wholly to God; consequently He was entitled to expect that God would not fail Him or cast Him off; and specially that God would give Him aid in any emergency into which the method He used might lead Him. Faith in God entitled Him, as it entitles all others who live by it, to expect God’s aid; for God can never allow Himself to become less than men can honestly expect Him to be. As truly as the disciples in the storm knew they were entitled to expect Christ’s aid because He had led them into the difficulty, so truly did Christ Himself feel entitled to claim His Father’s help whenever the circumstances of His mission rendered it necessary. He trusted God, but would not tempt Him. He saved Himself by timely precautions from the rulers of Jerusalem, and by departure from the hatred of Herod; but He refused to create bread to allay His own hunger, and accepted death when it became clear as God’s will. Yet, whenever He was led 1 Mark vi. 46. o o Matt. xvi. 1, 3. 2 Luke vi. 12. Christ’s self-guidance 231 into a situation where nothing but a miracle could relieve His need without disgrace, He unhesitatingly and plainly calculated upon it. So it was with even the first venture of such faith at the marriage in Cana; at Jerusalem, where He was naturally enough committed to take His stand and to act symbolically; and at Nazareth, when they would have cast Him over the brow of the hill. So it was when multitudes followed Him spite of all precautions, and had to be fed lest they should faint by the way. So it was when His disciples appealed to Him in the storm on the lake, when demoniacs sprang up in the synagogues suddenly, when Jairus, or the rulers of Capernaum, or the sisters of Bethany, or His disciples who had failed to cure, or the father of the child requiring cure, appealed to Him in public; when cases of desperate need were brought and cast down at His feet, or when He found it written and to be fulfilled, “ Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and riding upon a colt the foal of an ass.” 1 One can see what a constant and varied strain His faith had to bear; not only how strong the faith was, but how well it was warranted; in fact, that it was sure of the God it rested on. The help of God was guaranteed by His living for God, and by the service He was rendering to God. After a very real fashion, therefore, Christ did not need to consider results. His own teaching as to anxiety and care is the fruit of His own experience. Sometimes He forgot results altogether in His eagerness and zeal for the work, as when His mother waited to speak to Him whilst He taught in a crowded house after 1 Matt. xxi. 5. 232 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST a long clay’s work; 1 and sometimes He ignored results altogether, as when He expelled the temple merchants, 2 or when He healed a man with a withered arm in a synagogue, though the scowling faces of some present warned Him of the trap laid for Him; 3 as when He faced a Galilean ministry from which He had no expecta¬ tions, 4 or events leading assuredly to a death from which His whole being recoiled. 5 The sanity and rightness of the whole method in the hands of a character perfectly balanced is made clear in this, that it never led to presumption, yet never left Him who followed it without the aid which it could give and He required. Christ never expected God to do for Him what He could do for Himself. He never provoked any persons needlessly. He would go to Jerusalem without or with disciples, He would send messengers before His face or remain in the wilderness, take precautions for safety or yield Himself up, as God willed. He had but to follow God’s will, as that was made plain to Him. He had to leave Himself wholly in His Father’s hands and be loyal. Controversy, private preferences, and active methods were excluded from His life. What God willed came to Him, and what God willed He did. God filled Christ’s life with what He pleased; and Christ accepted that, as the surest way towards His Father’s aim. The bulk of Christ’s life was determined for Him; it came independently of His choice. His love tied His hands. He was helpless, that we might be helped. He saved others, Himself He could not save. 1 Luke viii. 20. 4 John iv. 44. 2 Matt. xxi. 12. 3 Luke vi. 6, 11. 5 Luke xii. 50. I CHAPTER X Christ’s plan It seems beyond doubt that Christ regulated His life by faith, and that by faith He chose its method. He did not go forth to seek men, seeing He believed the fitting ones would be brought to Him in the ordinary course of providence. We have found that He had His own tests for recognising these, and that in deal¬ ing with them He looked for guidance from God. The great bulk of His life was therefore, as we have seen, filled with what cannot be said to have been of His choosing. However, one cannot read His life without feeling that this rule does not hold good universally in it, and that though it applies to the bulk of His life, it not only fails, but fails on occasions when one might have thought it most likely to apply. At what may be called the crises of His life—if not in them only, yet in them most markedly—Christ, whatever was the guid¬ ance which determined Him, takes the step forward positively, and even with assurance. If the bulk of the detail of His life was determined for Him without wish or interference of His own, the main line of His life was the result of His own decisions. In the more 233 234 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST important events of His life, those on which it turned, Christ was not led blindly any more than driven, was not a mere tool but an active agent, with free, consenting will, and active, regulative effort. His life was not altogether plastic, for that would have meant mere weakness; its main lines were certainly determined by His own action. Thus, if the former chapter might be looked on as setting forth the flesh and blood, the filling up and detail of the Saviour’s life, this one has to consider its bones or framework. As we examine that, we shall see Christ’s patient self-restraint meant the maximum of power, and was the companion of the greatest, clearest, surest resolution. His will was equally strong to act or to wait. We must remember that sometimes Christ seems to have acted of His own initiative when really He did not. For instance, when He called Levi, 1 He did so through being brought into providential contact with him. On the other hand, though He sought Philip ere Philip even knew of Him, 2 He acted on wdiat, as we saw, was special supernatural guidance. There are one or two other cases of a similar kind, but none great in themselves, or at least lying in the line of His death. For instance, Christ prompted Peter to launch out when the great take of fishes was to be given; 3 for the empty nets suggested to His mind, as a providential idea, the way in which the fisliermen-followers might be led to become fishers of men. When He suggested to His disciples the crossing of the lake, it was on the one occasion to escape overwork, 4 and 1 Mark ii. 14. 3 Luke v. 3, 4. 2 John i. 43. 4 Luke viii. 22. Christ’s plan 235 on the other to keep His disciples away from the bread- fed multitudes and their earthly Messianic ideas . 1 When He sought out the once blind man in Jerusalem, it was, we are expressly told, because He had heard that the rulers had cast that person out of the synagogue . 2 There were, therefore, special reasons, such as those indicated in the last chapter, for modifying the general method in these cases. Tor Christ always shows that He regarded the ordinary intelligence which God had given Him as a real means of guidance. His movements were not formal, or determined by mere laws, but easy, natural, spiritual, well-balanced, unerring. Laws did not cramp Him; they were not above Him. Like the Bible, they were to Him absolute, but not final. He moved easily among them ; they were in His hand, He was not in theirs. There is, however, another class of events, quite different from these comparatively unimportant ones, and in it we shall see the marked volition of the Saviour. The events in it were of the greatest moment; they formed the turning-points in the Saviour’s life; nay, they were such that, as He Himself saw, they carried with them the shaping of His future. Bor Christ shows uniformly in connection with them that He is fully conscious of what is at stake, and that Lie is guiding events towards a great end. From the first it is clear that He is directing His life to gain a great purpose. To see this one has only to look at the resolution to go up to Jerusalem with His new-found disciples shortly after His ministry had begun, or the calling 1 Matt. xiv. 23. 2 John ix. 35. 236 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST and sending forth of His disciples, or the third journey and visit to Jerusalem, or the raising of Lazarus, or the determination of His own death and its details. What is most important, however, is to observe that the object is ever the outcome of His Messiahship in death. When one examines this class of cases, one finds that, though He kept steadily doing God’s will, He anticipated death must come in order to gain salvation, and had for such an end accepted the idea of death. We may say, then, that though the question of Christ’s life was His Messianicity, the regulative principle in His own eyes was His death, or, what was virtually its counterpart, His rejection by the Jews. If He had, as I think He had, for an endowment previous to the beginning of His ministry, the knowledge expressed in the epourania of the third chapter of John’s Gospel, then to use it as a guiding star was only to live in loyalty to conscience or by faith. As He Himself put it,—and must have felt as well as recognised it, 1 —“ the Son of Man indeed goeth, as it hath been determined.” Two things at least are clear in regard to this class of instances, one at the beginning, and the other at the end of His career ; the one in connection with His first visit to Jerusalem, and the other in connection with the determining of His own death. At His first official journey to the holy city, even if that were undertaken in the exhilaration of having new¬ found followers and newly-exercised miraculous gifts, Christ made His claim formally, and, by means of the 1 Luke xxii. 22. Christ’s plan 237 temple cleansing, threw down the gauntlet. Besides, as John shows us, the Saviour on that occasion not only gauged the people’s feelings, but the rulers’ condition; nay, He both anticipated and challenged the result of the struggle as one to the death ; for He said, “ Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up; ” 1 and this, says the author, His disciples came by Divine guidance to know referred on His part to the temple of His body. That it might be seen how He maintained the same attitude even when the end was close at hand, and when He knew it to be near, He repeated the act, and met the official demand for a statement of His authority to do it, although that had to be done in such a way as meant sure death. On the subject of a right worship of God, such as should be in the line of the Old Testament, He openly differed from the rulers altogether and always, made the introduction of it His great aim, and was from the first willing to seal His testimony to it by His blood. Let us now look at the other matter. The Saviour did not merely die a martyr death at the hands of men whom He could not resist; He determined His own death. He regarded it as the right ending of His life. What He Himself had said was proved true: “ Ho man taketh My life from Me; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment re¬ ceived I from My Father ”; 2 “I lay down My life for the sheep ”; 3 “I lay down My life, that I may take it again.” 4 How, whilst I say that Christ determined His 1 John ii. 19, 21. 3 John x. 15. 2 John x. 18. 4 John x. 17. 238 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST own death, I do not mean that His general plan of life from the first necessitated it, or that He merely acted so that it could not but take place; I mean that He determined the fact and ruled its detail, that He could have avoided death if He could so have willed it, and that His death w r ould not have taken place when it did if He had been altogether passive or had had different con¬ ceptions of it from what He had. For instance, He must have known what the effect of the resurrection of Lazarus would be, for even the disciples saw it; yet He did not keep back. The rulers, as often before, sought to kill Him, but their wish had become confessed; and they aimed at gaining their object before the feast, because, with many of the people on His side, there was danger of an uproar if they did not carry out their purpose till later. To avoid them and delay it He went to Ephraim, and nightly thereafter retired to Bethany. The Gospels expressly put Christ’s open statement of the date of His death before the final meeting of the rulers which decided on it: “Ye know that after two days the passover cometh, and the Son of Man is delivered up to be crucified. Then were gathered together the chief priests,” etc . 1 Judas “ sought opportunity to deliver Him unto them ,” 2 but the Saviour retarded him from obtaining it before the feast, by the expedient of sending some of His disciples to a nameless man’s house, to prepare for celebrating the passover ; then He hurried the traitor on to it, when the time had come, by goading him with love, and after¬ wards by sending him from the supper-table with direct permission. The agony in the garden shows us how 1 Matt. xxvi. 2, 3. 2 Matt. xxvi. 16. Christ’s plan 239 vividly Christ realised the nearness of the end and its moral necessity, but also that He had no thought of its physical necessity. We read, “Behold, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners,” 1 and “ Be¬ hold, he that betrayeth Me is at hand. And straightway, while He yet spake, cometh Judas .” 2 To him, notwith¬ standing an inherent power evidently able to command even legions of angels at will by a word, He yielded Him¬ self, saying, “ I am He. If, therefore, ye seek Me, let these go their way.” 3 He gave Himself up, allowed Himself to be bound, and went with them. His death, therefore, was more than a mere protest. It was willing on His part; wherefore nothing but a positive and worthy object to be gained could justify it. We must face, then, as the result, these two facts: viz. that Christ contemplated, from the time of His first official visit to Jerusalem, the possibility at least that His struggle for the spiritual worship of God might end at the hand of the national representatives in death, though His resurrection would speedily follow; and that in the end Christ’s death did not come to pass by the wrath of man, great though that was, and threatening though it had been from the first, but by His own free will. Whether, then, did Christ believe His death must come in order that His work might be finished, or did the idea of submitting to it come when the thing was really unavoidable, or practically nothing more was to be gained by it save the putting of a better face on things ? Let us see. Death was, even to Christ, not a naturally desirable 1 Matt. xxvi. 45. 