The one, while there is nothing in it inconsistent with history, is mainly inspired by a religious interest. When a man who is morally in earnest, absorbed in the effort to lead a spiritual life in the world of nature, a life of freedom in the realm of necessity, takes the gospels into his hand and looks upon the figure of Jesus, the last thing which will occur to him is that this figure is unreal. There may be a great deal in the gospel narratives which puzzles him, which he does not know what to do with, and for the present must ignore; but there is something also which is its own evidence and which rises out of the narrative in unquestionable reality-the spiritual life of Jesus. There is a person before his eyes in the gospel whose spiritual reality (to express it thus) is so indisputable that it carries his historical reality along with it. A life of such perfect trust in God, such wonderful love to God and man

-a life that by its very mass attracts to itself so irresistibly all feeble lives that have the faintest affinity with it or capacity for it-a life that gathers into its own deep and powerful stream all souls in search of God and bears them on to the salvation they seek: what could be idler than to speak of such a life as unhistorical or unreal? Those who come to the gospels thus can only feel that the life of Jesus, even in the historical sense, is the most real thing in the world; and so far from admitting that Jesus is practically unknown to us, they are certain that they know Him better than any one who has ever lived, better even than themselves. They are quite willing to leave to historical criticism the investigation of incident and detail; their conviction is not dependent on what is thought of any isolated word or act ascribed to Jesus in the gospels; but the reality, and it must be added the historical reality, of the spiritual life of Jesus is established for them on grounds which historical criticism must acknowledge, and which it cannot set aside.

This is a way of approaching the gospels, and of getting into contact with the reality attested in them, of which we are bound to speak with the utmost respect. It is a truly religious way of approaching them, and must largely reproduce in the soul the experiences of the first disciples of Jesus. But the more completely Jesus, through the picture of His life in the gospels, establishes His ascendency over souls seeking God and freedom, the more inevitably will those questions arise which deal with His place in the relations of the soul and God. How is it that such an ascendency comes to be His? How does it come to be His alone? When we say, 'Yes, this life is real; it is the life of one whom we experience through it and in virtue of it to be Saviour and Lord,' what do we mean? Who is He? Is there any indication, in words ascribed to Him, of a consciousness on His own part answering to or agreeing with these experiences of ours? Such questions cannot fail to arise and to press for an answer, and it is in investigating the gospels to find material for the answer, rather than in dwelling upon the general assurance of the reality of the inner life of Jesus, that any contribution is likely to be made to the subject with which we are concerned. It is too easily taken for granted by many who study the genesis of faith in the modern man that he will rest content with the immediate impression made by Jesus in the gospels, and that ulterior questions need not be asked. There are even those who think that it does not matter how the ulterior questions are answered; the impressions are their own evidence and will remain what they are, though the questions they naturally prompt should by some never be raised, and by others pronounced insoluble. But this is not so certain. Capable as the human mind is of inconsistency, it does not readily disown the responsibility of explaining and justifying its convictions. What if Jesus Himself, in the special case

with which we are engaged, pressed this responsibility upon it? What if He directly prompted the ulterior questions? It may turn out to be the case that in His whole bearing toward men and God He assumes one way of answering them to be adequate, and others not; the extraordinary influence which in the pages of the gospels He wields over others may be merely the reflection of an extraordinary consciousness on His part of the place He fills in all the relations of God and human souls. If upon examination this should prove to be so, then, valuable as it is as a starting-point, that conviction of the historical reality of Jesus which confines itself to the self-evidencing reality of His spiritual life-a life assumed to be assimilable, to the last fibre, by us-is not all we have to take into account. While it assures us that Jesus was truly a historical person, and a historical person who was a great conductor of spiritual force, it does not face with sufficient definiteness the question whether there was in this historical person, not that which makes a spiritual movement of some kind credible, but that which justifies the particular spiritual movement which appeals to Him as its Author. When we speak of the spiritual or inner life of Jesus-an expression which we instinctively interpret by those experiences in ourselves which we should. describe by the same name-there is an involuntary tendency to obliterate or ignore any difference which may exist between Jesus and those to whom His spiritual life appeals. Without consciously thinking of it, we regard Him for the time as if He were only what the rest of us are. But this amounts to deciding, also without thinking, the greatest question which the gospels and the Christian religion raise. The self-consciousness of Jesus is not a happy expression, but it is preferable to the inner life of Jesus in one way: it safeguards more effectively the objectivity and personal peculiarity of

that which it denotes. It leaves room for the possibility that in the mind of Jesus about Himself there may be not only the consciousness that He is one with us, but uch a consciousness as justifies the transcendent place apart given to Him in the faith of the Church. Hence itis the mind of Christ about Himself-His self-consciousnes in the technical sense-and not His inner life or spiritual experiences in general, which must be our principal subject of inquiry; and to investigate this subject satisfacbrily we must go beyond the vague impressions in which the life of Jesus first proves its reality to us, and stud the gospel evidence in detail.

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The second of the two summary ways of getting into contac with the reality in the gospels is the polar opposite of the one just discussed. It is that which is illustrated in the vell-known article of Schmiedel in the Encyclopædia Bblica. When a profane historian,' says Schmiedel, fins before him a historical document which testifies to te worship of a hero unknown to other sources, he attache first and foremost importance to those features which cannot be deduced merely from the fact of this worship and he does so on the simple and sufficient ground that hey would not be found in this source unless the author ha met with them as fixed data of tradition. The same fulamental principle may safely be applied in the case of he gospels, for they also are all of them written by wohippers of Jesus.' We only put this more simply whe we say that anything in the gospels may be regarded as snally true if it is inconsistent with the worship of Jesus. If we could not find such things at all, Schmiedel holds would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any hiorical value whatever was to be assigned to the gospe he would be in a position to declare the picture of us contained in them to be purely

› Encyædia Biblica, 1872 ff.

a work of phantasy, and could remove the person of Jesus from the field of history.' If we accepted this canon of criticism, it might be reassuring to us as historians to find that there are passages in the gospels which no worshipper of Jesus could have invented, passages, consequently, which were data to the evangelists, ard which we are safe in counting historical. Of these tie article referred to mentions five, which along with four others, all the latter being connected with the miracles ind employed to discredit them, 'might be called the foundation pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus.' The five passages in question are worth repeating. They are —(1) Mark 10 17: Why callest thou Me good? None is good save God only. (2) Mark 3: He is beside Himself. (3) Matt. 1232: Whoso speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him. (4) Mark 13 32: Of that day and of that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son but the Father. And (5) Mark 15 3: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? It is a curious comment on the things most surely believed among profane historians, that of these foundation pillars the third and fifth have since been found by some decidedly shaky. This, however, does not matter to us at present. What does matter is that Jesus is only admitted to be real in a sense which, avowedly, leaves the whole phenomenon of New Testament religion not only unjustified but inexplicable. We have no testimony to Jesus at all, as Schmiedel points out, except that of men who worshipped Him; but though some of that testimony, as will be afterwards shown, comes from intimates and contemporaries, the only part of it which we can receive as true is that which is inconsistent with such worship. The idea that there should be reality in Jesus of such a kind as to justify worship is summarily excluded ab initio: its exclusion, indeed, is