V»W»>A^MA'*raMWfW>'A'"A''"A"'A"'A"T. LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. Di'vision Section '- :SB24^1 ^ ^^iWmicf DEVOTIONAL LIF^ OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. BY THE ^ Rev. EDWARD L. CUTTS, B.A. Bon. D.D. Univ. of (he South, U.S.A. AUTHOR OF 'turning-points of general and of ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORV, "CONSTANTINE THE GREAT," "CHARLEMAGNE," ETC. PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TR.\CT COMMITTER. LONDON : SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, W.C. 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. 26, ST. GEOKGRS PLACE, HYDE PARK CORNER, S.W. BRIGHTON: 135, north street. New Yohk : E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 1884. PREFACE. HAT the writer has proposed to himself in this work is not a d tailed Nairative of all that our Blessed Lord did and said, so much as a series of studies of His Person, Character, and Work. The endeavour has been made to impress vividly on the reader's mind that Jesus was a real historical person, perfectly human in character and natural in life ; and, at the same time, never to suffer him to lose sight of the great truth that Jesus was very God ; and to call attention to the relation of the two Natures in the one Person of the Christ. The endeavour has been made to direct attention not only to the invisible side of the Saviour's work in its relations with God and with the human soul, but also to the human side of His work in the establishment of a kingdom on earth as His agency for carrying out the work of the salvation of men. iv PREFACE. It has been necessary, for these ends, to consider in some detail all which the Gospel tells us of the Divine Infancy, Childhood, and Youth, and also all which it tells us of the closing scenes of the Divine life. But it has been thought sufficient to summarise the events of the Ministry, dwelling only on such features of it as seemed necessary to the main pur- pose of the work. This has been done partly for the sake of reducing the size of the book, and partly in order to present in fewer traits, and therefore more easily grasped at one view, what is intended to be a Portrait rather than a Biography. The sacred subject has been approached with hesitation, humility, and reverence. Undertaken in the first instance for the writer's own edification, then wrought out in a scries of Sermons, then digested into the present form, in the hope, and with the prayer, that it might help others to form to themselves a more vivid knowledge of our Blessed Lord, and so to love Him with a more enthusiastic loyalty, to trust Him with an unhesitating con- fidence, to live to Him with an entire self-devotion. CONTENTS. Preface Page St. John's Prologue PART I. THE CHILDHOOD AND OBSCURE LIFE. CHAP. 1. THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE 9 2. THE INCARNATION 23 3. THE VISITATION 3I 4. "IT CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DAYS" 44 5. THE NATIVITY ... 55 6. THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS 59 7. THE CIRCUMCISION 63 8. THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE 68 9. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 80 10. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS 89 11. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 93 12. THE HOLY CHILDHOOD 96 \l. THE "SON OF THE LAW" I04 14. THE OBSCURE LIFE 1 14 15. " HE WAS SUBJECT UNTO THEM " 121 16. HIS GROWTH INTO MANHOOD 127 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. PART II. THE PREPARATION. CHAP. 17. THE FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS C^SAR Page \yj 18. THE FORERUNNER 163 PART III. THE MINISTRY. 19. THE BAPTISM 20. THE GREAT FAST 21. THE TEMPTATION 22. THE FIRST DAYS OF THE MINISTRY 23. THE FIRST MIRACLE 24. THE SON OF MAN 25. THE HOLY CITY 26. LANDMARKS OF THE MINISTRY 27. SUMMARY OF THE GALILEAN MINISTRY 28. THE MIRACLES 29. THE CONFESSION OF THE DIVINITY 30. THE SON OF GOD 31. THE TRANSFIGURATION 32. THE JUD^AN MINISTRY 33. THE WORDS OF JESUS 34. "BEHOLD, THY KING COMETH UNTO THEE" 35. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 170 180 184 197 201 208 219 230 234 254 262 274 281 288 299 307 CONTENTS. CHAP. 37. 38. 35- 40. 41. PART IV. THE PASSION AND DEATH. THE HOLY WEEK THE LAST SUPPER THE PASSION THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS THE CRUCIFIED THE BURIAL ^^«§^ 337 369 392 430 459 468 PART V. THE RISEN LIFE. 42. THE RESURRECTION. THE APPEARANCES 43. THE RISEN LIFE 44. THE ASCENSION 473 539 547 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. THE PROLOGUE. [HERE are two ways of writing a life of oui blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Like St. Luke, to begin with the birth of the Babe of Bethlehem, and to let his life and character and work gradually develope themselves, until the reader is constrained, with the Apostles, to recognize him as the Son of God ; and to continue the narrative until the Gift of Pentecost reveals the fulfilled work of Christ in the restoration to mankind of in-dwelling Deity. Or, like St. John, to go back to the pre-existence of the Divine Person, who took upon Him our nature of the substance of the Virgin Mother, to assume from the first days our com- pleted knowledge of his work, and to make full use of this knowledge in our study of all the incidents of the history. The latter method will best serve the purpose of the devout contemplation of the Person and work of Jesus, which is proposed in the following pages; and the proper Prologue to such an under- £ J 2 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. taking is that which St. John himself has prefixed to his Gospel : — " In the beginning was the Word : " And the Word was with God : " And the Word was God. " The same was in the beginning with God. "All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. " And the light shineth in darkness, and the dark- ness comprehended it not. . . . " He was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. " He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. " He came unto his own, and his own received him not. "But as many as received him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name. Which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God " And the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among ITS (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." PROLOGUE. " In the beginning," They are the same words with which Moses, in the book of Genesis, commences the history of the creation of the world : — " In the be- ginning God created the heavens and the earth." Moses carries us back into the period before any created thing or being — man or world or angel — existed ; into that inconceivable eternity in which God lived alone ; into that unbounded abyss, un- broken yet by sun or star, which was not therefore dark and void, but filled everywhere with the splen- dour of the presence of God. Of all the rest of the sons of men without excep- tion it may be asserted that they had no existence before they were conceived and born into this world ; but John asserts the pre-existence of Jesus ; and he does not date back his pre-existence to any definite period when it began ; but he carries us back to that period of which Moses spake, beyond the be- ginning of all things which had a beginning; and he asserts that then, already, Christ existed : " In the beginning was the Word." But since in that eternity God lived alone, where was there place for the existence of the Word ? The Evangelist answers, though God lived alone, " the Word was with God." The Word was with God not as a separate Being outside the Godhead, for he adds " the Word was God." It is the mystery of the Trinity of Being in the Unity of the Godhead, which B 2 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. is thus brought before us. The Word is the second person of the ever blessed Trinity. Not only was the Word in the beginning, before creation began, but creation was His work : " All things were made by Him"; all created things without exception, animate and inanimate, angels and archangels, thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers: "Without Him was not anything made that was made." "In Him was Life." As he himself explains, "as the Father hath life in himself so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself." He is the source of life to living beings. " And the Life was the Light of men." " He was the true light, which Ughteth every man that cometh into the world ;" the source of light to all men, of intellectual light, of spiritual light, the light of reason and of conscience, the light of revela- tion. " He was in the world ;" " He came unto His own ;" He left "the glory which He had with the Father before the world was ;" lie " came forth from the Father and came into the world," and " the world knew Him not ;" " His own received Him not." The Evangelist anticipates in his prologue the perplexing fact of the history that His own world (regarding the facts in a broad general way) did not recognise Him when He came, His own creatures did not receive Him. And St. John sums up what he has said in the PROLOGUE. 5 words " the Word was made flesh and dwelt amon"- us." A mere commonplace to those who have known it all their lives, and never thought about it ; the most august and glorious truth of all truths which affect the human race, to those who realize its meaning; God entered into our humanity, God became m.an, God dwelt among men. " And we " who believed in Him " beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." The Epiphany of God In- carnate was not in the splendour of a descent from heaven, surrounded by shining hosts, in the sight of gazing mankind. It was in the humility and weak- ness of the birth at Bethlehem. The redemption of man from sin and death was not by an exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy, but by the suffering of the penalty of sin upon the cross. The glory which they beheld who gazed upon the Person and Life of Incarnate God was the glory of "grace and truth." Most of us, it is to be feared, are too much in the state of spiritual development in which the Jews were in our Lord's time, profoundly impressed by physical might and material splendour, idolizing intellectual clearness, and depth, and vigour, so that a com- bination of them would be the fulfilment of our h'ghest conceptions of a Divine Incarnation. We have, most of us, hardly caught a glimpse of the superiority of the spiritual over the intellectual 6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and the physical. We need to lay seriously to heart at the beginning of our study of the person and life of the Lord and Saviour that the revelation which God gives of Himself in Christ is not a sudden flashing forth of splendour and power, but the slow dawning of grace and truth, displayed in the daily course of a human life. Therefore it was that " the Light shined in the darkness and the darkness" of man's dulled spiritual apprehension " comprehended it not." Let us take care, in our present study of His Person, and character, and work, that we do not fall into the same blindness, and fail to understand the glory which consists in the fulness of grace and truth. He did not by a mere act of creative power make all men Sons of God ; but to them that received him and "believed in Him, to them He gave power," through a spiritual regeneration " to become the Sons of God." The keenest intellect fails to explain to itself, the profoundest spiritual insight into the things of God fails to divine, the way in which the human nature is united with the divine nature, in the person of Jesus : any more than " the spirit of a man which knows the things of a man," can explain the way in which the material body and the immaterial soul are united in one man. The union of the human and di\'ine natures in PROLOGUE. Jesus is a mystery. The fact is revealed to us, but not the " how." We accept the fact as a revelation. What we have to do is to apprehend clearly and accurately what it is which God has revealed on the subject, and to hold it fast. We have also in our studies of the subject to take care to avoid the various erroneous ways of conceiv- ing the mystery which have suggested themselves, and naturally suggest themselves, to men's minds, and which have been declared to be unsound. It may be useful briefly to enumerate the chief of these errors : — 1. The failure to realise the true and complete humanity of Jesus. 2. The failure to realise the true and consubstantial deity of Jesus. 3. To think of the union of the two natures as if they were fused into one mixed nature which is neither human nor divine. 4. To think of Jesus as two persons, a man in whom God was pleased to dwell. The truth as opposed to these errors is that God the Son, the second person of the blessed Trinity, assumed human nature to Himself, so that two whole and perfect natures, — that is to say, the Divine nature and the human nature, — stand side by side, not mixed together, but intimately united, and never to be divided again, in one person. And the personality S A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. of Jesus is to be found in the divine nature. The divine person took human nature to himself without adding a human person to himself, as a human soul at the resurrection maybe conceived to take a material body to itself, without adding another self to itself In all the great crises of the history we shall find ourselves face to face with this great mystery, and shall do well to study it again and again, that we may the more fully enter into the blessed truth, which is thus announced on the threshold, the WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US. PART I-THE CHILDHOOD. CHAPTER I. THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. HE grey dawn appears first in the heavens ; then the distant snow peak glows with rosy Hght ; lastly, the sun rises over the eastern hill and slowly fills the land with Day. So the rising of the Sun of Righteousness has its premonitions. The Gospel history opens amidst the sacred splen- dours of the Temple of God in Jerusalem, with the supernatural glory of an angelic apparition, bringing a divine revelation that the New Dispensation is about to appear. If we desire to realise vividly not only this grand opening scene, but also many subsequent scenes, of the history, we shall do well to take some pains to make ourselves acquainted with at least the broad features of the architecture of the Temple and the Ritual of its worship. It was an age of architectural magnificence. 'She Greek sovereigns of Syria and Egypt had studded lo A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. the countries round about Palestine with new cities planned on a scale of extraordinary grandeur — the main streets bordered in their whole length with colonnades of great splendour, large public places surrounded with colonnades, magnificent temples, and public buildings. Herod the Great had ac- quired this taste for magnificence, and, desiring to ingratiate himself with his subjects, had beautified Jerusalem with public buildings, and rebuilt the Temple/ enlarging its precincts, and surrounding it with cloisters, on a scale of magnitude and sump- tuousness which made the whole group of buildings one of the most costly and splendid architectural achievements of the ancient world. The situation of the Temple greatly assisted its general effect. Jerusalem is situated on a projection of table land surrounded on three sides by deep and narrow gorges, — the Valley of Kedron on the east, the Valley of Hinnom, which sweeps round the western and southern sides, and joins the Kedron valley at the south-east corner of the site ; this plat- form is again divided by the Tyropoean valley into two irregular and unequal portions, the larger, IMount Zion, on the west, the site of the ancient city of ' Probably it was the surrounding buildings of the Temple which were rebuilt by Herod, while the central and most sacred portion containing the Holy Place and Most Holy Place were added to and adorned. THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. ii David, and the lesser, Mount Ivloriah, on the east, the site of Arannah's threshing-floor outside the ancient city, where the destroying angel was stayed, where David offered his thanksgiving sacrifice, and which he therefore adopted as the site of the Temple This eastern hill, then, was bounded on the east and south by the precipitous sides of the valleys of Kedron and Hinnom, and the Tyropoean valley separated it from the city on the west ; on the north an artificial trench, excavated in the rock from valley to valley, isolated the Temple site from the rest of the hill, and on this side the strong palace-fortress of Antonia, based on a precipitous rock, 75 feet high, defended and dominated it. Herod had enlarged the natural available area on the south by vast substructures faced with enormous blocks of stone. So that the Temple stood isolated on its rocky platform close by, and yet apart from, the city. The walls which enclosed it seemed to grow out of the natural rock and rise sheer out of the depths of the surrounding valleys in stately strength. The enlarged area included by Herod in the Temple precincts was in all probability identical with the Haram area of the modern city. This area is irregular in shape, its mean measurement being 982 feet from east to west, and 1,565 feet from north to south, including 35 acres, about four times the area of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was enclosed 12 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. by walls 40 feet high, of vast thickness, built of immense blocks of white marble. Internally the enclosure was surrounded by cloisters or porticos, intended not only for ornament, but also to give large spaces of shade from the heat and glare of the eastern sun. On three sides, viz. the west, norht, and east, these cloisters were formed of double rows of marble Corinthian columns -i,"/ feet 6 inches high. The cloister on the south side was called the Royal Portico, because at its western end a bridge thrown across the Tyropcean connected it with the ancient palace on the western hill. This royal en- trance was enlarged into a vast hall consisting of a body and aisles 600 feet long and 100 feet wide, formed of four rows of polished white marble co- lumns, forty in each row, each formed of a single stone 40 feet high, with gilded Corinthian capitals ; the aisles were 40 feet high, and the centre 100 feet, ceiled with carved and gilded beams of cedar, the floor paved with coloured marbles. It may give a measure of this magnificent portico to say that it was 100 feet longer than York Minster, and rather wider than its nave and aisles. These cloisters as a whole were a magnificent work. There are remains of similar colonnades of the same style which may help us to realise the architectural efiect. The double columns of the porticos of the Parthenon at Athens are but 34 feet in height, and may help us to THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. 13 realise the grand height of the Temple cloisters ; the broken lines of columns which still remain at Palmyra may help us to picture the effect of the long double colonnades of the vast quadrangle of the Temple. Within this area was formed an inner court, situated centrally between the north and south sides, but a third nearer to the west than the cast. This situa- tion of the inner court was dictated by the natural formation of the hill, which here rose to its highest point, and this natural rise offered the opportunity to give to the inner court an increased dignity by con- structing it on a platform elevated 22 feet 6 inches above the area round about it. The external appear- ance of the inner court was that of a strong building, about 500 feet square, enclosed by a high wall of white marble ornamented with sculptures on its ex- ternal face. Three lofty gates of highly ornamental design gave entrance to it on the north and three on the south ; the one eastern gate — the Beautiful Gate — was one of the most magnificent portions of the whole building, faced with Corinthian brass, the leaves of its great doors covered with thick plates of gold and silver. Broad stairs of white marble gave access from the outer court through these gates to the inner court. The level platform of the inner court was paved with marble, and surrounded with a cloister of single marble columns. Towards the western side of the inner court the 14 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. apex of the hill aftbrdcd another platform elevated 9 feet above its marble pavement, for the basis of the central and most sacred portion of the Temple, viz., the roofed building which contained the Holy and Most Holy Places. The apartments themselves were of comparatively small dimensions, the outer holy place 60 feet by 30 feet, and the inner and most sacred place a cube of 30 feet by 30 feet, and 30 feet high ; and both these chambers were lined with plates of gold. But according to the measurements given by Josephus, the external dimensions of this building had been increased by the addition of chambers at the sides, and a lofty fagade 150 feet in width and height, ornamented with thick plates of gold. An arch 60 feet high occupied the centre, and formed the entrance, closed by its thick veil of •'blue and purple and fine linen and scarlet," and ascended by a flight of twelve broad marble steps. In the middle of the inner court, in front of the entrance to the holy place, stood the altar of Burnt Sacrifice, a great structure of unhewn stones, 75 feet square, and 22 feet 6 inches high, whence the charcoal fire kept always burning sent up its thin blue wreath of smoke into the sky. A low marble wall 4 feet 6 inches high fenced in the portion of the court around the altar and the Temple to keep it clear for the ministering priests and Levites. The remainder of the inner court was the court of the Israelites ; the women's court was THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. 15 at the east end. A low wall surrounded the inner court a little way from the bottom of the stairs, and marked out the limits beyond which none but a son of Abraham might approach, but the remainder of the great outer court v/as open to Gentiles also. The outer haram area has now, — and possibly the outer court of the Temple formerly had, — a profusion of trees, olive, acacia, and cypress, assuming the den- sity of a grove under the eastern wall ; and beneath their shade the people of modern Jerusalem delight to rest. The contrast of the varied foliage with the stately white colonnades around the court, and the magnificent architectural group which rose in the midst, and the blue sky above, would add to the general beauty of the scene. If one of our cathedral closes with its ancient elms were surrounded b}^ a vast cloister it might give us some idea of the combination. This grand group of buildings was seen to the greatest ad- vantage when looked down upon from the opposite heights of Mount Olivet. Thence the site appeared no longer as a projecting neck of table-land, but as " Mount Moriah " rising with precipitous sides out of the depths of Kcdron. The eye could see over the outer wall into the court and catch glimpses of its cloister, could see the inner court on its raised platform, and the Temple itself rising out of the midst of the group and crowning the white marble substructures with its golden roofs and 1 6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. gates. Josephus^ says "it appeared to strangers, when they were at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow, for as to those parts of it that were not gilt they were exceeding white," while the plates of gold, which covered the whole vast front of the holy place and its roof, " at the first rising of the sun reflected back a very fiery splendour, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it turn their eyes away, just as they would have done from the sun's own rays." The Gospel history opens at the time of the even- ing sacrifice. The ritual of the evening worship con- sisted of three portions, the Burnt offering, the Vocal worship of the Levite choir, and the offering of the Incense in the Sanctuary. On the evening on which the history opens the Lamb had been slain, its blood sprinkled upon the altar, and its members laid upon the fire upon the altar, while the priests sounded the silver trumpets. The preparation for the offer- ing of the incense had been made. The people had been as usual cleared away from between the porch and the brazen altar, and the Levites re- moved from between the altar and the holy place, so that all might see the subsequent ceremony. The Levite choir had formed into semi-choirs on ' " Wars," book v., chap. 5. THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. 17 each side of the altar, the musicians bearing their instruments. Then the ceremony began as usual. One priest ascended the steps, and lifting the corner of the great veil entered the holy place to fetch away from the golden altar the ashes of the morning incense. Another took the golden censer which hung at the horn of the brazen altar and filled it with live charcoal from the pure consecrated fire maintained at the south- east corner of the altar ; and then he also entered within the veil to place the live coals on the altar of incense for the new offering. Meanwhile a Levite had brought out from the chamber of the Temple in which the incense was prepared and stored, a covered golden vessel containing a portion of it. The priest to whom the honour had fallen by lot of making the actual oftering took the allotted quantity on a golden salver, and entered within the veil. A moment after the Prefect of the Temple, who presided over the sacrifices, sounded the signal for the offering. The people could not see into the holy place, so as to witness the actual offering ; but all knew well what was behind the veil, and in what the ceremony of the offering consisted. In the Holy Place was the golden table on the right hand bearing the twelve loaves of the Shew bread. On the left the tall seven-branched golden candle- stick, with its seven lamps burning. In front, before the second veil which screened the entrance into the C i8 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Most Holy place, stood the golden altar of incense with the fire already burning on it. The priest's duty was to pour the incense from his salver upon the live coals, and as the fragrant cloud rose and spread through the house, to retire slowly backward with an obeisance to the Divine Presence secluded within the dark ^ mysterious solitude of the Most Holy Place. Then, having emerged again from behind the veil, his duty was to turn to the people, and standing there on the top of the flight of twelve steps, framed within the lofty golden doorway, with the veil of blue and fine linen and scarlet and purple forming a rich background to his simple white robes, to lift his hands, while the people knelt before him on the marble pavement, and to pronounce the solemn blessing which God had commanded : — " The Lord Bless you and Keep you. " The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. " The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." Then the Levite choir burst forth with the chanting of the evening Psalms, On this evening the priest entered the Holy place, and the people outside waited for his reappearance ; ^ The second Temple is said to have lacked the Shekinah, the luminous appearance over the Mercy Seat which in the first Temple formed the visible symbol of God's presence. THE ANGEL IN THE TEMPLE. 19 the Lcvite musicians handled their harps, and the people watched in breathless silence, ready to pro- strate themselves to receive the Blessing. But he did not come. It was his duty not to delay, lest the people should fear that he had been struck dead for some failure in his office. But minute after minute passed and he did not come. At length, after a time which seemed long to the anxious spectators, he came hastily forth with marks of agitation, and instead of giving the usual blessing, he made signs to them that he had seen a vision in the Holy Place, and had been struck speechless. Perhaps he gave the blessing in dumb show, with extended hands, and the service concluded as usual, and the worshippers dis- persed to wonder at the portent. This was what had happened within the veil. The priest to whom had fallen by lot to offer the incense was named Zacharias ; and his wife, who was also of the sacred family, was named Elizabeth. " They were both righteous before God, walking in all the com- mandments and ordinances of the law blameless. And they had no child, because that Elizabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years." When Zacharias had entered into the Holy Place to offer the incense, " there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord, standing on the right side of the altar of incense," and when Zacharias saw him he was troubled C 2 20 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and fear fell upon him. But the angel said unto him, "Fear not, Zacharias, for thy prayer is heard." We infer that the aged priest had not ceased to hope and pray for offspring, and perhaps at this holiest time, when his office permitted him to stand before the presence of God and minister before Him, he had taken the oppor- tunity again to prefer his request : — " Thy prayer is heard, and thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son." Then the angel went on to declare the great destiny which awaited the child. " Thou shalt call his name John, and thou shalt have joy and gladness, and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink ; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before Him in the spirit and power of Elias to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just ; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord:" i.e., he shall be a Nazarite, filled from his birth with the Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets of old ; a great religious reformer ; the forerunner of the Messiah predicted by Malachi in the last words of ancient prophecy.^ Thus the spirit of prophecy in 1 " Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord ; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers." — Malachi iv. 5, 6. THE ANGEL /iV THE TEMPLE. 21 breaking its long silence of 300 years, takes up in the first words of the new revelation the last words of the old, and binds them into a continuous revelation. Zacharias, troubled and awed by the unexpected apparition, with the natural slowness of age to believe in any departure from the common order, expressed his doubt : — " Whereby shall I know this ? For I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." And the angel answered in words which make us think that angels may feel some sense of offended dignity : — " I am Gabriel, that stand in the Presence of God," one of the most honoured and trusted of the servants of the Great King, " and I am sent (by God) to speak unto thee and to shew thee these glad tidings. And behold thou shalt be dumb and not able to speak until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season."^ And so it was that the priest emerged from behind the veil agitated and unable to speak the Evening Benediction. 1 It is said "of Abraham, when he was promised a son in his old age, that, being not weak in faith ... he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief" (Rom. iv. 19, 20). Zacharias was weak in faith and staggered at the promise, and asked for confirmation of it. 22 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. What a splendid opening of the Gospel ! What a striking scene of earthly magnificence and superna- tural glory ! The material magnificence of the chamber — with its walls and ceiling and furniture of gold, lighted by the mild radiance of the seven sacred lamps ; the sacredness of the place — divided only by a curtain from the mercy-seat on which dwelt the special presence of God ; the awe of the sudden apparition of the glorious angel, as if he had stepped suddenly from behind the second veil ; the aged priest in his white robe in the midst of this splendour and awe, receiving the first words of the new re- velation of God to man — the proclamation of the speedy advent of the long-promised Messiah, and the announcement that the son to be born to him out of due time should be the Herald of the Christ. The grey dawn had appeared in the sky. A brief paragraph tells us that as soon as the days of his official ministrations were accomplished Zacharias departed to his own house, somewhere in the hill country of Judea ; perhaps in the Levitical city of Hebron. " And after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and hid herself," and the know ledge of her state, " for five months, saying, thus hath the Lord dealt with me to take away my reproach among men." A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 23 CHAPTER 11. THE INCARNATION. |HE history opened amid the splendour and awe of the Temple of God in Jerusalem and the solemnities of the Evening Sacrifice. Its second scene, with dramatic contrast, is laid in a maiden's chamber in a cottage of a mountain village among the hills of Galilee. The part of Galilee, north of the great plain of Esdraelon, is a region of hills, for the most part green and wooded. One of their features is the upland valleys of fertile soil and pleasant climate which usually lie just below their highest summits. The valley of Nazareth is one of these upland hollows, surrounded by gently rounded heights. On one of its slopes, half concealed among groves and gardens, are the flat-roofed white houses of the modern vil- lage which represents the ancient Nazareth. It was an obscure village unnamed in the Old Testament, unnoted at the time of the beginning of the New Testament. In the spring time the sloping hill sides which 24 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. enclose the valley are green with grass and studded with the bright flowers which abound in the Syrian fields ; the fertile bottom of the valley is cultivated and covered with crops ; shaded by broad-leaved fig-trees, and olive-trees with twisted trunks and white under-leaves ; gay with scarlet blossoms of pomegranate. The flocks dot the hill sides, wild pigeons coo among the garden trees, and the pea- sants work cheerfully among their vines. The vil- lage well, outside the village, is frequented, morning and evening, by groups of women, who talk and laugh while they leisurely fill their tall water-jars of classic shape, then poise the elegant burden on their heads, and, with upright figure and elastic step, return through the village street to their humble homes. The country, the village, the vil- lage life, have changed but little in all these cen- turies. In the days of which the Gospel speaks, among these lowly villagers of Nazareth, not distinguished from the. rest, like them fulfilling all the duties of a humble household, fetching water from the well morning and evening like the rest, is a young maiden ; already at an early age, according to the custom of the East, betrothed to a kinsman of mature age, and like station, a carpenter in the village. The maiden, Mary, is pure and sweet, and thoughtful and gentle, with a latent grandeur of character which future THE INCARNATION. 25 events will develope, and a wondrous destiny, which was now about to be accomplished. Joseph was calm and good and kindly. They were peasants, and contented in their peasant life ; yet the care with which Jews preserved their genealogies left no doubt that they were descended from the ancient royal house of Judah, — they were " of the house and lineage of David." In all this preliminary description we have been taking pains to get our minds fully and strongly impressed with the historic truth and every-day reality of the scene and persons ; for the next step in the history carries us at once into the sphere of the supernatural, which, indeed, is always about us, though so seldom manifested. The Christian imagination of the Middle Ages, endeavouring to realize the scene of the Annuncia- tion, has almost uniformly placed Mary in the solitude of the chamber of her cottage home, and with a beautiful instinct of piety has represented her as kneeling in prayer, when the chamber is suddenly filled " with brightness and perfume," and the startled maiden looking up sees the " majestic grace" of the Archangel Gabriel standing before her, the same Divine messenger who lately had appeared to the aged priest Zacharias in the Holy Place of the Temple. 26 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. He thus addressed her : — " Hail, thou that art highly favoured : ^ the Lord is with thee : blessed art thou among women." She, amazed at the glorious apparition, and con- sidering in her mind the meaning of his words remained silent. The angel gently reassured her : — " Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour with God." And then he made the wondrous announce- ment which he had been sent from heaven to make to the shrinking maiden : — " Behold thou shalt conceive, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus, " He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest. " And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. " And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever. " And of his kingdom there shall be no end." We are told that every Hebrew woman for ages past had cherished in her heart the sublime hope that she perhaps might prove to be the mother or the ancestress of the Messiah ; much more must every woman of the house of David have indulged this hope ; and the hope must have been intensified at 1 Or "graciously accepted," marginai reading. THE INCARNATION. this period by the general expectation which pre- vailed that the time was ripe for the Messiah's coming. All who were " looking for redemption in Israel " were familiar with the ancient prophecies ^ relating to the Messiah, and the allusions to them in the mes- sage of Gabriel would be at once recognised by the pious and thoughtful Mary. So that the announce- ment would be intelligible to Mary, and the thought not altogether strange to her, that the hope of the Hebrew women was to be fulfilled to her; that she was the daughter of Eve, of Abraham, of David, whom God had chosen for this great destiny. But how could it be } It was probably some natural shrinking of maiden modesty which dictated the question : — " How shall this be, seeing that I know not a man." And the angel said : — " The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee ; there- fore that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." Moreover, for her assurance, and for a sign to her, he told her of the supernatural conception of Elizabeth. " Behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she hath also con- ' See note at the end of this chapter. 28 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. ceived a son in her old age ; for with God nothing shall be impossible." We saw in the case of the annunciation to Zacharias that it was possible that he had been praying for a child since the angel's opening words are, " Thy prayer is heard, and thou shalt have a son" ; so here again it is possible that Mary had been praying the common prayer of Hebrew women, for the angel's opening words are " Hail thou that art graciously ac- cepted." At least, if she had not prayed for it, this high destin)' was not thrust upon her, without re- ference to her willingness. It was offered to her, and she humbly and trustingly accepted it : — " Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word." "And the angel departed from her ;" the brightness of his presence faded into the dim light of the com- mon day, and the lonely chamber resumed its usual homely aspect. But what a tremendous result re- mained, to Mary and to the world : The Holy Spirit the Lord and Giver of all life, had created a new germ of human life within her. Mary was "with child of the Holy Ghost." "The Word was made flesh." God had become incarnate. The snow peak glowed with rosy light. THE INCARNATION. -9 NOTE. The following are some of the prophecies alluded to at page 27 :— "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come " (Gen. xlix. 10). " Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and pro- phecy, and to anoint the Most Holy. Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks " (Dan. ix. 24). The prophecy is probably dated from the seventh year of Artaxerxes, when he made his decree and wrote the letter to Ezra (vii. 11), from which period to the passion of our Lord was exactly 490 (seventy weeks of) years. "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots " (Is. xi. i). " I have made a covenant with my chosen, I have sworn unto David my servant, thy seed will I establish for ever, and build up thy throne to all generations " (Ps. Ixxxix. 3, 4). " Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper "' (Jer. xxiii. 5). " The Lord hath sworn unto David, he will not turn from it ; of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne " (Ps. cxxxii. 11). " Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his I\Ies- siah. . . . Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. 30 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. I will declare the decree : Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession " (Ps. ii. i-6). " Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel," God with us (Is. vii. 14). " Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his govern- ment and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of . David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it> with judgment and with justice, from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this" (Is. ix. 6, 7). A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER III. THE VISITATION. HE Angel had given Mary a sign, viz. the conception of her cousin Elizabeth. She had not previously known of it, for they lived far apart, lOO miles or more, Mary at Nazareth, Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea, probably at or near the Levitical city of Hebron. Moreover, Elizabeth had " hid herself," and waited in silence till she saw the event. The supernatural maternity of Elizabeth was vouchsafed to Mary as a sign to assure her of her own miraculous conception. It was a duty not to refuse — like Ahaz — the offered confirma- tion of her faith. Accordingly " she arose and went into the hill country of Judea with haste, and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth." " And it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost, and she spake out with a loud voice:" — i\Iary did not first tell her the honour bestowed upon herself; Elizabeth knew it by revelation, and was the first to speak of it : — " She spake out with a j2 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. loud voice," i.e., with the inspired energy and in the exalted language of a prophetess : — " Blessed art thou among women, And blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me That the mother of my Lord should come to me, For lo ! as soon as thy salutation sounded in mine ears, The babe leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed, For there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord." This inspired Canticle of Elizabeth's is not so familiar to us as the other Evangelical Canticles, and its significance is often overlooked. The Angel had given Mary a sign, and in obedience to the implied direction she goes in haste to seek this confirmation of the wonderful announcement which had been made to herself. In the fact of Elizabeth's maternity she finds the sign she sought. She receives, moreover, the additional confirmations of Elizabeth's inspired knowledge of her own miraculous conception, and of her prophetic assurance : — " Blessed is she that believed, " For there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord." " Blessed is she that believed ;" so the fulfilment of the proffered honour had been dependent upon Mary's faith in the word of God, and her resignation to His will. Not indeed that the birth of the Messiah was THE VISITATION. 33 dependent on Mary's faith, but His birth of her was. Had she failed in faith and willingness, another would doubtless have been chosen — or rather God chose one v/ho, he foresaw, would not fail, — but Mary's faith and holiness were the causes why this blessedness fell upon her and not upon another. " Blessed art thou among women." We know that some of the most lamentable perversions of the faith have been with respect to the Virgin Mary. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, — i.e., the theory that she was herself conceived free from the taint of the hereditary sinfulness of Adam's fallen race, — is a part of that tissue of Mediaeval poetical fancies which sought to exalt the mother of our Lord ; another of these opinions was her assumption, — i.e., that her body did not see corruption, but was " assumed" taken up to heaven, and that there she was received by her divine Son, and crowned Queen of Heaven ; that she exer- cises a prevalent, almost authoritative, interest with her Son, and is to be sought as a mediatress by those who fear to approach Jesus ; in short, that she holds an intermediate nature and position between the ordinary Saints and the Incarnate Lord, and is her- self an object of worship and prayer. But it would be a very vulgar error, if, in refusing our assent to these exaggerations of the character and position of the Virgin, we were to run to the other extreme, and refuse to award to her her rightful D 34 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. position in the estimation of wise, thoughtful, and pious minds. God chooses instruments fit for his purposes ; and we cannot doubt that for this crowning- honour of womanhood He chose one whose holiness of character marked her out for such a destiny. There is no disputing that the mystery of the Incar- nation places the Virgin Mother in a position which is unique and transcendent, and which commands our reverent interest. We cannot refuse to recognise the significance of the words of Gabriel, " Hail, thou that art highly favoured : blessed art thou among women" ; echoed by the inspired canticle of Elizabeth, " Blessed art thou among women," and, " blessed is she that believed " ; accepted by Mary in her inspired utter- ance, "All generations shall call me blessed, for He that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is His Name." The attitude of mind which it is right to entertain towards the Blessed Virgin Mother seems to be indi- cated in the words of Elizabeth, " Whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me.'" In all worldly respects Elizabeth was the superior ; one the wife of a priest, that is of the aristocratic caste of the Jewish nation, the other a peasant woman ; one an elderly matron, the other a young unmarried girl. True, they were cousins, and this tie, if it diminished the social distance between them, would only lead to a more kindly familiarity on the THE VISITATION. 35 part of her who possessed the superior natural and social advantages ; but it is Elizabeth who says in the tone of one who receives the distinguished honour and unexpected condescension of a visit from one greatly superior, " Whence is this to me ? To what do I owe this honour ?" And the ground of this feeling is that Mary is " the Mother of my Lord." We are expressly told that Elizabeth spoke under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and therefore we conclude that this feeling in her was a legitimate and laudable feeling. To any one disposed to exaggerate this feeling unduly, the tendency ought at once to find its correction in the remarkable words of our Lord to the woman who cried to him, with natural womanly feeling, " Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the breasts which thou hast sucked." But he said, " Yea rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it " (Luke xi. 27, 28). When Mary set out in haste to seek the sign of the wonderful announcement which had been made to her, she told no one what had happened, " she kept these things in heart." But now the sign is fulfilled, and the angelic message abundantly confirmed by Elizabeth's inspired words, and her heart is .set at rest. And thereupon the spirit of inspiration falls upon her also, and in the like prophetic strain she D 2 36 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. lifts up her voice and praises God in the words of the Magnificat : — " My soul dolh magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour, For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden, For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For He that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is His name. And His mercy is on them that fear Him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with His arm ; He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart ; He hath put down the m.ighty from their seats, And exalted them of low degree ; He hath filled the hungry with good things. And the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath holpen His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy. As He spake to our Fathers, to Abraham, and his seed for ever." ' ^ Comparing this with the song of Hannah, in which she gave utterance to her thankfulness to God for the birth of Samuel, we find a remarkable similarity of thought between them. There is also a certain similarity in tone and ex- pression between Mary's canticle and some of the Psalms, e.g, the 98th, the " Sing unto the Lord," which is put in the Prayer-book as its alternative canticle. This inspired hymn of praise affords such fitting expression to the thankfulness of Christ's Church for the Incarnation, which has given the divine nature to the human nature, and taken up the human nature into the divine, and made us one body with Christ, that we take the words out of Mary's mouth and use them, with such THE VISITATION. 37 We men, who write books and preach sermons, usually look at things from our own stand -point, and write and preach as men to men, dealing with those questions and taking those views of matters which are interesting to us men. The sacred history does not forget that half mankind are women, and often appears to be specially address- ing them ; dealing with such subjects — and treating them from such points of view — as are specially in- teresting to them. This whole Gospel of the child- hood— of equal importance to us all — seems espe- cially addressed to women ; the maiden purity of the Jewish girl, the presentation to her mind of the thought of maternity, the incidents of the Visitation of Elizabeth, the mutual congratulations of the two holy women, seem to belong to the regions of thought and feeling into which women only can fully enter.^ Such, then, is the simple, beautiful history of the Incarnation of the Son of God ; thus it was that "the Word was made Flesh." silently-understood modifications of meaning as are needed, as the Church's daily thanksgiving for the Incarnation of the Son of God — for the mystery of the Word made Flesh. ^ When we call to mind that Luke professes to have com- piled his history from the testimony of those who had personal knowledge of the events, we see at once the high probability that all this "Gospel of the Childhood" is Mary's own nar- rative of the events which she had " kept " and " pondered in her heart" (Luke ii. 19 and 51). 38 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. It may be of advantage to direct attention here to one or two points which, in the subsequent history, we shall find of the utmost importance. The first is this, it was the Divine Power, the power of the Lord and Life Giver, which created in the womb of the Virgin the germ of that humanity, which, taking substance from her, grew into a true human child, who was in due time born in Bethlehem. The reason of this miraculous conception was, we suppose, to estop the descent of the hereditary taint ; for Adam's fallen race are naturally born in sin, and children of wrath (Ps. li. 5 ; Eph. ii. 3) " born in sin," i.e., inherit a nature which is full of germs of evil, and which, if left to develope without interference, would grow up into a sinful life ; " children of wrath " i.e., seeing the necessary antagonism between good and evil, such an evil creature must necessarily be in antagonism to God and an object of aversion to Him. Had the son of Mary been the child of her marriage with Joseph, he would have inherited this hereditary defect and fault. But it was necessary that the sacrifice for the sin of mankind should himself be sinless, free from hereditary taint as well as guiltless of actual sin. Therefore was Jesus thus miraculously conceived by a direct exercise of the creative power of the Holy Ghost, the Lord, and Life Giver. But the Holy Being which was thus miraculously THE VISITATION. 39 conceived in her, took substance of the Virgin Mother, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone ; He was " the fruit of her womb " ; His human nature was derived from her human nature ; so that He was truly man, as truly as she was woman, lineally descended from the first man ; inheriting Adam's manhood in all that constitutes true manhood, only not inheriting that taint, or defect, or fault, which came in upon our manhood afterwards, and which is no more a part of true human nature than disease is a part of life. Note, again, as a truth of the highest consequence, that from the moment of her conception He was not only man, but God also. "The flesh and the con- junction of the flesh with God began both at one instant," says Hooker (" Eccl. Pol.," bk. ix., 1. 3-5). God the Son took to Himself our human nature of the substance of the Virgin Mary ; " the Word was made flesh." Note again, that the humanity which he took to himself was perfect human nature, or human nature in its perfection. As the first unfallen Adam pos- sessed each faculty perfect in itself, — perfect reason, perfect affections, perfect will, and all in perfectly harmonious proportion, — so the second Adam took upon Him our whole nature, perfect in all its powers- and faculties, and in their harmonious proportion and just equipoise. 40 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Yet again, though truly man, our Lord stands above all other men, on a different platform of being. A man is truly animal, but the immortal spirit within him puts him far above all other animals ; so Jesus is truly man, but the deity within him puts him far above all other men. There are many men; there is but one Christ. Mary remained with her cousin Elizabeth about three months, and then returned to her home in Nazareth. Then it became known that she was with child ; and " then Joseph, her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary, thy wife ; for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name jESUS, for he shall save his people from their sins " (Matt. i. 19.). Self-respect required that he should put her away ; pity led him to do it privately, and not to bring her to public shame ; the heavenly message satisfied his doubts at once, and he at once obeyed the heavenly command, took the Virgin Mother under the shelter of his name and home, and accepted the charge of the Holy Child. It was not God's design that the mystery of the THE VISITATION. 41 Virgin-birth should immediately be made known to men ; thus, therefore, He protects the reputation of the Virgin Mother and her child. Ignatius (the disciple of St. John) says that thus also God con- cealed from Satan the fact that " the Virgin had con- ceived, and born a son," and so protected him from any special assaults of Satan until the time came for him to enter upon the Messiahship, and to encounter in the wilderness the special assault of the great enemy of mankind. Very little is said of Joseph in the Gospels, — his dream and conduct on this occasion ; his presence at the purification, when he, as well as Mary, " mar- velled at those things which were spoken of" Jesus; his second dream, and consequent flight into Egypt with the Mother and Child ; a third dream, which led him to return from Egypt; and yet a fourth dream, directing him to take up his residence at Nazareth ; his custom of going up to Jerusalem with Mary every year at the feast of the Passover; his visit thither when Jesus was twelve years old ; these are the only occasions on which he is an actor, and then always a silent actor, in the sacred history ; but we must not overlook the importance of his position in the holy family, as its head, the Guardian of the holy Child- hood. The Scripture tells U5 he was "a just man," that is, an upright, good man ; the frequent revelations given 42 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. him indicate that he was especially under the Divine guidance ; and his prompt and exact obedience to these revelations is evidence of his faith and piety. His intentions towards Mary on the present occasion shew that he was a considerate and charitable man. The way in which the Evangelist associates him with Mary in their marvelling at the things which were spoken at the purification, and the way in which Mary associates him with herself in their anxiety when they could not find Jesus on the return from his first Passover, indicate his entire sympathy with Mary in the care of the Child, and the earnestness with which he fulfilled his duty as His guardian. God chooses agents qualified for the work they have to do. We seem to see in these traits of Joseph's conduct the outlines of a character, wise, holy, calm, gentle, retiring, full of faith in God and obedience to God ; one of those men, full of calm wisdom and quiet power, who do nothing striking, to be talked about, but who fulfil quietly and well all the duties of their life. The angel spoke to Mary of her child as the Mes- siah, the son of David, the founder of the Universal and Lasting Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace : — " The Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no end." He speaks to Joseph of the other and deeper THE VISITATION. 43 aspect of His work : — " He shall save His people from their sins." We shall find, now one now another, of these two aspects of the work of the Christ con- tinually brought forward throughout the Gospels, — the spiritual work of Christ in the souls of men, and the external organisation of the heavenly kingdom ; and the two must both be kept in view, in order to obtain a complete conception of the work of Christ. 44 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER IV. " IT CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DAYS.' T came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed " (Luke ii. i). Preachers and painters have set the Nativity before our minds surrounded by a halo of religious sentiment through whose golden haze the event sometimes perhaps assumes an appearance of un- reality. It is right that we should view the event with the eye of faith in all its divine grandeur and infinite importance ; but first let us see clearly with the eye of reason that it was a real event; and mark — as the sentence above quoted suggests — how and where and when it fits in with the course of the world's history. We shall find it in the end very useful to our main object, if we take a little pains at the outset to obtain a clear summary view of the course of Jewish history from the Captivity down to the period of the be- ginning of the Gospel narrative. Such a review soon makes us recognise what a prominent place Daniel's prophecy of the course of history (Dan. ii. 31) must " IT CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DA VS." 45 have held in the minds of the Jewish people " in those days " which we are considering ; for its earlier portions sketch the period from the Captivity to the period at which they had arrived, and there were reasons for believing that the remaining portion of the prophecy was about to enter upon its fulfilment. The great image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream had typified, according to Daniel's interpretation, four great mo- narchies, succeeding each the other on the stage of history; and with these four monarchies the Jews had been brought into intimate political relations. The kings of Assyria put an end to the kingdom of Israel, and carried the Israelites captive, " and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes" (2 Kings xvii. 6), i.e. in the fertile district watered by the (modern) Khabour, the northern part of Mesopotamia. And Nebuchad- nezzar put an end to the kingdom of Judah, and car- ried the Jews captive to Babylon. Thus the Assyro- Babylonian monarchy was made the instrument of God's chastisement of his people for their sins. When Babylon, " the head of Gold," had been suc- ceeded by the Persian monarchy, " the silver king- dom," Cyrus (B.C. 536) gave the people leave to re- turn to their own land and rebuild their city and Temple. Only a small proportion of the people had a sufficiently strong feeling of patriotism and religion to abandon the homes in which they had been born, A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and the occupations in which they had grown into prosperity in the fertile plains about the Tigris and Euphrates, to undertake the task of reclaiming the desolated hills of Judea and rebuilding the city and Temple out of their ruins. The rest of the people remained in the land of their captivity, a numerous and prosperous people, enjoying a large amount of self-government under a prince of the house of David, to whom they gave the expressive title of " Prince of the Captivity." The difficulties which the returned exiles encoun- tered in the reconstruction of their city and Temple are told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. What we have especially to notice here is that Ezra revived in the new commonwealth of Israel the original theocratic constitution. Restored Israel was a Church, not a Monarchy. The high priest was its chief magis- trate, the Law of Moses its code. It was virtually independent, under the protection and patronage of the Persian monarchy. After 250 years' duration the Persian monarchy gave place to the Grecian, " the kingdom of brass." Alexander (B.C. 306) visited Jerusalem, which opened her gates to him, and the conqueror left to the Jewish commonwealth its independence, and took it under his protection. The Macedonian conquests broke up the political constitutions of the ancient civilisations of the East "/r CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DAYS." 47 and of Egypt, and introduced a new civilisation in their place. Greek cities were built on a scale of great architectural magnificence ; the Greek language became the universal medium of literature and of commercial intercourse ; Greek manners were gene- rally adopted by the better classes of the Eastern races ; and Greek philosophy undermined the ancient Eastern religions, and produced a general tone of scepticism. In the division of the Greek conquests which fol- lowed on the death of Alexander, Judea became the frontier country between the rival kingdoms of Syria and Egypt. For the most part it retained its self- government, paying a tribute to the Antiochus of Syria or the Ptolemy of Egypt, as each alternately gained the superiority ; and, on the whole, the Jewish nation flourished under the Greek rule. For a time the strong religious feeling of the Jews resisted the inroad of Greek manners. Antiochus Epiphanes aimed at the more complete incorporation of Judea into his dominion. He aided Joshua to supplant his brother Onias " the Good " in the high priesthood, and the traitor proceeded to use his influence to in- duce the people to abandon their national pecu- liarities, and to adopt Greek manners. Soon after- wards Antiochus seized the pretext of some civil commotions to march upon Jerusalem, and occupy it as a conqueror. He pillaged the Temple of its 48 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. sacred vessels and treasures, carried off spoil and captives, and left Philip, a Phrygian, as governor of the city. A few years later he again occupied the city, pillaged it, destroyed its walls, and dedicated the Temple to Zeus Olympius, to whom he set up an altar upon the great brazen altar of burnt sacri- fice. He caused heathen altars to be set up through- out the country, and proceeded to compel the Jews, by torture and death, to abandon their religion and adopt that of their conqueror. This last outrage led to the revolt of the Maccabees and the war of independence, which, " if less famous, is not less glorious than any of those in which a {qw brave men have successfully maintained the cause of freedom or religion against overpowering might." ^ The revolt was ultimately successful. Judea secured its entire independence, and the family of its liberators (the Asmonean family) obtained, as the reward of their patriotism, the hereditary high priest- hood, and the supreme authority. The priest-kings of this race continued for a cen- tury, till a contest between Hyrcanus and his brother, Aristobulus, who had driven Hyrcanus away, and seized the priesthood, offered a pretext for foreign intervention. The Roman republic, the fourth great power, " the 1 " Bible Diet." : Art. Maccabees. "/r CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DAYS." 49 iron kingdom," had already succeeded to the Greek, and was extending its sovereignty over the East. Hyrcanus sought the aid of the Romans. Pompey took Jerusalem by force of arms (A.D. 6^) and restored Hyrcanus ; but he reduced the area of his dominions, gave freedom to many cities, placing them under the prefect of Syria, and forbade Hyrcanus to wear the diadem, the token of independent sove- reignty, on his high priestly tiara, ie. he reduced Judea to the position of a dependent state. In 47 B.C. Julius Cresar confirmed the government to Hyrcanus, with the title of " Ethnarch "; but he made Antipater the Idumean, who had been Hyrcanus's chief minister. Procurator, ie. the representative of the Roman sovereignty, a kind of " Political Resi- dent" at the court of Hyrcanus; and Antipater made his eldest son, Phasaelis, governor of Judea, and Herod, his younger son, at fifteen years old, governor of Galilee, to which, shortly afterwards, the government of Ccele Syria was added. The relations between the higli priest and the procurator were strengthened by the betrothal of Hyrcanus's grand- daughter, the beautiful Mariamne, to the noble youth, Herod, who had already given evidence of a great character. When Antony came to Syria in 41 B.C. he conferred on Phasaelis and Herod (Antipater, their father, having been recently slain) the title of " Tetrarch." E 50 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Antigonus, the son of the Aristobulus above mentioned, maintained his claim to succeed to his father's usurped dignity. He obtained help from the Parthians, and with their aid obtained possession of the person of his uncle Hyrcanus, mutilated him by cutting off his ears, and so made him incapable, as a blemished person, of exercising the office of high priest ; he killed Phasaelis, and reduced Herod to the necessity of a hasty flight. Herod fled to Rome, and besought the interest of Antony and Caesar, his friends and patrons, to solicit of the Senate the appointment of Aristobulus, the son of Hyrcanus and brother of Mariamne, to the high priesthood. The Senate instead, at the instance of his powerful patrons, conferred on Herod the govern- ment of Judea, with the title of " King." It was, how- ever, three years before Herod, with the aid of Roman arms, succeeded in driving Antigonus out of Jeru- salem. During the siege Herod married Mariamne. When seated in Jerusalem he sent for Hyrcanus, and treated him with great outward respect, affecting to regard him as co-sovereign ; but he raised an obscure priest from Babylon, Ananelus, to the dignity of high priest. Soon after, indeed, he deposed Ananelus and raised Aristobulus to the dignity which his an- cestors had held for so many generations ; but shortly he had the unhappy youth secretly mur- dered. Before long he had Hyrcanus put to death, "/r CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DA YSP 51 and then, in a fit of jealousy, Mariamne, and took care ever after to exclude the Asmonean family from a position so dangerous to his own security. Herod was a man of noble presence, an able statesman, a successful administrator, an ambitious prince, in favour with the emperor. Josephus says (Antiq. xv. 10, 3), whereas there were but two men who governed the Roman empire, first Caesar, then Agrippa, who was his principal favourite ; Caesar esteemed Herod next to Agrippa, and Agrippa had no greater friend than Herod except Caesar. He built up a kingdom which in its extent and prosperity recalled the traditional splendour of Solomon. Lavish in his expenditure and magnificent in his tastes, he strengthened and beautified his capital. He built the strong castle of Antonia on the north of the Temple, and a palace-fortress in the upper city, and otherwise strengthened the city with forts and adorned it with public buildings. Especially he rebuilt the Temple with such magnificence as to make it one of the wonders of the world. But though Herod was by hereditary profession a Jew, and though he used the fanatical attachment of the Jews to their religion as an engine of state, he really shared the Roman toleration of, and practical disbelief in, all religions. He affected Roman manners, and sent several of his sons to Rome, where they lived in great friendship and intimacy with the E 2 52 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. emperor and the principal men of Rome (Josephus, Antiq. xv. lo, i). He built a theatre in Jerusalem, and an amphi- theatre outside the city, in which he instituted quinquennial games with combats of gladiators in honour of Caesar. He built a temple of Jupiter in his new town of Caesarea by the sea, and another temple in the city of Sebaste (Samaria) which he strongly fortified. Besides building several other cities, palaces, and public works in his own dominions, his magnificence was displayed in costly works in other places both in Syria and In Greece ; e.g., he built a street a mile long, adorned with colonnades as an entrance into the city of Antioch, and gave revenues for the revival of the splendour of the Olympian games there; he rebuilt the temple of Apollo at Rhodes, and gave the citizens a large sum for the repair of their fleet. By the success and splendour of his reign, by the magnificence of his public works, and by the estima- tion in which he was held by his contemporaries, he merited the title, which history has bestowed upon him, of " the Great." But he was a man of strong and violent passions, suspicious, jealous, unscrupulous, tyrannical, and cruel. He was as unhappy in his domestic relations as he was fortunate in public affairs. The sections of his family intrigued against one another and inflamed his mind with suspicions, "/r CAME TO PASS IN THOSE DA F5." 53 under whose influence, at various times, he put to death his favourite wife Mariamne, and three of his sons, and many others of those who were nearest to him. It was in the seventieth year of his age and thirty- fourth^ of his reign — when sickness had enfeebled him, and domestic treasons and domestic tragedies had embittered his life ; when his successful, magnificent, tyrannical, bloodstained reign was drawing to its close — that the Gospel history begins. It was the 26th year of the reign of Augustus, one of the great ages of the world's history and one better known to us than any other period of ancient history, an age of great Statesmen, and Philosophers and Poets. "These things were not done in a corner," said Paul at the tribunal of Fcstus. The Roman arms had thrown the world wide open, and the light of Greek philosophy and Roman common sense had lighted it up, and a spirit of universal incredulity searched everything through and through. " Those " were " the days " in which the decree went forth from Caesar Augustus " that all the world should be taxed," i.e., that a census of the Roman world should be taken ; and Herod, in compliance with the wish of his imperial patron, ordered such a census to be made in his kingdom. ^ Thirty-seventh from his nomination to the kingdom. 54 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. In Italy the people would be numbered naturally by their towns and villages ; but it was in accordance with ancient Jewish usage that a census of the people should be taken by their tribes and families. Therefore all the people were ordered for the pur- poses of this census to go to the place from which their family had sprung, and so it came to pass that " Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child " (Luke ii. 49). A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 55 CHAPTER V. THE NATIVITY. ALF A DOZEN miles south of Jerusalem, situated on the crest of a long limestone hill, was the little city of Bethlehem, dear to Israel as the birth-place of King David, dearer to the true Israel as the birth-place of a greater than he. The descendants of the once royal house were scat- tered far and wide. Since the Captivity the high- priests had been the rulers of the nation — until the Romans came and conquered the land, and placed Herod over it— and the ancient royal house had fallen into obscurity and decay. Of the men and women, who came up to Bethlehem because they were of the house and lineage of David, some were from the neighbouring fields and farms, and some from the distant hills of Galilee ; some, perhaps, men of wealth and consideration, some peasants and artisans ; some, doubtless, had friends in the town who housed them hospitably, and some crowded the caravanserai out- side the city walls. This caravanserai was connected with the history of David. When the king was returning to Jeru- 56 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. salem after the defeat of Absalom's rebellion, he invited Barzillai, the old Gileadite chieftain who had so hospitably entertained him in his temporary- exile, to accompany him to Jerusalem, and attach himself to his court, that he might return his hospitality. Barzillai declined on the ground of his advanced age, but substituted his son Chimham for himself. It would seem that David gave Chimham lands at Bethlehem out of his patrimonial estate ; and that Chimham, in the princely spirit of his father, built on this land a caravanserai for the public accommodation, — it is one of the ordinary works of Eastern charitable munificence ; and this " Khan of Chimham " became well known as the place where travellers were accustomed to assemble, and form themselves into caravans for mutual protection on the hazardous journey down to Egypt. To this historical khan strangers had been flocking all day, till all the chambers ranged round its court were filled, and the court itself crowded with the horses and mules and asses of the travellers. In the evening of the day a middle-aged man came, accompanied by his youthful wife, who approached the time of her confinement. There was no room for them in the khan ; but beside the khan, in the hill-side, was one of the innumerable caves which honey-combed the limestone hills of Judea, used as a stable ; here the late comers found a rude shelter ; THE NATIVITY. -^y and here during the night, under circumstances of such discomfort, the young wife was delivered of a son, whom she wrapped in swaddling-clothes, and cradled in a hollow of the rock out of which the cattle ate their provender. The sun had risen above the eastern hills! This birth takes its place as a plain historical fact in the record of the world's doings : — Augustus, perhaps, was supping with Maecenas and Horace, in Rome ; Herod was, perhaps, in his palace-fortress of Macherus, only a ^ew miles off across the Judaean hills, when this child was born in the grotto-stable adjoining the khan of Chimham, at Bethlehem. The name of the new-born child was inscribed next day in the census roll, among the children of the house of David ; and Justin Martyr, one hundred years afterwards, appealed to the original documents of the census, still preserved among the archives of Rome. " The Virgin and Child ! " How many myriads of representations of the subject Art has given to the world ! There is a perennial human attraction in the sight of a mother and her child which touches every heart ; there is a mystery of nature in this type of reproduction — of life reproducing itself in another life, which has an undying interest. There is a special natural attraction, too, in this mother and child ; for this is the first and only perfect human 58 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. babe the world has seen. Adam and Eve were created in maturity. When Eve looked upon the firstborn cradled in her lap, she looked upon the exiled heir of Paradise, whose sole inheritance was a fallen nature. This Babe, conceived by miracle and born of a Virgin, is the one only human babe which has exhibited fully and without imperfection the characteristics of the race, the divine ideal of a human child. But it is the divine mystery in the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child which has made this group the subject which Art has more frequently repro- duced than any other. And it has had the effect of teaching vividly the great foundation-truth of religion, that the " Word was made flesh," that the Son of God was born of a woman. Only let us bear in mind, in trying to paint the picture to our mind's eye, that it is a true human child lying on the lap of his mother. We must not imagine any luminous glory, like that of Moses when he came down from the Mount, beaming from his infant person ; we must not suppose that there is really any divine depth in his limpid eyes. He is God as well as man, but the Godhead is, here as always, invisible ; all which is visible is man. And yet the Nativity of the Divine Child was not without its external signs and super- natural indications to call the attention of the world to the Babe of Bethlehem. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. SO CHAPTER VI. ' THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. HERE were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo ! the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid." " And the angel said unto them," as he had done to Zachariah and to Mary, " Fear not," " For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." And he gave to them a sign, as he had previously given to Zachariah and to Mary, " This shall be a sign unto you, ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling-clothes, lying in a manger." And when the angel had proclaimed his gospel, there suddenly flashed upon the sight of the shep- herds " a multitude of the heavenly host," the choir attendant upon the heavenly choragus, who burst forth into an anthem of praise : — " Glory to God in 6o A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men." ^ The angels did not fade again into the darkness, but ascended to heaven in the sight of the wondering shepherds. And when the angelic vision had receded out of sight, the shepherds said to one another, " Let us go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger." And when they had seen it, and so the message was verified by the sign, then "they made known abroad " what had happened to them, the vision of angels, and the good tidings proclaimed from heaven, that this Babe was the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord. And all they that heard it, including, no doubt, many of the strangers " of the house and lineage of David," who were gathered for the occasion at Beth- lehem, "wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds." And they returned to their flock, " glorifying and praising God for all the things ^ It may be well to state at once that the Authorized Version of the Gospels has been adhered to throughout this work. The Revised Version has not yet been received by the Church, neither have its proposed alterations in the Greek and in the Translation yet received the general adhesion of scholars. See articles in the Quarterly Review ,iox 1881 and 18S2; and pamphlets by the Bishop of Derry and Bishop Wordsworth of St. Andrews. THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. 