that the appearances of Jesus to His disciples meant. These appearances may well have been more numerous -with 1 Cor. 15 in our hands we may say quite freely that they were more numerous-than the evangelists enable us to see; but it is not separate appearances, nor the incidental phenomena connected with them, nor the details of time and place, in which the evangelists and the Church for which they write are interested. It is the significance of the resurrection itself. If for the purpose of bringing out this significance the whole manifestation of Jesus to His disciples was condensed into a single representative or typical scene, and if Jesus nevertheless had in point of fact appeared in different places, we can understand how one evangelist should put this typical scene in Galilee and another in Jerusalem. When we see what is being done we should rather say that both are right than that either is wrong. If the gospel according to Matthew rests on the authority of an original disciple of Jesus, it is very natural that he should make Galilee the scene of the appearing; Galilee, as we have seen, had been prepared for by the word of Jesus, and it would be endeared by old associations. Luke, on the other hand, knew Christianity only as a faith which had its cradle and capital at Jerusalem, and it was as natural that he should put the representative appearing there. In either case, however, it is a representative appearing that is meant, and with whatever relative right it is located in Jerusalem or in Galilee, it is not in the location that the writer's interest lies. It is in the revelation which is made of the exaltation of Jesus and the calling of the Church. This, too, has a representative character, as is evident from the fact that, though the meaning is substantially the same in all the gospels, the language in which it is conveyed is surprisingly different. If we compare the words which Jesus speaks in the four passages

just referred to-all of which unquestionably serve the same purpose in the gospels in which they respectively stand-it is evident that we have no literal report of words of the Lord. We have an expression of the significance of His exaltation for Himself and for the Church. What this significance was we have considered already in speaking of the place of Christ in the faith of the synoptic evangelists; it covered their assurance that He was Lord of all, that He was exalted a Prince and a Saviour, that forgiveness was to be preached to all men in His name; it included the gift of the Holy Spirit and His own spiritual presence. This is what an evangelist is concerned to attest, and if the difficulties which a literal and formal criticism finds in his narrative had been presented to him, the probability is that he would not have taken them seriously. He might cheerfully have admitted that with a perfectly honest mind he had been mistaken about a detail here or there; but that he had been mistaken about the main thing that the Lord had appeared to His own, and that this great commission was what His appearing signified he could not possibly admit. Nor need we. The resurrection is not attested in the gospels by outside witnesses who had inquired into it as the Psychical Research Society inquires into ghost stories; it is attested-in the only way in which it can be attested at all-by people who are within the circle of realities to which it belongs, who share in the life it has begotten, and who therefore know that it is, and can tell what it means. To see this is to get the right point of view for dealing with the difficulties in the narratives; it is not too much to add, that it takes away from these difficulties any religious importance. Whether we can tell precisely how they originated or not, the testimony of the apostles and the Church to the resurrection is unimpaired: Jesus lives in His exaltation, and He holds from the beginning in

the faith of His disciples that incomparable place which He can never lose.

But

The question with which we are ultimately concerned -whether the Christian faith which we see in the New Testament has a basis of fact sufficient to sustain it-is in part answered by what has now been said. The New Testament life would have no sufficient basis, indeed it would never have been manifested in history, but for the resurrection. It is in a sense the fulfilment of the word of Jesus in the fourth gospel: Because I live, ye shall live also; we could never have seen or known it if the creed had ended, as some people think a Christian creed might end, with 'crucified, dead, and buried.' though without the resurrection the New Testament attitude to Christ would have no justification, and would in point of fact be plainly impossible, the resurrection, taken by itself, is not that complete historical justification of Christianity which our ultimate question had in view. The resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus, and though it lifts Jesus, as it were, into His place of incommunicable greatness, it is this Person and no other who is thus transcendently exalted, and there must be some inner relation between what He is and what He was. There must be some proportion between the life which He now lives at God's right hand, and that which He lived among men upon the earth; there must, if Christian faith is to be vindicated, be some congruity between His present significance for God and man, as faith apprehends it, and that which can be traced in His historical career. It is in the life He lived on earth that His mind is mainly revealed to us; and if His mind, as we there come in contact with it-His mind, in particular, with regard to Himself, and the significance of His being and work in the relations of God and man-did not stand in essential relation to the believing Christian attitude

towards Him, we should feel that Christian faith, historically speaking, had an insecure foundation. The New Testament estimate of Christ can only be vindicated if we can show that the historical Person, whose resurrection is attested by the apostles, explicitly or virtually asserted for Himself, during His life in the world, a place in the relations of God and man as incommunicable and all-determining as that which we have seen bestowed upon Him in the primitive Christian books. The question, therefore, we have now to answer is, What do we know of Jesus? In particular, what place-in His own apprehension-did Jesus fill in the relations of men to God?

II

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS

(a) Preliminary critical considerations.

In proposing this question for discussion, at least in the second and more definite form, we encounter the same preliminary objections which confronted us in dealing with the resurrection. There are those for whom it is not a question at all, and who therefore will not seriously raise it. To ask what place Jesus filled in the relations of God and men contemplates the possibility of finding that He did fill some place of peculiar interest and importance-the possibility, to put it extremely, that He was and is to both God and man what no other can be, and that all divine and human relations are determined by Him; and this is a possibility which principle does not allow them to contemplate. Jesus was a historical character, they argue; and there cannot be in history a man whose relations to God and his kind

are essentially different from those of other men. A man may be a great spiritual genius, through whom the realities and possibilities of the spiritual life are revealed to others, but no man can be so identified with the truth which he reveals as that if he were lost it would be lost also. Plausible as this may seem, it is an à priori settlement of a question which insists on being settled otherwise. The only reason we have for raising the question is that Jesus has, in point of fact, from the very beginning, had a place assigned to Him by Christian faith which is distinct in kind from that assigned to other men; He has been believed to be, both to God and to the human race, what no other is or can be. After what has been said in the earlier part of this discussion, we cannot think this statement of the facts open to question, and we do not feel at liberty to decide à priori that the Christian faith from the beginning was a complete mistake. There may have been grounds for giving Jesus His incomparable place. It may not have been an irrational enthusiasm, but the irresistible compulsion of fact in His character, His personality, His attitude and claims, that made His followers exalt Him as they did. No dogmatic preconception as to what is possible or impossible in the field of history can exempt us from the duty of inquiring into the facts. The very men who were the first to have their religious life so absolutely determined by Jesus once thought of Him as only a neighbour, another like themselves. But they came to think of Him very differently, and it is not for the historian to decide peremptorily and off-hand that they were wrong; his function is rather to inquire what it was in Jesus which changed their attitude to Him. Even if he could not find out, he would have no right to say that the change was gratuitous or irrational. He could only say it awaited explanation.

What we have to do, therefore, is to get at the facts