2 Mark xiv. 43. 3 John xviii. 8. 240 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST thing. He bases its necessity on His Father’s command ; 1 and the forgiveness He promised early, He later associated with His death, as its result . 2 Yet, though He accepted it, He was not shut up to it absolutely by the events around. It might at the very least have been delayed for some time by such means as had often before helped Him both in Judaea and Galilee. The Saviour was not at His wit’s end for means of escape even among His own people. And, after all, there was still the crude Jewish suggestion, that He might perhaps betake Himself to the Gentiles. We are face to face, then, with the question, what was it which made the Saviour clear that His time was come, and that it was fitting He should die on that particular occasion ? Looking at the history, we observe the event with which that assurance seems to have been bound up to be the death and resurrection of Lazarus. Hence Gess suggests that this event becomes the key to the life of Christ. The Saviour, as we have seen, looked on the household at Bethany as authenticated by its love to, and its restfulness for Him; yet we have seen as well that the narrative cannot be understood apart from some supernatural communication made to Him in connection with the event. Certainly, there¬ after at least, Jesus entered on a new method of regulating matters, doing and ruling all in order that death might come when it did. Thus we may say, I think, that, from that time at least, the Saviour was quite clear He ought to die at the approaching pass- over, and ordered all the detail of His life that its end might take place on the right day. I say nothing 1 John xiv. 31. 2 Matt. xxvi. 28. Christ’s plan 241 meantime about what induced Him to fix on a pass- over season; I only point out that He determined that special passover as the date of His death. We cannot fail then to recognise, after Lazarus died, a distinct purpose in Christ as to His own death. Accordingly we must now go back to look at Christ’s state of mind upon this subject at an earlier period. Let us ask what it was during His Persean ministry, which preceded the great miracle on Lazarus. We see very clearly during that period the results of the third visit He had made to the great city . 1 We see traces of depression and of excitement alter¬ nating ; there was a deep, overclouding conviction of His doom, now attracting and now repelling Him, moving Him to send out seventy disciples to overtake the district in time, and causing Him to dally on the way, as one would have thought needlessly. On the other hand, we find Him aware that the date of His death was not to be of His fixing, though He saw it to be nearer than ever. And He knew it must take place in the capital, where prophets and righteous men had of old suffered. “ Behold,” He said, in His answer to the Pharisees when they said Herod sought to kill Him , 2 “ Behold, I cast out devils, and perform cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day ” (that is, in a short time) “ I am perfected. Howbeit I must go on My way to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” Of course the perfecting which He expected to come by means of His death could hardly mean the 1 John vii. 14. 2 Luke xiii. 32, 33. 16 242 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST attainment of spiritual perfection, seeing He claimed sinlessness and even more than sinlessness. He must have meant that the work of His life as Messiah could be accomplished only by His death. His hasty visit to Jerusalem during this Periean work , 1 shortly after that earlier (or third) one in which He had experienced a most markedly adverse and stormy reception, must indicate that He did not go simply to see if at this new feast matters were the same as before, but rather to sustain the ferment and bring it to a crisis; not, therefore, with the expectation that matters would end at this feast of the dedication. Be¬ sides, there was no sign of actual betrayal as yet, and that was to Him a finger-post. As He said , 2 “ The Son of Man goeth, even as it is written of Him: but woe to that man through whom the Son of Man is betrayed ! good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was not for lack of hatred on the part of the Jewish rulers that His death did not take place at this earlier feast; only the Saviour did not see fit yet to give Himself into their hands. He did not see that His time had come. The mere wrath of man was not enough; He could avoid that at any time; He needed to see His Father’s will in the matter first. He certainly made such plain confession of Himself that they desired to kill Him ; 3 “ but He went forth out of their hand. And He went away again beyond Jordan, into the place where John was at the first baptizing, and there He abode.” This He did though all through He was clear that “ the Son of Man shall be delivered 1 John x. 22. 2 Mark xiv. 21. 3 John x. 23, 24, 39, 40. Christ’s plan 243 unto the chief priests and the scribes; and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him unto the Gentiles, and they shall mock and scourge and crucify Him : and after three days He shall rise again.” 1 These particulars—of which He showed nothing but assurance —were not gained, nor perhaps the general knowledge of the date which is indicated, by supernatural means; but at least the certitude which authorised positive co-opera¬ tion came, as we have seen, afterwards, specially and directly from heaven. Where He got that impression of the nearness of His death which created such a ferment in Him is not far to seek. It was unavoidably roused by the treatment accorded Him just before at the feast of tabernacles. As we saw, His going up to Jerusalem at that time was not directly for the sake of the feast. He seems, in fact, to have taken little part in it; though He was active throughout that part of it at which He was present. For He intentionally came up late, and then waited behind ; He proclaimed Himself officially on the great day, yet waited behind to see the state of matters, after the excitement of the crowded city had died down. John selects his facts to bring out these points. He represents the Saviour as speaking on the very first day of His appearance like one whose life was threatened, if not doomed, and that for some time past. In that way the people soon recog¬ nised Him as the worker of the miracle at Bethesda ; for it had given rise, or at least definite shape, to this aim against Him. “ Why seek ye to kill Me ? . . . are ye wroth with Me because I made a man every whit whole 1 Mark x. 33, 34. 244 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST on the Sabbath ? . . . Some therefore of them of Jeru¬ salem said, Is not this He whom they seek to kill ? ” 1 Thus at His introduction Christ connected the various parts of His ministry in the capital; He showed He had not lost sight of the past, but was looking on the different sections as forming a united whole. On the great day of the feast He made His public profession, and challenged their verdict about Him as the Christ. This left them embittered but divided. Hence, after all was calmed down, He tested their state, when it became clear that the hatred was keen and implacable, not merely due to religious prejudices roused in con¬ nection with the feast. It culminated in an attempt to stone Him , 2 and in expelling from the synagogue the blind man who had confessed Him . 3 The Saviour seems to have been disappointed in finding hatred so general and deep rooted, and consequently to have been at first depressed at the immediate view opened out, until He surmounted it by faith, and became roused in taking action which must daily make the state of matters more adapted for the closing scene. It is worth noting that Christ’s visits to the capital were viewed by Him as forming a connected ministry, apart from anything He did in the rest of the land. The work in Galilee had not the same primary import¬ ance in His eyes; it was in some sense a thing dis¬ tinct; though there are evident signs of a desire upon His part to overtake the evangelising of the whole of that district. Providentially what He did in Galilee was part of His life’s work, of course ; in its own way and 1 John vii. 19, 23, 25. 2 John viii. 59. 3 John ix. 35. Christ’s plan 245 place it contributed towards bringing about the death which He met. But it was not part of the main line of events by which He guided His life. That connected itself unmistakably with Jerusalem. Whatever love the Saviour entertained for Galilee and Nazareth, He had an affection for Jerusalem which many passages show to have been intense. In it were blended pity and desire, as well as the respect due to hallowed associations and authoritative symbolism. His burning words of regret show us the pent-up feelings which had existed from the first. And similar emotions display themselves alike on the Cross and in the Resurrection. Of course some will say that Christ must have had hope, at least to begin with, that He would win the city, else such feelings at the end, when disappointment came, could not have been possible. On the other hand, it seems that His loving, earnest grace would agonise the more to save its people, as He saw the work they were—many of them in blindness—setting themselves to do. There can be little doubt that Christ expected, or at least sought hard to find, some mellowing of the hatred felt for Him after His return from the prolonged Galilean ministry ; but, though disappointed in this, His heart only the more loved those hating Him, only loved them more than when seeking to find in them the signs of some response. Our views as to His belief about His own death will become clearer if we go back further and examine the earlier part of His life. His third visit to Jerusalem revealed an embitterment which meant death as soon as opportunity offered; but we must remember that, long ere He reached the city on that occasion, He had stated 246 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST His views plainly about His end, and in words which imply no doubt as to the fact, or its nearness and terrors. Perhaps from the time of this visit it became clearer in detail, as certainly it became more continuously real; but long before that it was perfectly real, and has been faced quite decisively. Christ’s ministry in Galilee began only after He found His Father excluding Him from Persea, where He had been baptizing, and from Jerusalem, where He had pro¬ claimed Himself. God’s hand pointed Him homewards. Samaria came only as a passing incident in the way. But He went north, knowing and even saying frankly that He had no more hope of success in His own land than in His own town. There was in Him the natural desire to help His people; and when other doors were closed, love, even if far from hopeful, did not despise this opportunity. There was all the difference possible between knowing there could be no complete success, and finding out in the bitter course of actual experience how much that really meant. The people were not like those of Jerusalem; their religious ideas were formed as much by the synagogue as by the temple. Thus, different methods of dealing with them were advisable, and a different class of truths had to be taught. But though Jesus laboured earnestly in Galilee, because He thought God wished Him to work there, and after what He thought the fittest way for it, His eyes were ever on Jerusalem, and it was His destination. Christ’s work in the north may be divided into two parts, marked with sufficient accuracy by the great con¬ fession at Caesarea Philippi. In the former there was Christ’s plan 247 comparatively little mention of His death. The specific work in which He was engaged was that of evangelising the district, and then out of that securing fellow- workers to complete the evangelisation. That clearly implied the necessity of silence as to His death, till other and preliminary subjects had been dealt with, and the way had been prepared for it. He had first to rouse the country, and cut the outlines of great impressions deep in the hearts of those who were to be His followers; then He needed to add teaching for both the crowds and the disciples; after which there came out the fact of capacity in the latter and incapacity in the former to recognise His mission. The use of miracles for the first of these objects He was led into providentially ; but He never relied on them as the highest and surest means to His end, being clear, as He had been in Jerusalem, that they were liable to much abuse, and apt to hinder rather than to help. He tried prudently to restrain excess, and rule their use for the best ends; for He saw that by them the ecclesiastical position was % accentuated, that His death was being hastened, and His freedom of speech meantime hindered. To preaching He applied Himself ardently; He used His miracles for its ends. He accepted, as part of His life’s work in God’s eyes, the evangelising of Galilee; even as afterwards He accepted that of the whole land so far as possible. “ I must preach the good tidings to the other cities also: for therefore am I sent ,” 1 He said. He preached from Capernaum as a centre, in towns and synagogues, with the evident intention of overtaking the whole district, and 1 Luke iv. 43. 248 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST influencing all classes of the community. To multiply His presence and to create less excitement He sent forth His apostles ; and He set forth His own teaching in parables, that those who were ill-intentioned might find no cause of offence in that by which they could not profit. Yet that did not imply less work; He worked harder as He saw the difficulty and greatness of His task. He became careless of Himself; and women set themselves to care for Him. The difference between the disciples and the people soon showed itself as the out¬ come of His new form of teaching. This Christ found out at Caesarea Philippi. Along with the know¬ ledge of this separation of view in His audience, there came at the same time news of the death of John the Baptist. Everything combined to give significance to that great event. By it the Saviour felt He had turned a corner, and come in full view of His death. If the forerunner—more acknowledged than Himself— was so treated, then much more Himself. The forerunner was now out of the way ; His own day had begun ; His time was come. They had done to John what they listed, and even so were they sure to do to the Son of Man . 