6r which they had heard, and seen, as it was told unto them." "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." We wonder, perhaps, why this angelic vision and this great announcement came to two or three humble shepherds, and not to Augustus in Rome, or to Herod in Jerusalem. But at least we see that it is in accordance with the fact that Jesus was not born in the house of the Caesars on the Palatine Mount, or in Herod's palace at Jerusalem, but in a stable in Bethlehem ; it is in harmony with our Lord's utterance, " I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes ; even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." These shepherds were the chosen representatives of Israel, they were the firstfruits of the chosen people who recognised the Lord. If we knew who — or rather what — they were, we should, perhaps, recognize the propriety of the announcement to them ; for God does not act capriciously, — there is a reason of infinite wisdom for all He does. There is a good Mediaeval story that two ascetic devotees in a nunnery, who were beginning to feel some motions of spiritual pride, were told in a dream that there were in the city two holier women than they. And when they sought the house indicated to them in their 62 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. dream they found two homely women, who had hus- bands and children, and who were so fulfilling the ordinary duties of their lowly life that they were more devout than the devotees. If we knew what these shepherds of Bethlehem were, we might find them men who knew as well as the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem that Christ should be born at Bethlehem, and who had a longing as great as Simeon's to see His advent, and who in their night- watch were accustomed to talk of, and pray for, and expect His coming; and we might recognise it as the reward of faith and prayer, that they were chosen to be the first of all Israel to hear the Gospel, and to see the Lord. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 63 CHAPTER VII. THE CIRCUMCISION. I HEN God called Abraham out of the rest of mankind and brought him into relations of special nearness to Himself, in a New- Covenant, He gave him an outward sign (the sign of circumcision), by which he and all his posterity, — the heirs of the promises, — should be admitted into this new covenant : — " I w^ll establish My covenant between Me and thee, and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee. . , . Every man-child among you shall be circumcised, and ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt Me and you" (Gen. xvii. 7, 10, 11). The peculiar nature of the rite had probably an allusion lO the doctrine of " original sin," i. e. the doctrine that every child, naturally descended from Adam, has inherited from him a nature corrupted through sin ; and it signified the remission of the guilt attaching to this condition of hereditary sinful- ness ; and admission into the special covenant of 64 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. grace : — " being by nature born in sin and children of wrath, they were hereby made children of grace." The taint of Adam's sin had not been inherited by our Blessed Lord owing to the miraculous nature ot His incarnation ; the angel spoke of "that Holy Thing that shall be born of thee " ; and St. John declares that " in Him is no sin " ; and St. Paul, that he is " holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners " (Heb. vii. 26). Why, then, should he be circumcised ? Be- cause, being a child of Abraham, born under the law, and sent to fulfil the law, it was clearly fitting that he should enter into the covenant which God had made with Abraham and his seed, and the only way to enter into it was through the appointed rite : so he was obedient to the law in this its initiatory obligation. And though sinless by nature, as sinless afterwards in life, yet he came to be made " sin for us, who knew no sin" (2 Cor. v. 21), and so he humbled Himself to be "numbered among the trans- gressors." Accordingly, "when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb" (Luke ii. 21). It was a domestic rite, performed, not at the temple, but at home ; not by a priest, but by the father, or some friend of the family. As it was our Blessed Lord's first obedience to the law for man, so it was THE CIRCUMCISION. his first suffering, and these were the first drops of His precious blood shed, on behalf of man. The rite was usually accompanied by the giving of a name to the child. And our Lord was named Jesus in obedience to the divine direction given first to Mary, " thou shalt call his name Jesus " (Luke i. 31), and afterwards to Joseph, "thou shalt call his name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins" (Matt. i. 21). The custom of giving a name to a child is coeval with the human race, and names are all, more or less intentionally, significant. God called the first man Adam — Earth, because he was made of the dust of the ground. And Adam called his wife's name Eve — Life-giving, because she was the mother of all living. And Eve called her first-born Cain — Acquisition, for she said, " I have gotten a man from the Lord," the idea is more definitely expressed, perhaps, in the medidcval name, Deus-dedit. Lamech called his son Noah — Consolation, saying, " This same shall com- fort us." God had previously announced the supernatural births of Isaac and of John the Baptist, and in both cases had dictated a name at the time of the an- nouncement. And now the name dictated by God at the annunciation is given to the Divine Child, the name which announces his quality, Jesus — F 66 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Saviour, "because he shall save his people from their sins." Let us not fail to observe the fulness of the inter- pretation of the Saviour's name thus given us from heaven, Jesus, " because he shall save his people from their sins." It defines the mode of salvation. He shall save his people out of the miseries of this world into the happiness of heaven by saving them from their sins. And as there is no other Saviour than He, so there is no other salvation than this. It is sin which is the cause of ruin and misery and death, and the effects can only be removed by the removal of the cause. To take all men such as ^'^^-' -n-e, and translate them to heaven, would only be -^ x.iLioduce sin and misery into the abodes of the blessed. To place a single sinner as he is among the blessed in heaven would not be to save him. The evil is in the man himself, not merely in his surroundings. The cause of man's infelicity is sin. The only effectual remedy for his miserable condition, is not to alter his surroundings merely, but to alter himself, to eliminate sin out of his nature. Joshua could only save his people from the wilder- ness, and plant them in the Promised Land, where they took their sins with them ; and consequently were miserable, and perished in Canaan as their fathers did in the wilderness. Our Jesus saves his THE CIRCUMCISION. 67 people from their sins, and even while they remain in the wilderness of this world they are already saved/ they have eternal life/ their conversation is in heaven ;'' and when He brings them into the heavenly Canaan they live a perfectly sinless, and , therefore a perfectly noble and blissful life for ever. * I Cor. i. 18. " John vi. 54. ' Phil. iii. 20. F 2 68 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER VIII. THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. FTER the birth of our Lord, the holy family, doubtless, remained in Bethlehem till it was the time to go up to Jerusalem to fulfil the requirements of the law. For it was commanded in the law (Lev. xii.), that when a woman had given birth to a child, she should, at the end of forty days for a male-child, and of eighty days for a female child, " bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin-offering, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest ; who shall offer it before the Lord, and make an atonement for her. And if she be not able," by reason of poverty, " to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtle-doves, or two young pigeons, the one for the burnt-offering, and the other for a sin-offering ; and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean." It is a remarkable rite — that a woman after childbirth, should have to offer a burnt- offering and sin-offering, and have an atonement made for her, in the same way as for one who had THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 69 committed a sin. It seems to have been to teach, over and over again, with respect to every child born into the world, that Adam's sinful nature descended to every one of his posterity, so that in every birth the mother brought a sinful being into the world. So, when the days of her purification were accom- plished, Mary came up to Jerusalem, bringing the offering of the poor — the two turtle-doves — for her offering. Wc have all seen the beautiful modern engraving which represents her with the sweet but solemn happiness of a young mother, bringing her turtle-doves nestling in her bosom. But there was a further commandment of the law to be observed. It was required that every first-born man-child should be taken to the Temple on the day of the mother's purification, to be presented before the Lord. This was a memorial of the sparing of the first- born of the Israelites, when the plague slew the first-born of the Egyptians on the night of the Exodus. In that night of terror and anguish the destroying angel slew all the first-born of Egypt, both of man and beast. The Israelites were not spared for their innocency, but of God's special mercy ; and in token of this the paschal lambs (repre- senting the first-born of cattle) were slain, and their blood sprinkled on the doorposts of the houses of the ^o A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Israelites, and the angel seeing in the blood the con- fession of guilt and the token of the vicarious sacrifice^ passed over them. But God claimed the first-born of Israel, both of man and beast, for ever after, as belonging to Himself: "Sanctify^ unto me all the first-born," the first-born " among the children of Israel, both of man and beast, it is mine." The first- born children were dedicated to His service (Exodus xiii. 2, and xxxiv. 19). The first-born of beasts, it clean, were offered in sacrifice ; if unclean, the owner might redeem them at a price to be paid to the Temple treasury ; if he did not care to redeem them they were to be slain as a quasi-offering. God afterwards took the Levites instead of the first-born : " The Levites shall be mine ; instead of the first-born of all the children of Israel have I taken them unto me" (Numbers viii. 14, 16). Only the Lord commanded that every first-born should be pre- sented before Him in the Temple, and that he should be redeemed by payment of a half-shekel. It was the individual domestic inemorial, as the Feast of the Passover was the national commemoration, of the deliverance of the first-born on the night of the Passover. Accordingly, when Mary went up to Jerusalem for her Purification accompanied by Joseph, "they brought ' To sanctify = to dedicate to God's service THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 71 Jesus also to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord " (Luke ii. 22), The presentation of Christ was the antitype of all the presentations of first-born which had been made for fifteen centuries. This was the true First-born, the Only-begotten, whom God had sanctified for his own service. And He is not without witness. As the angels hovered over Bethlehem, and the shepherds " made known abroad the saying that was told them concern- ing this child," and the star appeared to the Magi, and their inquiries called the attention of Herod and of the chief priests and scribes and all Jerusalem to their announcement of the birth of Messiah, so now again, when he appears in his temple it is not without welcome and witness. " There was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon ; and the same man was just and devout, w^aiting for the consolation of Israel," i.e., for the Messiah's coming, "and the Holy Ghost was upon him " in an unusual manner or degree, as is shown by what is next stated of a special inspiration. " And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came by the Spirit into the Temple " (Luke ii. 25). And when Joseph and Mary entered with the child Jesus to do for him according to the law, the Holy Spirit caused Simeon to recognise in him the Christ for whom he waited. " Then took he 72 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. him up in his arms," — (the tradition that Ignatius the Bishop of Antioch, was the child whom Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and took in his arms (Mark ix. 2)^), gives the venerable martyr additional interest in our eyes ; with similar interest we regard the man who took up Christ in his arms), — " and blessed God, and said : — " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people ; A light to lighten the Gentiles, And the glory of thy people Israel." " And Joseph and his mother," we read, " marvelled at those things which were spoken of him." ^ It would seem that they were ignorant of the fulness of 1 This song of Simeon has been adopted by the Church of Christ as one of the canticles of its evening vi^orship from the earliest ages ; it is so mentioned in the " Apostolical Consti- tutions." It expresses the calm faith of one who in the evening of life, assured of the salvation which God has given in Christ, is content to lie down in peace and sleep the sleep of death, in full confidence of a joyful awakening. The evening of every day is a type of the evening of our life ; of the evening of the world's life ; and every evening the Church borrows the inspired words of Simeon to express its calm faith and thanksgiving. Happy the man who in the evening of his life can say, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." That it may be so with us let us so live every day, that every evening we may sing that song. THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 73 the mystery to which they were so near. They knew of the miraculous birth, they beHeved that He was to be the Messiah ; but they did not comprehend the divine nature of the child, and the rays of glory which, as it were, broke forth from behind the veil of his humanity from time to time and played about his infant head, filled them with wonder : — " Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart" (Luke ii. 19). "Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him " (Luke ii. 33), and so by observation and comparison, meditation and prayer, did they gradually ascend to the height of that divine knowledge which still was " not far from them, but in their mouth and in their heart." So we also, though we knew the great truths of the Gospel long before, yet if we keep them and ponder them in our hearts, are continually gaining new insight into that which we had before seen and thought we knew, but now find that our former know- ledge was comparative ignorance. "And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother. Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against ; (yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." Another remarkable person was also present, one Anna, a prophetess, an aged widow, if we rightly 74 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. understand the narrative,^ of the great age of over lOO years, who "departed not from the Temple"; but, perhaps, being recognised as "a prophetess," lived in one of the numerous apartments of the Temple, and " served God with fastings and prayers, day and night." " She coming into " the women's court of " the Temple, that instant gave thanks like- wise unto the Lord ; and " subsequently " spake of Jesus to all them that looked for redemption in Jeru- salem,"— viz., to those numerous persons who, doubt- less, visited the devotee and prophetess in her own apartment, and those whom she met continually in the women's court when they came to worship there. Pause to look at the group of persons thus brought before our eyes, as they stand, probably in the women's court, outside the magnificent gate called the " Beautiful Gate." The priest, holding the Holy Child in his arms, on the upper step ; and on a lower step Simeon and Anna uttering their inspired praises and blessings ; and Mary and Joseph standing won- dering by ; and probably a crowd of spectators whose * " She had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity, and she had been a widow 4 score and 4 years" (Revised Ver.). A woman of eighty-four would hardly be spoken of emphatically as " of a great age," but if about 12 + 7 + 84 = 103, it would be natural so to speak of her. THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 73 attention has been attracted, and who gather upon and about the foot of the stair gazing upwards at the group. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Hagg ai, " The desire of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house wuth glory, saith the Lord of hosts" (Hag<^ai ii. 7) ; and of Malachi, " The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his Temple " (Mai. iii. i). If Simeon was, indeed, as many have thought, the famous Simeon son of the great Rabbi Hillel and father of the Rabbi of hardly less reputation, Gamaliel,, then he was at this time the chief of the Sanhedrim, the representative of the Law; and the occasion assumes an appearance of high symbolical significance. The Priest who receives the divine child, the great Rabbi, and the Prophetess, represent the great branches of the Jewish Church and the great ideas of its religion. We see the Lord suddenly come to his temple and there received and acknowledged by prophet, priest,, and scribe ; and the prophetess fulfils her function by speaking of Him to all them that looked for redemp- tion in Israel. Or, we may see, in the group of the aged Simeon with the infant Jesus in his arms, the Law, aged and ready to depart, acknowledging and giving its testimony to the Gospel. We linger yet a little longer to note the light which is thrown by this narrative upon the state of the Jewish Church at the time of our Lord's corning. 76 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. The popular view of the state of the Jewish church at this period is that true rehgion was dead. We seem to read of the Sadducees as wordly- minded sceptics, of the Pharisees as hypocrites, and of the priests and scribes as the persecutors and murderers of Christ. When we look more closely we see that, however this may have been the general character of the people, there were many exceptions. If we only glance through the sacred narrative so far as we have already gone, we find Zacharias the priest and his wife Elizabeth "both righteous before God, walking in all the command- ments and ordinances of the Lord blameless " ; Mary " filled with grace " and " blessed among women " ; Joseph " a just man " ; Simeon "just and devout " and " the Holy Ghost was upon him" ; Anna, who " served God night and day"; and "all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem." A flood of light is thrown also on God's dealings with the Jewish church in those latter days. It was 300 years since the canon of Scripture had been closed, the people had lost their independence, they were now living in intercourse with Greece and Rome, in the full blaze of science and philosophy and civilisation, in one of the most enlightened and civilised periods of the world's history, yet we find God's ordinary and his supernatural grace still active among his people. We go no further than the THE PRESENTATION IiY THE TEMPLE. 77 group before us, for illustration of the ordinary grace by which men became eminent for saintliness, in Mary and Joseph, of the supernatural grace by which God works always in his church, in Anna the devotee and prophetess, and Simeon the just man and devout with whom the Holy Ghost habitually was, who had re- ceived special divine revelation, and was inspired with the " Nunc Dimittis " and the prophecy to Mary. The narrative throws light also on another subject which must often exercise the mind of the thoughtful reader, viz., the rejection of Christ by the Jews as a nation. We are sometimes disposed to think that there must be some special excuses for a rejection which was so general. Their rejection seems to have arisen from the fact that Christ was not the kind of Messiah whom they expected, and did not promise to do what they desired. They expected a temporal conqueror, who would deliver them from the Roman yoke and found a new universal empire, of which they should be the leading people. He was some- thing far grander and offered them something far more desirable ; but the worldliness, pride, and unspirituality of their hearts made them blind to the spiritual glory of Christ and his kingdom, and they rejected him, declared him a deceiver, and crucified him. But we have evidence here that the humble, teachable, spiritual minded, were not unprepared to accept Christ as he was, and the kingdom as it was 78 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. now revealed. The shepherds accepted the Babe cradled in a manger as "Christ the Lord" (Luke ii. ii). The magi we shall presently see worshipped the child of the lowly Mary as King of the Jews, and offered him the presents of a king (Matt. ii. ii). Simeon recognised as the Lord's Christ the child whose parents could only bring as the offering for his re- demption the two turtle doves of the poor. The " Nunc Dimittis " shows that the two thoughts which were so repugnant to the wordly Jewish mind, a suffering Christ, and the equality of the Gentiles, pre- sented no such difficulties to the pious Jewish mind : — " This child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel ; and for a sign which shall be spoken against ; yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also"; "a light to lighten the Gentiles" as well as " the glory of thy people Israel." " That the thoughts of many hearts may be re- vealed." So said the prophet Malachi, " the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his Temple . . • but who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?" (Mai. iii. i, 2.) The Lord does spiritually come from time to time to his church ; he comes from time to time in the spiritual history of each one of his people, and when he comes it is a testing time. Our time is a time of Christ's coming to his church, in a great revival and increase of true religion among THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 79 us, in a republication of half- forgotten truths, in a call to greater earnestness, unworldliness, self-denial, and self-devotion. It is a testing time, the honest and good hearts, the pure and teachable hearts, ^vill receive the new manifestation of Christ to them, and respond to it and grow in grace and holiness ; the proud and worldly and impure will be offended, and will harden themselves against Christ, and seek another Christ, and find nothing but disappointment. 8o A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER IX. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. [HE incident of the Adoration of the Magi, related by St. Matthew, seems, from the internal evidence of the history, to have occurred some time in the second year from cur Lord's birth. In that case we must conclude that Joseph and Mary had settled down in the place to which God's providence had led them. It might well seem to them to be God's will that the Child should not only be born, but also be brought up, in the city of his father David. " There came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, saying, ' Where is he that is born King of the Jews ? For we have seen his star in the East, and are come to worship him.' " — iMatt. ii. I, 2. It does not appear, on a study of the whole nar- rative, that the star (as represented in popular pic- tures) went before them as a guide from their abode in the East to Jerusalem, It seems only to have appeared to them as a sign, and then to have dis- appeared, other indications leading them to under- stand its meaning. We call to mind that these Magi came from the country of Balaam, who prophesied THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. 8r of the " Star which should come out of Jacob, and the Sceptre which should rise out of Israel " (Numb. xxiv. 17) ; the country of Daniel, who prophesied (Dan. ii. 44, 45 ; vii. 13, 14) of the fifth universal kingdom, and of the " One like the Son of Man . . . to w^hom was given dominion and glory and a king- dom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him." If these prophecies had been, as is very possible, preserved among the successors of " the wase men of Babylon," together with some traditional inter- pretation of them, this would perhaps be enough to account for the meaning which they assigned to the appearance of this star. Again, when we compare the way in which God was revealing his will at this time to Joseph in repeated dreams, with the recorded fact that God warned the Magi in a dream not to return to the East by the way by which they came, it is a probable conjecture that God also revealed to them in a dream the birth of the Universal King, and bade them go and worship him ; and that he gave them a sign in the star, as he had given a sign to Zechariah, to the Virgin, and to the shepherds. So that these Gentiles, like God's people, had ancient prophecy and present revelation and confirmincr siern.^ ' The incident has an interest as one of the series of special revelations which God from time to time made to persons out- G 82 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD Naturally the Magi went to the capital of the country to inquire for the new-born King of the Jews. Their inquiries were publicly made, and be- came generally known. And when Herod the king heard of them " he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him." The magnificent old tyrant, half dis- tracted with disease and family discords, jealous of the power which he felt was falling from his dying hands, was in such a state that the suggestion of a pretender to the grand monarchy which he had built up with daring and statesmanship, and craft and crime, and which he had hoped might grow into a still grander Empire of the East, would be likely to excite suspicions which would breed danger to his throne and all about him. No wonder, therefore, that all Jerusalem also was disturbed with mingled hopes and fears. He summoned the chief priests and the scribes, the political and religious leaders and the men of learning, and no doubt they obeyed his summons with fear. But his present object was only to ask them where, according to the prophecies, Christ should be born. For while the Gentiles were vaguely side the special covenant : as to Job and his friends, Abimelech, Pharaoh, Balaam, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Cyrus, Alex- ander the Great (if we credit Josephus's account of his dream), these Magi, and Cornelius the centurion. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. 83 expecting the birth of some illustrious monarch, the Jews were definitely looking for their Messiah ; and it would at once suggest itself to the mind of a Jew that it was He at whom the inquiries of these Eastern Magi pointed. Herod at once took it for granted, and sent for the chief priests and scribes of the people to inquire of them where Christ should be born. The prophecies relating to the Messiah had, no doubt, been of late collected and studied with the interest natural in those who expected their speedy- fulfilment. The chief priests and scribes had no difficulty in replying that a prophecy of Micah (v. 2) pointed out Bethlehem as the birth-place of the Messiah, " for thus it is written by the Prophet, And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda ; for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my people Israel." Herod dismissed the priests and scribes, and then he carefully obtained information from the Magi as to the time of the star's appearance. This they told him, and from what they told him he made his cal- culations as to the age of the child they sought. In answer to further inquiries they had no definite information to give. So Herod indicated Bethlehem as the probable birth-place of the King they sought, and sent them thither to complete their quest; and G 2 84 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD desired them, when they had found the child, to bring him word again, professing his pious intention to go and worship him also. The inquiries of the Magi would have the effect of raising the expectation of all the Jews as to the coming of the Messiah. The replies of the chief priests and scribes would inform the Magi of the Jewish belief as to the character of the King whose birth had been made known to them. When they had departed from Jerusalem, journey- ing south towards Bethlehem, " lo ! the star which they saw in the East " re-appeared to them ; " and when they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy." We can suppose that the ignorance of Jerusalem that any king had been born among them, and, perhaps, the incredulity of Jerusalem that God should have revealed Messiah's birth to these strangers rather than to his own people, may have perplexed and troubled their minds ; and this re-appearance of the sign, was a confirmation of all which they had believed, and which had led them to set out on their long journey, and a proof to them that they were in the right way, and under Divine guidance in the pro- secution of their search. And " the star went before them, until it came and stood over where the young child was." The star was therefore moving at but a small height in the air, or it could not have plainly indicated THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. 85 one particular house from among the houses of the city. For the next sentence tells us that it was not in the stable of the inn, nor in the inn itself, but in a house that the Magi found the Holy Family ; which agrees with the conjecture that they had taken up their settled abode in Bethlehem. " And when they were come into the house" they no doubt told all the story of the star and of their journey, and of the object of their coming. " And when they saw the young child and Mary his mother they fell down and worshipped him," did homage to him as to a king. And opening their treasures they offered presents to him as to a king : " they presented unto him gifts, gold, and frankincense and myrrh." We have put the Adoration of the Magi in its chronological order, but in the natural grouping of the circumstances of the Nativity, it stands beside the Adoration of the Shepherds. The one was the manifestation of the Christ to the Jews, the other his manifestation to the Gentiles. It was the first fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy (Ix. 3). " The Gentiles shall come to Thy light, and kings to the brightness of Thy rising." That other prophecy in the Psalms (Ixxii. 10, 11) seemed also here to find its first fulfilment : — "The kings of Tarshish and of the Isles shall give presents The kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts." 86 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. They were the first-fruits of the Gentiles, of whom the Psalmist went on to say : — " All kings shall fall down before him : All nations shall do him service." The King who was born was not to be King of the Jews only, but his kingdom was to extend over all the nations. The Jews were not to be a dominant race, but Jew and Gentile were to stand on terms of equal citizenship in the kingdom of the Christ. Already Simeon had declared him "a Light to lighten the Gentiles," as well as "the glory of God's people Israel." And so a revelation of the birth of the Desire of all Nations is made to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews ; at the same time as to the Jews, for we assume that it was on the night of his birth that the star appeared ; nay, it was made to Herod the King, and to the chief priests and scribes, by these Gentiles. The Magi, who acknowledged the infant of Beth- lehem as the Christ, were the first-fruits of the Gentiles ; and the devout imagination of the Gentile Christians delighted to dwell upon the incident. It assumed that the number of the Magi was three, answering to the three gifts ; that they were kings ; that one was an Asiatic, one an Ethiopian, one a European ; thus making them more strikingly sym- bolic of the three races of mankind, and the three THE ADORATION OF THE MAGT. 87 quarters of the world. It attributed a symbolical meaning to the three gifts : — " Sacred gifts of mystic meaning : Incense doth their God disclose, Gold the King of kings proclaimeth, Myrrh his sepulchre foreshows." The painter, perhaps, does rightly in retaining this traditional treatment of the subject, on the ground that his business is to present to our minds all the inner significance of the history ; but in studying the life of our Lord we must distinguish between this symbolic treatment of its incidents and the actual facts of history. Among the early paintings in the Roman cata- combs, the Adoration of the Magi is a favourite sub- ject. In the system of parallels which they delighted to draw between subjects of the two Testaments, the deliverance of the three children from Nebuchad- nezzar's burning fiery furnace was the parallel subject with this Adoration of the Magi. It helps us to see the prophetic aspect of the latter, and the encourage- ment it gave to the Christians for the first three centuries. In times of persecution, the picture of the three Israelites delivered from the hand of the Baby- lonian king encouraged the Christian to be true to his God ; and the picture of the three Gentile kings worshipping the infant Saviour was a prophecy and assurance that the time should come when the " Kings 88 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. of Tarshish and of the Isles shall bring presents, the Kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him, all nations shall serve him" (Ps. Ixxii. lo, ii). "Thus saith the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel, and His Holy One, to Him whom man despiseth, to Him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship " (Is. xlix. 7 ; see also Ix. 9-17). Nor is the prophecy yet fulfilled or its encourage- ment no longer needed. The kings and nations of the world have not yet acknowledged the kingship of Christ, rather the nations of Christendom seem to be revolting from Him. We may still be encouraged by the prophecy of the Adoration of the Magi. They were the first-fruits of a harvest which shall yet surely be gathered in. "Why do the nations rage together, and the heathen imagine a vain thing } " " All kings shall fall down before him, all nations shall do him service." A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 89 CHAPTER X. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. JHE Magi, being warned of God in a dream not to return to Herod, returned to their own country by another way. Herod's design of identifying, through the Magi, his infant rival in the kingdom, having failed, he proceeded to take his measures with characteristic vigour and unscrupulousness. We conclude that the result of the inquiries which Herod had made of the Magi v/as that the star had appeared to them something less than two years before, and that its appearance indicated the time of the birth. Herod, accordingly, gave orders that all the children in Bethlehem and its neigh- bourhood of two years old and under should be killed, so as to ensure the death of the unknown child in the general slaughter. Bethlehem was only a village, and it has been computed that not more than ten to fifteen children could have perished by Herod's order ; a small act ot ferocity for him who in his own family had slain a wife whom he passionately loved, a father-in-law, a JO A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. brother-in-law, a brother, and three sons. We know, from Josephus, that at this time bodily pain and mental anxiety had wroug'ht him to a state of almost insane ferocity. For, a few months afterwards, on his deathbed, knowing that all Judea would rejoice at their deliverance from his tyranny, he commanded all the principal men of the entire Jewish nation, wheresoever they lived, on pain of death, to come to him where he lay dying at Jericho. And when they came he had them imprisoned in the Hippodrome ; and gave orders to his sister and her husband, that as soon as he was dead, before the news of his death was made public, they should surround the Hippo- drome with soldiers, and massacre all who were in it ; in order that the mock mourning of the nation for his death might be turned into real mourning because of their own dead. But it is not the mere brutality which slew a dozen children in order to ensure the death of one, which makes the special heinousness of the act. It is the deliberate intention to slay the Messiah. Granted that Herod knew nothing of the divinity of Jesus, or of his spiritual character as Saviour of the world, he did know that the Messiah was the One promised in a long series of prophecies, whose advent had been long looked for by the nation as of One who was at their head to win a universal monarchy, and to intro- duce into the world a Golden Age of prosperity and THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 9I happiness. There was a universal expectation, among both Jews and Gentiles, of the immediate advent of such a king. Herod clearly believed that the Child whose birth had been signified to these wise men by the portentous star was this expected Messiah ; and he deliberately intended to identify him by means of the Magi and slay him, and, failing this, he recklessly sought to include him in the massacre of the inno- cents. For the Herod family had, it is said, the ambition to use the Jewish race and the Jewish religion as the means of building up a great Eastern Empire. The successful growth of the power of Herod from the subordinate government of Galilee to a monarchy extending almost as widely as the kingdom of Solomon seemed to sanction the ambitious idea. And the temper of the Jews — their impatience under the Roman yoke, their fanatical valour, their expectation of a career of conquest — seemed to encourage the expectation of a still grander future. The design over which the mind of Herod brooded seems like a debased rival of the Messianic idea which filled the mind of the nation with grander though still inadequate aspirations. Herod seems deliberately to have regarded the Messiah as a riv^al, and to have sought to slay him in the dynastic interests of his own family : — " this is the heir, come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours." Herod was the first c^reat Antichrist. 92 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Herod's disturbance was all for nothing, and his wicked precautions, had they succeeded, would have been not only a crime, but a blunder. His rival was, indeed, to be king of the Jews, but his kingdom was not to be of this world. He would have reigned without depriving Herod of his crown. Nay, had Herod deferred to the will of God, and done that which he acknowledged with his own mouth to be his duty when he said to the Magi " I will come and worship him also," it might have been the beginning of the conversion of that proud stubborn will ; it might have kept the temporal crown on the head of his posterity ; at least, it would have secured for himself an unfading crown in heaven. Not only a crime, but a blunder ; nay, we should think it sheer madness in Herod, recognising the Child of Bethlehem as the subject of the prophecies, to suppose that he could hinder the accomplishment of the counsels of God ; but that all who sin are simi- larly blind, when, knowing the will of God, they strive against it, and think to get any good in spite of Him. It is not without reason that the Scripture speaks of sin as folly and madness also, and true wisdom as synonymous with holiness. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 93 CHAPTER XL THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. HE providence of God watches over all of us, and special providences probably occur to all of us sometimes. We should expect that special providences, even miracles perhaps, would attend every step of the life of Jesus. And in fact the history so far has been a series of marvels. Though we observe that while the supernatural has preceded the birth of the holy child and surrounded his cradle, nothing supernatural has manifested itself in the child himself He is a natural human child, reposing peacefully in the midst of angel choirs and human worshippers, apparently unconscious of it all. We arc not surprised, therefore, when we are told that while a dream warned the Magi not to return to Herod, another dream bade Joseph " arise and take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose he took the young child and his mother by night and departed into Egypt " (Matt, ii. 13). 94 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Or, if we are surprised, it is that we should have expected some striking judgment would befall the wicked king, or that some miracle would turn aside the swords of his soldiers. Whereas what really happened was that Jesus fled to save his life from Herod. We gather, in passing, this lesson for our- selves, that the prudent evasion of danger is one of God's providential ways of delivering us from danger, as our industry and foresight are one of His ways of providing for our needs. Again, when we look forward to the subsequent life of Christ, we see and note the remarkable fact that no miracle was ever wrought on his behalf. He could have commanded the stones of the wilderness to become bread, he could have prayed and his father would have sent him more than twelve legions of angels in the garden, but did not. And we realise the truth that he came to work miracles on behalf of others, but not to have miracles wrought on his behalf, " he came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" ; he came to live the ordinary human life, under its ordinary conditions of weakness, danger, suffering, and sorrow. So now when he is in danger he flees from it. The Evangelist draws our attention to the fact that this fulfilled the prophecy of Hosea (xi. i). " Out of Egypt have I called my son," Hosea's direct allusion is to Israel's deliverance from Egypt THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. 95 and the Evangelist's quotation of his words points out to us the remarkable historical analogy between the life of God's people and the life of Jesus. As Israel was driven by famine out of Canaan to seek refuge in Egypt, and returned out of Egypt to dwell in the Promised Land, so our Lord was driven by Herod's persecution to seek safety in Egypt and returned to dwell at Nazareth. For " when Herod was dead behold an angel of the Lord appeared again in a dream to Joseph, in Egypt, saying, Arise and take the young child and his mother and go into the land of Israel for they are dead which sought the young child's life." And Joseph obeyed the intimation. It would seem to have been his intention to return to Judea, pro- bably to Bethlehem. But " when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither," — Archelaus was known to be of a cruel disposition ; and he showed it by putting to death 3,000 Jews in the Temple, soon after his accession, — "and being warned by God in " another " dream, he turned aside and went into Galilee," which was under the rule of the milder Antipas, and took up his abode again at Nazareth. 96 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XII. THE HOLY CHILDHOOD. FTER the return from Egypt we have seen that Joseph was turned from his intention of settling in Judea, and returned with Mary and the Holy Child to their former home in the little mountain village of Nazareth ; there the childhood and youth of our blessed Lord were passed. All that is told us of that "wondrous childhood " is contained in one brief sentence : — " The child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled ^ with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him" (Luke ii. 40). He grew physically in body, and the immaterial part of his human nature, his human spirit, also developed vigorously. This is not so difficult to understand, it seems merely to declare the natural healthy growth of the child of Mary. But the next sentence makes us aware of the difficulties which really lay hidden in the former sen- tence. He grew in wisdom, i.e. in knowledge and ^ The word in the original is in the present tense, and implies gradual growth in fulness of wisdom. THE HOL V CHILDHOOD. 97 experience, and the sound judgment which comes of reflection on knowledge and experience. How could He be less than omniscient ? Yet it is clear that the Divine nature controlled itself by self-imposed con- ditions of union with the human nature. " The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us " as one of us ; God became man and lived as man, imposing upon himself the necessary limitations of that wonderful relation. As He grew bodily from the smallness and helplessness of infancy into the full stature and vigour of manhood, so intellectually He grew from the vacuity of an infant's mind to the range of know- ledge and intellectual vigour of His manhood. Still more we read " the grace of God was upon Him." So entirely was He man, that though He was God also, yet His human nature received that gift of God's grace which human nature needs in order to its perfectness. Theologians tell us that that which was breathed into the nostrils of Adam at his creation was not merely the animal soul and human spirit, but that it included also a gift of divine grace, an in- breathing of the Holy Spirit, which is, as it were, the essence of the life of man ; and that it was the with- drawal of this gift, consequent upon man's sin, which left him with his faculties enfeebled, discordant, tainted with corruption. It was declared of John the Baptist that he should be " filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb " (Luke i. 15). John said of II 98 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Jesus, " God gave not the Spirit by measure unto him" (John iii. 34). His human nature, then, though conceived without sin, though perfect, yet needed and received the grace of God, though all the while intimately and inseparably united with the divine nature in the hypostatic union. The humanity of Jesus was a true human nature ; was developed and acted according to the laws of human nature ; united, indeed, with the divine nature, but not altered by it ; showing forth the divinity, indeed, but after a truly human manner. Otherwise we fall into the heresy that the divine and human natures were confused into a third nature siii generis. It is true the divinity constantly manifests itself in ways which we could not anticipate, and cannot reduce to rule, but we must hold that, however the divine was united with the human, and however it manifested itself, it was in ways consistent with the true and real human nature, and natural human living and human thinking and human acting, of Jesus of Nazareth. We know so little of the divine nature that we cannot predicate its mode of acting through the human nature ; but we do know a good deal of human nature, and we must hold fast that side of the truth, that Jesus was really man. This will be the place to call special attention to the truth that He whose human growth and develop- ment we are tracincr had received our human nature THE HOL V CHILDHOOD. 99 in its cntircncss and pciTcctness. Let us consider our human nature. Every man possesses a certain bodily organisation, as head, heart, limbs ; and every man has also certain faculties of mind, as thought, reason, affection, conscience, will. But different men have these common qualities in different proportions. One is taller or stronger than another ; one has less scope or acutcncss of intellect than another ; one has a more affectionate disposition ; another a stronger will. It is these differences between one man and another, partly natural, partly the result of education, which constitute what we call character. Our Blessed Lord took our human nature free from any taint of hereditary corruption or weakness ; he took it in its entirety and perfection, each faculty perfect in itself — perfect reason, perfect affections, perfect will — and all in harmonious proportion and just equipoise. Still, though perfect beyond our experience of human nature, it was human nature ; our Lord was perfect man, but He was man. He grew in bod}", m.ind, and spirit, and was gradually filled with wisdom. He grew up, as children and boys grow up, naturally, subject to influences from the things and persons around them. It seems clear that Joseph and Mary pursued no exceptional method in their training of his childhood. He seemed to them a merely human child. They H 2 loo A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. knew, indceu, that angelic messages, and prophetic utterances, and signs and wonders, had revealed that He should be the greatest of the children of men, the Desire of all nations, the Messiah, the Saviour, but they knew no more than this ; and though, no doubt, tliey watched over him with the tenderest solicitude, and fulfilled to the utmost the duty of wise parents in his training, yet it was by no exceptional methods. One great part of a child's education lies in the unconscious influence exercised upon him by his natural surroundings, and by the character of those among whom he grows up. The child Jesus grew up in a secluded mountain village, among picturesque hills and valleys and fields, strewn in spring-time with a profusion of flowers, among vineyards and olive-yards and plots of wheat. From the hill-tops above thevillagewereviews of grand varied historic scenery; snow-crowned Lebanon and Hermon in the distance, the broad plain of Esdraelon close by, with the Kishon winding through it, the great battle-field of the Holy Land, bounded on the south by the hills of Ephraim, all full of great historic memories. The Lake of Capernaum, with its teeming commercial population, was not far off over the north-eastern hills, and gleams of the Great Sea could be caught on the western horizon. Amid such natural surroundings the child grew up, in the simple, unsophisticated humanness of Eastern village life, THE HOL V CHILDHOOD. under the influence of tlie wise and good Joseph, and of the sweet, pure, thoughtful, young mother. The more dehbcrate and systematic instruction and training which we call education, and which helps so largely in the development of a human being is worth a few moments' thought. Where much thought and care have been bestowed upon methods of education we find various systems adopted. The curriculum of Jewish education consisted of a study of the Sacred Books. And they afforded the materials for a wide, and deep, and true education. Let it be remembered that the Sacred Books of the Jews comprised a whole literature ; the literature, not of one age, but of all the ages from Abraham to Christ ; it included history, philosophy, poetry, law, religion. No nation in the world at that period pos- sessed a literature which offered so grand a subject of study, so favourable a material for the training of a great man, as that divinely inspired and divinely preserved literature of the great Hebrew race. No people at that period had so true and complete a knowledge of human history, so true and profound a philosoph}', grander models of poetry ; above all, no other nation had that which is the key to all right knowledge and true wisdom, the knowledge of God, and of man's relations to God, to nature, and to his fellow-men. It was a nation which had a grand past I02 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. to be proud of; and though at present held under a foreign yoke, it resented the indignit}-, and was sus- tained by the confident expectation in the immediate future of the achievement of a universal monarchy, which should last so long as the world endured. The consciousness of a great ancestry and a great destiny is no mean help to the formation of great- ness of character. These Sacred Books, then, and these traditions, and these national sentiments, aftbrded the material of the education of a Jewish youth. The Rabbis dis- couraged the study of Gentile learning. It was an innovation, and an evidence of unusual freedom of thought, ^^•hen Gamaliel, a little later, allowed and encouraged the Jewish youth to read the Greek and Latin writers. But Greek was the common language of commerce in Galilee in the time of which we are speaking ; Greek civilisation and literature had been disseminated all over the East, and no intelligent, thoughtful person could well be ignorant of the great outlines of Greek teaching. We have abundant evidence that our Lord had a familiar, thorough, and profound knowledge of the Sacred Books ; there is no reason to think that He was less acquainted with the Greek language and Greek thought than Peter and John and James, who wrote their Epistles in Greek. Then we must bear in mind what manner of child THE HOL Y CHILDHOOD. 103 Me was whose training and education we are consi- dering. When we say that He possessed every human faculty in perfect and harmonious develop- ment, we are saying that Tie was a child of great genius and of unexampled " many-sidedness " ; when we add that He was as perfect in affections and in will as in intellect, we recognise that we have no deductions to make for the flaws of temper, and the waywardnesses which so often reduce great genius to sterility. We have a vast genius, a perfect moral cha- racter, and firm will, untainted by any hereditary or acquired imperfection; and quickened and invigorated by the grace of God to the keenest edge and finest temper. We have our human nature in the highest possible manifestation of what man is capable of being. It is the Child of the highest endowments and noblest promise which the race ever bore, who is thus growing up, in silence and obscurity, in the home of Joseph, in the mountain village of Na.^areth. J04 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XIII. "THE SON OF THE LAW." |N the course of our study of the Gospels we arrive now at a fact of the most remarkable kind. We have seen how fully the history of the Nativity, with the group of events around it, is related — the Annunciation and Birth of the Forerunner, the An- nunciation to the Virgin, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Shepherds, of the Magi, the Circumcision, the Presentation, the Flight into Egypt, the Return to Nazareth. We shall see hereafter at what length the history of the three years' ministry is told, — the Discourses, Parables, Miracles, Life. Lastly, the history of the Passion and Death is related in continuous and minute detail. In contrast with this, we find, between the history of the Nativity and the history of the Ministry, a space of thirty years of our Lord's life which the Evangelists leave almost an entire blank. Not quite a blank ; for that point of the Sacred Life when childhood ends and responsibility begins is marked by one incident, which is recorded. More- " THE SON OF THE LA IV." 105 over, the period of childhood, on one side of that incident, and the period of manhood on the other, are each summed up in a sentence. The incident is the visit to Jerusalem at twelve years old. The sentence which sums up the child- hood is that which we considered in the last chapter:— " The child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him " (Luke ii. 39-40), and the sentence which sums up the manhood is this, " And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour v,ith God and man," — which will occupy us in the next chapter. It is this incident of the visit to Jerusalem which we have now to consider. St. Luke relates it as follows : — "Now His parents went up to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. And when Jesus was twelve years old they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the Feast " (Luke ii. 41, &c.). There is a time in a boy's life when the mind begins to look abroad beyond the circle of home, when the affections begin to bud, and the will to assert itself; in short, when the boy develops into the young man. It was the custom of the Jews, when their boys attained this age, to carry them up to Jerusalem at one of the feasts. There they were l)resented to the Rabbis, in one of the chambers of the Temple, to be questioned as to their religiouj io6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. knowledge, and further instructed in it. Then they were brought into the Temple, to take part in its solemn worship. And from that time they entered upon all the obligations, and were entitled to all the privileges, of adult members of the commonwealth of Israel. This formal admission of the youthful Jew into the full privileges of the covenant was not based upon any commandment of the law. It was an ecclesi- astical regulation which those " who sat in Moses' seat " had made, or it was a religious custom which had gradually grown up, out of a conviction of its practical usefulness for edification. Our Lord's obe- dience to it, therefore, assumes an important signifi- cance. In his circumcision, we saw he submitted to the first precept of the law, and accepted the obliga- tion to obey the whole law ; but here he dutifully observes an ecclesiastical regulation, and so sets us the example of that deference to lawful ecclesiastical authority which he afterwards broadly enunciated in the sentence : — " The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat : All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do" (Matt, xxiii. 2, 3). This, then, was the purpose for which, when Jesus was twelve years old, his parents brought him up to Jerusalem, It was such a crisis in the spiritual life as Confirmation and First Communion are with us, and this, perhaps, would have been enough to account " THE SON OF THE LA IK" 107 for its being recorded by the Evangelist, even if nothing remarkable had occurred in connexion with it. But something remarkable did occur. "When they had fulfilled the days," viz., the eight days of the Festival, " as they returned homewards the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey, and they sought him among" the travelling groups of " their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not they turned back again to Jerusalem seeking him ; " looking anxiously among the people they met, and making inquiries from time to time. " And it came to pass that after three days," — accord- ing to the Jewish way of speaking, we should say on the third day, for they travelled homeward one day and returned to Jerusalem the next, and some time on the third day,—" they found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers." Some of the popular pictures of the subject represent the boy Jesus seated in the midst, while the venerable Rabbis stand round receiving his teaching. It is a conception of the subject not borne out by the narra- tive, and quite out of harmony with our Lord's cha- racter ; and it conveys a lesson quite inconsistent with loS A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. the true lesson of the whole incident. The youth had, probably, with the freedom of Eastern manners, joined some group of learned men as they sat in the shade of one of the cloisters of the Temple, and listened to their conversation, and, at length, by asking ques- tions took part in it. "All that heard him were astonished at his under- standing and answers." It is wonderfully interesting to watch the development of children's minds ; to see how the great problems of life, the mysteries of the unseen and the future, present themselves to their young intelligence. What profound questions they ask, taxing all our wisdom to answer, and often taxing our candour to confess that we cannot answer them. Now and then we meet with a child of espe- cially sweet disposition and thoughtful mind, whose just observations and suggestive questions delight and instruct us. Such an exceptional child Jesus was. Not a pre- cocious child, which implies some abnormal develop- ment, or some injudicious forcing of the intellect, but a boy who possessed all human qualities in their highest perfection. A modest, ingenuous boy, but a boy of the highest genius. Brought up hitherto in the seclusion of a mountain village, he has found himself for ten days past in the stately streets of the sacred city, crowded with multitudes of his country- men from all parts of the world. He has seen, for " THE SON OF THE LAW." 109 the first time, the imposing magnificence of the Temple; he has joined with deep spiritual insight and fervour in the awful solemnity of the sacrifices. The bud which has been long slowly swelling in the shade, bursts at once into bloom when brought out into the sun. He had listened to the teachings of his home; he had learnt what further could be learnt from the addresses of the village fathers in the synagogue of Nazareth ; but here he is at the source of the theological teaching of his Church. Hillel, Simeon, and Gamaliel were Rabbis whose learning and wisdom have gained them a place among the very foremost names on the roll of the learned men of the Jewish nation. We can imagine the eager interest with which the boy Jesus would listen to their deep learning, their practised acuteness and subtlety, their ripe experience; and would propound the questions which he had pondered in his own mind ; and we can realise the generous pleasure with which the great Rabbis would recognise the clear insight, the untaught justness of thought, and elevation of sentiment, and would catch glimpses of the purity and sweetness of disposition ; in short, the wonderful genius, the spiritual grandeur, of this Galilean boy. But it would be utterly out of harmony with the character of our Lord to suppose that he was teaching the doctors. Ihe Fathers of the Church, from the no A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. earliest of them downwards, have understood the incident otherwise, " Not teaching, but hearing," says Origen ; " Not teaching them, but asking them ques- tions," says Gregory the Great, who says again, " It is His will as a boy to learn by asking questions, who, by the might of His divinity, gave their science to these very doctors." The superficial objection, that he was God, and knew all things, and could teach these doctors, but could not be taught by them, has already been dis- posed of He was man with man's ignorance, and however perfect as man, needed to learn like other men. The relations of the divine nature to the human nature in their union in Christ are unknown to us ; we can only watch with reverence the way in which we sometimes seem to see in Jesus a con- sciousness of his divinity, and sometimes seem to witness a manifestation of the divinity in his words and acts. It is by pondering the subject again and again, on each occasion when the history brings it before us, that we come to realise more vividly, and to hold more firmly, the truth of the perfect Godhead and the perfect manhood united in the Person of Christ. The sequel of the present narrative opens before us at once one of the profoundest of these occasions. " When they saw Him they were amazed." And his mother uses a mother's privilege, and gently remon- " THE SON OF THE LA \Vr in stratcs with him on the anxiety lie had caused : " Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us ? Thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." The remonstrance sheds a flood of h'ght upon the training of the infancy. He had not been treated as one whose actions were never to be interfered with, one who was above a father's control and a mother's remonstrance. We confidently infer that the training of his infancy had been that of any other sweet and holy child in a wise and good family. Our Lord's answer is not so easy to understand. " How is it that ye sought me } Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house } " ^ We note the different meaning of the word "Father" in the question and repi}-. We learn from Mary's question, " Thy father and I have sought thee," that it had been the habit of the household to speak of Joseph as the father of Jesus. But our Blessed Lord in his reply uses it in a different sense, "Knew you not that I must be in my Father's house.'" She uses the word, according to the conventional ^ The words in the original are iv rohj tov irarpoc fiov, in the • of my Father. Many ancient authorities translate them in the house of my Father ; which seems to agree better with the whole drift of the answer—" How is it that ye sought me? You should have known where to find me— in my Father's house." The words above have been adopted in the Revised Version. 112 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. habit of the household, for Joseph. His reply carries her back to the thought of Him who was really His Father ; to the day when it was said to her, " There- fore that Holy Thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." We have here, then, the record of his conscious- ness of his own Divinity ; and we may suppose the first intimation he had given of his conscious- ness of it. Are we to suppose that Mary and Joseph had told the child of the miraculous conception and the wondrous birth } These are not subjects we talk to children about. Are we to suppose that they had filled his mind with ambitious dreams by telling him that he was marked out by all the wonders which surrounded his birth to be the Mes- siah } If we think of the education which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert gave their children we shall see that it is the wise aim of those whose children are born to high destinies to bring them up modestly and naturally ; we suppose, therefore, that this was the first intimation which Jesus, now that he had crossed the line which divides boyhood from manhood, gave of his consciousness of his own true parentage. Ah ! what thoughts must have been awakened in the hearts of Mary and Joseph. Twelve long years had elapsed since that wondrous time, and its memories were not forgotten, indeed, but had faded into the background of their uneventful life. All " THE SON OF THE LA IV." 113 that long time no new wonders had happened ; the infant had grown into a sweet and holy child, a pure and noble boy, but their life had been bounded by the mountain valley of Nazareth, and nothing had broken its calm tenor. The apocryphal gospels, indeed, talk of the miracles of the childhood of Jesus, and the wonders which surrounded him, but they are clearly the inventions of the natural human taste for the marvellous ; and we mention them only because they make more striking, by contrast, the fact of the thorough naturalness of the real childhood of the Lord. " They understood not the saying which he spake unto them." They knew that he was the son of the miraculous conception, they believed that he was the destined Messiah, but they did not (in all probability) know that he was divine. This ignorance of theirs helps us, again, to realise the perfect humanness of his childhood. They knew that his conception had been miraculous, they believed in his great future destinies, but meantime there was no great present awe to interfere with the perfect natural- ness of their relations to him. 114 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XIV. THE OBSCURE LIFE. E went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject unto them. (But his mother kept all these sayings in her heart), and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man '^ (Luke ii. 51, 52). He went down to Nazareth with them. Not only the infancy and boyhood, from birth to twelve years old, but also the early manhood, from twelve to thirty, those years when the character is being fully formed and settled, were spent in the seclusion of the mountain village. Let us try to realise what that obscure life at Nazareth was like. And first of all we have to clear away some mis- apprehensions which commonly exist in the English mind, naturally regarding that life from the stand- point of its own prepossessions, with respect to the supposed poverty, and lowly social condition, and ignoble calling, of the holy family. If the ordinary better-class English Christian would be perfectly candid he would confess that he never quite overcomes the painful impression produced on THE OBSCURE LIFE. nj Ill's mind by the fact that our Lord was born among " the lower classes " ; the fact carries with it, to his mind, a presumption of inferiority of race. And after all that can be said about it, the fact remains that there is something in pedigree, and that the " well born " have by nature a more refined organisa- tion than the " low born." In other words, to be of the lower classes carries with it a presumption of inferior natural endowments, and therefore of inferior capacity for the attainment of the highest type of refined humanity. The English people are supposed to be made up of an inferior conquered and a superior conquering race. The upper classes are supposed to represent the fiery chivalrous refined Norman, and the lower classes the slow and heavy Saxon. The truth IS that the two races have long since so thoroughly intermingled, that the distinction of race does^'no't practically exist among us ; but the feelings and habits belonging to such a distinction of race have to a great extent survived, and it is still largely taken for granted that the lower classes arc of a naturall}- inferior race and type. But, however it may be in England, there was nothing of this distinction of race, or of this feeling between the upper and lower classes, in Jewish society. They were all of one blood. They all claimed Abraham as their father. One Jew was of one tribe and another of another, but the progenitors of th.e I 2 ii6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. tribes were twelve brothers. The noble and the vine- dresser, the great lady and the gleaner in the barley field, were all of the same blood. We can perhaps best understand this state of society by comparison with the highland clans ; the chief of a great clan was recognised as a noble among nobles, but all the men of his clan were his cousins, and, by birth, of as good blood, and as proud of their good blood, as he. The nearest approach to an aristocratic caste among the Jews at this time was the priestly family, which was supported by the labours of the rest of the people, and whose chief had been the virtual ruler of the nation from the return from the captivity to the time of Herod. The only other family which could put forth any hereditary claim to special distinction was the family of David, which had been the royal family of Judah down to the captivity, and from which, moreover, the Messiah was to be born. But Joseph and Mary and Jesus were of the family of David ; and, if we do not misunderstand the genealogy of St. Matthew, Jesus was the represen- tative of the family, and not only David's son, but David's heir. That their pedigree, as of the house of David, was well known and recognised is evident from the fact that they went up to Bethlehem to be enrolled at the census " because they were of the house and lineage of David." That little family of Nazareth, though poor and obscure, was at least of THE OBSCURE LIFE. 117 one of the great races of mankind, and of the ancient royal family of that race. In the case of this family of Nazareth, then, there was, as a matter of fact, no inferiority of race, and no sentiment of inferiorit}^, which might diminish their own self-respect or lead others to treat them as in- ferior. Again, as to their supposed ignoble calling. Joseph, we are expressly told, was a carpenter, and Jesus in all probability was so also : trades tend to be heredi- tary in the East, and Jesus is called "the carpenter" (Mark vi. 3). The average Englishman has an illi- beral prejudice against handicrafts, which did not exist in the Jewish mind. It was one of their national customs that every man was taught a trade ; probably not merely as a pru- dential precaution, so that if necessary he could earn his living by it, but as a part of his education. Thus Saul of Tarsus, the son apparently of wealthy parents, who had received a liberal education at Jerusalem from the most famous Rabbi of his time, had learned a trade and fell back upon it for subsistence when his conversion had brought about his temporal ruin. Some of the most famous of the Jewish Rabbis practised handicrafts as their regular occupation. It was not possible, therefore, for the Jews to have the feeling that the mere fact of a man exercising a handicraft put him in a low social caste. ii8 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Again, as to the poverty which we think so humi- liating a circumstance in the condition of the holy family. It is one of the bad features of our present state of civilisation and society that we think poverty in itself an evil and a disgrace ; it is in a plutocracy that poverty is loss of caste ; in an aristocracy a gentleman is a gentleman, however poor. This scorn of poverty is unphilosophical and unchristian ; and though it may obtain among ill-regulated minds at all times in all countries, it did not exist in the East in the time of our Lord so generally and in so exag- gerated a form as among us. The study of that household of Nazareth may teach us all a needed lesson. It may be that our climate and soil and social habits compel us to surround ourselves with appliances in houses and gardens, clothing and food, objects of beauty and sources of amusement which we obtain only at the cost of incessant exertion ; whereas in the East the ease with which sufficient shelter, food, and clothing can be obtained ; the possession of an air, a sky, a " nature " in which to live is delight enough, allows men to be poor and their lives simple, and gives them leisure for thought, for poetry, for religion. An Eastern house and its furniture and menage might content a Stoic. An iron pot, an iron " griddle " for baking the flat bread, and a handful of charcoal, are sufficient for its simple cookery ; two or three earthen jars containing meal, sour milk, and water^ THE OBSCURE LIFE. 119 are all its stores. The one living-room of the family is amply furnished if the earthen floor has been raised at one end of the room for a divan, with a strip of carpet laid upon it. A round brass tray and a bowl in which to serve the simple meal, a spoon to eat it with, and an earthenware vase of water of which all may drink, are the table equipage. A chest in one corner may contain the best dresses, and the two or three trinkets of the family; a bundle laid upon it contains the thin mattresses and coverings, which at sunset are carried up a rude ladder and spread on the flat house-top, which constitutes the common bed- chamber of the whole family.