we need not misunderstand it. It is misunderstood, for example, by Wernle when he says that the consciousness of God must have been weakened in Paul before he could have said of Christ the things which he says in Colossians.' Christ, in other words, practically displaces God in this epistle; the Jewish sneer is almost justified which represents Christians as teaching that there is no God, but that Jesus is His Son. But Christ does not displace God; it is in Christ alone that Paul gets that assurance of God, and of his eternal truth and love, in which he lives, and in the light of which he cannot but interpret all things. Nothing that he says justifies the Jewish sneer: what it does justify is the truly evangelical remark of Dr. Chalmers-'I find that without a hold of Christ there is no hold of God at all.' In truth, what we have in Colossians is only another assertion of the absolute significance of Christ for Christian faith. It is consciously pursued, no doubt, in its consequences further than elsewhere, but it is the same thing. A person of absolute significance-an eternal person-a person to whom in one way or another the idea of finality attaches: all these are indistinguishable. If we say that Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, we represent His absolute significance in one way; it is eternity for the imagination. If we say that He is the final Judge of all, on whose decision their destiny depends, we represent His absolute significance in another way; it is eternity for the conscience. But imagination and conscience have not rights in human nature which can be denied to the intelligence or speculative faculty; and it is to this last, and not merely to imagination and conscience, that Paul interprets in Colossians the abso

1Die Anfänge unserer Religion, 205: Die paulinische Gnosis geht hier von einem sehr lebendigen Gefühl des Christlichen aus, aber zugleich von einem gänzlich toten Gottesbegriff.'

Hanna's Life, ii. 448.

lute significance of the Lord. It is not our business at this point to consider whether or not he can be justified in doing so by appeal to Jesus Himself, but it seemed necessary to say what has been said because the question of justification cannot be fairly raised until there is agreement upon what he has actually done.

In several passages of Paul's writings there is a conception of Christ which to most readers will seem akin to that which we have been discussing, but which is in truth much more difficult to apprehend-the conception of Him as pre-existent. The one difficulty which haunts theological thinking everywhere, the difficulty or rather the impossibility of defining the relation of time to eternity, is peculiarly felt here. Is an eternal person rightly or adequately thought of as a person existing before all things, or is the idea of pre-existence an imperfect means of representing eternity in the form of timean idea, therefore, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies and contradictions? When Paul speaks of the pre-existence of Christ, is he carrying out in this inadequate form his own conviction, based on experience, that Christ is a person in whom the eternal truth of God has come into the world, and who, therefore, belongs to God's eternal being? Or is he simply applying to Him the common Jewish belief that the Messiah existed with God before He appeared among men? It is not easy to say: even if we admit the inadequacy of an idea like pre-existence to represent the eternal significance of Christ, and see no reason to doubt that current Jewish beliefs made this inadequate representation easier to the apostle, we must admit that in the most characteristic passages in which he uses it (2 Cor. 8o; Phil. 25 ff.) it has been thoroughly Christianised. Judged by the Christian knowledge of God's revelation in Christ, the act by which the eternal person, conceived as pre

existent, enters into the world of time, is a characteristically divine act. It is one in which the eternal truth of the divine nature-that God's name is Redeemer from of old, and that He humbles Himself to bear us and our burdens (Isa. 63; Ps. 68 19)-is conspicuously revealed. In itself, the idea of pre-existence is harder to understand and to appreciate than that of eternal reality and worth; but even those who find it, abstractly considered, least congenial, must admit that in its Pauline applications it is in thorough harmony with the mind of Christ. Our interest in it here, however, need not carry us further; its application to Christ, and to Him alone, is only a final indication of the incomparable place He fills in the faith of Paul.

What has now been said is conclusive, and yet it makes practically no reference to the one signal proof Paul's writings afford of the unique and incommunicable place Christ held in his faith. That proof is afforded by what the apostle teaches of the meaning and power of Christ's death. This is not the place to enter into an exposition of this: it is sufficient to refer to the fact. He died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we might live together with Him (1 Thess. 510). Paul delivers to men first of all that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; this is the divinely laid foundation of the gospel (1 Cor. 15). He died for all, so then all died their death was somehow involved and comprehended in His; Him, who knew no sin, God made to be sin on our behalf, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 514-21). In His crucifixion He became a curse for us (Gal. 31). God set Him forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood; when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son (Rom. 3 25, 5 10). In Him we have our redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness

of our trespasses (Eph. 17). So it runs through the epistles from beginning to end. There is no other person of whom such things can be said, or who can claim even to have some part of them extended to him when they are said of Christ. They are all for Him and for Him alone. They make it impossible to dispute the fact that Christ held a unique place in Paul's faith, and they make us feel deeply that this unique place was held by Christ in virtue of something which made Paul infinitely his debtor.

What has now been said hardly needs to be summarised. Whether the apostle was right or wrong; whether he was impelled by his experience as a Christian, or prompted by reminiscences of pre-Christian, Messianic theology, and extra-Christian Alexandrian philosophy, there is no doubt about the place he gave to Christ. Look at it as we will, it was a place which no man could share. Christ determined everything in the relations of God and men; but this, though it is central, is only the starting-point. All things whatsoever have to be determined by relation to Him; in Him alone is the key to their meaning to be found. All nature, all history, all revelation and redemption, all that is human and all that is divine, can be understood only through Him. The universe has to be reconstituted with Him as its centre, the principle of its unity, its goal. To understand the world is to discover that it is a Christian world-that spiritual law, the very law in which Christ lived and died-pervades the constitution of nature and the history of man. There is not in the history of the human mind an instance of intellectual boldness to compare with this, and it is the supreme daring of it which convinces us that it is the native birth of Paul's Christian faith. No one ever soared so high on borrowed wings.

III

CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS

When we pass from Paul, it is open to us, in view of the chronological and other uncertainties regarding the books of the New Testament, to take them in almost any order. The Epistle to the Hebrews, while it has affinities with almost all types of Christian thoughtwith the synoptic gospels and the early chapters of Acts, with Paul and with the Judaism of Alexandria-nevertheless stands alone in the New Testament. It is the most solitary of the primitive Christian books. In its presentation of Christ we might almost say that extremes meet. On the one hand, it is the most humanitarian of apostolic writings. It speaks with a kind of predilection of Jesus, not the Christ; it recalls 'the days of His flesh,' when, with strong crying and tears, He offered prayers and supplications to Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear; it holds Him up to us as a pattern of faith, the ideal subject of religion, who was tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin; who passed through a curriculum of suffering by which He was made perfect for His calling, and who learned in doing so what it is to obey; who lived the life of faith in God from beginning to end, and is in short the typical believer. All this touches

the heart of the reader as it no doubt moved the writer of the epistle, but it does not disclose to us the full significance of Jesus for His own faith. The most humanitarian book of the New Testament can also be fairly described as the most theological. Jesus is not only the pattern of true piety, but everything in the relations of God and men is determined by Him. He is