1 Soon, too, rather than late; for if mere enthusiasm, like Herod’s for John, or that of the multitudes of Jerusalem and later of Galilee for Himself, meant so little, His appearance in the capital might well be the signal for the bitterness of a party to convert excitement into prejudice. Still John’s execution does not seem to have told the Saviour for the first time of what His end would be, but rather to have brought it 1 Matt. xvii. 12. Christ’s plan 249 into the field of practical realities, liable to come at any moment in the near future. As long as John lived Christ appears to have felt John’s existence a barrier between Him and the end. His forerunner’s work was not finished; and His own end—the completion of His own work—could not come before that. It was for this reason that He seems to have felt constrained to sum up the first part of the training of the apostles, and to find out the state of Galilean opinion by the questions to which I have adverted. “ From that time,” 1 as we are expressly told, He formally and frequently thrust on the attention of His followers the fact of His approaching end. Hot popularity, but the Cross, filled His gaze when He looked onwards. “ They . . . passed through Galilee . 2 ... For He taught His disciples, and said unto them ” (this is evidently its epitome), “ the Son of Man is delivered up into the hands of men, and they shall kill Him; and when He is killed, after three days He shall rise again.” There seems little doubt, then, that from this time forward Christ’s death was quite clear to Him. The question is, now, whether we are to believe the matter was clear at an earlier date. As John’s Gospel tells us 3 (referring chap. vii. to the end of chap, v.), “ After these things,” at His second visit to Jerusalem, “Jesus walked in Galilee: for He would not walk in Judsea, because the Jews sought to kill Him.” That describes the fact we have already seen to have become widely known among the people of the city by the time of the Saviour’s third visit. But Jesus Himself had spoken of it, when He 1 Matt. xvi. 21. 2 Mark ix. 30, 31. 3 John vii. 1. 250 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST told John’s disciples about the effect which the taking away of the Bridegroom would have on His friends’ hearts . 1 And the genuineness of that saying is attested by the similar saying found even earlier on the lips of the Baptist. In fact, the whole subject seems to have been in the Saviour’s thoughts at the time; for there was no absolute necessity of introducing the subject into His reply. Nay, there was no need to add the two illustra¬ tions which are given, the second of which at least makes plain that the peculiarity of Christ’s mission was His removal, for that was to make it unlike all which preceded, and no mere patch upon the past. That the thought must have been familiar by this time to the Saviour conies out in connection with His knowledge of its details. He knew not only the fact but its means—betrayal; He knew not only the deed but the person through whom it would take place . 2 He was clear as to the traitor, if not from the beginning of His ministry or earlier, then at least from the time the man had met Him or had become a disciple. It is a very weak explanation which tries to account for the origin of Christ’s knowledge in regard to His death by merely natural causes. To deny the passage in regard to the Bridegroom and His friends is not to get rid of it, but to confess its inconvenience. To assert that Christ’s views as to His kingdom swayed back and forwards, and wavered during the earlier half of His Galilean ministry, because He hoped for an out¬ ward expression of His kingdom in His own time, is to mistake the character of His claim, and so of His 1 Matt. ix. 15 ; John iii. 29. 2 John vi. 70, 71. Christ’s plan 251 teaching; for if He began His ministry—as will hardly be denied—with spiritual views of the kingdom, views quite unlike those of His contemporaries, there is no departure from His ideal either in holding that it had come and existed in His own person, or that it had been existent since John’s day,—the violent taking it by force, 1 —or that it had diffused itself invisibly, so that “ the kingdom of God is within you ” 2 (or, in your midst). It was known on the guarantee of Spirit-wrought miracles ; 3 it was shaping itself in the person of His followers; and after what He had seen in Jerusalem, and expected to find in Galilee, He could not have thought the whole country was going to flock into it. Ho doubt Christ sometimes spoke of His kingdom as in heaven and sometimes as on earth, some¬ times as spiritual and sometimes as outward; but, whilst both may have been true, the statements not being mutually exclusive, we can easily explain the seeming difficulty, and find in it rather support of its genuineness from the peculiar habit which we have already seen marked Christ, of seeing the two sides of a thing, the one by which it looked heavenwards, and the other by which it appeared earthwards. Thus not only do I think Baldensperger’s idea about Christ’s change¬ ableness and wavering of view on the subject of His kingdom quite unwarranted, but I cannot agree with Wendt’s, who, denying essential change in Christ’s idea of His kingdom, denies also His original or early knowledge of His death. It is, of course, still more absurd to argue, on the mis- 1 Matt. xi. 12. 2 Luke xvii. 20, 21. 3 Matt. xii. 28. 252 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST taken basis of changeable ideas, that the Saviour, being disappointed, transferred the hope of realising the king¬ dom on to the end of the world, or, as it seemed to Him, to a period after His death. For even if that were true, and its foundation trustworthy, it would only make clear that Christ expected the kingdom to come after, and not by means of, His death. Now how could that have authorised Him to die ? Death might have brought Him comfort, if it had been either compulsory or natural, but how could mere surrender to death do so ? How could this situation, in which He was placed, have authorised Him to get rid of life, to encourage and to play into the hands of those who wished to take it, instead of resisting them ? Nay, how could it have authorised Him to lead others into the same difficulty as Himself, as when, for instance, the end was clear in connection with the death of Lazarus, and matter-of-fact but loving Thomas, sensible and clear sighted, said, “ Let us also go, that we may die with him ” ? 1 Do you think that Christ was afraid of what they could face bravely, specially if in His case some hope was attached to it ? But, after all, what of the vague hope supposed to be associated with this most unwarrantable line of action? It cannot be that becom¬ ing “ a ransom for many ” 2 is the same as getting out of the way, because the kingdom could not come whilst He was on earth. That were to represent the Saviour as looking on Himself in the light of an obstacle to His kingdom, and not its means; as mistaking His own limitations, and the difficulties they entailed, for the obstacles sin presented; as forgetting His own great ideas, 1 John xi. 16. 2 Matt. xx. 28; Mark x. 45. Christ’s plan 253 taught by the leaven and the mustard seed and the law, “ he knoweth not how.” Then the Incarnation would be proved by the experience of the Incarnate One to have been a mistake ! Thus Christ’s knowledge of His own death is forced back to the beginning of His Galilean ministry. But even there several indications point to it as having- existed at a still earlier date. That the statements should not be so clear or so numerous is natural. Christ, as we see, did not teach all He knew, but only what was fitting. He did not begin to teach the fact of His death when His popularity had collapsed, as if He were trying to save Himself from the disgrace by predicting it. The remembrance of it had not been suggested by popular hatred, for He announced it formally when His popu¬ larity was at its height. But He spoke of it to outsiders only when necessity arose, or the matter was brought vividly before Him; whilst to His followers He spake of it only after He had prepared their mind by other truths. Accordingly, if we look to an earlier date, even though we set aside, because of its vagueness, the saying at Cana, “ Mine hour is not yet come,” we find that He was perfectly aware of the hatred of the rulers and the uncertainty of popular favour whilst He was on His first visit to Jerusalem. We even find that He was not unprepared so early for the contingency of a violent death, and was sure of its result. He was never de¬ ceived as to the watchful hatred of the Pharisees, either when with John in Persea , 1 or during His earlier Galilean ministry . 2 And His second official visit to the holy city, 1 John iv. 1 ff. 2 Mark ii. 16, 25. 254 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST in which He appealed specially rather to the poor and needy than to people in general as before, made the bitterness of the hatred entertained toward Him plain, and the length to which it w^as prepared to go in expressing itself clear beyond mistake. How it im¬ pressed itself on Him we saw when looking at His third visit to Jerusalem. To go back to a still earlier period: it seems to me that that part of the Temptation which set before the Saviour all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and offered them as the reward of worship to Satan, or of the acceptance of them at his hand, failed largely of its point, if it did not rest on the tacit assumption that here was an easier way to His object than by the suffering of death. The worship of the devil was a large demand, whilst glitter was a poor bait, totally inadequate in the case of a spiritual soul—a combination quite absurd as a temptation, if the method of suffering in soul for sin were not presupposed. Christ’s baptism was not enlighten¬ ment so much as strengthening; and the Temptation was the testing of His new-found strength. It is not enough to admit that from the first Christ saw that sorrow must await Him, and that as events advanced and the Cross loomed up, He arrived at the conviction that it was the inevitable goal for all who were loyal to God, and specially for the Messianic King. If we deny to Christ the con¬ sciousness from the first of His coming death, we strip Him of the agony of the resolve which He upheld all the way, and look on Him as forced in the end to accept unavoidably, or to prevent confessed failure, what He accepted cheerfully and bore patiently from first to last. Christ’s plan 255 At every step forward in the great line of His life, the Saviour acted with full view of the end, and freely, in order to gain it. His death, as God willed, was all His plan. His life, as God willed, was all His will. He guided His life for the end, as God made events plain; He left God to fill up His life as God would ere He took it back. The regulative idea of the Saviour’s life was from the first and throughout all His ministry, His death—the death He died. It was all His plan. How, of course, to all this there is the very natural objection that such a conscious future would render wholly unnatural the life this person led. I can only say that there is no sign of that in Christ’s case. From the first moment He gave any evidence of thought about death He associated with it the idea of resurrection, further on supplemented by that of loving service, and finally even of highest service for man. At first it lay far off. He was impressed by it only as He went on, but more and more ; because it was one thing even for Him to know a truth in theory, and quite another to behold it near, or to experience it practically. His boyhood was not spoiled, or the development of His human mind, by the consciousness of divinity. He was not old before His time. There was neither pride nor morbid brooding in Him. There was no crushing load of responsibility or fear till strength came proportion¬ ately. There was no constant cloud obscuring His young life, but an unmatched joy in the beauties of nature as shown in bracing, breezy, sunshiny, Palestinian uplands. Life added its interests to those of nature. 256 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST These, although trying, were strong, even overwhelming, in their attractions. His own experience was “ Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” He gradually saw the future more clearly, even as He saw the barren fig tree better by coming nearer to it. Only God’s moral laws knew no exceptions; they were not fallible, like His physical ones. Christ was never blind to the end, but He became clearer as to its detail, and gradually found out all it involved. At first, when He spoke of His death, He spoke of it by the resurrection it involved. In the springtime of hope the one bulked more largely in His eye than the other did. A further stage is seen when He represented to Mcodemus the necessity which exists on men’s part, not only for death, but the death that must be His : “ As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. . . . Tor God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ,” 1 etc. There is a new and addi¬ tional joy mentioned, when He spoke of the feeling which the Bridegroom’s presence brings to His people, and knew that their sorrow for His loss would become the measure of the joy which should pour in on them at finding Him again. The great cycle of statements, beginning at Caesarea Philippi after the execution of John the Baptist, marks the era when darkness began by reason of the conscious approach of the dread event. There was repeatedly temptation to avoid it, and con¬ tinuous anxiety till it came. The gloom deepened towards the end of the Peraean journey, and presaged Gethsemane. From the time of Lazarus’ resurrection, 1 John iii. 14. Christ’s plan 257 and of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the positive action which the Saviour felt entitled to take seems to have done away largely with the excited, yet gloomy mood, which had marked the journey south. At the passover table He found a joy He had long desired—the joy of being able to look on His work as practically finished, and as secured in its results. At it He could give thanks even for occupying the position He did, and for being able to give His people the pledge He was offering them. Having made submission of will, He was able to go forth and give Himself up in the assurance that He would rise shortly and meet His disciples in Galilee. One cannot fail to see that in all the great events lying in the line of, and leading up to, the Saviour’s death, He was personally active, and that He determined, by positive decisions of His will, the shape they took. He lived with the end in view from the first, and latterly at least acted in order to it. CHAPTER XI SOME OF THE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER It is probable that most persons regard Christ’s miracles as the result of His divinity. They think of these as done with the ease of Divine power and by the mere utterance of a creative fiat. They are under the im¬ pression that Christ’s mighty works cost Him nothing; they even wonder why, when that is the case, He did not do more of them. Such persons forget that if these works had been the result of Christ’s divinity they must have been im¬ possible to His disciples. He could not in that case have transferred His power. They forget that Christ rested on the fact of His doing miracles by the Holy Spirit as undeniable evidence that the kingdom of God had come, and that, both in the synagogue at Nazareth 1 and in the reply to John’s messengers , 2 the Saviour identified His gracious power of working miracles, like His gracious power of preaching the gospel, with the express gift of the Holy Spirit. We are therefore shut up to the conclusion that these works were His as a dependent being, that they were part of His real human 1 Luke iv. 18. 