^ But this kind of life, accepted as God's disposition of our lot, carrying with it no sense of humiliation or privation, is not poverty ; it becomes poverty when it is borne with dissatisfaction and envy, or when there is anxious scheming of mind and wearing labour of body in the endeavour to force one's way out of it. But a life so simple and frugal may yet be contented and cheerful, bright and happy ; may be full of re- fined enjoyments, full of intellectual richness and dignity; may be spiritually grand and elevated. Such a life may be the life of a philosopher, the life of a Christian ; it was the life of the Son of Man. ' The wealthy lady of Shunem, wishing to make hospitable arrangements for Elisha, said, " Let us make a little chamber on the wall, and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick" (2 Kings iv. 10). I20 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Although the Scripture is silent on the history of these eighteen years, yet we may gather a note or two which will help us to realise the progress of the sacred life. Some time during those years Joseph, the guardian of the sacred childhood, died. Thenceforth the mother and the son alone formed the humble house- hold (for we accept the primitive tradition, that those who are called in one place the " brothers " of our Lord were really his cousins) Let us try to realise the daily life of that household. All great men (and regarding our Lord's humanity we recog- nise in Him a great man — the greatest of the race) — all great men, it is said, have owed much to their mothers. We will not enlarge on the subject, but let us think for a moment of the character of Mary, pure, sweet, and gentle, with a deep thoughtfulness to which the Gospels often direct attention, — " Mary kept all these things [about the Nativity] and pondered them in her heart " ; and again about the twelve years old incidents, "His mother kept all these sayings in her neart" (Luke ii. 19, 51), with a grandeur of spirit which breaks forth in the Magnificat ; with a spiritual insight which anticipated the first miracle ; with the heroic devotion which stood beside the cross. Think, O you sons, what such a mother must have been to such a Son ; and think, O you mothers, what such a Son to such a mother ! A DEVOTIOXAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XV. "HE WAS SUBJECT UNTO THEM." jE went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and zvas subject unto thetn." Subject to Mary and to Joseph. The two cases are different. Mary was his mother and had that sacred natural claim to the obedience of her son. Joseph was but his foster-father. Let us reaHse what this going down to Nazareth with them, and subjection to them, impHes. ReaHse the obscure village life, the daily round of lowly toil, the narrow circle of the cottage home. When we read of God the Son emptying himself of " the glory which he had with the Father before the world was," and becoming man, the transaction is so beyond the range of our experience, and the contrast so transcends the measure of our limited being, that we fail to realise the condescension, the humilit}'. When we see the Divine Child cradled in the rude manger in the stable of the inn, we recognise that this was, humanly speaking, a mere accidental occurrence, and the Divine Child unconscious of the strange incongruit)-. But when we see the Lo}' of 122 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. transcendent genius reared in a peasant's home ; the young man of royal descent and of grand destinies, sharing the daily labours of a carpenter's shop, and playing the part of a dutiful son to Joseph, his foster- father, then we have perhaps an exhibition of humility and obedience which our habits of thought enable us better to appreciate ; and we gaze with amazement at the son of David and the Son of God living thus from infancy to manhood. Meditating upon it, we recognise that humility, submission, patience, obedience, are as striking fea- tures of our Lord's life at this period, as transcendent wisdom and miraculous power were of the period of the ministry, or meek endurance of the Passion. Subordination is the rule of creation : it makes the harmony of the universe ; without it is chaos. Higher and lower, superior and inferior, command and obedience, are the order of God. The Divine Three Persons, are co-eternal and co-equal, and none is greater or less than another, but there is subordi- nation among them. The Father is the source and fountain of Deity ; the Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. The Father sends the Son, and the Son is sent by the Father, and the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. Among the angelic hosts there are archangel and angel, superior and inferior, command and obe- dience. The inevitable necessities of human nature »//£■ JVAS SUBJECT UNTO THEM.'' 123 enforce subordination, so long as there are mothers and infants, grown men and boys. Society means an organisation of men ; and organisation implies subor- dination. In the Church "he made some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the edifying of the Body of Christ." In the mystical body some members are more, some less, honourable. In the little world of each man's being there must, for his well-being, be command and obedience ; the muscles obedient to the nerves, the passions to the reason, and all subject to the will. Humility is not meanness; obedience is not degrading. Humility and obedience are the great foundations of a perfect character ; the bonds of harmony and power and greatness in the individual and in society, in the Church, and in the hierarchy of heaven. We shall find, on consideration, that as there are in Christ's humility two phases, — God humbling himself to be man, and the man humbling himself to low estate, — so we shall see our Lord's obedience in four different categories. Obedience to God, " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God " : religious obedience, in his submission to circumcision : ecclesiastical obe- dience, in his conformity to the custom of catechising and first sacrifice : parental obedience to ]\Iar}-, and civil obedience to Joseph. We shall find, moreover, something taught by our Lord's independent action in remaining behind in 124 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Jerusalem, and in his reply to his mother ; viz., the limitation of obedience, to God first, and then the other obligations in their order. Again, we learn what obedience is. It is not merely a natural deference to those whom we recog- nise as greater or wiser than ourselves ; Joseph and Mary were not greater, nor wiser (at least, as he grew up to manhood) than Jesus ; but in God's providence they had been put in a position of authority over him, and therefore he obeyed them. Origen points the lesson: "We see that the lesser is often placed over the greater, that he who is in authority may not be swollen with pride because he is in authority, but that he may recognise that his better is subject to him, as Jesus was subject to Joseph." It is God who putteth down one and setteth up another. *' We must needs be subject " to those set over us in God's providence " for conscience' sake." All rightful authority comes from God, and is to be exercised for the welfare of the subjects and for God's glory. We obey those whom God, in nature or in providence, sets over us, because He has set them over us. And so all true obedience is really paid to God, in the person of his representatives to us, in the family and society, in the State and in the Church. Seeing that of all that life of preparation, from his nativity to his entry on his Messiahship and ministry, these few words are all which are told us of his moral ''HE WAS SUBJECT UNTO THEM:' 125 character, they are the more emphatic, and demand the more searching and prolonged study. " He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them." Humility and obedience, then, are clearly the traits of character thus set in such em- phatic relief before us. They are the foundations of every noble and perfect character. They needed to be laid broad and deep to sustain the superstructure of the character of the perfect man, the exemplar of the race. And we men need to study the lesson, and never more than at the present time. Yor want of humility and want of obedience are among the wide-spread faults of our age and country. We find everywhere an impatience of obscurity, an impatience of control ; everybody craving and striving to be rich, to be distinguished , everybody scorning subordina- tion, refusing to acknowledge any man as master. Jesus came to set us an example of that which is noblest and best in human character and life. This does not mean tkat v.c arc mechanically to copy the details of his life ; but to adopt its principles, and apply them in the circumstances of ours. We are not to suppose that Jesus did all this merely for the purpose of teaching us a lesson of humility and obedience, and patient preparation in obscurit}\ No, Christ did not do things merely to furnish an example. He lived the life which naturally became him, he said the words and did the deeds which were 126 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. proper to him, and we are permitted to look on and learn. This obscurity was his natural preparation for his work, this humility and obedience were the natural discipline of his manhood. " He learned obedience by the things which he suffered." " He was made perfect through suffering." Very likely He often looked forward during these years of patient training, not with impatience but with longing, for the Divine signal to go forth and begin His work. " His heart burned within him," " He felt straitened," until the time came. What a rebuke to our impa- tience, and rashness, and self-will ! For all those thirty years the Son of God was humble, obedient, patient, and silent; and waited till God gave Him the sicrii A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 127 CHAPTER XVI. HIS GROWTH INTO MANHOOD. " He increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." HIS brief statement sums up the eighteen years of our Lord's Hfe which lie between * his visit to Jerusalem at twelve years old, and the commencement of his public life. Important years in every life, during which the child is growing into the man, and character is setting, and the powers are maturing, and the question is deciding what manner of man he will be, whether he wall resolutely under- take the work God sent each man into the world to do, or whether he will miss it, or decline it, and make shipwreck of his life. " He increased ... in favour with God." It is a statement of the same kind as the former one, relating to the period of childhood, that " the grace of God was upon him," but it adds something to that statement. It tells us that just as any child of man growing up from an innocent childhood into a wise and holy manhood receives grace upon grace, and grows in the love and favour of God, so was it 128 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. with the Son of Man. May we not assume that the way in which the statement that Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man is connected with the account of his admission to the higher privileges of the Sons of the law, indicates a relation of cause and consequence between the two ? " The grace of God was upon him " in his childhood. On the threshold of manhood he is admitted to new means of grace, and these new means of grace, used as they would be by him, naturally produce the result that he " grows in wisdom and in the favour of God." It is easy to see how all this bears upon the subject of Confirmation. Probably the time for the adminis- tration of this Apostolic rite chosen by the Church of England is borrowed from this example of our Lord. And we may certainly point to His example of obe- dience to the observances of His Church in urging our young people to present themselves for confirmation and first communion ; and we may confidently hope as the result of their earnest preparation and devout participation that they also will increase in wisdom as in stature and in favour with God and man. " Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man " is almost a repetition of the summary of the childhood, " the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him " ; and they impress HIS GROWTH INTO MANHOOD. 129 upon us again the continuous natural growth of the Son of man according to the laws of human develop- ment. And yet there would be a difference between the two periods, if only the natural difference between the spontaneous development of the child, and the conscious self-cultivation of the youth. We try there- fore to picture to ourselves the circumstances of his youth, and reverently to conjecture the natural growth and development of that perfect human mind and character. We see the acute insight into nature and human life exercised on a larger scale, as the youth begins to range wider afield beyond the limits of his native valley and hills, and to walk with observant eyes among the busy streets of the cities on the western shore of the neighbouring lake, — the royal watering place of Tiberias, the commercial city of Capernaum, and the agricultural towns of the fertile plain. We follow him three times a year, when, in scru- pulous fulfilment of the requirements of the law, he goes up to Jerusalem. Thrice a year, eight^ days on each occasion he spent in the holy city, receiving to the full all the wisdom, grace, and communion with God which the human soul most capacious of such » From the time of leaving Nazareth to the time of returning would be about fourteen days, three being spent on the journey in each direction. K I30 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. influences could receive from the divinely-appointed channels of special communion and special grace. Thrice a year he would be brought within reach of the currents of thought which circulated among the inhabitants of the capital, and of the freer, wider range of ideas which the Hellenist Jews brought up with them from all parts of the civilised world. What opportunities for one with the eye which nothing escapes, the intelligence which comprehends at a word, the judgment which distinguishes at a glance the wheat from the chaff, the profound genius which assimilates all knowledge and experience and converts them into wisdom ! His discourses, parables, and proverbial sayings savour as strongly of this universal insight into nature, and experience of life, as the writings of Solomon ; and this comparison with the writings of Solomon helps to bring out more vividly the grander moral tone, the truer, deeper, healthier philosophy of life, of the words of Jesus. We may venture upon another conjecture as to the human growth and development of the youth of Jesus. The wide knowledge of the Sacred Books, and profound understanding of their meaning, were not, probably, an intuition of the Divine side of his Being. We rather see in this the evidence of many an evening and many a Sabbath spent in reading, and many an hour in meditation ; we may even venture to think that we see indications of a special line of study when HIS GROWTH INTO MANHOOD. 131 we afterwards read how, " beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded " to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, and afterwards to the ten apos- tles, " in all the Scriptures, the things concerning himself." Again, when we read so often ' afterwards of his going up into " the mountain " and spending the night in prayer, we confidently conclude that this was no new thing, but the continuation of a habit of vigils spent under the stars upon the hills of Nazareth- Yes, his preparation for his great office and his great work was not in schools and universities, in cabinets and camps ; it was in the calm routine of a simple human life ; in the thoughtful contemplation of nature ; in the profound study of God's word ; in solitary meditations and communings with God under the midnight stars ; in the penetrating and wise observation of human life ; in mountain village and busy commercial town and grand historic capital ; in the earnest fulfilment of all religious duties and the use of all means of grace. "All great things are done in solitude," says a great thinker.- At least the forty years which Moses spent in the wilderness were a preparation for his great work parallel with these thirty years of silence ' Luke vi. 12. Matt. xiv. 23 ; xv. 29. Luke ix. 28. « J. P. Richter. K 2 132 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and seclusion in which our Lord " increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man." Observe that this silent obedient life was part of the work of redemption. In the first place, it proved that when God made Adam and placed him in the world, he did not place a being of so frail a nature, in circumstances of such temptation that it was unreasonable and unjust to expect him to live an obedient life. For Jesus being very man, a second Adam, living the ordinary- human life, under ordinary circumstances, did live an obedient life, and grew continually in the favour of God, It teaches us a most important lesson, that we are not now so frail, nor are in circumstances of such temptation, that it would be unreasonable and unjust in God to expect us to live consistently holy lives. Without God's grace we could not, but God gives us grace ; without great watchfulness and firm resistance to temptation and perseverance in well-doing we could not, but watchfulness and firmness and perse- verance are not virtues beyond our reach. Again, this holy life was part of the work of our redemption ; as Jesus was conceived without the taint of hereditary sin, so it was necessary that he should grow up free from actual sin, in order that he might be the spotless lamb of God, fit offering for the sins of the world. HIS GROWTH INTO MANHOOD. 133 This holy life of humility and obedience is a part of the price paid for our redemption, as well as the Passion and the Cross. " As by (the) one man's dis- obedience (the) many were made sinners, so by the obedience of (the) one shall (the) many be made righteous." The obedience God requires is not in one or two great heroic crises of life only, but it is the obedience of a life. Christ's meritorious obedience was not merely that of the Incarnation and the cross, but also of this thirty years of a " subject " life. " Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient" (Phil. ii. 8). "He learned obedience by the things which he suffered," not merely by the sufferings of the Passion, but by the patience and endurance of all his previous life. Lastly, he increased in favour with man. We picture to ourselves the quiet unpretending fulfilment of all the humble duties and domestic and social charities of life, the frank, unassuming, kindly inter- course with neighbours and friends. We know from the details of his subsequent life that in his wisdom there was no assumption, in his holiness nothing austere and repellent. His unselfishness, his ready sympathy, his many-sidedness, his gentleness, we can readily understand, attracted liking, so long as no claims to a higher character excited doubt, distrust, and opposition. And so " he increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man." 134 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Does it seem wonderful that his character did not excite more attention and remark than is impHed here, and elsewhere more plainly stated ? But we see so little of any man's life that we can hardly judge of it as a whole ; and if we see ever so much of it, it is only the external life we see ; of all that inner life of thought and feeling and motive and aim which is the real life we see nothing. Two men may be living side by side, doing almost the same things, leading almost the same external lives, while their inner lives are wide as the poles asunder. To their neighbours all the members of that holy family, per- haps, seemed equally blameless and estimable ; while holy as the lives of Joseph and Mary no doubt were, there was the difference of grey dawn and dazzling noon between their lives and his. 136 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 6 o S in ^ ^ in ',5 ex • • -^ fi-3 O ft S O 1— ( en S ° JS opq c 2 ?2, <« o a ° ^- c § c-s C O O Ul o ,^1 . 5 ^ '^ ^ w U o5 en tn _r !- ^ _ rt i2 C rt ^ o R* C oJ rt ir. : : : : :',5 g tn O &i : : Q : : : < ;-i fa O as 03 to : W U • -< O >< Fh "55 g^ > CIS : .o ^ %'t 1— > : ^W ^U •< Z H pq U 4t^t^ O " ^ 2- -+ i-n 0\ m t^-* -^ CO < M N N A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 137 CHAPTER XVII. THE FIFTEENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF TIBERIUS C^SAR. " Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Csesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias, the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the High Priests " (Luke iii. I, 2). LONG period of thirty years has elapsed since the days when Herod the Great reigned over the Jews, and Caesar Augustus commanded that all the world should be taxed, and Christ was born in Bethlehem. In entering upon the second part of his Gospel, St. Luke again fixes his chronology by enumerating the contemporary sovereigns. And this would be enough to enable the contemporaries of the Evangelist at once to syn- chronise his narrative with the general history of the times, and to recal to their minds the political con- dition of the countries in which the events of the narrative occurred. But we at this distance of time and place need some research and reflection in order 138 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. to prepare our minds with this prehminary know- ledge. In Chapter IV. we sketched the course of the history down to the time of Herod the king, and the political condition of the country in the latter part of his reign. But in the interval of thirty years many important political changes had taken place, as the sentence which we have quoted from St. Luke is enough to indicate. These it will be necessary to explain, and to add a few notes on the religious con- dition of the people, in order to lay before the reader a sketch of the circumstances in which the public life of the Lord was lived. " In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius." Tiberius succeeded Augustus eighteen years after the birth of Christ (a.d. 14), but made no change in the imperial policy towards the nations of the East, and has no personal connexion with the Gospel history. About four years after the nativity, the magnificent tyrant Herod died at Jericho in horrible suffering of body and mind. He left a will, by which, subject to its confirmation by Augustus, he named his son Archelaus to succeed him in the kingdom ; but he diminished the extent of his dominion by severing from it Galilee and Perea, i.e., the country beyond Jordan, which he left under the name of a tetrarchy FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR. 139 to Antipas ; and erected Gaulonitis, Trachonitis, and Paneas into another tetrarchy in favour of Philip. The Herodian princes flocked to Rome " to receive their kingdoms and to return," while some went to plead against Archelaus and to say, " We do not wish to have this man to reign over us," In the end the Emperor confirmed the will of Herod, with the ex- ception that he only allowed Archelaus to assume the title of Ethnarch, promising to give him the royal dignity hereafter if he should so reign as to prove himself worthy of it. The opposition offered to the sovereignty of Archelaus, and the distrust of him shown by Augustus even while giving effect to his father's disposition in his favour, were justified by the event. After nine years of misgovernment, the principal of his subjects sent a formal embassy to Rome to com- plain of his tyranny. They sustained their accusa- tions before Augustus, and Archelaus was deposed and banished. Augustus did not replace Archelaus by another king, or add his dominions to those of one of his brothers, but included his government in the Province of Syria, and placed it under the immediate care of a Procurator. ^ ' The office of a Procurator, strictly speaking, was to act under the governor of a province, as chief of the revenue depart- ment ; but sometimes, in a small territory contiguous to a larger I40 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Josephus says that " after the death of Herod and Archelaus the government became an aristocracy, and the high priests were entrusted with a dominion over the nation." -^ The relations of Imperial Rome with the kingdoms of the East are well illustrated by the relations of Imperial England now with the kingdoms of India. The Procurator of Judea seems to have been imme- diately appointed by and responsible to the Emperor. He represented the imperial authority. The Roman troops and garrisons were under his command. He only had the power of capital punishment. The taxes were farmed according to the financial system of the Roman Empire. The chief lessors were Roman Equites, who sublet special taxes or special localities to speculators, who again employed inferior agents in the actual collection. The system gave rise to much chicanery and oppression, and the Publicani were always an unpopular class. But in Judea the actual collectors of the taxes, who were mostly Jews, were specially hated as men who lent their services to the conqueror and made gain of the degradation and oppression of their own country. province, and dependent upon it, the Procurator was the head of the administration, and had full military and judicial autho- rity,— being, however, responsible to the President of the pro- vince. The position of the Procurator of Judea partook more of the latter character, though with some special modifications' » " Antiquities," XX., x. lo. FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CAESAR. 141 In other respects the Emperor allowed the admi- nistration to revert to something like its ancient con- dition before the Senate had conferred on Herod the title and authority of king. The ancient laws and customs were administered by the High Priest, as- sisted by the ancient council of the Sanhedrim, a council consisting of the chief priests, — that is, the heads of the twenty-four courses into which the priesthood was divided, — and others of the most influential men of the nation. If, as is probable, the ancient constitution was carried out, there were judges appointed in every town, with Scribes as their assessors, from whom there was an appeal to the Sanhedrim.^ The Sanhedrim appears to have exercised a considerable ecclesiastical authority over Jews beyond the limits of its civil jurisdiction. The Procurator usually resided at the new city of Caesarea, which Herod had built on the sea coast, and thus maintained his communications with Italy. A strong Roman garrison in the Castle of Antonia held possession of Jerusalem. At the great feasts, when Jerusalem was crowded by a vast multitude of Jews, filled with religious and patriotic fervour, the Gover- nor was accustomed to go up with a reinforcement of troops as a precaution against any sudden fanatical outbreak, to which the Jewish temper was liable, and ^ Josephus, "Antiquities," IV., viii. 14. 142 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. took up his residence in the palace of Herod the Great. The Roman authority was guilty of occasional acts of cruelty ; and, sometimes ignorantly, some- times wantonly, offended the religious scruples of the Jews ; but on the whole their government of Judca was not systematically oppressive ; the tribute not exxes- sive ; and though the religious and patriotic feeling of the Jews was sore at their subjection to a heathen power, yet their material interests prospered, and they enjoyed a great amount of practical religious and civil liberty. Jerusalem was still the religious capital, not only of the whole of Palestine, but of the great Jewish colonics in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and of the multitudes of Jews who were scattered throughout all the commercial cities of the world. " In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea.^' He was the fifth who had been appointed since the deposition of Archelaus. ^ He had been appointed by Tiberius in the year A.D 25-6, and consequently had now been about two years in his government. Two incidents related by Josephus will help us to realise the ^ Viz., I, Ccponius ; 2, Marcus Ambivius ; 3, Annius Rufus ; 4, Valerius Gratus ; 5, Pontius Pilatus. FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR. 143 character of the man. On his first coming he had ordered the army from Caesarea to Jerusalem to take up their winter quarters there. Under former Procurators, out of deference to the reh'gious objec- tion of the Jews to have the " hkeness of any thing " within the precincts of the Holy City, the troops sent to Jerusalem had carried standards which had not the usual sculptured ornaments ; but Pilate sent the troops up with their usual standards, and since they made their entry into the city in the night this was not observed. But as soon as it became known the people came down in multitudes to Cffisarea and beset him day after day entreating that he would withdraw the idolatrous ensigns. Pilate refused, on the ground that it would be derogatory to the dignity of the Emperor. At last, on the sixth day, wearied out with their continual annoyance, he surrounded the crowd of supplicants with his soldiers, and threatened them with immediate death if they did not cease from annoying him and return home. But they threw themselves upon the ground, and bared their necks, and declared that they were willing to die rather than that their law should be transgressed. Pilate was moved by their resolution, and consented to withdraw the objectionable ensigns.^ On another occasion Pilate was about to construct ' Joscphus, "Antiquities," XVIII., c. 3, § I. 144 ^ DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. an aqueduct to bring water into Jerusalem, out of the sacred money. The Jews again raised a tumult and insisted that he should abandon his design and " some of them used reproaches and abused the Procurator as crowds of such people usually do." Pilate sent disguised soldiers with concealed daggers among the crowd ; and when they refused to disperse and assailed him with reproaches he gave a signal and the soldiers drew their daggers, and, far exceeding their commanders' intentions, killed and wounded many of the people, peaceful spectators as well as the tumultuous mob. "Annas and Caiaphas being High Priests." Seeing that the High Priest was the head of the administration of Judea, it is not surprising that St. Luke, in fixing the chronology of his history, and glancing at the political condition of the scene of it, should include among the names of the princes and governors who administered the various divisions of the country, the name of the contemporary High Priest who was the chief of the administration of Judea, and whose authority over the Jews, in certain matters, extended far beyond the boundaries of Judea. But the remarkable statement that there were two High Priests ("Annas and Caiaphas being High Priests ") requires explanation. FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CjESAR. 145 It is not difficult to conjecture how two men could be said to be High Priests at the same time. In the reign of David there were two priests of apparently nearly equal authority Zadok and Abiathar (i Chr. xv. ii; 2 Sam. viii. 17). Indeed it is only from the deposition of Abiathar and the placing of Zadok in his room by Solomon (i Kings ii. 35) that we learn certainly that Abiathar was the High Priest and Zadok the second. In later times we find two priests, the High Priest and the second priest (2 Kings xxv. 18) of nearly equal diginity ; the coadjutor probably helping the High Priest in the administration of his office, and taking his place in the ceremonies of the divine service, if anything prevented the High Priest from officiating in person. Herod and Archelaus more than once deposed a High Priest and appointed another for reasons of political convenience. The Romans could not be expected to be more scrupu- lous than the Herods, and they not infrequently changed the occupant of the office, which they natur- ally regarded from its political rather than from its religious side. The Jews themselves, regarding the office from its religious side, probably found a way of mitigating the confusion which might have been caused by the co-existence of several High Priests, by regarding the elder (by creation) of the ex-priests as still High Priest, and the present holder of the L 146 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. office as his coadjutor. Annas had been appointed High Priest by Ouirinus, governor of Syria, after the battle of Actium, but after seven years tenure of office was deposed by the Procurator Valerius Gratus (A.D. 14) and Ismael appointed in his place, but he in turn was soon deposed in favour of Eleazar a son of Annas. He only held office for a year, and was replaced by Simon son of Camithus, who again held the office only for a year and was succeeded by Joseph Caiaphas the son-in-law of Annas. Before his death Annas had seen five of his sons, in the office of High Priest. It is easy to see how Annas might be regarded all this while as being the rightful High Priest, and how his sons and son-in-law, while exercising the civiP authority of the office, might willingly accord to him the personal deference and ecclesiastical precedence which the religious feeling of the Jews dictated " Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee." Galilee, ir the Old Testament of inferior interest to the other two divisions of the country, in the Gospel history becomes of as great importance and deep interest as Judea, for among its hills He lived for thirty years, and its lake, its cities, its hills and plains ' Hyrcanus had left the civil government to his brother Aris- tobulus. — Josephus, "Antiquities," XIV., I, 2. FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CALSAR. 147 were the scene of the greater part of His public ministry. The intermediate Samaria, then the scene of the turbulent story of the rival kingdom of Israel, now hardly appears in the history. The Sea of Galilee is a mountain lake about thirteen miles long, by about six miles across in its broadest parts. The country in the midst of which it is situated is for the most part an undulating table-land, which slopes abruptly down to the shores of the lake, where its waters lie about a thousand feet below the general level of the country, and seven or eight hun- dred feet below the level of the Mediterranean. This deep depression in which the lake lies is probably of volcanic origin ; and the climate, like that of the whole deep Jordan valley is tropical in its heat, in strong contrast with the clear bracing atmosphere of the hills and upland valleys of the country round. The hills on the eastern shore have the monotonous horizontal outline which belongs to the whole range of hills forming the eastern boundary of the Jordan valley ; but those on the western shore are more varied in outline,espccially at the northern end, and present a varied face of sloping hillside, and jutting crags ; numerous springs break out and run a longer or shorter course into the lake scattering verdure and fertility along their course. The hills for the most part slope abruptly down to the shore, but they leave all round a narrow margin of greater or less breadth ; L 2 148 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and the whole circumference of the water is fringed by a beach of white sand, often bordered with shrubs of thorn and oleander. There are three larger spaces left between the v/ater and the hills. Where the Jordan enters at the north, in a foaming rapid torrent, a little plain of fertile land is left between the lake and the high wall of the eastern range. At the southern extremity the river flows out into a wide valley which continues all the way to the Dead Sea. About the middle of its western side the hills suddenly recede and leave a level plain of five miles wide and six or seven miles long, watered by four springs which pour forth their almost full-grown rivers through the plain, and give to the rich soil a wonderful fertility ; this is the plain of Genesareth. In the time of our Lord this mountain lake abounded in fish, and was the highway of a consi- derable traffic. The hills in the north of Galilee, with the exception of a (qw rocky summits about Nazareth, were all wooded and sank down in graceful slopes and broad winding valleys of richest green. The plain of Esdraelon which stretched from west to east across the breadth of the country, and from north to south from the foot of the Galilean hills to the yise of those of Samaria, was exceedingly fertile. The plains and valleys grew corn ; the terraced hill- FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR. 149 sides olive and vine ; the higher slopes were dotted over with sheep. The whole region of Galilee was thickly studded with towns and villages, and was perhaps the most busy and thriving portion of the whole land. The eastern side of the Jordan valley, and how great a breadth of the grass of the wilder- ness beyond its boundary wall of hills we do not know, was also part of the territory of Antipas. Herod the Tetrarch, until his father's death called him to the throne, had passed most of his life in Italy in friendship with the Emperor and familiar inter- course with the great nobles of Rome. Josephus says that he was of a quiet, indolent, unambitious spirit ; he seems to have had something of his father's ostentation and religious laxity. He had brought from Italy a taste for magnificence and for the man- ners of Rome. He fortified Sephoris, the most considerable of the towns of Galilee, on the hills near the Mediterra- nean, and made it the metropolis of the Tetrarchy. At a spot a little south of the fertile and populous plain of Genesareth, and divided from it by a spur of the mountains, the steep hills leave a narrow strip of land between their slope and the water, and at its southern extremity some remarkable hot springs break forth from the foot of the hills. At- tracted by these hot springs Antipas built, on the strip of lake shore, a new city, which, in compliment to ISO A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. the Emperor, he named Tiberias. He built a palace for himself, — of whose gilded roofs and royal furniture and stores of silver Josephus speaks [Life, § 13], — a stadium, and adorned the city with fine buildings, and attracted to it Greek and Roman as well as Jewish inhabitants. Beyond Jordan he also built the city and palace of Macherus, as a protection to his trans-Jordan territories on the side of Arabia. The city was situated (we learn from Josephus, for its very site is now unknown) on a spur of the range of hills which bound the eastern side of the valley, about four miles north of the Dead Sea, on the confines of his own jurisdiction, and of the territories of Aretas, the Arabian king, whose capital was at Petra, and whose daughter Herod had married and repudiated. The steep declivity of the Jordan valley defended the site of the city on the west ; two deep lateral ravines defended it on the north and south, a great artificial fosse on the east side completed the isolation of the city. Its great natural strength was increased by strong walls and towers. The elevated peak of the hill within the city was converted into a citadel with additional strong fortifications, and within the citadel the Tetrarch had built himself another mag- nificent palace. Pliny speaks of the place as second in strength only to Jerusalem. In these strong places Herod maintained a force of foreign merce- FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR. 151 narics. He was a favourite of the Emperor and a wealthy and prosperous prince. Philip's Tetrarchy of Ituraea and the region of Trachonitis was the least important of the shares into which Herod had divided his inheritance among his sons. Having the upper course of the Jordan and the north-east shore of the lake of Galilee, for its western boundary it extended under the southern base of Hcrmon and to the south of Damascus- Trachonitis was the remarkable volcanic district anciently called Argob, and in modern times the Lejah. From the description of Josephus, from whom most of our knowledge of the Herods is derived, Philip would seem to have been the best of the Herodian princes. " He had shown himself," he says.^ " a person of moderation and quietness in his government ;^ he constantly lived in that country which was subject to him ; he used to make his progress with a few chosen friends ; his tribunal also, on which he sat in judgment, followed him in his progress; and when any one met him who wanted his assistance, he made no delay, but had his tribunal set down immediately wheresoever he happened to be, and sat down upon it and heard the complaint; he then ordered the guilty that were convicted to > "Antiquities," XVI 1 1., iv. 6. 152 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. be punished, and absolved those that had been accused unjustly." The Tetrarch of Ituraia had probably more excuse for city building in his remote province than some of his contemporaries. He built a new city for his capital at the foot of Hermon, near the sources of the Jordan which he called Caesarea in honour of his Imperial patron, while to distinguish it from the numerous other Caesareas people added his own name to that of his patron, so that it is known to us as Caesarea Philippi. On the hill, over the cavern from which the visible fountain of the Jordan issues, he built a temple of white marble in honour of the Csssar. Also, on the triangular plain which the Jordan leaves on the eastern bank where it flows into the sea of Galilee, between the river, the mountain, and the lake, he found in the town of Bethsaida the site for another royal city and palace on the pleasant shores of the lake, which he named Julias in compliment to his patron's daughter. The Tetrarchy of Lysanias was situated on the eastern slope of Antilibanus, in a district fertilised by the river Barada (the Abana of the Old Testa- ment), on its course towards the plain of Damascus. It was not a part of the dominions of Herod, and it does not enter into the gospel history and need not detain us longer. FIFTEENTH \hAR OF TIBERIUS CAESAR. 153 That holy land then, over which our Lord travelled to and fro, was divided into three jurisdictions. There were some dififerences also in the character of the populations of the several parts of the land. In Judea, Gaza was a Greek city, and Ca^sarea a Roman, but the rest of the people were of more unmixed Jewish race than elsewhere. In Galilee, Tiberias as wc have seen had more of the character of a Greek than of a Jewish city ; and the Galileans generally had a greater admixture of foreign blood than the people of Judea. The centre of the country stretching from the sea eastward to the Jordan, and from the southern border of the plain of Esdraelon to the northern border of Benjamin, was inhabited by the Samari- tans. These were descended from the Assyrian colonists with whom Esarhaddon had peopled the desolated country of Israel. They had adopted the religion of the land, but when Ezra refused to allow them to unite with the Jews in the rebuilding of the temple, they built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, and the apostate priest Manasseh origi- nated a rival priesthood there. The antagonism had continued throughout the subsequent period ; the Samaritans receiving only the Pentateuch, and keeping up their schismatical priesthood and worship. Herod the great had rebuilt the city of Samaria, erected a heathen temple there, and peopled it with a 154 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. colony of veterans, and called it Sebaste (Augustus) in honour of the Emperor. The Jews refused to hold any intercourse with them, and the Samaritans retorted by opposing the passage through their country of the Galilean pilgrims bound to the feasts at Jerusalem, and driving them to go round by the eastern side of the Jordan. In the Tetrarchy of Philip there was a prepon- derating Gentile population, and cities which were largely Greek in civilisation and religion ; Gadara and Hippos are described by Josephus as Grecian cities ; Caesarea Philippi the capital of the Tetrarchy, and Bethsaida Julias had been built by Philip in the classical taste of the Herod family. - The population of the whole land was divided into three broad political parties. First, the Herodians, M'ho are mentioned in Matt. xxii. 15, and Mark xii. 13. They were those whom hereditary connexions and personal interest bound to the cause of the family which for so many years had been the ruling family of the whole country, together with others who, with little personal attachment to the Herods, yet looked upon the continuance of the power of that family as the only practicable barrier against the direct dominion of Rome. In Judea, especially, a large part of the noble and wealthy classes were anxious to keep things as they were, and were sensi- FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CJSSAR. 