33 acter of the salvation which men owe here and now to the Christ who is to come. 'Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remission of your sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit' (Acts 238). Remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit: these are the present religious experiences which are offered to men through faith in the 'eschatological' Christ. But these are supremely gifts of God, and we do not appreciate truly the place of Christ in the apostle's faith until we see that where salvation is concerned He stands upon God's side, confronting men. The most vivid expression is given to this in Acts 2 'Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear.' There can be no doubt that in this passage Peter looks upon Jesus in His exaltation as forming with God His Father one Divine causality at work through the Spirit for the salvation of men. His humanity is not questioned or curtailed; it has been spoken of without prejudice in words which immediately precede. But His relation to those experiences which constitute Christian life is that of being their Author, the Divine Source from which they come; he is not to Christian faith a Christian, but all Christians owe their being, as such, to Him. We may have any opinion we please about the rightness or the wrongness of this, but it is not possible to question the fact. We may argue that the history of the Church, like that of the human race, began with a fall-that the apostolic belief in the Resurrection was a mistake, and the spiritual experiences which accompanied it morbid phenomena to be referred to the mental pathologist; but even if we do, we must admit that primitive Christianity gave Jesus in its faith the extraordinary place which has just been described. He is the Christ, the Prince of Life, Lord of all, Judge of the living and the dead, at God's right hand, the Giver of the Spirit, the fulfiller of all the promises of God. He is not the first of Christians or the best of men, but something absolutely different from this. The apostles and their converts are not persons who share the faith of Jesus; they are persons who have Jesus as the object of their faith, and who believe in God through Him. II CHRIST IN THE FAITH OF PAUL There is an idea abroad that it does not much matter what Paul thought of Christ, because he never knew Him. He had not that acquaintance with Him during His public ministry on which, as we have seen, stress was laid in choosing a successor to Judas; his Christ, therefore, cannot but have been an ideal and theological rather than a real person. He has even been charged, on the ground of a difficult expression in one of his epistles (2 Cor. 5 16), with disparaging the kind of knowledge to which importance was attached in Jerusalem, and much of the modern criticism of his theology really assumes with the Pharisaic Christianity of Acts that he lacked the indispensable qualifications of an apostle. We even find scholars like Gunkel congratulating themselves on this ground that Paul's influence speedily waned. It would have been all over with Christianity as a beneficent historical force if the synoptic gospels had not come to the front and established an ascendancy in the Church which to a great extent neutralised the Pauline gospel. If the question before us were, What 'Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes, 56. did Paul know of Jesus of Nazareth? it would not be difficult to reduce these assertions to their true proportions. Paul did not live in a vacuum; he lived in the primitive Christian society in which all that was known of Jesus was current, and he could not, by the most determined and obstinate effort, have been as ignorant of Jesus as he is sometimes represented to be. Among his most intimate friends and fellow-workers, at different periods of his life, were Mark and Luke, the authors of our second and third gospels. There is much to be said for the idea of Mr. Wright, that they worked as catechists in the Pauline Churches. Is it conceivable that the apostle did not know what they taught, and did not care? If this reasoning seems too à priori, or too much based on mere probabilities, to carry conviction, it only needs such a searching examination of the apostle's writings as Feine's Jesus Christus und Paulus to raise it beyond doubt. Paul was in no sense ignorant of Jesus. If our synoptic gospels are not works of imagination, but a genuine deposit of tradition-and this is the only view which is represented by serious scholars-then the substance of them must have been as familiar to Paul as it is to us. In view, however, of the question which we are discussing, Paul's knowledge of Jesus is beside the mark. Whether he knew Jesus or not, whether his influence on Christianity has been pernicious or not, he is the most important figure in Christian history. He did more than any of the apostles to win for the Christian religion its place in the life of the world, and he has done more than any of them in always winning that place again when it seemed in danger of being lost. Evangelical revival, in personalities so powerful as Luther, Wesley, and Chalmers, has always been kindled afresh at the flame 'The Composition of the Four Gospels, cc. i. and ii. which burns inextinguishable in his testimony to Christ. Hence, quite apart from any question as to its justification or otherwise, nothing can be of more consequence than to ascertain the place which Christ actually filled in the faith and life of the apostle. Was He to him what we have seen Him to be in the faith of the primitive Church? In one respect at least, the answer cannot be doubtful. Paul's Christian life began with the appearance to him of the Risen Saviour; to him, as to Peter, in virtue of His exaltation the crucified Jesus was both Lord and Christ. With the splendour of that appearance present to his mind Paul calls Jesus the Lord of glory (I Cor. 2 "); to acknowledge Him in this character is to make the fundamental Christian confession in which all believers are united (1 Cor. 123; Rom. 109). It is often said that whatever doctrinal differences may be detected in the New Testament, there is no trace of Christological disputes. It is not quite clear that this is the case, nor is it clear that it must be so. It may quite fairly be argued from such a passage as 2 Cor. 1 19-Now God's Son-God's' has a strong emphasis-who was preached among you by us, I mean by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay-that Paul was acquainted with preachers of another stamp than himself and his friends, whose Jesus was not in his sense God's Son, but perhaps only the son of David. There is something, too, to support this in 2 Cor. 11, where we hear of ' another Jesus,' which means a 'different spirit' and a 'different gospel.' But, however this may be, it is certain that the Risen Jesus fills the same place in the religion of Paul as in that of Peter. To both apostles He is Lord and Christ. To both He is exalted at God's right hand. In the faith of both He comes again to judge the living and the dead. It is of Him that both say, with that great and terrible day in view, 'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved' (Acts 221; Rom. 1013). If Peter cries to the Jews, 'There is not salvation in any other' (Acts 412), Paul writes to the Gentiles, 'Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ' (1 Cor. 3). The absolute religious significance of Jesus, in all the relations of God and man, is the specific quality of the new faith as it appears in both. The place Paul has filled in the history of Christianity justifies us in showing with some detail how this absolute religious significance of Christ pervades and dominates his spiritual life. Sometimes it comes out quite casually, where, as we might say, he is not specially thinking about it. Thus in the salutations of his epistles he habitually wishes the churches grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 17; 1 Cor. 13; 2 Cor. 12; Gal. 13, etc.), or he writes to them as societies which have their being in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess. 1; 2 Thess. 1'). This is exactly parallel, in the place it gives to Jesus, to what we have already seen in Acts 2. Paul would not think any more than Peter of questioning the real and complete humanity of Jesus; but when he thinks of the grace and peace by which the Church lives, he does not think of Jesus as sharing in them with himself; he sets Him instinctively and spontaneously on the side of God from whom they come. If the Father is the source, Christ is the channel of these blessings; the Father and the Son together confront men as the divine power to which salvation is due. Sometimes, again, the place Christ has in Paul's faith comes out in a single word; for example, when in 1 Cor. 15 28 he calls Him without qualification 'the Son.' This passage, in which the apostle tells us that when the end comes the Son Himself shall be subject to Him who put |