2 Matt. xi. 4. 258 CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 259 life, not easy to Him, but the fruit of a life which cost Him much care. They were not, however, in that case, the result of a mere general benevolence, which had found a cheap way of indulging its tastes ; Christ in His depend¬ ence could not use this power according to whim, just as He could not leave it unused, or trust its application to mere chance. It was not intended for Himself, to make life easy, or pleasant, or glorious. It was not intended promiscuously for men at large, but for those who had faith when they came into contact with Him. The exercise of it,—ay, the continued possession of it,— therefore, not only shows His power, but His spiritual grandeur, not only His rank but His character. We get a starting-point in examining the mental marks of Christ whilst performing His miracles, by finding a great explicative principle in a formal statement made by Him in connection with the raising of Lazarus. Jesus had gone to the grave of His friend, and at His request the stone at its mouth had been rolled away. The surrounding observers all, even Martha, seemed faithless. Then, ere the Saviour called on the dead man, He said, as He deliberately lifted up His eyes to heaven, in order that there might be no mistake about the person He addressed, “ Father, I thank Thee that Thou heardest Me: and I knew that Thou hearest me always; ” 1 adding the explanation, “ but because of the multitude which standeth around I said it, that they may believe that Thou didst send Me.” Now here there is a distinct assertion that He had prayed as to this matter, and that this was only an instance of what was customary with 1 John xi. 41. 260 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Him in such cases—so customary, in fact, that He had no doubt God heard Him as usual, and also that He was not afraid to commit Himself to that, or to show His assur¬ ance of God’s response even ere it came. That He had prayed aloud, or rather had given any indication of prayer, was evidently unusual, and formed the peculiarity of this case. It was not His ordinary practice on such occasions to pray aloud; He had altered His habit for the time, through a wish to help the bystanders into intelligent sympathy with Him and faith in God, to cut them free from any idea of the use of magic in the thing. Tor they had quite misapprehended Him and His delay, saying, “ Could not this man, which opened the eyes of him that was blind, have caused that this man also should not die ? ” 1 They did not know that He could have done it but would not, because God was to be glorified in Him. Accordingly, He let them see by His words that He had no doubt about His power; and He let them see whence it came, that they might make no mistake as to its scope and range. The evidence was such as to enable them to see, when the miracle was accomplished, that the delay and the death were right, that the resurrection of the man was willed of God as well as desired of Christ, and that, spite of its seeming untoward results, it served in God’s sight a good end, to which Christ had lent Himself. Neverthe¬ less, we hear no prayer by Christ as He goes to the grave; in fact, but for His own express statement, we would not have suspected the presence of any. No doubt the days just before, which had been spent in 1 John xi. 37. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 261 delay, may have been thus employed; certainly the return to such clearly terrible consequences as He foresaw could scarcely have been determined on and carried out in any other way. But even that does not exclude the possibility of more prayer during His agony of heart as He approached the tomb. If we turn from this case to that of the demoniac lad , 1 whom the Saviour met when He had descended from the Mount of Transfiguration, we shall find the same principle verified. The cure of the lad is an example of a hurried miracle. Christ was entering into details of the case by asking the boy’s father about them; by that process He was finding out both the extent of the father’s weakness and the greatness of the lad’s need. Just then, however, He “ saw a multitude come running together, and He rebuked the unclean spirit ,” 2 who, after violently struggling, came out. The lad was so hurt that he seemed dead; but Jesus, having confidence in the result, took him by the hand, and raised him up. Now, though there is no sign of prayer on this occasion, and though the event was hurried, so that the time naturally to be looked for as available for offering it was shortened, we must remember that the Saviour had been much engaged in prayer just before. For when Jesus had gone on to the mount He went up to pray, and without thought of transfiguration; but “ it came to pass, that as He was praying, He was trans¬ figured before them.” Now, in the circumstances, that prayer must have had reference to the future and to the world’s need of His death, and even to the world’s 1 Matt. xvii. 14. 2 Mark ix. 25. 262 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST need around Him and His power of meeting it, so that we may argue His prayerful condition, His prayerful state of mind as to men and their well-being, lay at the root of this cure. And, specially, we must keep in memory that this cure is that in which we have an explanation given by Jesus of the secret of His disciples’ weakness, and a statement of the sources of His own power. “ This kind,” said He, “ can come out by nothing save by prayer ” (and fasting ). 1 I am not concerned just now with this as showing the secret of their failure, but of His power. Leaving out of account meantime the description “ this kind,” it is clear that Christ relied on prayer, and seemingly not so much on a short, instant, special petition at the time, though that is not excluded, as a general state of prayerfulness and high spirituality, without which the momentary prayer would have been ineffectual. In such miracles as Jesus performed by contact or touch—the raising of Jairus’ daughter, for instance—I think we may therefore take the action to be expressive of His own assurance as to the result, and so a stimulus to or ground for the faith of the onlookers (or of the patient, as the case may be), who watched His every movement with curiosity and expectation. This explains His action in the case of the blind young man of Jerusalem whom He saved , 2 of the blind man at Bethsaida whose eyes He anointed and touched , 3 and of the deaf and dumb man in Decapolis whom He treated similarly . 4 1 Mark ix. 29. 3 Mark viii. 24, 25. 2 John ix. 4 Mark vii. 33. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 263 This last case, in which our Saviour led the man aside, and then, groaning, uttered the word Ephphatha, “ be opened,” 1 also implies prayer as well as the expression of assurance. The groaning here is similar to the dis¬ turbed state of mind which marked Him at the grave of Lazarus. It was the outcome of aggravated feeling. In that case we see He began with pity, but ended in open weeping and audible groaning. Possibly it had some¬ thing to do with the faithlessness of those who stood by and had misunderstood Him so sadly. And not unlikely the same explanation holds good in this case. For Christ began by leading the man aside from the multitude , 2 just as He prefaced His cure of Jairus’ daughter by expelling the multitude of Jewish mourners, who laughed His words to scorn. He then cured this man in privacy. The groaning and the word of command would both be inaudible, and perhaps not by eye very intelligible to a deaf and dumb man. And as they were evidently not intended for a crowd, unfitted to benefit by them, the only way of giving them any intelligible and definite meaning is to understand them as the result of a prayer, and as the command of the Mediator in the name of God on any whom it might concern, on him who had faith in such measure as was possible by the eye without the ear, and by the expectation which touch roused, although without much intelligence. It is natural to associate such agony of soul with prayer in this case, since Jesus Himself does so at the grave of Lazarus. The circum¬ stances explain the difference in Decapolis and in Bethany; the one was done in secret and the other in 1 Mark vii. 33. 2 Ibid. 264 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST public. On the latter occasion the momentous results of the report by eye witnesses of the miracle about to be done could not be overlooked, and were not avoided. And some of the bystanders on that occasion being true disciples, we must remember that the sign was meant for them, not, as in the other case, for the person to be wrought on. At least we shall not think that such agony of soul as was seen in the Saviour on these two occasions was the result of an unsubmissive and unprayerful, struggling spirit. Every anxiety or source of pain was to Him a cause of prayer, but of true, that is, submissive prayer. His spirit was always in a state of prayerfulness. But further : our Saviour brings out the relation in which prayer stands to His miracles by means of the blasting of the barren fig tree. It is true that on this occasion also one does not hear of any prayer, and that in fact one sees little sign of it in the spirit of Christ as He approaches the tree, or when He reproaches it. Yet when He gives to the wondering disciples His explana¬ tion of what they had seen, He first describes the power of prayer, and then adds as its application, “ All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” 1 So that one cannot ignore the fact that here too Christ intends us to understand prayer had been used to secure the result. In that case, the “ I will ” 2 of Christ, uttered before men, was really the expression of assured desire toward God. It revealed His will to them, but it expressed His will to God. His “ I will ” before them was the result of 1 Matt. xxi. 22. 2 Mark i. 41. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 265 an “ I will ” first uttered to God : “ Father, I will” ; 1 not perhaps of one expressly and consciously offered at the moment, but of one which was the constant expression of habitual desire for men’s greatest good according to the Father’s will, of one in which all selfishness was utterly lost and in which guidance was secured by hourly dependence. But prayerfulness, if it was the necessary condition in which a miracle became possible, implied the con¬ stant desire to bless others to the full, and there¬ fore the actual and intense prayer for that whenever opportunity offered. Miracles did not spring from general goodwill any more than from a cold and unsympathetic nature. Prayerfulness was the needed condition, because it implied accordance with the will of God. Desire and prayer in at least some cases were actual elements. Prayer on such occasions meant in Him, whose will accorded with God’s, not impassivity, but intensity of undivided, concentrated desire. Every miracle was the fruit of the Saviour’s perfect spiritual condition, and meant tension of the severest kind on His spiritual strength. Men were healed at what, to Him, was a vast personal cost. As Peter was upheld by the strength which Christ willed into His hand when that apostle began to sink, so Jairus’ daughter was raised from the dead. Christ’s sympathies were deeply moved ere He performed the most of His miracles. The Saviour seemed to require to know the person’s condition, and to need to be able to put Himself in the man’s place ere He could be of any use in aiding him. 1 John xvii. 24. 266 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST His groaning at Bethsaida and at Bethany has given signs of that already ; so does the emotion which caused Him to cry, with a loud voice , “ Lazarus, come forth.” In like manner, the questions put to the father of the lad at the foot of the Transfiguration Mount, about the duration and type of his son’s illness, had the same effect. So also had His question put to blind men , 1 “ What will ye ? ” The same feeling is shown by means of the comfort and guid¬ ance with which He sought to sustain Jairus, as He went with him to heal his daughter. The fact, too, that He rose up in the boat when He quelled the storm by His word, and the further fact that, as the evangelists seem to imply , 2 He enumerated the elements on which He laid His command, show that He put His whole heart into the desire for the result. He emphasised His will on each of them, amid all the turmoil, though He could not concentrate His attention on the healing of Jairus’ daughter, much as He sympathised with him, till the unsympathetic mourners, wholly out of touch with Him, were excluded. We see, then, that to act sympathetically He had to give His undivided attention to each case. He could not heal men in the mass, even though He was able to heal them all. He healed them one by one, and so He healed every one. He needed to love them as persons, and He could only love them and so pray for them separately. He could heal only those who came, and He could heal them only thus. His faith sought their faith by His desires, and their desires met His desires by their faith. A conscious and willing cure meant the absorption of all His interest, the yielding up 1 Matt. xx. 32. 