155 tively afraid of anything which should provoke Rome or give it an excuse to deprive them of the large measure of self-government and religious toleration they still possessed. But a very large proportion of the people in all the sections of the land were profoundly dissatisfied with the political condition of the sacred nation, and nourished desires and expectations which made the situation critical and dangerous. The general feeling of the people, that in them submission to any earthly sovereign was not only a national degradation, but also a sin against their allegiance to God, found its highest expression in the party of the Zealots. Josephus says, "These men agree in all things with the Pharisaic notions ; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty ; and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death . . . nor can any such fear make them call any man Lord." 1 The Jewish historian attributes the rise of the party to Judas of Galilee, who, when Cyrenius came to Syria on the deposition of Archclaus and began to take account of the substance of the people, headed a revolt against the Roman autho- rity. The revolt was put down with great severity. » '< Antiquities," XVIII., i, i and 6. 156 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. But the fanatical spirit survived and showed itself in many future outbreaks. It culminated in the great rebellion of the time of Hadrian and Vespasian, which resulted in the destruction of the city and the dispersion of the people. In matters of religious belief and practice also there were two great schools of thought among the Jews, the Pharisees, and Sadducees, to which the Essenes may be added as a third. The Pharisees were not a sect, but a party or school among the Jews. The name means " separated," and it seems probable that it was in the days when the Greek masters of Palestine, and a party among the Jews themselves, were introducing Greek ideas and usages, and obliterating the distinctions between the Jews and the Gentiles, and so " mingling " the sacred race with the races among whom they dwelt, that the more zealous Jews maintained the more rigidly every point of difference, and a more exclusive attitude, and obtained the name of the Separatists. But besides a strict adherence to the law, which would have been commendable, the Pharisees of our Lord's time believed that, in addition to the written law which contained general principles, Moses had given an oral law, which completed and explained the written law ; and that this oral law was as binding as the written law. To this oral law had been added, FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS C^SAR. 157 from time to time, the decisions of prophets and Rabbis, which were all equally binding. A principle had been adopted by the late teachers of "fencing the law," i.e., adding prohibitions, ex majori cautcia, to keep men far away from the approach to any violation of the law, e.g., the law said, " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk," the Rabbis added a prohibition to use any milk in the cooking of any flesh. Thus they multiplied prohibitions and cere- monials, which interfered with personal conduct and social intercourse, until they became " a burden too heavy to be borne." In the Mishna, written a short time after this period, these "traditions" were at length committed to writing, and the book remains to us as an illustration of the popular teaching of the Pharisaic school to which our Lord so often alludes. But in these later times, the Pharisees were fast tending to become, not merely a school, but a sect or caste, for they formed societies among themselves, and avoided association with those who did not observe the same rules of life as themselves. Another characteristic of the Pharisees is that they exalted the office of Rabbi, which depended upon learning and personal character, to the depreciation of that of Priest, which, being hereditary, was inde- pendent of personal merit. Josephus says "they live meanly, despising deli- 158 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. cacies in diet, and follow the conduct of reason, and what that prescribes to them as good they do They also pay a respect to such as are in years. . . . whatsoever the people do about divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform according to their directions The cities give great attesta- tions to them on account of their entire virtuous conduct, both in the actions of their lives and their discourses also." ("Antiquities," bk. xviii., ch. i, § 3.) There was much hypocrisy among them, as there will always be among any large party of men who make asceticism obligatory instead of voluntary ; they were all, in a sense, formalists, but much of the religious earnestness of the nation was to be found among the Pharisees ; they professed a strictness of moral conduct as well as a scrupulousness in the observance of religious duties ; they contrasted favour- ably with the cold, legal orthodoxy of the Sadducees, and with the lax religious belief and practice of the Herodians, and the carelessness of the multitude, and were held in high respect, and consequently exercised a considerable influence among the people. The origin of the Sadducees is more obscure.^ The most probable conjecture is that the priests of the time of Zadok (who obtained the High-Priesthood on the accession of Solomon) formed a kind of sacer- ^ Article upon them in Smith's " Bible Dictionary." FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR. 159 dotal aristocracy, to which afterwards were attached all who for any reason reckoned themselves as belonging to the aristocracy,— such, for example, as the families of the high-priest, judges, and individuals of the official or governing class. The leading dis- tinction between the Sadducees and the Pharisees was that the former denied that the oral law, as it existed among them, had come from Moses, or had any religious authority ; though it is possible that they observed many of the customary observances which had been thus introduced as matters of custom. Thus rejecting the oral law, and relying entirely on the written law, they also rejected the doctrine of a resurrection from the dead, on the ground that it is not taught in the Law of Moses. The belief that they rejected all the Old Testament Scriptures except the Tentat^uch is now generally admitted to be an error ; though it may be, that not only they, but the Jews generally, regarded Closes as standing on a higher level of authority than any of the later Pro- phets ; so that, while admitting that there appear to be allusions to a future life in the Prophetical and Poetical Writings, they might still decline to accept it is a doctrine divinely revealed, on the ground that it was not definitely taught by Moses. In the narrative of the New Testament the Saddu- cees seem to have consisted of a small number of i6o A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. persons oi the highest class of Jewish society, whose position gave them an influence in the conduct of affairs not less than that which numbers and popu- larity gave to the Pharisaic party. These two schools of thought — the Pharisees and Sadducees — were widely scattered throughout Jewish society. There was still another religious school, not numerous, but which excited much interest, and probably exercised an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. These were the Essenes. In doc- trine they did not differ from strict Pharisees, the difference lay chiefly in their mode of life ; they separated themselves from the world, lived a rigid ascetic life, and gave themselves to religious contem- plation. They were to the Jewish Church of those times what the anchorites and monks were after- wards to the Christian Church. About two centuries before the period of which we write, there arose in the solitary country on the west side of the Dead Sea a society of pious men, who sought refuge in these solitudes from reigning cor- ruption, from the strifes of parties, and the storms and conflicts of the world. They attracted the interest of the elder Pliny, who describes them as "a race entirely by themselves, and, beyond every other in the world deserving of wonder; men living in communion with nature ; without wives, without money. Every day their number is replen- FIFTEENTH YEAR OF TIBERIUS CESAR, rfii ished by a new troop of settlers, since they are much visited by those whom the reverses of fortune have driven, tired of the world, to their mode of hving." Josephus tells us they entirely addressed themselves to agriculture, and had all things in common ("Anti- quities," xviii. 1,5). When a boy of sixteen he himself joined their ranks. " When I was informed that one whose name was Banus lived in the desert, and used no other clothing than grew upon trees, and had no other food than what grew of its own accord, and bathed himself in cold water frequently, by night and by day, in order to preserve his chastity, I imi- tated him in those things, and continued with him three years." From their original seat colonies had been formed in other parts of Palestine, some even in villages and towns ; and individuals attached to their body even lived in the ordinary occupations of life. Manahem (said to have been the colleague of Hillel, the great Rabbi), the friend of Herod, was an Essene, and the school was regarded with favour by Herod on that account. Josephus states that in his time their numbers were only about 4,000 ; but it is probable that they excited general interest, and exercised that influence which examples of purity, self-denial, unworldliness and spirituality do usually exercise, silently, it may be, but extensively upon the mind of their age. l62 A nrVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. This, then, was the scene of the history of the years of our Lord's pubhc Hfe : this Palestine, with its teeming population of mingled nationalities, with its administrative divisions, its political parties, its sects and schools, the domination of Rome giving a certain unity to its political constitution, and the Jewish religion and municipal law giving a certain unity of national life. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 163 CHAPTER XVIII. THE FORERUNNER. JIHEN a monarch makes a royal progress, a forerunner or harbinger or courier goes before him to give notice, that everything may be duly prepared for his coming ; so John the Baptist goes before the Lord Jesus, " to prepare the way of the Lord." Usually the harbinger goes on his way, no one looks at him a second time, or remembers him after he is gone; but John is a remarkable person ; the functions he fulfils are important ; for a little while he and his ministry occupy the foreground of the history, and claim our attentive consideration. John is so important a person in the history of the Christ that he himself was the subject of more than one ancient prophecy ; for he is the " Voice " of Isaiah proclaiming " Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God";^ he is the " Messenger " who, Malachi fore- told, "should prepare the way before Him";- and the " Elijah "^ of the same prophet, who was to be sent before the Advent of the Lord. ' Isaiah xl. 3. - Malachi iii. i. ^ Malachi iv. 5. M 2 i64 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. His birth was attended by remarkable circum- stances. It was announced to Zachariah by the angel Gabriel in the Holy Place of the Temple ; he was born like Isaac of a mother past the age of child- bearing ; his name was divinely given to him before his birth ; the voice of revived prophecy declared him in his earliest days to be the prophet and fore- runner promised of old time : " Thou child shall be called the Prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways."^ A single sentence contains his history from the day on which these words were spoken of him during the thirty years which passed away until the Gospel brings him upon the stage again : " The child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the desert till the day of his showing unto Israel." If we also recall to mind that the angel had directed that the child should be brought up as a Nazaritc from his birth, and had declared that he should be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb, we shall have before us all the knowledge we possess of John's early years. The desert mentioned was probably that which lay between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. But we have seen that this was the very locality in which the Essenes had their head quarters, and the story of > Luke i. 76. THE FORERUNNER. 165 Josephus indicates that besides the large communi- ties on the shore of the Dead Sea there were indi- vidual recluses scattered over the neighbouring desert. John would appear, to people who knew anything of him, to be one of these. And there, in the solitude and mortification, in the reading and prayer and contem- plation of the ascetic life, John was trained for his office and work. The contrast between this ascetic life of John in the desert and the life of domestic charities and homely duties which Jesus led in the home at Nazareth is very sharp and striking, and naturally attracted the attention of their contemporaries :^John with his attenuated figure and features, his prophet's mantle of rough hair cloth girded with a leather thong, his dark dishevelled Nazaritic hair flowing over his shoulders, his dark deep-set eyes, now with the mystic's dreamy inward look of habitual medi- tation, now flashing with the fire of prophetic inspiration ; Jesus with his calm and gracious pre- sence, his golden hair and outward-looking observant eyes, his white tunic, woven without seam, which loving hands had made, girded after the fashion of the day with a scarf of many colours, and the striped blue robe ; the contrast in their mode of life, John holding aloof from men, "neither eating nor drinking"; Jesus freely mixing with his fellows, ac- cepting invitations to marriages and to feasts. i66 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. In allusion to thfe objections which people made then, as they do now, some objecting to John's asceticism and some to the absence of it in Jesus, the Lord replied "Wisdom is justified of all her chil- dren." Probably the stern, self-denying, unworldly ascetic is the most efficient preacher of repentance, and renewed religious earnestness, to a religious world like that to which the Baptist had to preach, formal and proud, wealthy, worldly, and self-indul- gent. While it was of the essence of Christ's ex- ample to show the pattern of a holy life, not in an exceptional mode of life, but in a life led under the ordinary conditions ; thus hallowing the common human life and showing all men how they may hallow their own lives after the pattern of His. At length, at the age of thirty years, ^ " the word of the Lord came to John in the wilderness," that is the prophetic inspiration came upon him, and he came forth into the fertile populous Jordan valley, and began to preach Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. His remarkable appearance, like " one of the old prophets risen again,'^ naturally attracted the atten- tion of the people ; his declaration " the kingdom of 1 It was the age at which the law (or custom) allowed the sons of Aaron to enter upon their priestly functions. THE FORERUNNER. 167 Heaven is at hand " fell on their expectant state of mind like a spark on tinder. By " the kingdom of heaven '^ John's contem- poraries understood that kingdom which God had promised to the Son of David (Ps. i. S); that fifth great monarchy of which Daniel had prophesied (Dan. ii. 44, 45 ; ix. 24) ; that reign of peace and righteousness whose characteristics Isaiah had de- scribed in beautiful language, as familiar to the hearts of God's people in that day as in this. They had gathered together all the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah and his kingdom, and out of them they had evolved a magnificent picture of a Messiah who should be a legislator like Moses, a conqueror like Joshua and David, a mag- nificent monarch like Solomon ; who should break the yoke of Rome from off the neck of the world, and make Jerusalem instead of Rome the centre of the world, and the Jewish instead of the Roman the dominant race ; who should establish a reign of peace, justice, prosperity and happiness, such as the world had never seen ; a reign which should extend to the uttermost part of the earth and last to the end of time. We must grasp this idea in all its gran- deur, and all its likelihood, if we would understand the exalted condition of mind of those who were " looking for redemption in Israel," if we would un- derstand the full significance of John's prophecy, i6S A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. "the kingdom of Heaven is at hand," and of Christ's fulfilment of it. As the preparation for the coming of this kingdom John preached repentance ; a national revival of spiritual holiness. So in former times in preparation for the giving of the Law, Moses had bidden the people to sanctify themselves. So at this time when the Jews admitted Gentiles into the covenant of Abraham they first baptized them with water to purify and fit them for admission among the people of God. And so John baptized the Jews unto repentance to purify and fit them for admission into the higher dispensation of the Kingdom of God. Profounder minds might have seen that the character of the Forerunner and the mode of his announcement of the kingdom foreshadowed the nature of the Christ and of his kingdom. The royal herald was not a warrior, but an ascetic, and the note of preparation was not " He that hath no sword let him sell his coat and buy one," but " Repent." The Baptist's preaching produced a widespread and profound impression over the whole of Palestine : " All men counted John that he was a prophet." " Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan confessing their sins."^ ' Matt. iii. 5. THE FORERUNNER. 169 " Many of the Pharisees and Sadducees came to his baptism."! The despised publicans;- the hated soldiers^' of Herod Antipas from the neighbouring Macherus. Herod^ himself " knew him to be a good man and an holy, and observed him, and when he heard him he did many things, and heard him gladly" ; and "the Jews," i.e., the authorities of the nation, " sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou ? Art thou Elias ? Art thou the Christ?" 5 ' Matt. iii. 7. ^ Luke iii. 12. ' Luke iii. 14. ^ Mark vl 20. '' John i. 19, 2:. PART IIL-THE MINISTRY. CHAPTER XIX. THE BAPTISM. HE scene of John's baptism was at Bethabara (or Bethany), beyond Jordan, where the Jordan valley as it approaches its de- bouchure into the Dead Sea, widens into a broad fertile tract of country, with the Judean hills on the west, and the long wall of the mountains of Moab on the East. The remarkable depression of the country, here i,ooo feet below the level of the Mediterranean Sea, gives it a tropical climate ; and the groups of palms and luxuriant vegetation, fed by numerous springs, gave the landscape an air of beauty in striking contrast with the bare and brown hills which enclose it. The important city of Jericho was on the other side of the river at the foot of the western hills ; the strong fortress of Macherus with its de- pendent town was at about the same distance on an isolated spur of the Moabite hills. The Jordan here is a broad and rapid stream ; but the scene of the Baptism was probably some affluent rising from THE BAPTISM. i7i the eastern range, whose sparkling waters afforded the typical element in convenient abundance, while the groups of trees nourished by the water-course afforded shade to the disciples, as they sat and listened to the prophet. " Then cometh Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee to Jordan unto John to be baptized of him" (Matt. iii. 13). It may be doubted whether the significance of the baptism of Jesus is commonly understood, and whether the incident holds so important a place as it ought to do in the popular view of the sacred life. It was, in fact, the outward designation of Jesus as the promised Messiah, and his solemn consecration to the office. When Jesus "came from Nazareth of Galilee to Jordan unto John," he was an unknown man ; he had said nothing and done nothing to attract men's atten- tion to him ; he was one among the thousands who came from all parts to hear John preach and to be baptized of him. John had, indeed, some previous knowledge of him ; they were cousins ; he could hardly be ignorant of the prophetic utterances at the time of their in- fancy which had foretold their after destinies, and rela- tion as the Forerunner and the Christ ; he recognised that there was an incongruity in his baptizing Jesus for the kingdom of Heaven, that he ought rather to be baptized for the kingdom by its destined king. 172 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. The reply, " Suffer it to be so now, for thus it bc- cometh us to fulfil all righteousness " {Mat. iii. 14-15), seems to mean that since he had not yet been called and consecrated to his office he was yet one among the rest of the people ; that in this character he was doing right in showing faith in John's announcement of the kingdom and seeking his baptism as one who desired to enter into it; and that, though hereafter their relation might be altered, John would do right now in performing the functions of his office upon him. But John could not declare him to be the Christ on the testimony of others, he could not add his inde- pendent testimony until he was authorised by the sign which had been given him. For as it had been revealed to Simeon that he should not die till he had seen the Lord's Christ ; and, as on a particular day he came by the spirit into the Temple and it was made known to him that the child then being pre- sented was the Christ, so it had been revealed to John that he should not only vaguely prepare men's minds for the Messiah's coming, but that he should know the Messiah by the testimony of a sign from heaven, and should point him out to the people : — " He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me. Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost " (John i. 33). " Now, when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was THE BAPTISM. I73 opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him : and lo, the heavens were opened, and a voice came from heaven which said, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. iii. 17, "This is," &c. ; Mark i. 1 1 ; Luke iii. 22). Then the long line of Messianic prophecy, which began in Paradise with the promise of " the seed of the woman," and which had grown continually clearer and more definite, designating successively the seed of Abraham, of Isaac (not of Ishmael), of Jacob (not of Esau), the tribe of Judah,thc house of David, reached its climax when the Baptist stretched forth his hand towards Jesus and said : — " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." " This is he of whom 1 said. He that cometh after me is preferred before me, for he was before me " (John i. 29, 30). Now that we are perhaps better prepared to under- stand its significance we may glance again at the brief but important narrative and make a further note or two upon it. It was as he was praying that the heaven was opened and the dove descended and the voice was heard; as if the supernatural conclusion was connected with, was in answer to, his prayer. The heaven was opened, " rent asunder " is the force of St. Mark's expression ; and as Stephen saw heaven opened and the glory of God and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God, so now Jesus saw "the heavens opened unto him " and the glory of the Divine Majesty, and the spirit descend ;74 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. out of the midst of the divine glory, in a bodily shape like a dove, — of light or fire perhaps, and lighting upon him, as the tongues of fire afterwards on the disciples on the day of Pentecost ; and there came a voice out of the opened heavens, the voice of the Father, saying " Thou art my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." St. Mark and St. Luke say that the voice was addressed to Jesus. If John heard it, as St. Matthew's " This is my Beloved Son" seems to suggest, for a further confirmation of the appointed sign of the descending dove, still the declaration was addressed to Jesus, and was for his sake ; not only, or chiefly, if at all, for the sake of them that stood by. It was God's declaration to the man Jesus of his being the Son of God, beloved of God, and approved by God, made at this momentous crisis of his life and work. It was the confirmation to the human mind and spirit of the Son of Man of God's approval of his pre- vious life up to this great crisis, and an assurance of his love and support in the great work to which He now called Him. The descent of the Holy Spirit at his baptism was not only the designation of Jesus as the IMessiah of the ancient prophecies, it was also his consecration to the office, and qualification for the work. The Hebrew word " Messiah," translated into Greek is " Christ," and translated into English is " Anointed.'" THE BAPTISM. 175 The Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed mean precisely the same thing. We shall better understand the significance of the title if we consider some of its types. In the ancient dispensation God directed that three classes of men should be solemnly designated and consecrated for their office by the ceremony of anointing, i.e. the pouring of consecrated oil upon the head. The three classes of men who were to be anointed were kings, priests, and prophets. Thus Samuel anointed Saul, and afterwards David to be kings of God's people (i Sam. x. i ; xvi. 13); and Zadok anointed Solomon (i Kings i. 34). Moses anointed Aaron to be priest (Exod. xxix. 7). God bade Elijah to anoint Hazael to be king of Syria, and Jehu to be king of Israel, and Elisha to be prophet in his own place (i Kings xix. 15). The meaning of the ceremony was this. These three classes of men are appointed by God, and He delegates to them something of His own prerogative. The king is the vicegerent over a particular nation of Him who is the King of all nations, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The priest fulfils a two-fold function : at one time he stands at the head of the people as their representative and spokesman, offer- ing their prayers and solemn things to God ; at another time he stands before the people as God's re- presentative, the channel through which he gives them 176 A DEVOTIOXAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. grace and blessings. The prophet speaks God's words to the people. The anointing was a sacra- mental rite ; oil is a symbol of the Holy Spirit ; and the pouring it upon the heads of these men was not only an authoritative appointment of them to their offices, but it was also a sacramental communica- tion to them of the graces of the spirit necessary to qualify them to fulfil the functions delegated to them. For example, David was thus designated out of all the sons of Jesse as the future king of Israel, and when Samuel poured the oil upon him " the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward " (I Samuel xvi. 13). But these ancient kings were only types of Him to whom, as Son of Man, all power is given in heaven and in earth. He is the real king, of whom all others are vicegerents. The ancient priesthoods, whether of Melchizedek or Aaron, were types of Him who is the only real priest ; who being God as well as man. represents the godhead to us, and is the channel of all pardon, grace, and blessing to us ; and who, having taken our humanity, being the second Adam, represents our race before the mercy- seat, and offers our prayers and praises, with the in- cense of his own intercession. God spake of old time by his prophets, who brought occasional and partial messages to his people, but in these last days he has spoken unto us by his Son, who is the very THE BAPTISM. 177 word and wisdom of God. Thus Jesus is tJic king, the priest, the prophet, emphatically THE ANOINTED OF THE Lord, the Christ, the Messiah. He was not only designated to this office at his baptism by prophetic voice and heavenly sign, but the Holy Spirit was given to him to fit him for the fulfil- ment of the great office and work of the Messiahship. We have already been told that " the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled wnth wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him," ^ and again, that "Jesus ncreased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." " Now we are told that he received fresh grace of the Holy Spirit to fit him for new duties : the Baptist says in allusion to this occasion, " God giveth not the spirit by measure unto him" ;^ and St. John the Evangelist tells us that it is of this " his fulness that all we have received, and grace upon grace.""* Those long years of silence and obscurity which were thus brought to a close, were not silent and obscure through the voluntary choice, so to speak, of Jesus ; they were a part of his humility and obedience to the will of God. \^ery possibl}' he had alread}' said many times in his heart in allusion to this baptism of the Spirit, as he did afterwards to the ' Luke ii. 40. - Luke ii. 52. ^ John iii. 34. ■• John i. 16. N 178 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. baptism of blood, " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accom- plished." But it was not for him to assume to him- self the Messiahship, and to go forth to its awful work, until God should call him and qualify him : " No man taketh this honour to himself, but when he is called of God, even as was Aaron," So Christ glorified not himself to be made a High Priest, but he that said unto him, " Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." At every great crisis of the history the question arises anew of the nature of the relations of the divine nature and the human nature in Jesus. We should have thought that the Son of God need not thus wait to be called by God the Father to take upon him the office and work which he came into the world on purpose to fulfil ; and that God the Son did not need the grace of the Holy Spirit to qualify him for it ; but we gather that it was the duty of the Son of Man to wait for God's call, and that the Son of Man did need the grace of the Spirit. We should, perhaps, have thought that the Son of God did not need to pray to the Father, and did not need the Voice to assure him of the Father's love and approval ; but we see in many places that the Son of Man habitually prayed, spent nights of prayer, and we gather that the Son of Man was strengthened and reassured by the gracious words of God. THE BAPTISM. 179 John's ministry had done its work of attracting universal attention, and the multitudes who were baptized by him were an evidence of a real and wide- spread spirit of moral preparation ; it was then that Jesus came to John ; and John's ministry was crowned when he designated and sacramcntally consecrated the Messiah. His ministry was virtually accom- plished, and he begins to recede into the background of the history: "John decreases while Jesus in- creases." 1 Shortly after John was imprisoned and after some months he was put to death. Let us not fail to learn a lesson from his humility who described himself as no one, a mere voice uttering a message ; who contentedly saw his own popularity wane before that of Jesus ; and another lesson from his boldness in rebuking vice not only among publicans and harlots, but among chief priests and kings ; let us remember to his honour the testimony of his Lord, " a prophet, yea, I say unto you and much more than a prophet, for verily I say unto you among those that are born of woman there hath not arisen a greater than John, the Baptist"; and we are constrained to add the- glorious conclusion of the saying, " notwithstanding, he that is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." ^ John iii. 30. N 2 j8o a devotional LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XX THE GREAT FAST. HE long years of growth and preparation are over, and this one perfect and unspotted scion of the great human race, like a young plant which had grown in a sheltered situation, and bloomed under a smiling sky, — this brilliant youth (he was still only thirty years old), the flower of the human race, — has been led forth from his obscurity by the hand of God, and proclaimed by a voice from heaven to be the promised man round w^hom the whole history of the world turns, the " Desire of all nations," the destined Saviour and King of men. The Divine Spirit has been poured without measure upon that perfect humanity. He stands upon the threshold of his career. What will follow .'' What divine splendours will henceforth surround the Beloved Son ? What will be the great achievements of the Champion of mankind } We expect now the Jewish nation first, and then all the nations, to rally round their natural Head and Prince. It is very striking to find that what docs really immediately follow is the record of his being brought THE GREAT FAST. into the depth of human destitution and feebleness. " Immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilder- ness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days [and forty nights, St. Matthew iv. 2] . . . . with the wild beasts" (St. Mark i. 12, 13), " and in those days he did eat nothing ; and when they were ended he afterward hungered " (St. Luke iv. 2). The Fasting followed " immediately " upon the Baptism ; and all three of the Evangelists specially call our attention. to the fact that this first act of the newly-consecrated Messiah was undertaken under a strong impulse of that Holy Spirit which had just been without measure given to Him : " He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness," say St. Matthew and St. Luke, while St. Mark seems to indicate the urgency of the impulse, — " the Spirit driveth him into the wilder- ness"; overcoming, perhaps, some natural shrinking of the human will from the great initial trial and combat with the powers of evil, as afterwards from the great final conflict at Gethsemane. Again the Fasting clearly is related to the subse- quent Temptation ; St. Matthew says, "He was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness [in order] to be tempted of the devil." What were the relations between the Fasting and the Temptation of our Lord ">. The question opens up the whole subject of the use of Fasting as a spiritual exercise. We find it taken for granted all through both the Old and the i82 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. New Testaments as a proper accompaniment of times of special prayer, and a proper preparation for great spiritual crises. Ezra^ fasted before he started from Babylon to go up to Jerusalem to undertake the reconstruction of the theocracy of Israel ; Christ fasted before he called His twelve Apostles ; ^ Saul fasted during the crisis of his conversion ; ^ the Pro- phets and Teachers of Antioch'^ fasted before they consecrated Barnabas and Saul to the apostolate ; Barnabas and Saul,^ fasted when they ordained elders in every city. Our Lord seems to throw light upon the special relation of the Fasting to the Temptation when he says to his Apostles, who had failed to heal the paralytic boy, " This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." ^ The Fasts which at once occur to our mind as presenting the most resemblance to that of our Lord are the Fasts of Moses before he went up into Mount Sinai to hold communication with God and to receive the law, and the Fast of Elijah on his pilgrimage to the Vision and the still small voice of God in Horeb. On the whole, we seem to gather that this great Fast of our Blessed Lord, immediately after his desig- ' Ezra viii. 23. - Luke vi. 12. ^ Acts xi. 9. * Acts xiii. 3. * Acts xiv. 23. * Matt. xvii. 21. THE GREAT FAST. 183 nation to the office of the Messiah, and imn:iediately before his first great encounter with the Enemy or Mankind, was the solemn disciphne of his human spirit for the work upon which he had entered. It gives a clue to the whole character of the work of Redemption. The great Champion of fallen humanity was to fight by suffering, and to conquer by dying. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." i84 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XXI. THE T E M P T A T I O N. HE history has already brought us face to face with great and glorious mysteries of the unseen world. We have heard the Father's voice from heaven, and seen the Spirit descending in bodily shape upon the Incarnate Lord. We have seen the angels of God mingling in the affairs of men, appearing to the priest in the Temple, and the maid in her cottage, and to Joseph and the Magi in dreams. We are now to be brought face to face with another, — the darkest and most dreadful of the mysteries of the unseen world, — the existence of evil spirits, and their agency in effecting the original fall of man, and in aggravating man's sin and misery in every age. The Gospel postulates the history of the Fall, tliough now it first alludes directly to it. As soon as he has assumed the Messiahship, Jesus finds himself confronted with the Arch Enemy. There are many Christian people who have very vague notions about the Satan of the Scriptures. THE TEMPTATION. 185 Some think him a kind of unreal personification of a principle of evil which pervades the world. Some who believe in Satan's real personality think of him as if he were present to every man, and tempting him always, i.e., as ubiquitous and omniscient, makint;- him a kind of evil deity. It is important for the understanding of the whole religious history and condition of man to have an accurate knowledge of this important subject. Satan was originally one of the angels of heaven, probably an archangel, one of the chiefs of the heavenly hosts. Angels, like all creatures with a free will, are liable to set their will in opposition to God's will, i.e., to sin; and the Scriptures tell us that some of the angels, of whom Satan was chief, did actually sin. We know how fallen men and women seem to have a jealous hatred of the good, and to take a dreadful pleasure in bringing others down to their own moral level. The fallen angels exhibit the same dreadful malice. There was, per- haps, some special relation between Satan and man- kind. It has been conjectured that God executes his ordinary providential government of the universe through his angels, and that the special care of this world and its newly-created race had been committed to the archangel Satan, and that when he fell, instead of its beneficent ruler he became its tyrant, so far as his power was permitted, in accordance with God's i86 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. wonderful ways, who is accustomed to let evil kings still rule nations, and evil fathers still rule their families, and who out of all this evil will eventually deduce a higher good, and justify his long-suffering, and vindicate his wisdom and goodness in the face of men and angels. Others have conjectured that the fall of the angels )ccurred before the creation of mankind, and that the creation of this new race had some relation to the angels' fall, and that this directed the special malice of Satan against our unhappy race, and made him the special enemy of mankind. This spiritual foe of mankind, then, is a fallen archangel. By falling into sin he did not cease to be an angel, and become a being of another nature. He did not gain any new powers, or any increase of his original powers, rather we may be sure that his original powers suffered deterioration. We need not suppose, then, that Satan knew more of the divine scheme by which man was to be reco- vered from the fall into which Satan had seduced him than the unfallen angels ; and we seem to gather that this scheme of redemption was not made known beforehand to them, but that they watch it unfolded before their eyes with intensest interest, — "which things the angels desire to look into." Perhaps Satan knew as much of it as the unfallen angels, and watched it with equal interest, and sought to defeat it. THE TEMPTATIOX. 