mate. This position is frankly avowed, for example, by Wellhausen. He distinguishes in the broadest manner between Jesus and the gospel-that is, between Jesus and the Christian religion as it has existed from the beginning; and he is not only certain that the attempt to get back to the historical Jesus is one which must always be frustrated, but one which, even if it were successful, could only lead to disappointment. The historical Jesus, could we come face. to face with Him, would not sustain the Christian conception of the Christ; He would not provide a justification for the religion which has attached itself to His name. The true policy of the Church, therefore, is to stick to the gospel, and not to try to return to Jesus.' Those who retain any connexion with historical Christianity find it hard to comprehend this state of mind. They can draw no such distinction between Jesus and the gospel. They know that if they eliminated Jesus from what they call the gospel they would eliminate everything. Their religion rests on historical realities which are inseparable from the person of Jesus, or it ceases to be. It would not follow, though it ceased to be, that they could have no religion whatever. They might still be believers in God as men were in Old Testament times, but they could not be believers in God 'through Him' (1 Peter 1 20). Their religion would have no title to be called Christian, no claim to the character of gospel. It is impossible, therefore, to suppose that the members of any Christian Church can find relief from the stress of intellectual difficulty by distinguishing between the gospel and Jesus. This is not relief, but ruin; it is not the rescuing of their religion, but the abandonment, not to say the renunciation of it. The assumption which underlies it has been frankly stated by a writer already referred to: 'Jesus was nothing more than a human being like

1 Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 108 ff.

the rest of us.' 1 Of course if this can be assumed there is no more to be said. The place which Jesus has always held in Christian faith is one which is not open to the rest of us, never has been and never can be; and if He is no more than the rest of us, it should never have been open to Him. Nevertheless, the connexion between Jesus and the Christian religion remains; and unless we are content to leave it entirely in the dark, we shall find ourselves compelled to raise the ulterior question which by this assumption is foreclosed. Granting that the figure in the gospels is the product of the Church's faith, by what was that faith itself produced? The New Testament taken as a whole represents the most astonishing outburst of intellectual and spiritual energy in the history of our race: by what was it evoked? Surely the probabilities are that some extraordinary reality-something quite unlike the rest of us-lies behind and explains all this: a reality so powerful and impressive that it could not easily be lost within the limits of a generation, either by simply falling out of memory, or by being so transfigured and exalted in imagination as to preserve almost no trace of its original aspect or proportions. It is with this prejudice, rather than with the opposite one, that we think it reasonable to approach the investigation of a question which can never be less than vital to those who have been educated in Christian faith.

Before proceeding, however, to examination of the facts, it is desirable to refer to two prevalent but somewhat summary ways in which an attempt has been made to get into contact with the reality which lies beneath the gospel narratives, without entering into any scrutiny in detail.

'J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, i. 67. The very words ought to be quoted. 'Gerade dass Jesus nichts weiter war als ein Menschenkind wie wir andern auch, &c.' Weiss asserts in the same sentence the greatness and power of the personality of Jesus and his own reverence for it.

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