2 Mark iv. 39. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 267 of all His attention, the application of all His power. His prayers were not merely the prayers of a prayerful being, they were as if they were the very prayers of the person for whom He prayed. He understood by His sympathy the case of many who said nothing—for instance, of the woman bound with an infirmity eighteen years but healed by Him in a synagogue. Their prayer was not needed; His was enough. This enables us to understand the case of the paralytic man let down through the roof of a house and placed at the feet of Jesus. We read that the cure came when Jesus saw the faith of the four bearers. Ho doubt it is difficult to see how Christ was able to do what He did for the man, speci¬ ally in the forgiveness of sins, because of what He saw in them. But the key to the matter is found in that phrase —“ Jesus seeing their faith saith to the sick of the palsy,” etc . 1 For thereby we perceive that their act in putting the man at Christ’s feet was regarded by the Saviour as a tacit appeal of their faith to Him. It was really an act of intercessory prayer. Accordingly, He could not deny its claim, but had to adopt it on the spur of the moment and make it His own, had to offer it as His and theirs. Then He was sure of the result. The shape it took was determined by the faith of the four bearers. Christ gave forgiveness that they might know it was as easy to give that as healing : “ Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise, and walk ? ” and that He preferred to give the one rather than the other. We conclude, from the condition of prayerfulness by which Christ’s harmony of will with the Father was 1 Mark. ii. 5. 268 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST maintained, that He was really an incarnate prayer. His incarnation meant the great request; His death put it with power. One might almost say He was in His humanity an embodied prayer. For such was His condition that a desire meant a prayer, and the unchang¬ ing, though unconscious, bent of His heart was ever toward blessing men according to God’s will, that is, to the greatest extent possible. There was continuous union of His will and God’s, so that a command by Him was the fruit of prayerfulness, that is, of submission of will to God, or of desire for God’s will to be done, and became equivalent, as it were, to God’s command. His will was God’s will. The expression of His will was enough for God to give effect to it. Faith in Him derived its assurance from conviction of this great principle, and consciousness that He ful¬ filled all its conditions. “ I do always the things that please Him.” His prayer when it laid hold on God for a result was definite and irresistible. He told His own experience when He added in explanation, after the blast¬ ing of the barren fig tree , 1 “ Verily I say unto you, if ye have faith and doubt not, ye shall not only do what is done to the fig tree, but even if ye shall say to this mountain, Be thou taken up, and cast into the sea, it shall be done.” The assurance He had of the answer even ere it came, the assurance He showed when He touched in order to cure, rested on this principle, and His knowledge that He exemplified it Himself. It enabled Him not only to undertake deliberately to raise Lazarus by letting him die, but by committing Himself 1 Matt. xxi. 20 ft'. ; Mark xi. 20 S’. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 269 to it before the dead man’s sisters, and even before the disciples and the Jews. It enabled Him to pledge Himself to His disciples when He said in regard to the crowds, “ They have need to go away; give ye them to eat ,” 1 and then to the crowds, as He made the disciples cause them to sit down in order. This, of course, was that faith by which, as I have already pointed out, He felt warranted in looking to His Heavenly Father for help, when, by the duties of His calling, placed in circumstances in which He could not help Himself. By it He ventured on the finding of the ass’s colt in order to fulfilment of the prophecy; by it, because of His disciple’s ignorant indiscretion, He ven¬ tured on the prediction of the coin to be found in the fish’s mouth ; 2 and by it, because He found him in a synagogue, He ventured on healing a man whom His enemies had brought , 3 though He saw it would mean another step towards death. This also makes clear the great venture which His first miracle must have meant to Him, and the assurance even then of His own perfect state, which warranted belief in the possession of such marvellous though untried power. We see no signs of any excitement raised in Him by it. Yet it was undertaken before people, ay, before His new-found disciples — impressed by His miraculous knowledge and expectant of wonders at His hand—so that we are astonished at the calm audacity of His faith, when success or failure hung thus manifestly in the balance. Perhaps the words on His mother’s lips, “ Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it,” implied in His 1 Matt. xiv. 16. 2 Matt. xvii. 27. 3 Markiii. 2. 270 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST view a hint of God’s will, though not a human command, and, as He thought, showed that she remembered what she had forgotten, and that she spoke with a different spirit from the moment before—as a reliable guide, as a really authenticated source. This, it may be, was what made Him no longer stand by His decision, “ Woman, what have I to do with thee ? Mine hour is not yet come,” but turn to the servants and command them to draw. Even then, however, her words only warranted the occasion as appropriate; His conscious right, due to His perfect spiritual condition, was what authorised Him to expect He could exercise miraculous power. •' I think, then, that we may look on the Saviour’s power of doing miracles as having some such explanation as this: that the Father put Himself into the Saviour’s hands ; that because the Saviour had proved He loved, and was loyal to the pre-eminence of, the epourania, and always submitted Himself to the power of the Holy Spirit, the Father held Himself at His command, and could trust Him with the exercise of all His power, so far as He saw fit to claim it. He who was wholly under the power of the Spirit was fit to use the power of the Spirit. One might at least illustrate this idea by what we see in the relation of the Syro-Phcenician woman and Christ . 1 When He saw the greatness of her faith, He gave utterance to what was, for this case, the interpre¬ tation of the wider general principle, “ According to thy faith be it done unto thee,” by saying, “ Be it done unto thee even as thou wilt.” That is to say, He put Himself wholly into her hands. To others—not, for instance, to 1 Matt. xv. 21 ff. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 271 a blind man only, but to His favourite disciples, as they came and through their mother begged that their hearts’ desire be granted them—He said, “ What wilt thou ? ” for He knew how imperfect and unreliable they were, and how they might have abused His promise if He had granted it; how, in fact, as matters turned out, they would have done so. Perfect faith is a faith that can be trusted wholly to exercise, with a deep sense of personal responsibility, and only according to God’s will, the power given. Such faith God can trust; He puts Himself at its disposal; it deserves no less. He must not in any way fail the trust which is convinced He cannot fail, and stakes its all upon His perfectness. The power which His Father gave the Saviour was never abused, and so never withdrawn. It was neither flaunted before others, nor put above God’s love, nor used for His own ends, nor denied to others who had any claim on it, that is, who were suitable for it^. We are now in a position, I think, to get light on the meaning of some of the prayers which Christ asso¬ ciated with His miracles. When He fed the multitudes with loaves and fishes, He first blessed the food. The act, I think, implies that He set the food apart to be a real blessing to these thousands of people, and by that not only meant to acknowledge the goodness of God as the Great Giver, but intended the provision to do more than nourish the body, designating it to gain the miraculous purpose He had already resolved on. His consecrating prayer, like His miraculous power, was real through the exercise of this faith. The same thing may be said of the prayer with which He prefaced the institution of the Lord’s 272 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST Supper ; for whilst, no doubt, it contained joyful thanks¬ giving that He was privileged to do His work for men according to His Father’s will, and would soon be able to complete that, it contained also the desire that the food used might so become the means of representing Him in His saving death, as to feed the souls of the worshippers and not their body only. These two expressions of His will in order to the glory of God show us the spiritual process which went on in the Saviour before each of His miracles, which was embodied alike in His prayer¬ fulness and His prayers, His will, His desires, and His commands. We may now go on to consider the case of the apostles, to whom our Saviour gave the same miraculous powers, and to whom He even made promise that they would be able to do greater things than He Himself had ever been able to achieve. When the disciples failed to expel the demon from the lad who had been brought to them at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration, their Master explained to them that the difficulty they found in the matter was because “ this kind cometh not out but by prayer (and fasting).” The difficulty with them, as with the father of the child, was just their lack of faith. The reference, understood by what we have already seen in the case of Christ, is evidently to their prayer- lessness, and so to their unspirituality. They were in a state in which it was unfit they should have God’s power. They were not fit to be trusted with it, for they had allowed themselves to get out of sympathy with the Holy Spirit. When their Master was engaged in prayer as to His death and the world’s need, they were busy CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 273 wrangling with the scribes, and bent rather on the assertion of their selves, and the exhibition of their prerogative in healing the lad, than in securing or show¬ ing the glory of God. Christ was able to cure the lad, because He had the qualification and they had not. He was in fit condition ; they were not fit for such a trust. It was only right they should be put to shame, that they should be reduced to their own position—the lowest; and He exalted to His—the highest. But how, then, had they got this power before ? It only failed them then ; and it had never failed Christ at all. We find, to begin with, that they got this gift from Christ. He gave them authority to heal, and to cast out devils in His name . 1 How, whatever that may imply, it implies something more than a mere declaration of their fitness for the use of it, and of their right to it. It implies dependence on Him for the gift, just as does the promise of “ greater things than these shall ye do, because I go to the Father.” The Spirit which these works represented came, in whatever fulness, by Him ; He Himself had received that Spirit without measure ; and it is significant that the disciples’ failure occurred when He was absent on the mount, and they were deprived of His influence for the time. By Him came the Spirit and any fitness they possessed to exercise such power. What He had given them was no mockery, no mere matter of words. They had often exercised the power. The seventy returned from their mission re¬ joicing, and saying, “ Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in Thy name.” But these words contain indica- 1 Luke x. 9, 17 ; Matt. x. 1. 