187 The circumstances of the Baptism may have directed Satan's attention to Jesus. He, as well as the Baptist, had, perhaps, recognised the signs of the Messiah- ship ; he too, perhaps, had heard the voice saying, " Thou art my Beloved Son." He recognises Him of whom it had been prophesied from the beginning, that He should " bruise the serpent's head." He recognises the great Champion of the human race, and he, the great Enemy, enters into spiritual conflict with Him. It is an awful moment in the world's history. The Champion of the human race has entered the lists, and its great and hitherto trium- phant Tyrant comes forth to meet him. The weapons of Satan's warfare are temptations ; and his temptations are always adapted with great subtlety to the character and circumstances of those he assails. Coarse temptations, pleasure, wealth, ambition, — are adapted to coarse minds ; but to finer natures he presents more refined allurements. He approached unfallen Eve in some bright disguise, and tempted her with the hope of raising mankind at once to that more glorious height which God had held out vaguely in the future as the reward of steadfastness. The Tree of Life God had given to sustain their actual life ; this higher life, He had declared, was in some way connected with the other Tree of Know- ledge. Satan led Eve to believe that the eating of Ihis other tree would raise her at once to that higher iS8 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. life without probation and delay. Eat of it and " ye shall be as gods." No doubt he approached our Lord in some disguise. Perhaps it is to his apparent form on this occasion, that St. Paul alludes when he says, that Satan " is transformed into an angel of light." ^ And he adapted his temptation to our Lord's nature and circumstances. He is the " Beloved Son," He is the destined Deliverer. This fact is the key to his three- fold temptation : it is based upon the " If thou be the Son of God." The Lord kneels in the desert, at the end of his forty days' fast, reduced to the extremity of human weakness ; one appears to him like an angel of light ; he only anticipates by a few hours — or moments — the coming of the angels who ministered to Him when the Temptation was done. In plausible words he utters the suggestion, " If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread " : — If thou art the Son of God thou hast great destinies before Thee ; suffer not thyself thus to perish miserably of hunger ; thy fast has surely lasted long enough ; now exert the power which, as Son of God, thou must needs possess, and so save thyself for the great future. Where would have been the harm .^ In after years, twice over. He wrought a miracle to alleviate the ' 2 Cor. xi. 14. THE TEMPTATION. 189 discomfort of the multitudes suftering from a few hours' fast; why should lie not make a similar exertion of His power on this occasion ? In a few hours — or minutes — the angels did bring supernatural succour ; why should not the king of the angels anticipate their ministration ? He Himself gives us the reply : — Jesus answered him, saying, — " It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proccedeth out of the mouth of God." The meaning of the answer is a little obscure. Let us turn to the place in which " it is written," viz., Deut. viii. 3, and study it there, and we shall arrive at its meaning. God fed Israel with manna in the wilderness, " to humble them, and to prove them, and to make them know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proccedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live " ; i.e., God fed Israel with manna to make them know that He who gave life, and ordinarily sustains it by ordinary food, could, in the absence of ordinary food create new means of sustaining it, or without means could sustain it by the mere word of his power. The manna fell every day, just sufficient for every person, until they entered the Promised Land, and came within reach ot the garnered corn of the Canaanites. Thus God brought Israel to trust with entire dependence and confidence in Him for the supply of their necessities. Jesus is truly man, living ;i true human life in all I90 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. respects, not bringing in his Godhead at every turn, or even in any extremity, to help his human feeble- ness, or soften the conditions of his human life. He exercised His divine power with the utmost readiness and freedom on behalf of others, never on His own behalf He had undertaken this fast under a divine impulse, " the Spirit had led him up [" driven him "] into the wilderness," and he left Himself in the hands of God. To have complied with Satan's sug- gestion would have shown that His trust in God's providence had come to an end. It was not so, He still had perfect confidence in God. And thereby He taught zis a perfect confidence in God ; God often lets man reach the extremity of endurance before He interferes ; so often that it has become a proverb, " Man's extremity is God's opportunity." "Then the devil taketh him up into the Holy City, and setteth him on the pinnacle of the Temple, and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God cast thyself down, for it is written. He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone " (Matt. iv. ; Luke iv.). Whether Satan actually transported our Lord in the body, or only in a trance or vision ; whether, afterwards, in the third temptation, he caused him actually to see all the provinces of Palestine from some Pisgah-point, or only in a vision caused the kingdoms of the world and their glory to pass before His mind's eye, we do not know; and it is of little THE TEMPTATION. 191 importance to the matter in hand. We must bear in mind that there were no spectators of the temptation, that its circumstances can only be known from our Lord's own narration of them, and that he has told them in such a way as to produce upon our minds the truest impression of this great and mysterious transaction. ''The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose." Our Lord had quoted Scripture in justification of his leaving Himself, even in this extremity, in the hands of God ; Satan appeals to this sublime and entire confidence in the providential care of God. He quotes the Scripture promise contained in the 91st Psalm, which applies to Him,— if He be the Son of God,— and suggests to Him to make proof of it: " Cast thyself down from hence : for it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee to keep thee ; and in their hands shall they bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." Jesus, no doubt, had long looked forward, during the years of obscurity and waiting, to the hour when He would enter upon the office and work of the Messiah; His human heart was likely now to be swelling with a solemn exultation in the conscious- ness of the dignity and the powers lately committed to Him ; He might well be in haste to make proof of His powers; to realise them to Himself in their exercise ; to convince this doubting spirit. 192 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. But the clear insight of the mind and spirit of Jesus saw the fallacy and the snare. Satan had mis- quoted his text, it runs, " He shall give his angels charge of Thee to keep thee in all thy ivays." God's promise to preserve us " in all our ways " does not justify us in running into danger in order to make proof of His prom.ise ; nay, the promise does not extend to dangers which we wilfully incur, but only to those which come to us in the fulfilment of God's will for us, in walking in those ways which God has marked out for us to go in. Our Lord's reply to the temptation is again given in Scripture language, which touches the very heart of the matter : " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God," — thou shalt not put His promise to the proof to see if He will be as good as His word. Christ's perfect and entire trust in God was not tinged with the sin of spiritual presumption. " Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." Satan is " the Father of lies," but his suggestions generally have some truth in them, and it is that element of truth in them which makes them so dangerous : — " A lie which is half a truth is the greatest of lies." There was truth in his assertion to our first parents THE TEMPTATION. 193 that there was a higher state of being possible to them, and that God was delaying their admission into it ; the lie was in teaching them that it was possible for them by their own act to abridge this delay, and that the means to do so was to eat of this mysterious fruit which God had forbidden. So it is possible that there was a truth in what Satan here asserts to Jesus. We have already alluded to the suggestion that the government of this world had been committed to Satan, and that he still exer- cises a certain power over it. The vocation of the Messiah was to establish a universal monarchy ; Satan knew so much, as every Jew knew it ; and Satan may have shared the common Jewish error that it was a great temporal monarchy which the Messiah was to establish and rule. The temptation he offered was to withdraw his opposition, to use the power given him to aid Jesus in the accomplishment of his design, to abridge the long delay before the ultimate triumph of the kingdom, if the Messiah would make in r^turn some acknowledgment of the suzerainty of the Angel of the World. We must suppose that Satan knew not, any more than men did at that time, the awful mystery of the Deity which lay hidden in the humanity of Jesus, and that he did not know- that Jesus had penetrated his angelic disguise. Jesus answered, " Get thee behind me, Satan ! for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, o 194 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. and Him only shall thou serve," and so taught us not to be tempted to take evil roads to right ends, but to hold fast to God's way, though it seem to lead a long way round, through huge dangers and terrible sufferings ; that not for the sake of gaining the highest and noblest ends for ourselves, not in the desire of securing the greatest blessings to others, ought we to swerve a hair's breadth from the right, — that we ought not to do evil that good may come. " Then the devil departed from him [" for a season,"' Luke iv. 13], and angels came and ministered unto him." The difficult question of the relation of the Temp- tation to the double nature of our Lord, is sure to suggest itself to the thoughtful student of the history of our Redemption. First, we lay it down as a certain truth that Jesus endured the Fast and the Temp- tation in the strength of His human nature, aided by such helps of grace as are giren to other men in their time of need, but without availing Himself of the attributes of His divine nature. He endured the Fast as man. He encountered the Temptation as man. This is essential to the understanding of one great aspect of the transaction. Jesus was what unfallen Adam was. He was subjected to the same temp- tation in its essence as that with which the Enemy assailed Adam. And while the first Adam fell under the assault, the second Adam remained uninjured. It was necessary to the vindication of God's wisdom THE TEMPTATION. 195 and justice. Men will think that God placed Adam under circumstances in which it was morally impossible for him to retain his integrity ; the second Adam, under the same circumstances, did stand. Then the horrible thought suggests itself, suppose Jesus had succumbed to the subtlety of the Tempter. The reply of the great theologians is, that Jesus was " impeccable." Grasp clearly the truth, that though the assumption of the human nature clothes the Son I if God with human body, mind, and will, yet it is the Son of God who has assumed them ; and it is blas- phemous, impossible, to conceive of God yielding to temptation, and falling into sin. Yet the temptation was a real temptation ; for that human body, soul, and will, were capable of feeling the force of temptation ; His body, we know, felt hunger and thirst, His mind felt unkindness and unsuccess, His will felt the instinctive human desire to escape from that which was painful to human nature. The difficulty remains a difficulty, after all that can be said. Just as it remains a difficulty how Jesus could grow in wisdom, seeing the Son of God is omniscient. Let it be enough for our consolation to be assured that " He was tempted in all points like as we are," and can feel the sympathy of personal knowledge and experience for us in temptation, and will efficiently succour them that are tempted. Let it be enough for our assurance to know that His C) 2 ic6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. human will did not yield to temptation ; that Adam might equally have retained his integrity ; and that we sons of Adam who are born again into the second Adam by the Spirit, are now placed, like him, upon our probation ; that we can and must resist temp- tation ; that if we yield we fall, like the first Adam, into ruin ; if we remain firm, we triumph in the second Adam, and tread Satan under our feet. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 197 CHAPTER XXII. THE FIRST DAYS OF THE MINISTRY. ^^NE of the features of the history, which will ** strike every thoughtful mind, is its sur- prises. What happens is so different from what we should have expected ; but when we come to consider it, what really happens, — we can often see, and so we learn to take always for granted, — has a profounder appropriateness, a higher spiritual grandeur, than our anticipation. We should not have expected that this gracious youth, just pro- claimed Messiah, and declared the Beloved Son, and filled with the Spirit, would have been imme- diately led into the wilderness to undergo the forty days' fast. As little should we have expected that after the mysterious initiation of the forty days' fast, and the first great spiritual achievement of the victory over the great Enemy of Mankind, His life would pass straight from this tremendous strain to scenes of calm idyllic beauty. After the forty days were over, " Jesus returned to Bethabara, beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing." And now it is that the prophecy of igS A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. John rises to its highest strain. The object of prophecy was to point forward to the Christ, and to declare the nature of His person and His work. John is enabled to identify the Messiah, and to point Him out to all who were expecting His advent ; he also utters some remarkable declarations as to His person and His work : — " He that cometh from above is above all ; he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth, he that cometh from heaven is above all He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand" (John iii. 31-35). " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him" (John i. 18). " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John i. 29, 36). "The same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost'' (John i. 33). " Of his fulness have all we received, and gi-ace upon grace " (John i. 16). In these words we recognise that the last and greatest of the Prophets speaks in no ambiguous words : — I. — Of the eternal Sonship and mission unto the world. II. — Of the Great Sacrifice. III.— Of the gift of the Holy Spirit. The office of John was to prepare the way for the Christ, and we find that his ministry had been so effectual that he sends his disciples to Jesus and THE FIRST DA YS OF THE MINISTRY. 199 they become His disciples even before He Ir^'^ called them : — "The next day John seeth Jesus coming to him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John i. 29). And "Again, the next day after, John stood and two of his disciples, and looking upon Jesus as ht walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God ! And the two disciples followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye ? They said unto him, Rabbi (which is to say, being interpreted, Master), where dwellest thou? He saith unto them. Come and see. They came and abode with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour." " One of the two," he tells us, " was Andrew," and the other, doubtless, was John, who, as usual in his Gospel, refrains from naming himself. Of the nature of the momentous interview we are told nothing, but of the result of it : — " Andrew first findeth his brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias ; and he brought Simon to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona, thou shalt be called Cephas (which is, by interpreta- tion, [Peter], a stone)." The day following, Jesus " was minded to go forth into Galilee, and he findeth Philip and saith unto him. Follow me Philip findeth Nathanael [otherwise called liartholomew] and saith unto him. We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and the Prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel." Thus the first step of the Messiah is to begin to 200 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. gather a body of disciples ; and these five, — Andrew and John, and Simon, PhiHp, and Bartholomew, all of them apparently originally disciples of John, — become the first believers and adherents of the Messiah, the nucleus of the Church of Christ. A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 201 CHAPTER XXllI. THE FIRST MIRACLE. |FTER two days thus spent at Bethabara the third day Jesus left the company oi John, whom apparently he never saw again, and went forth to commence his own work. He did not go up to the Holy City to assert his office before the High Priest and Sanhedrim. He did not go down to commercial Capernaum to preach to the crowds of his countrymen. " There was a marriage at Cana of Galilee," probably of some relation of the Holy Family, for "the mother of Jesus was there," and her subsequent conduct is like that of one who was familiarly acquainted with and interested in the domestic arrangements. "And both Jesus was called, and His disciples to the marriage." And this is not a mere incident between the Temp- tation and the next great event in the history, — this 2S the next great event, for here He wrought His first miracle ; and the marriage feast was not the mere accidental scene and occasion of the miracle, but the miracle rose out of and received its sig- nificance from the marriage feast. 202 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. The narrative is too familiar to need that we should repeat it here, our business is to point out the significance of " this beginning of miracles." We note the comment of the Evangelist that in this miracle " He manifested forth His glory." John did no miracles. There is a great gap in the exer- cise of miraculous powers from the time of Daniel until the days of our Lord. We who are familiar with the multitude of miracles which our Lord wrought afterwards, may easily fail to realise the great effect which this first manifestation of the revival of this Divine Power would have upon the minds of those who witnessed it, in making them feel that " a great Prophet was risen up among them, and that God had visited His people." The Evangelist emphatically adds that after witnessing the miracle " His disciples believed on Him." We note a progressive strengthen- ing of their faith. They believed in Him on the word of John the Baptist ; their faith was confirmed by his supernatural knowledge ; it rises to a more entire belief when they witness His miracle. It was destined to rise through many subsequent degrees before it arrived at that absolute conviction which made them His witnesses to all the world. We should expect that the first manifestation of this miraculous power would take place on some appropriate occasion, and that it would have some special character and meaning ; and — if we have THE FIRST MIRACLE. 203 courage to confess it — this turning of water into wine at a wedding feast is not the kind of occa- sion, or the character of miracle, we should have expected. What is the explanation of it ? We find the significance of the miracle both in the occasion of it and in the nature of it. We shall very imperfectly comprehend much of the Gospel if we fail to realise from the beginning the important place which the Church of Christ holds in the Scripture view — in the Divine view — of the work of redemption. We must first grasp the great truth of the real, indissoluble union of the Divine nature and the human nature in the person of the Christ. Then we must realise that they who are truly Christians are organically united to Christ's humanity by an ineffable, mysterious, but real union ; " members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones" (Eph. v. 30), so that the Church is the body of Christ, an extension, as it were, of the humanity of Christ. The Church is united to God in Christ. The Church, Head and Body, is the mystical Christ. This union of the Divine nature and human nature, first, as regards the sacred humanity of Christ, is again and again spoken of in Holy Scrip- ture under the figure of the union which unites man and wife, so that they are no longer twain, but one flesh. And the inspired imagery is not restricted to 204 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. this narrower union, but grasps the wider union of God with our humanity in the mystical Christ, In the Old Testament Scripures the forty-fifth Psalm is the great Epithalamium — the marriage song — of Christ and his church. First the Psalmist addresses the Royal Bridegroom : — "Thou art fairer than the children of men, full of grace are thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for ever. "Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O thou most mighty, according to thy worship and renown ; ride on because of truth, of meekness, and of righteousness, and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things, " Thy arrows are very sharp, and the people shall be sub- dued unto thee, even in the midst, among the king's enemies. " Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever ; the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre ; thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore hath God anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. " All thy garments smell of myrrh, aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad." Then turning to the Bride he says : — "Hearken, O daughter, and consider, incline thine ear; forget also thine own people and thy father's house ; so shall the king have pleasure in thy beauty, for he is thy Lord God and worship thou him," &c. And this symbolism is wrought out in greater de- tail in the allegory of the Song of Solomon, which is the elaborate expression of the love of redeemed humanity for God, of the soul for its Lord, of the THE FIRST MIRACLE. church for Christ, of the bride for the Heavenly Bridegroom.^ St. John the Baptist had already used the same imagery when his disciples complained that the people were deserting him and going to Christ : " He that hath the bride is the bridegroom " (John iii. 29). Our Lord frequently uses the same similitude: — " The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a certain King, which made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding " (Matt, xxii.) represents the ex- ternal aspect of the Church of Christ in this world. The last scene of Christ's kingdom here on earth is represented in one of the latest parables, " Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins which took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom" (Matt, xxv.) And "the mystical union betwixt Christ and his church " is symbolised, St. Paul tells us, by marriage (Eph. v. 22— end). And so St. John in the Revelation : — " I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thun- derings, singing. Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be anayed in fine linen, clean and white ; for the tine linen is the righteous- ' See also Hosea ii. 14-20, &c. 2o6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. ness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb " (Rev, xix. 6-10). The marriage at Cana of Galilee was a type of his kingdom, — his church — the nucleus of which was already gathered together, and was there present with him in the persons of his mother and his five disciples. It is more than a mere beautiful similitude, re- peated so often because it so fittingly expresses the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church, — the noble, redeeming, protecting affection of God, — the dependent, devoted, clinging love of the human soul for God ; it is so profoundly true that the highest act of worship which Christ ordained in his church is that Feast on Bread and Wine, which is more than a type, it is a foretaste, of the marriage supper of the Lamb. We recognise, then, a deep significance and pro- priety in the occasion of " this beginning of miracles." Again, we find the significance of the miracle in the nature of it : the turning of the common element of water into the nobler wine which invigorates and " maketh glad the heart of man." Isaiah uses figurative language of the same kind : "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree" (Isaiah Iv. 13). " The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad THE FIRST MIRACLE. 207 for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose" (Isaiah xxxv. i), typifying that elevation of the whole being and life of humanity to a higher level which Christ came to effect in his king- dom. The whole incident also is significant of the tenor of the life of Jesus. We have seen that it is most probable that the family at Cana were relatives of our Lord. The first act, then, of the Lord after He has begun to gather together disciples is to take them with Him", not into the wilderness to ascetic discipline, not into the cities to teach and preach, but into a home, to recognise the social ties and fulfil the kindly sympathies of life. 2o8 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XXIV. THE SON OF MAN. EFORE we go any further in the history let us address ourselves to a question which is one of legitimate interest to every student of the life of our blessed Lord. In every picture which represents a scene of the Gospel history whether it be the nativity or a miracle or the sacrifice of the cross, the part of the picture upon which the artist has spent most time and thought, and perhaps, like Fra Angelico, most prayer, is the Divine figure in whom the interest centres, whether it be as the holy child on His mother's lap, or the Lord bidding the storm cease, or the dying Saviour. And we ourselves in endeavouring to meditate upon these subjects, have to begin by painting a mental picture of the scene, as truthfully and as vividly as we can ; and we are thus led to consider, not as a question of idle curiosity, but as a matter of devout interest, whether there is any authentic repre- sentation or description or any probable tradition of the personal appearance of Jesus. THE SOX OF MAX. There is no reason why there might not be The arts of painting and sculpture were at a high decree of excellence at the time, and the custom of perpe- tuatmg the likeness of great men was common The atrium of every noble Roman house contained a series of busts of ancestors, and the public places of the cities were crowded with the statues of Emperors and distinguished men. The public collections of Europe contain hundreds of such ancient portraits of ■such merit as portraits and as works of art as modern art can hardly equal. We have it on record that the Emperor Alex- ander Severus placed in his oratory statues of four persons whom he considered to be great religious teachers, viz., Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius of Tyana. But this was two centuries after Christ, and whether His statue was derived from original portraits then extant, or was, like those of Abraham and Orpheus, a mere ideal, we are not told There are early pictorial representations of Our Lord among the painted decorations of the Roman Catacombs, and some of these paintings are as early as the second century; but a glance at them is enough to show that they are merely conventional symbolical hgures, and were never intended to be portraits The same judgment applies to the sculptured representa- tions of Gospel scenes which are common on the sarcophagi of the fifth and sixth centuries. P 2IO A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. There are many legends which show that it was a subject in which Christian people naturally took a great interest. Such as the legend of the Veil of St. Veronica : — that when our Lord was on His way to Calvary, she lent Him her veil with which to wipe the sweat of agony from His face, and that when He returned it to her, a portrait of the sacred features was found to have been miraculously im- pressed upon it. Or that of Abgarus, king of Edessa : — that he was a believer in Christ, and wrote to invite him to his dominions, and that our Lord declined to go, but sent the king a portrait of him- self painted by St. Luke. Such legendary portraits, with the growth of the rage for relics, after the fourth century multiplied, so that in the sixth century every principal city and Christian community had some image, picture, cameo, or other representation of Christ, each having a legend which carried it back to the great original. The superstition became so great and objectionable that the Council of Constantinople in 754, A.D., con- demned all pictures which pretended to have come down from Christ or His apostles. Li fine, an ex- haustive study of the subject leads to the conclusion that no authentic portrait of our blessed Lord exists. There is not even a consistent tradition. At the earliest period at which we find the subject under THE SON OF MAN. discussion, we find no historical statement of what the Lord's appearance was, but only arguments as to, what it was likely — from this or that consideration — to be. The earliest conjectures seem to have been founded upon the evidence supplied by allusions in prophecy ; and the conjecture which at first found favour was derived from the famous prophecy in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah : — " He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see liim there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid, as it were, our faces from him ; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." It was perhaps the depressed condition of the early church, when "not many wise, not many learned, were called," which led it the more readily to receive the idea that the Lord in his humiliation had taken a form which was studiously mean and repul- sive. A little later we find that other passages ol* Scripture were quoted as leading to the opposite con- clusion ; e.g.. Psalm xiv. 2. "Thou art fairer than the children of men, full of grace arc thy lips, because God hath blessed thee for ever." " My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand; ... he is altogether lovely" (Cant. v. 10, 16). Isaiah, speaking of the Christ, says (xxxiii. 17) — '■'Thine eyes shall sec the king in his beauty." 1' 2 2J2 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. In support of these texts was urged the general consideration that Christ being perfect man, the perfections of his mind, and of his soul, must have been manifested in the perfection of his bodily form and feature. There is a famous description of the personal ap- pearance of our Lord which professes to have been written by Publius Lentulus, a Roman friend of Pilate^ but was really written, it is more probable, about the beginning of the fourth century. It is interest- ing and, indeed, important, since it gives the general character of face and person which art had probably already adopted, and which the great Italian masters and modern painters have accepted as the type for their representations of Christ. The letter runs thus : — " At this time appeared a man who lives till now, a man endowed with great powers. Men call him a great prophet ; his own disciples call him the Son of God. His name is Jesus Christ. He restores the dead to life, and cures the sick of all manner of diseases. " This man is of noble and well-proportioned stature, with a face full of kindness and yet firmness, so that the beholders both love him and fear him. His hair is the colour of wine [yellow probably] and golden at the root — straight and without lustre, but from the level of the ears curling and glossy, and THE SON OF MAN. divided down the centre after the fashion of the Nazarenes \i.e. Nazarites]. His forehead is even and smooth, his face without blemish, and enhanced by a tempered bloom. His countenance ingenuous and kind. Nose and mouth in no way faulty. His beard is full, of the same colour as his hair, and forked in form ; his eyes blue and extremely brilliant. " In reproof and rebuke he is formidable ; in ex- hortation and teaching gentle and amiable of tongue. None have seen him to laugh, but many on the contrary to weep. His person is tall, his hands beautiful and straight. In speaking he is deliberate and grave, and little given to loquacity. In beauty surpassing most men." This is not, we repeat, an authentic document, and it is not the record of a consistent early tradition, but it is a proof of the early adoption of that type of person and countenance which has been generally adopted by art, and which the devout imagination o\ subsequent ages has found satisfactory. It will at once occur to the reader that golden hair and blue eyes, and a blooming complexion, are not the prevalent type of Eastern physiognomy. But it is a type which does occur, though rarely, and is highly regarded. We are reminded that David was " ruddy and of a beautiful countenance,* and fair ot ' See I Sam. xvi. 12, iS ; xvii. 42. 214 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. eyes " (marginal reading), " a comely person," " ruddy and of a fair countenance," which the commentators assert to mean that he was of this rare type ; and the thought is suggested that, as so often happens, the constitution of the great ancestor had reappeared in this remote descendant, and that there was a special human propriety in his title of the Son of David ; or, in other words, that David, the king, warrior, statesman, prophet, poet, the man of widest spiritual experience and deepest human sympathy of all men known to us, was, more completely than we commonly think, a type of David's Lord. In one particular, we may be allowed to suggest, artists seem to have often erred, viz., in representing our Lord as of middle age. This one perfect un- spoiled example of humanity, this flower of the great human race, had only just entered upon His brilliant manhood ; He was only thirty years of age when He left the peaceful, pure, unworldly home in which He had been reared, the mountain village in which He had bloomed, and entered upon the grand career of His public life and work. The gravity, wisdom, and authority which appear in the narrative of the ministry may well, indeed, give tlie impression of ripened powers and experience ; and it adds to the grandeur — and, what is more important, to the truth — of our conception of the history if we bear in mind that all this fjcntleness and sweetness was THE SON OF MAN. 215 exhibited by a youth of brilliant genius, in the first flush of a great career ; that He was little more than a youth who manifested this ripe wisdom, and practical sagacity, and lofty authority, and this power of a great character over those with whom He had to do. His dress was that which had become almost universal among the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world — the tunic and pallium. His tunic, — " the coat without seam, woven from the top throughout," — is spoken of as if of more than usual value, the hand- some gift, perhaps, of some devout disciple ; and the pallium, we may suppose, would not be of inferior material. A shawl of many colours may have girded the white tunic about the middle, and the pallium was not improbably striped like the modern haik of the East. Sandals completed the simple, classical, and dignified costume. He was a man among men. There did not shine forth from Him any token of superhuman dignity which at once made Him a marked person, and set Him apart from free association with His fellow men. And He did not, by any unusual reserve of manner, keep Himself aloof from others. He mingled among men in a natural, frank, unpretending way. He travelled about on foot, according to the custom, in a country in which the roads are chiefly footpaths. He conversed readily with the people about Him. 2i6 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. He accepted the hospitalities offered Him. He had a broad humaneness of character which was not of any particular type. We Englishmen do not regard Him as a Jew, so all the nationalities of Christen- dom have regarded Him as a Man, with nothing to narrow His humanity down to any particular national type, so as to make them feel that He was not of the same nationality as themselves. We see the same absence of class feeling in His intercourse with different ranks and classes of people. He meets every one on the broad ground of common humanity, man to man. He moves among the highest of his countrymen with natural, unconscious dignity ; He moves among the common people with the frank, natural courtesy which respects the dignity of manhood in the masses of mankind. He recog- nises the essential equality of man to man. But beyond this we see in Him a profound and tender respect for the dignity of human nature, even in the fallen and degraded — what wonder, since, in His eyes, all mankind were fallen and degraded ; and He esteemed fallen and degraded humanity worth the Incarnation and the Cross to regenerate and restore. His courteous conversation with the woman ol Sychar, His pathetic compassion for the penitent woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee, and for the woman taken in adultery, His acceptance of THE SON OF MAX. 217 Matthew's invitation to dine with his fellow pub- licans, His inviting Himself to dine with Zaccheus,— these are only examples of that free association with all classes which made the Pharisees complain that " He was a friend of publicans and sinners," that " He receiveth sinners and eatcth with them " ; criticisms which drew from Him the blessed motive of his un- usual conduct,—" The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." He came from heaven and took our nature upon Him in order to seek and to save; so he puts Himself beside the lowest on the ground of common humanity, and wins confidence and sympathy, and then seeks to raise the lowly to the level of His own perfect manhood. One notable feature of our Lord's external bearing is the calm and repose of His ordinary manner. He is sympathetic but not emotional. There is no effort, haste, eagerness, or anxiety ; it is the calm of perfect faith, and consciousness of power equal to the achievement. It is not the result of natural impassibility. He looked round with grief Qt the blindness and hardness of some ; He ivept at the thought of the dreadful fate which He prophesied against Jerusalem ; He spoke with stern rebuke to Peter ; His eye kindled with anger as He poured forth a scathing torrent of denunciation against the Scribes and Pharisees—" Woe unto you^ Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " 2iS A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Is there not a trait of kindness of manner in the numerous records of His laying His hand on people ? He touched the eyes of the blind ; He ptit His fingers in the ears of the deaf ; He laid His hand upon the sick ; it was His habit. He could do no mighty work there, save that he laid His hand upon a few sick folk and healed them. " When the sun was set" they brought the sick, " and He laid His hands npon every one of tJiein, and healed them." He called the deformed woman to Him .... and He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight. "He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town, and then pat His hands upon himl' To the leper Jesus pnt forth His hana and touched him. Peter's mother-in-law ; He took her by the hand, and immediately the fever left her. He took Jairus's daughter " by the hand." So with children, " He took a child and set him in the midst of them,and when He had taken Him in Wisarms^' Sic, He said unto them, " Suffer the little children to come unto Me .... and He took them zip in His arms, and put His hajids upon them, and blessed them." All this may help us to realise the true humanness of the Son of Man, who at the same time was Son of God, the perfect human naturalness of the life of Him who at the same time was in heaven (John iii. 13). A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. 2:9 CHAPTER XXV. THE HOLY CITY. ERUSALEM differed from all the other great capitals of ancient or modern times in this, that it was a mountain city. Situated on the backbone of limestone hills, which runs from north to south through the middle of the country, the ravines west south and east of it iso- lated it on three sides, and though surrounded by loftier hills, gave it the safety and dignity of a pre- cipitous site. It was architecturally a grand city. The pile of buildings which constituted the Temple, on its eastern hill, was one of the wonders of the world ; the series of fortresses and towers which protected and adorned the city were not unworthy of the last builder of the Temple. The fortress-palace of Antonia on the north-east, as described by J osephus, was a grand building ; and the palace of Herod, in the north-west angle of the city, with the group of wall towers adjoining and communicating with it, formed another grand group of buildings ; and between these two groups extended 220 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. a strong and lofty wall strengthened by mural towers ; the whole forming a strong series of defences on the north side, where the city was most accessible. A less massive wall, with the usual mural towers run- ning along the edge of the steep declivities and picturesquely following their sinuosities, was enough to complete the natural defences of the city on the other sides. Internally, while the general slope of the plateau was from west to east, the lines of streets ran in parallel lines from north to south. The old Asmonean palace, adorned by Herod, occu- pied the Summit of the hill of Zion, on its eastern side, overlooking the Temple. The Xystus adjoined it. The palace of the High Priest was in the same quarter of the city. No doubt the courtiers of Herod the Great and the other princes of the country had imitated his ex- ample in the sumptuousness of their residences in the capital. And though Herod's palace was now only occupied by the Roman Procurator on his visits at the- Feasts, yet the High Priest, and the chief priests, and the members of the Sanhedrim, had their sumptuous residences in the city, and the wealthy nobles of the whole country probably had their palaces there,, which they occupied on their periodical visits at the great festivals. Again, Jerusalem differed from other capitals in this, that it was the centre of a great periodical THE HOLY CITY. pilgrimage. We are all familiar with descriptions of the gathering of the annual caravan of pilgrims outside Cairo and its march across the desert to Mecca ; and with descriptions of the Christian pilgrims who every Easter crowd into the Jordan and struggle for a place at the holy sepulchre. These descriptions may help us to realise the scenes which Jerusalem witnessed three times a year at the great festivals. For a week before the festival the whole country from Dan to Becrsheba was in motion. The inha- bitants of each little hill-top village set out together in their best array, trooping across the hills in cheerful groups ; at every cross road they fell in with similar groups, and as these crowds fell into the great main roads of the country, they formed an almost continu- ous stream of pilgrims. On their way to the Passover one man in each family would carry a lamb across his shoulders for the sacrifice ; if the feast of Tabernacles was the occasion, one of each group would bear a basket loaded with corn, fruits, grapes, and flowers, the firstfruits of the land. They lightened the journey with songs. And thus, rising before dawn, resting in the heat of the day, and journeying again till night, the streams of pilgrims marched up towards the holy city and poured into all its gates. Not only the inhabitants of the hoh' land, but large bodies from the great colonics of their 222 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. race, and groups from all the large towns of the civilised world came up to every feast. A caravan from Mesopotamia/ and another from Damascus, mostly perhaps on horseback, taking the road down the Jordan valley and going up through Jericho. A caravan from Alexandria and another from Cyrene and another from Cyprus crowding the decks of the ships which landed those at Joppa and these at Ptole- mais. A caravan of Idumaeans coming through the rocky defiles of the mountains of Moab. Individuals from still more widely scattered places, " Parthians, and Medes.and Elamites,and the dwellers in Mesopo- tamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians," all flocked up to the great national festivals at the holy city. The great majority on foot in family ^ Jews, according to Philo, were very numerous at this period in Mesopotamia, especially in the cities on both banks of the Euphrates. Petronius, the Prefect of Syria, was so struck with the great numbers which came to Jerusalem at the feast from those quarters that he feared a powerful force of them might come thence to help their countrymen to resist the setting-up of the Emperor's image in the Temple. One quarter of Alex- andria, then the second city of the empire, was inhabited by Jews ; their quarter was divided by walls and gates from the rest cf the city, and they were ruled by their own officers under their own laws. There were other great colonies of Jews, in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Antioch. THE HOLY CITY o-roups, the richer famiHes on horseback with servants and sumpter horses ; the princes of the land, and chieftains who had travelled from far through dangerous deserts and defiles, with armed escorts. Philip the tetrarch from his capital of Caesarea with his guard of Babylonian horsemen ^ clad in armour ; Herod Antipas, from Macherus, surrounded by his " lords, high captains and chief estates of Galilee," and guarded by his Gallic^ mercenaries. The Pro- curator also always came up from Caesarea-by-the Sea, with a strong force of legionaries and of horse- men, and took up his residence in the palace of Herod the Great, to maintain order and to guard against fanatical outbreaks on the part of the im- mense number of pilgrims in a state of religious excitement, which had more than once occurred." It is estimated that the number of pilgrims present at the Passover when Titus laid siege to the city, amounted to two millions seven hundred thousand and two hundred. They filled the houses, they pitched their tents on the open ground around the Temple,^ and perhaps in the open spaces— the " broad places "—of the city, 1 See Josephus, "Antiquities," XVII., 2, § 2 ; XIII., n, § i; "Wars," II., 17, §9- 2 E.g., at the Passover after the death of Herod the Great and that of the following year, Josephus, "Wars," II., i, § 3- 3 Josephus, "Antiquities," XVII., 9, § 3. 224 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. they lodged in the adjoining villages. From early dawn till nightfall, and during the Passover through all the moon-light night, the streets of Jerusalem were filled with a bustling multitude, and the great court and wide porticos of the Temple were crowded with devotees. It is here, at Jerusalem, at the Feast, that we should have expected that the Messiah would have been proclaimed, and would have wrought His beginning of miracles. As His brethren said on a later occasion, " If Thou do these things, show Thyself to the world " ; and our Lord's reply to them may answer us : " My time is not yet come " ; but He did go up to the Feast. So not many days after the miracle at Cana, " the Feast of the Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem." His first manifestation of Himself was by the exer- cise of an act of authority in the Temple. For the convenience of the pilgrims, oxen and sheep for sacrifice were allowed to be kept for sale in the outer court of the Temple itself; and since the offering to the treasury of the Temple of Roman or Greek money, with its idolatrous images, was regarded as a pro- fanation, the money-changers were allowed to have their tables in the court in order to exchange these foreign moneys for shekels. "And Jesus found in the Temple those that sold THE HOLY CITY. oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting : and when he had made a scourge of small cords," — after the symboHcal manner of the ancient prophets, — " he drove them all out of the Temple, and the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables, and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence ; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise " (John ii. 13-16). The people seem to have submitted to this peremptory treatment, His majesty overbore all feeling <)f resistance ; they recognised that tie who thus acted claimed to be a prophet, and to be acting by Divine command. This explains, also, the action of the authorities of the Temple, who did not find fault with his rebuke of a practice which they had per- mitted, but only asked him, " What sign showest thou, seeing that thou doest these things .?" — Prove thy claim to this character, and justify this action, by the usual miraculous credentials ; by some sign, for example, like Elijah's fire from heaven on Carme! or Isaiah's going back of the sun-dial of Ahaz They recognised that he claimed that old prophetic authority, akin to the dictatorial authority in the ancient republic of Rome, — which superseded all f)rdinary magistracies ; but they asked for a verifi- cation of his claim. "Jesus answered, Destroy this temple, and in three Q 226 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. days I will raise it up." The Evangelist explains that He spake of the temple of His body, and that He referred to His resurrection. This was the sign He offered. And we remember that on two subsequent occasions when they asked for a sign He said, "A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign ; and there shall no sign be given it but the sign of the prophet Jonas " (Matt. xii. 39 ; xvi. 4). The offered sign was again His resurrection from the dead. We note, then, that from the first, and always, he foreknew His own resurrection, and that He appealed to it, from the first, as the great evidence of his character and words. This ambiguous application of the word temple to his body requires a little further consideration. We are familiar with the idea, because St. Paul says of our bodies that they are " Temples of the Holy Ghost, which dwelleth in us" (Cor. vl. 19), and this is through our unity in the Body of Christ. The Temple was a temple because God dwelt in it, and our Lord's humanity was a Temple because God the Son dwelt in it. We recognise, then, in this utterance a covert allusion to the fact of the union of the Divinity with the humanity in His Person. Again, we note that, as on the first occasion of His coming to the Temple at twelve years old, He had called it His Father's house, — " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house .?" (Luke ii. 49), so now again He uses the same phrase, "Make not my Father's THE HOL Y CITY. 227 house an house of merchandise " : calling God His Father, and Himself the Son of God. The phrase might be taken in a lower sense as one of the recog- nised titles of the Messiah, in which it had already been applied to him by Nathanael, in which the Jews would in all probabilitv understand our Lord to use it now. But we can hardly doubt that the higher sense was always latent in the title when applied to the Messiah. Thus our Lord, in His first public utterance in the Temple before assembled Israel, claims to be the Messiah, and acts with authority in the House of God ; enunciates the great truth which lies at the root of His Person and Work ; and appeals to His Resurrection from the dead on the third day as the great and sufficient evidence of it all. We gather from a cursory remark of St. John that our Lord proceeded during the days of the Feast to work miracles, — which are not specified, — and that "many believed in His name "when they saw them (John ii. 23). The incident in the Temple could not have happened without creating a considerable sen- sation, and the subsequent miracles would greatly intensify the public interest in this remarkable person who had so suddenly appeared in the midst of them.. The incident of Nicodemus's visit to our Lord shows that Jesus had attracted attention in the very highest ranks of the nation. It is not our purpose to dwell 228 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. here on our Lord's conversation with Nicodemus, but we may briefly point out that St. John seems to give the heads of our Lord's discourse, and that these brief heads include the great truths of His Gospel : — His own pre-existence in heaven, " No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man " ; with the further mysterious indication of his simultaneous life in earth and in heaven, — " even the Son of Man, which is in heaven " ; His mission by the father, and the object of his coming, " God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have ever- lasting life " ; His sacrifice, and the saving effect of it, " As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that who- soever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life " ; fallen man's incapacity for the higher life, without a re-impartation of the Holy Spirit, " Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God " ; a promise of the gift of that Spirit to those who should enter into the new dispensation, " Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God " ; entering into the kingdom of heaven, then, was not merely entering into an earthly reign of peace and righteousness, but was being grafted into a higher THE HOLY CITY. 229 phase of spiritual life, so that it was like being born over again into a new and heavenly life. The mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, pardon through the sacrifice of the cross, faith in Christ, the work of the Spirit, the agency of the church, all arc here. We note that our Lord did not begin with high- raised expectations of immediate acceptance among His people. He foresaw His death from the first. He did not gradually develope a scheme of doctrine, we find all the essential features of it, its deepest and highest truths, in His very first discourse. :230 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XXVI. LANDMARKS OF THE PUBLIC MINISTRY. N Studying the early portion of the Lord's life, the aim of this work has required us to consider with some completeness all the incidents of the life which the Evangelists have recorded. But in dealing with the abundant materials which the sacred narratives supply of the public ministry, the limits, within which it is desirable that this work should be restricted, will compel us to pursue a different method. We shall have to select the features which seem to be of special importance to our aim. But it seems desirable to endeavour to give, though ever so briefly, a connected sketch of the public ministry, arranged, — so far as it can be so •arranged, — in chronological order, and to point out the broad features which characterise its different portions. There are certain great landmarks which help us to grasp and remember the plan and progress of the history. First of all, we call attention to two very important events, or groups of events, which enable us to divide LANDMARKS OF THE PUBLIC MINISTRY. the period into three portions, each of which has its special characteristic features. These critical groups of events are,— (i) the Confession of our Lord's Divinity by the Apostles, the Discourse on the Church and Ministry, the Prophecy of the Passion and Death, and the Transfiguration ; (2) The Trium- phant Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The first portion of the public life previously to Peter's confession was spent chiefly in Galilee, with the occasional visits to Jerusalem at the feasts, which were the duty of a pious ]^^w. The teaching is chiefly an unfolding to sympathising hearers of the nature of the kingdom,— as in the conversations with Nico- demus and the Samaritan woman, the Sermon on the Mount, the group of Parables of Matt, xiii., and the Discourse on the Bread of Life, in the syna- gogue of Capernaum (J jhn vi.). The majority of the miracles were wrought in this earlier half of the ministry. Especially we notice that, immediately on his entering upon the Mcssiahship, he began to gather disciples ; at an early period he chose the twelve Apostles ; after they had been his constant companions for some months he sent them out to preach, and they returned to him towards the end of this first portion of the histor^^ A thoughtful con- sideration of the subject will show that, throughout this period the Lord was gradually leading the Apo.stles up to the confession of his Divinity. 232 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. The second portion of the public ministry which follows the confession of the Divinity presents these especial characteristics : the scene of the history is, not entirely but for the most part, in Jerusalem and Judea, and the country beyond Jordan ; miracles do not cease, but they become less frequent. The dis- courses are of two kinds, (a) to the Apostles, arc specially adapted to prepare them for the passion and death of their Lord, and the spiritual nature of the kingdom ; ()3) to outside hearers, and these are no longer instructions addressed to a multitude of more or less sympathising hearers, but arguments addressed to disbelievers, disputations with opponents, parables aimed at the prejudices of the people, and denunciations of the hypocrisy and wickedness of the Pharisaic sect. The third portion of the public life, from the triumphal entry into Jerusalen to the death upon the cross, extends only over six days, but its history in the Gospels occupies as large a space as either of the others, and is crowded with events of infinite consequence. The actors in the great drama are now brought on the stage together — disciples and dis- believers, chief priests and scribes, Sadducees and Pharisees, Roman governor and Herodian king ; the doctrine of the previous ministry is brought to a focus — the claim to Divinity and to Royalty, the prophecy of Passion and of Resurrection ; the most LANDMARKS OF THE P UBLIC MINISTR V. 235 striking parables, the keenest controversies with oppo, ncnts, the most sublime discourses to the disciples; the grandest events, the Triumph, the Last Supper, the Betrayal, the Agony in the Garden, the Arrest, the Trial, the Passion, and the Death. We shall endeav'our to summarise the first and second of these portions of the public ministry. The consideration of the Confession of the Divinity, and of the Triumphal Entry will require an ampler exposition ; and in studying the solemn events of the Holy Week, and the great events which follow, it will again be necessary to adopt the more detailed method of the earlier oortion of the wotk. 234 ^ DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. CHAPTER XXVII. SUMMARY OF THE GALILEAN MINISTRY. OW long Jesus remained in Jerusalem on the occasion of the first Passover of His public ministry is not stated, perhaps only for the week of the feast. He next went not to Nazareth or to Capernaum, but back to the Jordan where he kept a body of disciples about Him. He took up John's preaching "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,^' and His disciples baptized those who offered themselves. The natural jealousy of John's disciples when they saw that Jesus baptized and all men came to him, brought forth that reply of the Baptist's so sublime in its humility and self-abnegation " a man can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves bear me witness that I said I am not the Christ, He that hath the bride is the bride- groom . . . He must increase, but I must decrease " (John iii. 27-30). And he renews his testimony to Him in remarkable words " He that cometh from above is above all, he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God, for God giveth not the spirit by measure unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and THE GALILEAN MLYISTRY, hath given all things into his hand. He that be- lieveth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John iii. 31-36). After a period of uncertain duration John was seized and cast into prison, and tlien it would seem Jesus also closed His ministry of preparation and entered upon another phase of his work. On His way to Galilee, by the nearest route across Samaria, he came to the neighbourhood of Sychar. And while His disciples went into the neighbouring town to buy provisions, he sat to rest by the famous Well of Jacob, which was in the wide entrance of the valley in whose narrower gorge the town is situated. It was now that the I'emarkable conversation occurred with the Samaritan woman who came from the neigh- bouring town to draw water. We can only point out the chief significance of the conversation which St. John has given at some length. After allegorising the water of the well, and speaking of the approach- ing changes which should abrogate the temple worship, he is at length led to reveal himself to her. " The woman saith, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ : when he is come he will teach us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he." We can only call attention to this remarkable re- velation of himself to this Samaritan woman, His con- 236 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. sent to stay in their town and teach them more fully ; the belief of many ; the terms in which they expre-ss their belief indicating the burden of his teachings "we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." This Avas the only occasion on which our Lord preached to the Samaritans : — " I am not sent," He said, "but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." This was an instance of His readiness, to preach in season and out of season, and to give of His truth and grace to all who sought it of Him. Arrived in Galilee He entered upon that systematic tour of preaching and working miracles of which sa many incidents are recorded by the first three Evan- gelists. His reputation had preceded Him, " there went a fame of him through all the region round about" (Luke iv. 14) ; "the Galileans received him,, having seen all the things that he did at Jerusalem at the feast'' (John iv. 45). At first he joined on his preaching to that of John and to his own previous- Ministry of preparation. He "came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying : — The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent ye and believe the Gospel "^ (Mark i. 15). We call attention to the remarkable phrase " the gospel of the Kingdom of God " ; it expresses in a phrase that which is the fact, but THE GALILEAX MIXISTRY. which is often overlooked, viz., that Christianity was presented to mankind not as a new rehgion, — since the fall there had only been one Religion, salvation through faith in the atonement of the sacrifice of the Son of God, — it was presented as the establishment of a kingdom, a divine or heavenly Kingdom upon earth, destined to be universal and everlasting. The first incident recorded is the second miracle at Cana, when a certain officer of the court of Herod Antipas whose son was sick at Capernaum, hearing that Jesus was in Cana, w^ent thither, and obtained by his faith and importunity the gracious assurance, " Go thy way thy, son liveth," and at that very hour he found afterwards the fever had left him. Next we hear of Him at Nazareth, where He had been brought up ; at first " they wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth " ; but on His pro- ceeding to intimate that He could not work any miracle among them because of their want of faith in Him, they justified his judgment of them by a sudden outbreak of violence, in which they sought His life. It would almost seem as if He thus offered to reside where He had been brought up, and only on their proving the truth of His words that a prophet hath no honour in his own country, " leaving Nazareth, came and dwelt in Capernaum." 238 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. Hitherto Jesus had had disciples ; now He pro- ceeds to a further step in the organisation of the kingdom : — He began to select His apostles, men who should be hearers of all His teachings, formed on His example, that they might hereafter be His witnesses, the depositories of His doctrine, the foun- dation stones of His church, the ministers of His grace, and the executors of His will. On the same day, it would seem, He called Peter and Andrew, James and John ; and, after the significant miracle of the draught of fishes, in which He showed how He would give them success as "fishers of men," "they brought their ships to land, and forsook all, and followed Him " (Matthew iv. i8, 22 ; Mark i. 11, 20 ; Luke v. I, 11). The other apostles He probably selected from time to time within a short period. At Capernaum his teaching and his miracles rapidly increased his fame : — " Straightway on the Sabbath-day he went to the synagogue, and taught, and they were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes." He did not merely interpret Scripture as a com- mentator on God's word, He spoke as one who had a new word from God to deliver. Moreover, in the midst of the .synagogue service a remarkable inci- dent occurred. There was present one possessed 239 -.Ar>TVC • {oUo«ed,*; Jesus'^* , ^„„e o"*^ „-,ed saying- " tv^teNV l^>f" „ T;hey ««"= ' . ., , what '^"'i *' T atne out of l^--^- ^,,, *»^g '= *'^av>de* t-;re:i-:-:tt^-s::\o:.a -^e even ^^ evangev ^^^ ^^ te^ " ^"'^•" 'Id abroad *t°"f .\„^ce iv, 33)- ^^„,«ent fame spread a ^^^^ ^ ,, ^ l^ setv.ce 3<=f ^,, =^'* , thefevef ^^f' ^'': ' resumed h<=' ;„„5trio"s btougW ti ^„d W every o-^<= °' 240 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. outof many, crying- and saying, Thou artChrist the Son of God" (Matt. viii. 14; Mark i. 29; Luke iv. 38). "And in the morning" of the next day, "rising up a great while before day, he went out and departed into a sohtary place, and there prayed. And Simon and they that were with him followed him, and when they had found him they said unto him, All men seek for thee. And he said unto them, Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also, for therefore came I forth." And He commenced that missionary tour which St. Matthew thus summarises, — "Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness, and all manner of disease, among the people" (Matt. iv. 23). Among the miracles of healing thus alluded to, the healing of a leper is particularly mentioned by all three evangelists, perhaps because, leprosy being looked upon as a divinely-sent infliction, and a special type of sin, its cure was a striking evidence of divine power, and a type of the healing of the sins of human nature (Matt. viii. 2 ; Mark i. 40 ; Luke v. 12). On the occasion of a return to Capernaum we read that " it was noised abroad that he was in the house. And straightway many were gathered together, inso- much that there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door, and he preached the word unto them," This was the time of the cure of THE GALILEAN MINISTRY. 241 the paralytic let down " through the roof " ; and is remarkable as the first instance recorded in which Jesus connected spiritual absolution with healing; and the Scribes and Pharisees who were present accused him of blasphemy, — " Who is this which speaketh blasphemies ? Who can forgive sins but God alone ? " and He asserted that " the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." And the people " were all amazed and glorified God, which had given such power unto men," and "were filled with fear, saying, We have seen strange things to-day " (Luke v. 21-26, and Matt. ix. 8). About this time occurred the call of St. Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an apostle. Here may be intercalated the visit to Jerusalem for one of the feasts, recorded in the fifth chapter of St. John ; which had serious results, and forms a turning point in the history. Jesus healed the man who lay in the porch of Bethesda on the Sabbath-day. The rulers considered this a breach of the command- ment, and concluded from it against His pretensions to be the Messiah :— " This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the Sabbath." In His defence of Him- self from the charge he made claims which still further alarmed and outraged the hearers. Our Lord appeals to John's testimony ; He appeals to His own miracles ; He appeals to the voice of God at His baptism ; He appeals to the Scriptures : — 242 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. " Ye sent imto John and he bare witness unto the truth ; but I have greater witness than that of John, for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do bear witness of me that the Father hath sent me. And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think that ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me." " The Jews sought the more to kill him because he not only had broken the Sabbath, but said that God was his father, making himself equal with God." This was the beginning of the open antagonism of the chief men of the nation against Jesus, which ultimately re- sulted in His trial, condemnation, and death. St. Matthew groups together with this violation of the Sabbath two other similar instances, — the plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath, as they walked through the cornfields, and the healing of the man with the withered hand in the synagogue of Capernaum (Matt, xii. I, 9). There are two other instances recorded (five in all) in which Christ disregarded the Phari- saical mode of keeping the Sabbath ; healing the man with the dropsy at the house of the Pharisee (Luke xvi. 7), and healing the man who was born blind at Jerusalem, at the time of one of the Feasts (Luke vi. 14). They made it the test question on which they decided against his claims; while our Lord's persistence in thus dealing with the Sabbath, and his declaration, " the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath," seems to indicate that some deep THE GALILEAN MINISTRY. 243 significance lay beneath his persistence. Was it that the question was whether the Messiah was to be tested by the glosses which the Pharisees had put on the law and the prophets ; or whether the reasoning of the paralytic was to be admitted by the Pharisees, — " He that made me whole said unto me, Take up thy bed and walk " ; and of the blind man who said, " Herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes. Now we know that God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth : if this man were not of God, he could do nothing " ; and of the people, " Can a man that is a sinner do these miracles that this man doeth?" Their final conclusion was, as we learn from all the Evangelists, that the Pharisaic party, whose religious prejudices were offended, took counsel with the Herodian party, who were afraid of the civil tumults which the enthusiasm of the people for this claimant of the Messiahship might occasion, " what they might do to Jesus," says St. Luke ; " how they might destroy him," say St. Matthew and St. I\Iark. We call attention to the next important step in the development of the Lord's " plan." He had returned to Galilee, where the people were still generally disposed in His favour. " And it came to pass in those days that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. R 2 244 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and out of them HE CHOSE TWELVE, whom he ordained that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out devils ; whom he also named apostles." It was a great manifestation of power, that He could not only work miracles Himself, but that He could give to others the same power. It was a great step in the organisation of His church. He addressed an ordination charge to these newly- appointed ministers, recorded Matt. x. 5-42. The Sermon on the Mount seems to have fol- lowed soon after the ordination of the apostles. It is an elaborate declaration of the relation of the New Dispensation to the Old. As the law was given from Mount Sinai, as the blessings and cursings were pronounced when Israel entered Canaan from Ebal and Gerizim, so now our Lord enunciates the new law, and it begins with the blessings and cursings of the Gospel Covenant. ^ The most striking feature of this great discourse is the assumption by Christ of authority to deal with the law, given by God under such awful sanctions, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, spoken with His own voice, written with His own finger upon the monuments of stone. He declares * We assume that St. Luke's sermon (vi. 20-end) is the same as St. Matthew's sermon (v., vi., vii.). THE GALILEAN MIXISTRY. 245 that He did not come to abrogate the old law but to fulfil, — to fill full, i.e. to complete it. And so He takes the Decalogue, and extends it beyond outward acts to words, and thoughts, and intentions. Not only. Do not kill, but do not give way to excessive anger; not only, Do not commit adultery, but do not indulge a loose thought. The old law tells men what they are to do and not to do ; the new law tells them what they ought to be. The old law speaks of outward manifestations of evil ; the new law deals with the character and dispositions of the heart. At the end of the sermon St. Matthew repeats the remark that the people " were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the Scribes " (Matt. vii. 28, 29). About this time must be placed the renewed decla- ration, made by all three evangelists, of the continued spread of Christ's reputation, not only throughout Judea and Samaria and Galilee, but " throughout all Sy/ia," and "Decapolis" (Matt. iv. 24, 25), in Idumea and beyond Jordan, and the country of Tyre and Sidon (Mark Hi. i — 12, and Luke vi. 17-19); and how " great multitudes " from those countries " followed him," and brought their sick to Him, and He healed them, " and the whole multitude sought to touch him, for there went virtue out of him and healed them all" (Luke vi. 19). To about this period also belongs the fact, men- 246 A DEVOTIONAL LIFE OF OUR LORD. tioned by all three evangelists, that His relatives came to expostulate with Him on the danger He ran in denouncing the Pharisees, and to use their influence to restrain Him. Besides the Twelve thus solemnly called out and ordained, there was also a group of women who attached themselves to Jesus. We are first told of them in Luke viii. i, 3, when some of the most pro- minent of theni are expressly named : " Mary called Magdalene, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, who ministered to him of their substance." This is in the earlier part of the ministry. We are told of them again at the cross: — " Many women were beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him, among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee's children" (Matt, xxvii. 55, 56). During His subsequent journey through Galilee He was accompanied by these two groups, the group of apostles and the group of ministering women. Some of the incidents of the journey are the heal- ing of the Centurion's servant, in which He fore- told the admission of the Gentiles, the failure of the Jews. " Verily, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that many shall come, &c., and shall sit down in the kingdom of God, but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out" (Matt. viii. 10-12). THE GALILEAN MINISTRY. The raising of the widow's son at Nain. The first of the raisings from the dead, which sent a new thrill of wonder and rejoicing through the people. "There came a great fear upon all, and they glorified God, saying that a great prophet is risen up among us, and that God hath visited his people" (Luke vii. i6). The message from John the Baptist ; the anoint- ing of His feet by the sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee; the healing of the blind and dumb man, when the Scribes from Jerusalem ex- plained his miracles by attributing them to Satanic power. In the usual harmonies of the Gospel the parables of the 13th chapter of St. Matthew are introduced here, but it is difficult to suppose that our Lord had not from the beginning of his public ministry made use of this striking form of popular teaching which he continued to employ to the end. The same day at evening as he crossed the lake occurred the stupendous miracle of the stilling of the storm, when : — " He rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea. Peace, be still ! And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." " And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another. What manner of man is this, that even the wind and sea obey him 1 " (Matt, viii. ; Mark iv. ; Luke viii.) And having arrived at the south-east corner of the lake, He landed and proceeded towards the city of ?A^ A DEVOTIONAL LIFE Op OUR LORD. Gadara, and on the way healed the two demoniacs, and suffered the devils to go into the herd of swine, and when the people in fear besought Him to depart out of their country He allowed himself to be rejected by them ; but sent the demoniac, who wished to follow Him, back to his own city to be his witness to them of " what great things Jesus had done for him, and had had compassion on him " (Mark v. 19). On His return to Capernaum He healed the woman who had an issue of blood, and raised Jairus's daughter. Afterwards He healed two blind men, and a dumb man possessed, when the Pharisees again said " He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils " (Matthew ix. 27, 34). Yet again He seems to have visited Nazareth ("his own country") and taught in their synagogue, but they were offended at Him. "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and Juda, and Simon ? And are not his sisters here with us ? And he marvelled because of their unbe- lief." The apostles having been in attendance on their Lord for some time. He now sent them out through the villages to preach, saying "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," and gave them power to work miracles to attract attention to their mission, and to authenticate their message. " They departed and went through the towns preaching the Gospel [" that THE GALILEAX MIXISTRY. =4'; men should repent " Mark vi.] and healing every- where." "And they returned and told him all things both what they had done, and what they had taught"