18 274 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST tion of failure in these men, ere even their short mission was ended. They had gone from His presence with prepared hearts and in His power, as their acts showed ; but in a few days, even ere they returned, they could only glory in their past, and were manifestly unable to repeat it in the present; so that they received the well-merited rebuke, directed at their unspiritual, un¬ believing condition, as the cause of all their failure— “ Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” If, now, it be asked why the apostles could not cast the demon out of the lad, the answer is partly that such cases seem to have varied in difficulty, and this was indeed one of the more difficult—though it should not have presented any difficulty to them, any more than to their Master, whose name they had, and whose powder they ought to have had—whose power at least lay open to them. This case was congenital; it was stubborn even before Christ’s power ; for the demon resisted, and came out only after doing the lad all the ill he could. But the answer is rather that they were spiritually degenerate and so disqualified, not merely unqualified. Their heart was not right, either in dependence on God or love to men ; they sought neither the glory of the one enthusiastically, nor the good of the other passion¬ ately. They had failed in the sense of responsibility which such a power ought to have roused in them, and so the power had been taken away lest it should be abused. The gift was lost to them for the time being at least. The faith which should have qualified them to effect a cure was the faith which enabled others to take and CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 275 receive a cure, only more exalted and more abiding, more enlightened and more blessed. There were differences in the faith of those receiving the cure ; some could say only, “ Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief; ” others, “ Lord, speak the word only.” Some pleaded for the body, others desired on behalf of the soul. Above all these in degree—but only in degree—was the faith found in stronger measure in those whom the Saviour chose to be His apostles. When He had educated their faith and prayerfulness into sympathy so far with Him¬ self, and habitual use of His own methods, as well as of His own ideas, He gave them what He had brought them to, what He had fitted them for. He gave them the exercise of His own power, in trust. They could not have got it without being in some measure fitted for it; when they were unfit it disappeared. Their fit¬ ness might vary, might be greater or less, and the power might be lost as well as gained. The power belonged to all who were fit for it, who could seek and receive it, not for themselves but for others. But that fitness came only by the Holy Spirit, and only from Christ. The power came to all who had a right, but the right was given by Christ. He came not only to give power but to join others with Himself in the exercise and giving of it. Though even He could give it in no other way than—as He gave healing—where it was fit; and the fitness was in both cases faith. We can now understand the hindrance which Christ felt in the presence of cold, or critical, or faithless persons. He was evidently as sensitive to their presence as to that of those who had faith and sympathy, and evidently 276 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST was as much hindered by the one as helped by the other. To the one He opened out as a flower does to the sun ; from the other He shrank, and withdrew Himself within Himself. He took the disciples to the mount, or the apostles to the table and the garden, because He expected from them something like faith and sympathy. When He came to Jairus’ house and found a scoffing though wailing people, He turned them all out before He felt freedom of spirit to concentrate His attention on the case, and fulfil to the father the expectation He had already roused. When He came to the tomb of Lazarus, and found so much faithlessness, or to Decapolis, where there was so much worldliness and lack of sym¬ pathy, He was pressed in spirit, and groaned, as He carried through His work. When the paralytic man borne of four was brought, a crowd of Pharisees and scribes and doctors of the law was present, wholly critical and full of hate. We find it recorded, as if the thing were unusual in these circumstances, that “ the power of the Lord was present to heal ” 1 (them). And Christ wrought His miracle; so that it seems as if He, in the interest of the others present, burst through the obstruction these men presented, as if He exerted Himself the more because of the one, and for the sake of the other, class. The same effect was produced on Christ in a slightly different way, not easy to be understood apart from this principle. When He healed the first demon-possessed man in the synagogue of Capernaum, the remark made by the astonished crowd was, “ What is this word ? for 1 Luke v. 17. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 277 with authority and power He commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out! ” 1 From that we see that the people were inclined to attach importance to the word He used, to think of the exercise of it as of some magical formula, like the use of the name of Beelzebub among themselves. They seem to have felt thus; though the evidence is all the other way in connection with the centurion’s expression, “ Only speak the word.” They did not attach importance to the person who used the word, or think He gave it weight. They separated the word from Him, and looked on it as an external thing; as if it were like a thing which could be carried in the hand to be used at will. It does not seem improbable that this was the secret of the apostles’ weakness. The form their low spirituality tended to take was that of looking on the name of Christ as a magical formula possessed of power without reference to moral conditions in themselves. They never thought of losing their power, just as they never thought of the possibility of its growing to what was greater, as Christ had promised ; they were surprised at its present greatness; they had not expected that; they could imagine no greater. We find that the same principle enters into the history of the woman who was cured of an issue of blood. Jairus, who might have known better, asked Christ to come and heal his daughter ; and Christ at once rose to go. The girl might have been restored on the spot, as in the case of the lad of the centurion of Capernaum. But Christ could only heal according to 1 Luke iv. 36. 278 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHEIST men’s faith. So the woman with the issue of blood snatched the blessing from Him, as He was on the way to heal the girl, and was healed at once. Hay, the maid died as they went, and had to be raised to life. Still the Saviour guided events sympathetically, so as to elevate the faith of the man to a purer, better condition. He saw in the death the action of God calling Him to raise the girl, whom He was committed to heal. He saw too the opportunity of overruling unbelief for the best ends. Suffering to the father there must naturally be, just because of his faithlessness ; he could hardly believe death could be conquered, when it had not been avoided ; he needed Christ’s reiterated assurance of the brightest or heavenly side of the fact, to sustain his hope: “Fear not, only believe; . . . the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.” Thus unbelief caused both waiting and suffering, which could be met, like the illness, only by Christ Himself. This, too, we ought to remark, that Christ’s miraculous power lay open to the claim of all. Anyone who had need might draw on it, and. would receive as he was capable. He had a right to it, as truly as the disciples to the miraculous power, if he were fit, as truly as sinners to forgiveness, if he claimed it. As Christ had no thought of retaining His power for Himself exclusively, as He even promised it in greater measure, or at least result, than in His own case, so He used it for men whenever God gave Him the opportunity. That He used it only where there was faith was not of His will, as little as that forgiveness could come only on the same condition. The condition was of God’s creating, not His; His duty CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 279 was only to observe it. The condition was not arbitrary or limiting; it gave the widest play of opportunity possible. For faith meant desire, need, appreciation, such as in healing meant gratitude and devotion, or in forgiveness meant the forgiving of “ men their trespasses also.” Faith was not anything really different from the “ will ” of the gospel message. The great “ whosoever will ” of spiritual blessing in it had a counterpart here in spirit as regards the blessings offered. Christ lay open to the claims of Jew and Gentile. The constant record is, “ He healed them all,” or, “ As many as touched Him were made perfectly whole.” Him that came would He in no wise cast out. Even when overworked, or hungry, or tired, He was at the disposal of every comer. Even those who followed Him into desert parts, where He had gone for rest, were received with kindness. Says Luke , 1 “ The multitudes followed them; and He welcomed them, and spake to them of the kingdom of God, and them that had need of healing He healed.” His help¬ lessness to avoid helping those sent of God to Him was the counterpart of that human ignorance which hemmed in His mind, as other limitations His body. “ He saved others; Himself He cannot save ,” 2 was true in more senses than one, and true throughout His life as well as during His agony on the Cross. Thus we find He not only touched or spoke and so healed, but that He allowed people to touch Him, giving them the initiative, and “ as many as touched were made whole .” 3 More remarkable still, however, was it that healing was taken from Him by one woman 2 Matt, xxvii. 42. 3 Matt. xiv. 36. 1 Luke ix. 11. 280 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST at least without His consent, and when He had given her no encouragement. So His will was not essential in the matter, at least any immediate exercise of it; just as His prayer before miracles needed not to be conscious in each case. As behind all prayers there was His constant state of prayerfulness, which rendered a wish a prayer and a command authoritative, and which kept His will constantly filled with desire of doing good to the utmost, so His will was never surprised in any other state and never unprepared, even though the claim made was unknown to it. The permanent state of His will was harmonious with that of Him who had sent His Son to be the Saviour, and bring to men the greatest blessing of which they were capable. God’s will intended His Saviour to lie open to all; it never meant His human weakness to be at least a permanent limit on His power of blessing ; it gave in this case a premonition of the time when He would be set free from the last traces of it, and become an unresting, open- handed Saviour, in all the glory of heavenly life. But though the cure came without Christ’s will, it did not go without His knowledge. For it cost Him some¬ thing. Perpetual openness of will to bless implied perpetual willingness for self-sacrifice. The perpetual prayerfulness found in Him meant keeping Himself always willing for that. Whatever was the feeling in Him, whether thrill or weakness, it was as clear and decided to Him as the cure was to her. He felt virtue had gone out of Him, just as she felt in her body that she was healed of her plague. Neither had any doubt as to their own experience. In His case the feeling was CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 281 evidently no new thing ; He was accustomed to it, for He knew at once and did not hesitate to say what it implied. He had no doubt of the fact that someone had been cured, but He could not tell who. When the disciples, with their. usual ignorance and ill-timed insistence, interfered, He spoke sternly, saying, “ Some¬ one did touch Me ; for I perceived that power had gone forth from Me.” 1 Then the woman saw she was not hid, and came trembling. Whether such a case as this affords some explanation of Matthew’s application of the words, “ Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases ,” 2 it is hard to say ; it shows at least how real was the cost of a miracle to Christ. We cannot tell how the apostles felt when similarly engaged. They do not seem to have under¬ stood their Master’s saying on this occasion, so that we may perhaps infer that their miracles had not the same effect on them. Their will was weak, their sympathies were poor, their feelings blunted when compared with His. They were unable to desire with His intensity, because the need did not appeal to them as to Him. Whatever they felt cost them little, and passed unnoticed. It may be even that He suffered, He in whose name, or by whose authority, they were able to do these things. Certainly there was some connection between Him and them, when they were at work. But that leads us to consider the cures in which Christ did not act by touch — cures performed at a dis¬ tance ; for by means of the one we shall get at least a little help in understanding the other. Of course 1 Luke viii. 46, 47. 2 Matt. viii. 17. 282 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST His ignorance of the case which was being dealt with by His disciples at the foot of the Transfigura¬ tion Mount was natural; for there had been no cure, but only the attempt at one. And the knowledge He had of the cure of the servant of the centurion of Caper¬ naum was gained by faith and inference from the faith of the petitioner, rather than held as an intuition or second sight. But, on the other hand, when the disciples to whom He had given power came back, saying, “ Lord, even the devils are subject unto us,” His remark was, “I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven .” 1 o o Now, that seems to imply a knowledge of something in process, though ignorance of its detail—an idea borne out by the fact that He allowed them to give an account of the ministry they had just returned from. This seems to be not very different from the case of the woman who had the issue of blood; for though that was a cure by means of contact, the disciples with Christ’s power were His representatives, and touching them meant really touching Him. In each case He knew the fact and was sure of it, though He knew nothing of the particulars. He was ignorant of the absent facts in each case, but was conscious of the feeling in Himself, as the fountainhead of power, when He healed the woman, and sure of the results of His wrestling, intercessory prayer for His absent representatives. In this case He had, possibly by that moral imagination which is a great result of belief in principle and in a spiritual God, seen an ideal result of which He was sure, a result He expressed in His words and they interpreted by their account. The 1 Luke x. IS. CHRIST AS A MIRACLE WORKER 283 process would thus ally itself with many of His pre¬ dictions. Christ’s cures at a distance were therefore miracles of knowledge, by which He recognised the fitness of the applicants and saw’ what they were entitled to at the hand of God. One other point we must still consider, namely, the connection between forgiveness and healing by miracle. The two things were not the same ; some got the one and others the other, according to their faith; and some who had the forgiveness were not sure of it till He made it clear. Yet the two things were connected. They both came by Jesus Christ, and in the same way. Men wondered at His words as to the one even more than as to the other. “ Why doth this man thus speak ? He blasphemeth. Who can forgive sins but one—God ? ” 1 But Christ made it plain that each was equally easy to Him : “ Whether is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Take up thy bed and walk ? ” And He even showed, as we have seen, that He preferred the one to the other, forgiving the sins of the paralytic, or rather declaring them forgiven, and not merely healing him as desired. The one was His duty like the other, because it lay in the line of His mission, and was cal¬ culated to aid it. Besides that, both were possible only to faith, on the person’s side as well as on the Saviour’s. The person had a right to it by faith, and that right Christ had given him by his faith. Christ informed him of what was his by God’s will, and the man only credited that. His word was declarative to the man because His existence and will were a request in God’s eyes and a 1 Mark ii. 7. 284 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHKIST request according to God’s will. His word of explanation is, “ Thy faith hath saved thee.” When He said, “ Thy sins are forgiven,” “ they that sat at meat with Him began to say within themselves, Who is this that even forgiveth sins ? And He said unto the woman ” (but before them, as the warrant and defence of His words), “ Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in (into) peace .” 1 Thus Christ taught men that they had the right to healing or forgiveness, either or both, according to their need. Of course, He administered His power for their greatest need, and healed in order to lead to God. In fact, however much He pitied sufferers, He thought suffering endurable when compared with the interests of spiritual well-being, for which alone it existed When John’s messengers asked in their master’s name, “ Art thou He that cometh, or look we for another ? ” He healed many ; were they kept waiting for that end, or were they, as Christ saw, gathered providentially for an evidence in His favour ? So at least He treated them. This explains how He associated the working of miracles with the preaching of the gospel, and assigned both to His apostles likewise, saying, “He that receivetli you receiveth Me, and He that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me.” Hay, we begin to see how, after His resurrection, He could breathe on His disciples and say, “ Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained ,” 2 and how He could fulfil to them even His former promise, “ Greater works than these shall ye do, because I go to the Rather.” 1 Luke vii. 49, 50. 2 John xx. 23. CHAPTER XII THE MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHRIST AFTER HIS RESURRECTION We have been hitherto occupied with Christ’s mind as it wrought in Him ere He died and rose again. Let us now look at its working after the resurrection, and see if there be any differences; if there be any, let us see whether they be essential, or whether they indicate a real agreement and merely such advance as might be expected. In looking at this subject, however, we must remember that whilst the space of time covered is much shorter than that which we were occupied with before, the record of it is also much more meagre. The identity of Christ after His resurrection may be seen in the essential unity of His mental conditions with those seen in Him ere He suffered death. That identity is brought out in three ways : by reminiscences, which show He had still a knowledge of what had taken place; by habits which we see to have belonged to Him before; and by continuity of purpose, though with progress in it beyond what He had shown previously. To begin with the reminiscences: Christ was Himself at times very unrecognisable, because of the change which had begun in His appearance after He rose ; though 285 \ 286 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST there is no sign of change in the case of the son of the widow of Nain, or Jairus’ daughter, or Lazarus, as regards appearance. None had any doubt in regard to them ; the Jews, who could not deny or get rid of Lazarus’ case, had even thought to kill him, and so get him out of the way, because he had become an inconvenient testimony against them. But if Jesus was sometimes very altered in appearance, He had no difficulty in recognising, naming, and identifying His friends whom He had known before death—Mary, Thomas, Peter, John, and others ; just as Lazarus knew his friends and sat at table with them again, and Jairus’ daughter took food from, because she recognised and did not feel startled at, her mother. So, if the Saviour was altered externally, He was the same person really, recognising His old friends, and willing to recognise them. The memory of heaven was not pre¬ served in Him as a child, but the remembrance of earth had become part of Him for ever. If He carried with Him the memory of heaven now, it did not displace the remembrance of the events of His humiliation. As we see, He had remembered His appointment to meet with His disciples in Galilee on a mountain ; 1 for, either in heaven or at the very first entrance again on earthly life, He had given the angel of the resurrection instructions to remind them of their duty. His life before and after was one; the promises made were to be kept. His first thought was as to others! His first feel¬ ing was that of duty; in which, without doubt, as had been the case from the first, there was a strain of love ! Many of the features of the scene on the shore of the 1 Matt. xxvi. 32, xxviii. 7, xxviii. 16. MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHRIST AFTER RESURRECTION 287 Galilean lake are like whispering echoes out of the earlier history 1 —the persons and the locality the same, but their relations somewhat modified. The casting of the net on the right side of the boat at Christ’s command, with the great draft and the heaps of struggling fishes on the shore; Peter throwing himself into the waters, as formerly he walked on them to get to his Master; the feeding of the disciples, instead of the multitudes, with food whose source none knew anything about; Peter’s questioning as to John instead of John’s mother question¬ ing as to her sons; one cannot read these without being struck by the resemblance to previous scenes in His history and theirs. Setting aside, however, such detail, which He may have desired to use as the means of awakening old and fading memories in them, we find that on such a great point as the matter and power of His ministry there was conscious continuity of view in Him. He called His disciples to preach repentance and remission of sins , 2 just as He had done before; and in connection with that He made distinct reference to the things they had heard previously from Him as constituting their preparation ; whilst the command to wait for the Holy Spirit 3 is like the echo of passages in His parting address before He died, and quite in the line of His promise , 4 “ It is expedi¬ ent for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto you.” The witness of habit must, however, give not only more 1 John xxi. 1. s Acts i. 4. 2 Lnke xxiv. 47. 4 John xvi. 7. 288 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST definite evidence than signs of remembrance, but, speci¬ ally if trifling and unsuspected, yield more weighty and valuable results. Take, for instance, the great mental habit which marked Him so prominently, yet in regard to which He had been unique up to the end, namely, His view of faith and His feeling towards it. He still held to that. He made its presence His guide still. It ruled His dealing with Mary Magdalene when she mistook Him for the gardener and was under the impression that her Lord was utterly lost to her. It explains the way in which He conducted His conversation with His two disciples on the way to Emmaus : His theme was, “ 0 foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken ! Behoved it not the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory ? ” It explains His dealing with the apostles in a room whose door was shut: His theme was, “ Why are ye troubled ? and wherefore do reasonings arise in your heart ? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye behold Me having.” It explains His action towards Thomas when He met him a week after; His theme was still Himself, and the end faith in Him: “ Beach hither thy finger,” He said, “ and see My hands ; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into My side ; and be not faithless, but believing.” It explains His special dealing with the apostle who had denied Hint, 1 as well as with the others who had fled. 2 Hay, it ex¬ plains His dealing with them in Galilee, and not in Jerusalem only; for by it He taught them to trust Him for everything, and to believe in His constant, even if 1 John xxi. 15. 2 John xxi. 14. MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHEIST AFTER RESURRECTION 289 unseen, presence. What He sought to create or to find in everyone was faith. His object was still to destroy the unbelief which hampered and thwarted Him. He acted on the remembrance of their failure in faith at His betrayal, and on His sense of it as their fundamental need ; so that it had to be recreated in them. He was willing to use means, any means, to secure it, just as of old, because it was pre-eminent in His eyes. As He had put clay on the blind man’s eyes, so He offered to His disciples the testimony of His hands and His feet. But this great habit of His has many kin to it; we take, for instance, the habit which lies at the root of the one we have been looking at—the habit of thinking of Himself as pre-eminently important—and we see the same thing. ISTo one ever thought of himself in the same way; yet here His view is just what it was before, the view He had died for. He who says, “ All autho¬ rity hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth,” 1 is He who had announced, “ All things are delivered unto Me of My Father,” and had assured His followers,There¬ fore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life for the sheep.” You see the same marked idea of the importance of the Old Testament, and the same habit of using con¬ stantly and relying on that book, though rather for the sake of others than Himself. In the same way His making as if He would have gone farther at Emmaus, until the disciples constrained Him, reminds one of what He did when long before He made as though He would have passed His disciples on the lake of Galilee. His 1 Matt, xxviii. 18. 19 290 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST being revealed to His followers in the breaking of bread seems to have had some connection with what must have been His peculiar manner of blessing that which was to be eaten. In leading the disciples out to the solitude of Bethany, we see the same habit as that shown in leading a blind man in Galilee aside ere He cured him, and in expelling the crowd from the room where Jairus’ daughter lay ere He could cure her. He was transfigured whilst praying; He ascended as He blessed. The fact that He came into the midst of His disciples on the first day of the week reminds us of His habit of attendance in the synagogues on the Sabbath day. 1 Jerusalem was still loved and longed after; “ beginning at Jerusalem ” is the word now of Him who had before apostrophised the city, “ 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! ” But stronger than the evidence of reminiscence, or even of habit, is that of object and plan. These were so peculiar to Himself, so far beyond the appreciation of those who had been most advanced in knowledge, and most sympathetic in feeling, that when we find Him clear upon them, fully aware of the point at which all had been broken off, gathering up the scattered threads, and even carrying their lines forward, we have conclusive evidence that He is still the same person and unchanged, at least in His inner being. We see that in Him there was continuity of life with the past. This is evident in the knowledge He had of His followers and their state, and of the affairs of His kingdom and how these must be conducted. True, He asked Mary Magdalene whom it was that she sought; but from what He must have seen 1 John xx. 19, 26. MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHRIST AFTER RESURRECTION 291 her doing at the entry of the tomb, that must have been evident to Him; for in any case it was probable by her very proximity to it. He asked, not because He was ignorant, but, as often in His earlier days, to elicit the condition of her heart, and be able to deal with it. Such, too, is the explanation of the question He put to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, “ Why are ye so sad ? ” They could not conceive any one ignorant of, or un¬ impressed by, the great event which had taken place. And we cannot imagine, that though their eyes were holden so that they did not recognise Him, His were blind to them. He might have used of both these questions the words which He used in another connec¬ tion, 1 “ Because of the people standing around I said it, that they might believe.” As we have already seen, there is no doubt about His knowledge of the inner state of His apostles. That would, however, be little; it might have been Divine, if He had not used the knowledge for ends similar to those He had formerly aimed at. He calculated on their condition, and knew by the past what it must be now. His very first words when He met them were, whether because of His appearing, or His appearance, or their conscious guilt, “ Bear not.” Examine His aims; they are still the same. He had offered Himself to the nation, specially and authorita¬ tively at Jerusalem, and been rejected. In that respect His work was complete, and God’s will had been gained. Death made the rejection final; He could not go back to work the work He was engaged on ere the crisis 1 John xi. 42. 292 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST came. What He was to do now might build on and continue, or expand it, but was not the same work. On the other hand, His work by means of His disciples was not done. He had trained them, associated them with Himself, used them. He knew that, under ap¬ parent failure, there was capacity in them for real success. They must therefore go on with the work He had called them to. Its characteristics are partly the same as they had been, but are partly new. He is to be with His servants always, though in a different way from formerly. His presence now, and then, is to be the ground of their faith and its energy. Rejected by the Jews, His object is not to serve them only; His eye is on the Gentile world too. To gain the world He can promise His workers such a fulness of the Spirit, and consequent largeness of result, as never was before. He sets them on the old lines, but puts before them a wider range of activity, and promises them a greater degree of success. “ Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Rather, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you.” 1 How He takes pains in reviving and enlarging their faith by means of His reality and continual nearness, and He does so in view of this wider sphere. He seeks to rouse them from the stupor by which they were overcome when stricken by the blow of His death, and to raise their faith, till it is adequate in assurance, in expectations, in patience, to this great aim. He who had said that the gospel must first be preached every- 1 Matt. xxviii. 19, 20. MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHRIST AFTER RESURRECTION 293 where for a testimony before the end could come, now sets Himself to bring that to pass. He lets Mary see that He is real, though not open to touch, as He had been. He lets the two Emmaus disciples see that His death has been the means of perfecting Him, in the view of God and according to the Old Testament, for His position as the Christ. He lets the body of the apostles see that He claims dominion over all, and that in seeking to secure that for Him they have His presence and power to the end, whether in a shut, secluded room, or engaged in business in distant Galilee. Instead of His outer presence, which they have found to vary so much that He is sometimes almost unrecognis¬ able, they are to have its effect, namely, the gift of the Holy Ghost. This is the form His continuous and abiding benediction from on high is to take; it is to bring and give them the power of Him who has all power in heaven and on earth. As He had seen them from the mountain top in Galilee on the lake, as He saw them from its shore in the dim dawn when they were in difficulties, as He saw them in the upper room with their fears, and on the road in their despair, so He will see and deal with their need, so He will be near and come to help them till the end of time. The way in which He dealt with His apostles in Galilee seems to have had special reference to the necessity of making clear to them their official position, and im¬ pressing on them its work as the great duty of their lives. In like manner He had to deal with Peter, who had received a special message to attend the tryst, and yet had been the first to lead off in the general 294 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST outburst of secularity. He had to remind him of his great failure; only, however, to assure him of express forgiveness, and then of special duty as its consequence. As we have seen in the former chapter, Christ, when calling His disciples to faith, promised them the power it implied. These signs were to follow them that believed: “ They shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents ; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall in no wise hurt them ; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” 1 This greater power when it came was to fit them not only to face Jerusalem, but also to cope with the world. How His eye could look forward to those for whom He had prayed, those who should “ believe on Him through their word.” Nothing, however, was more characteristic of what Christ intended, and what He expected to gain by them, than the new place in which He put Himself, as shown by the new relation to Himself in which He set baptism. 2 It was not, as under John, to repentance, but into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; that description set forth the source of the distinctive authority and power it implied. He did not hesitate by it to perpetuate His own name, as well as to set it in the forefront for ever, as that of one equal with God, and in rank between the Father and the Spirit. Most probably, too, the fact that He met more than once with His gathered disciples on the first day of the week indicates a similar assumption as “ Lord of the Sabbath.” It is certainly noticeable, that when His disciples were afraid to ask Him anything after His 1 Mark xvi. 18. 2 Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. MENTAL IDENTITY OF CHRIST AFTER RESURRECTION 295 resurrection, 1 the reason was not as before, the un¬ pleasantness of the truth they feared they might have to face, but the sense of disparity between Him and them, due to the new conception they had of His nature and majesty. And yet all this advance in personal claim, like that in respect to the range of work already noticed, is apparent. It is only the coming forth clearly of what had been not obscurely hinted at long before, but had not been openly declared till now because of the unfitness of those whom the knowledge of it was to benefit. There is not very much material available to guide us in forming clear ideas as to the state of knowledge in Christ’s human mind after He rose. We have seen that the questions He put, so far from indicating ignorance, were the result of knowledge of the hearts He was dealing with. We have seen that He had a full acquaintance with the state of mind in His apostles, and guided Himself by that in supplying their spiritual need. Of course it may be said that that indicates only remembrance of the limited knowledge He had before gained by experience. But if that be granted, as I think it may, there still remains the case of Thomas, where we have no indication of any human means of communication, and the knowledge of Peter’s defection into worldliness, “ I go a-fishing,” at the head of the ten. There seems no need of looking on such know¬ ledge as given specially by supernatural means to the occasion. It is more natural to look on it as the beginnings of that omniscience as the Christ, which 1 John xxi. 12. 296 STUDIES OF THE MIND IN CHRIST is seen in regard to Stephen and Saul, Ananias and Judas of Damascus, and the street Straight. We may conceive that the limits of knowledge were burst with the tomb, and that He outstepped them when He received the gift of His spiritual body. One thing only remains now to be noticed. Christ did not, as before, lodge with His disciples, though seemingly they lived with one another ; He abode apart, in the spirit of that unapproachableness which He had proclaimed to Mary Magdalene at the tomb; and He seems to have sought their presence only on special occa¬ sions or for special ends. Where He was, and how He occupied Himself, we know not. Nor does He appear to have conceived that He had a duty toward everyone, even to those with faith, whom He met. His outlook was wider, but His action was narrower. He devoted Himself specially to those who were to carry on His cause, as if He were conscious that His outer presence with them could not be long continued. He seems to have felt that His work was done, that all the rest to be carried out might be suitably left in their hand, and that the day of their activity and of His rest had dawned. INDEX OF TEXTS PAGE PAGE PAGE Genesis Jeremiah vi. 12 , # 106 vi. 32 179 i. 27. 135 vii. 11 .... 120 vi. 33 .105, 179 ii. 24. . . . 132, 135 vii. 7 . # # 104 vii. 11 m - 104 Hosea viii. 10 . . 12 Deuteronomy viii. 17 . # 281 vi. 6 . . . . 116, 121 viii. 18 . . 5 , 18 viii. 3 . . . . 129 viii. 23 # , 5 ix. 15 9 # 250 Zechariah ix. 23 18 2 Chronicles ix. 29 m # 226 xiii. 7 ... . 124 x. 1 . 273 xxiv. 20, 21 137 x. 15 . # # 117 x. 22 . 190 Malachi x. 23 . . 54, 182 Psalms x. 25 . • • 190 iv. 5, 6 . . . . 123 x. 39 . • • 103 xvi. 10 . . . 192 x. 42 . • • 107 xxii. 16 ... . 124 xi. 1 . # # 55 xli. 120 Matthew xi. 4 . 258 xli. 9. 124 xi. 12 . # 251 Ixix. 4, 5 . . 124, 125 iii. 15 .... 83 xi. 27 84 lxix. 21 ... . 126 iv. 4 . . . . 129, 202 xi. 28 , # 90 xci. 11, 12 . . . 128 iv. 12. . . 14, 123 xii. 3 . * # 119 135 iv. 17. 14 xii. 5 . 131 cxviii. 22 . . . 124 iv. 18. 123 xii. 10 , . 57 v. 1. 18 xii. 14 , , 57 v. 5, 6 . . . . 109 xii. 15 , # 21 Isaiah v. 7. 110 xii. 28 . 195, 251 v. 11. 110 xii. 39 . , 119 xxix. 13. . 120, 183 v. 13, 14 . . . 103 xii. 41, xii. 45 42 • . 117 liii. 8 . 124 v. 17. 105 t # 187 liii. 12 . . . 124, 125 v. 19. 132 xii. 48- 50 • . Ill, 203 liv. 13 123 v. 20. 105 xiii. 17 . 91, 122 lvi. 7. 120 v. 21. 101 xiii. 52 # . 101 ]xi. 6. 123 vi. 7, 8 . . . . 104 xiii. 54 • 220 298 INDEX OF TEXTS PAGE PAGE PAGE Matthew— continued. xxiv. 3 . 196 vi. 30-52 7 xiv. 12, 13 . 14 xxiv. 36 . 2 vi. 46 9, 230 xiv. 14 . 19 xxiv. 37 sqq. 184 vi. 48 8 xiv. 16 . . 269 xxiv. 43 . 182 vii. 6 . 183 xiv. 23 . . 235 xxv. 31 sqq. 187 vii. 24, 25 11 xiv. 33 . . 7 xxv. 40 . 107 vii. 33 262, 263 xiv. 36 . 279 xxvi. 2, 3 238 vii. 36 11 xv. 8, 9 . 114, 120, 183 xxvi. 10 . 21 viii. 12 12 xv. 12, 13 . 58 xxvi. 16 . 238 viii. 23 22 xv. 14 . . 52 xxvi. 17-19 42 viii. 24, 25 . 262 xv. 19 . . 108 xxvi. 24 . 71 viii. 33 . 18 xv. 21 . . 270 xxvi. 28 . 240 ix. 1 . . 195 xv. 32 20 xxvi. 31 . 45, 124, ix. 21 . 22 xvi. 1-3 . . 230 125, 238 ix. 25 18, 261 xvi. 13 . 22 xxvi. 32 . 286 ix. 29 . 262 xvi. 16 . 190 xxvi. 39 . 166 ix. 30, 31 . 249 xvi. 21 . 249 xxvi. 40 . 12, 182 ix. 33 . 21 xvi. 23 . 50 xxvi. 64 . • 196 x. 3 . 21 xvi. 24 . . 111 xxvii. 34 • 127 x. 29 . . 189 xvi. 25 . 190 xxvii. 42 ■ 279 x. 33 . . 124 xvi. 28 . . 195 xxviii. 7 • 286 x. 33, 34 . 243 xvii. 11, 12 . xvii. 14 . . .119, 248 xxviii. 16 286 x. 36 . . 22 261 xxviii. 18 289 x. 45 . . 252 xvii. 27 . . 269 xxviii. 19, 20 292, 294 x. 51 . . 21 xviii. 7 . 111 xi. 13 . 20 xviii. 22 . 107 xi. 20 . 268 xviii. 35 . 107 Mark xi. 26 . 106 xix. 1 . . 55 xi. 27 . 221 xix. 4 . . 135 i. 23 . . 220 xii. 1 . . 104 xix. 5 . . 132 i. 29-31 . 15 xii. 25 . 127 xix. 8 132 i. 37, 38 . 14, 229 xiii. 32 2 xix. 28, 29 . 189 i. 40 . . 179 xiv. 12- -16 42, 44 xx. 18 124 i. 41 . . 264 xiv. 27 45 xx. 22, 23 . xx. 28 . . 189 i. 44, 45 . 11 xiv. 30 . 44 252 ii. 1, 2 . 11 xiv. 33 . 167 xx. 32 . . 266 ii. 5 . 267 xiv. 37 . 12 xxi. 5 . 41, 231 ii. 7 . . 283 xiv. 43 . 239 xxi. 12 . 232 ii. 8 . . 21 xvi. 18 . 294 xxi. 20 . 268 ii. 14 . . 234 xxi. 22 . 264 ii. 16 . . 253 xxi. 23 . 217 ii. 17 . . 15 Luke xxi. 42 . 124 ii. 25 . . 253 xxi. 43 . . 187 ii. 27 . . 131 i. 17 . . 123 xxii. 29 . . 127 iii. 1 . . 220 ii. 40 . 99 xxii. 32 . 114 iii. 2 . . 269 ii. 47 . . 99 xxii. 36 . . 133 iii. 5 . . 12 ii. 49 . 12 xxii. 41 . . 122 iv. 27, 28 191 ii. 52 . 23, 99 xxii. 44 . 135 iv. 33-35 5 iv. 4 . , 129 xxii. 45 . 85 iv. 39 266 iv. 14 . 101 xxiii. 4, 5 . .’ 105, 106 v. 13 . . 69 iv. 16 . 220 xxiii. 20-22 112 v. 30-32. 16 iv. 17 19 xxiii. 29, 30 xxiii. 35 . . 118 vi. 2 . . 220 iv. 18 101, 122, 258 .117, 137 vi. 6 . . 12 iv. 25-27 • • . 115 INDEX OF TEXTS 299 PAGE PAGE PAGE Luke— continued. xxii. 7-13 . . 42 v. 44 . . . . 112 iv. 36 . 277 xxii. 22 . . . 236 vi. 1-21 ... 7 iv. 42-44 . 205 xxii. 31, 32 . . 44, 227 vi. 5 . ... 22 iv. 43 . 247 xxii. 37 . .124, 125 vi. 6 . ... 8 v. 2 . . . 17 xxii. 64 . . . 73 vi. 29 . . . 186 v. 3, 4 . . 234 xxii. 69 . . . 196 vi. 37-40 . .157, 172 v. 5 . . . 37 xxiv. 47 . . . 287 vi. 44 . . . 172 v. 8 . . . 38 vi. 45 . . . 103 v. 17 . . . 276 vi. 57 ... 173 v. 34-36 . . 91 John vii. 1 . ... 249 vi. 6 . . . 232 vii. 2 . ... 221 vi. 7, 8 . 56, 220 i. 18 . . . . 3 vii. 3 . ... 227 vi. 11 207, 232 i. 21-25 . . . 119 vii. 14 . .221,241 vi. 12 . . 230 i. 22-31 . . . 213 vii. 19-23 ... 244 vii. 5 . . . 74 i. 29 . . . . 27 vii. 22 . . . 131 vii. 13 . 18 i. 33 . . . 27, 122 vii. 25 . . 207, 244 vii. 39, 40 . 59 i. 38 . . . . 16 vii. 38 . . . 114 vii. 44 sqq. . 59 i. 42 . . . . 25 viii. 21 . . . 107 vii. 49, 50 . 284 i. 43 . . . 27, 234 viii. 24 . . . 103 viii. 19 . 5 i. 45 . . . . 33 viii. 26 . . 98, 178 viii. 20 . . 232 i. 48 . . . . 36 viii. 28 . . 98, 157 viii. 22 . 5, 234 i. 51 . . . . 76 viii. 29 ... 97 viii. 30 . . 22 ii. 4 . . . 21 viii. 38, 39 . . 97, 98 viii. 46 . 16 ii. 19-21. . . 237 viii. 44 . . 97, 207 viii. 46, 47 . 281 ii. 23-25. . 50, 65, 107 viii. 46 . . . 156 ix. 10-17 7 iii. 11, 12 . 76, 77 viii. 47 ... 207 ix. 11 . 279 iii. 13 . . . 78 viii. 55 . . . 158 ix. 46, 47 . 57 iii. 14 80, 119 , 184, 256 viii. 58 ... 88 ix. 57 , 61 iii. 16 . . 81 viii. 59 . .207,244 x. 9 . . . 273 iii. 17 . . . 103 ix. ... 262 x. 17 . . . 273 iii. 19 .108, 188 ix. 2, 3 32, 104, 184 x. 18 . . 64, 282 iii. 27-31 . 78, 91 ix. 5 . . . . 103 xi. 17 62 iii. 29 . . 250 ix. 35 19, 235, 244 xi. 31 . 99 iii. 34 . . 97 ix. 37 . . . 87 xi. 37 . . 58 iii. 36 . . . 186 ix. 39-41 . . . 187 xii. 50 . 232 iv. 1-3 . . 13, 253 x. 14 . . . . 173 xiii. 10-12 . 220 iv. 17, 18 . . 36 x. 16 . . . . 103 xiii. 12, 13 . 18 iv. 21 . . . 106 x. 17 . . . . 109 xiii. 31 . . 207 iv. 26 . . . 87 x. 18 . . . . 237 xiii. 32, 33 . 241 iv. 29 . . . 36 x. 23, 24 . . . 242 xiii. 34 . . 221 iv. 37, 38 . . 91 x. 28, 29 . . . 102 xiv. 1 . 207 iv. 43 . . . 222 x. 34 . . . . 132 xiv. 7 . 18 iv. 44, 45 . 66, 232 x. 39 . . . 39, 242 xiv. 16 sqq. . 104 iv. 46 . 67, 223 xi. . . . 39 xvi. 17 . . 132 v. 6 . . . 18, 54 xi. 8 . . . . 207 xvii. 12-14 . 17 v. 18 . . . 155, 206 xi. 16 . .207,252 xvii. 20, 21 . 251 v. 19 . . . 92, 98 xi. 34 . . 22, 74 xvii. 26 sqq. . 184 v. 22 . . . . 184 xi. 37 . . . 260 xviii. 7, 8 . 193 v. 24 . . . . 180 xi. 39 . . . 74 xix. 11 . . 194 v. 26 . . . . 173 xi. 41 . . . 259 xix. 41 . 18, 221 v. 27 . . .184, 186 xi. 42 . . . 291 xix. 43, 44 . 46 v. 30 . 97, 112, 157, 172 xi. 48 . . . 206 XX. 1 . . . 221 v. 40 . . • . . 108 xii. 14, 1 5 . . . 41 300 INDEX OF TEXTS rAGE J ohn— continued. xv. 22 • xii. 19 . . 206 xv. 25 • xii. 27 . . # „ 166 xvi. 7 xii. 47 . . 103 xvi. 25 • xii. 49 . . 178 xvi. 29 • xiii. 18 . . .120, 124 xvi. 30 • xiii. 27 . . 69 xvi. 31 • xiv. 2 . . 103 xvi. 33 • xiv. 6 . . , t 180 xvii. 5 • xiv. 12 . . 174 xvii. 16 • xiv. 30 . . , , 158 xvii. 18 xiv. 31 . . • • 240 xvii. 21- -23 xv. 10 . . • • 173 xvii. 24 • xv. 15 . . . 98, 178 xviii. 4 • xv. 19 . . .103, 190 xviii. 8 • rAGE rAGE 186 xviii. 34 . • • 22 124, 125 xviii. 37 . • • 92 287 xix. 28 . . 125 • 175 xix. 37 . . 124 • 175 xx. 19 • • . 290 • 72 xx. 23 • • . 284 74 xx. 26 • • . 290 158 xxi. 1 • • . 287 • 88 xxi. 12 . • • . 295 • 173 xxi. 14, 15 • • . 288 • 174 xxi. 18, 19 • . 45 174 • 265 Acts • 182 • 239 i. 4 . . # # . 287 PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH BY THE 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The new Dictionary will seek to cover the whole range of Bible knowledge, including Biblical Theology. The Editor is being assisted by Specialists in the oversight of the various departments. The Contributors include the following well-known scholars :— Professors S. R. Driver, W. Sanday, G. A. Smith, A. B. Davidson, F. Brown, J. A. Robinson, W. Lock, G. G. Findlay, W. T. Davison, A. B. Bruce, W. H. Bennett, R. Flint, D. S. Margoliouth, H. E. Ryle, S. D. F. Salmond, W. Max Muller, Flinders Petrie, W. M. Ramsay, H. M. Gwatkin, Marcus Dods, Rendel Harris, V. H. Stanton, J. Denney, A. Macalister, J. T. Marshall, J. Orr, Fr. Hommel, W. G. H. Nowack, K. Budde, H. Strack, W. W. Baudissin, J. H. Thayer, B. B. Warfield, 0. C. Whitehouse, A. Stewart, H. B. Swete, A. H. Sayce, Sir Charles Warren, Sir C. W. Wilson, Lt.-Col. Conder, Dr. George E. Post, Mr. T. G. Pinches, The Very Rev. Dean Farrar, Principal Ottley, Principal Chase, Dr. Moulton, and others. It is expected that the Work will be completed in Four Volumes of about 900 pp. each. The First Volume is now in type, and Messrs. Clark hope to issue it in February 1898. Full particulars, together with a Prospectus of the Work, will be sent to all who desire informa¬ tion about the Dictionary. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. t ^ ibraries ogical Seminary Princeton 1 1012 01190 2105 •Jvl&Z. — (Vi^ 111111 Wi4W $ 55 ^ 4 ?