Man be seated. These qualifications become important when we consider that Luke here represents a tradition which is independent of Mark, so that he is not modifying Mark's record, and that there is no probability that he knew anything of Matthew. They suggest that from a very early period, a period antecedent to all our evangelists, the words of Jesus were current in the Church in a form which requires a spiritual rather than a transcendent interpretation. It is no remote future to which Jesus appeals; the fulfilment of His words begins with the moment at which they are spoken. His enemies think they have expelled Him from the world, but from the very moment of their triumph His victory sets in. He filled Jerusalem from His death onward as He had never done in His life; it was impossible to escape His Presence or His Power; the Council had more to do with Him, was made more sensible of His predominance, found His challenge more inevitable, in the early days of Acts than in the period of the gospel history. Possibly it is in this line, which allows for the symbolical character of the words, rather than through a literal rendering of them, that the meaning of Jesus is to be sought. In any case He identifies Himself, in the last solemn utterance of His life, with the coming of the Kingdom of God; the coming of that kingdom means His own exaltation and return in glory; and however we may picture it—may we not say reverently, However, in the days of His flesh, He pictured it-the certainty of it is one to Him with His very being. In speaking as He speaks here, he puts Himself in the place which He holds throughout the New Testament; that place is given to Him only because He claims it as His own.

CONCLUSION

We have now completed our examination of the two questions with which we started. The first was: Has Christianity existed from the beginning only in the form of a faith which has Jesus as its object, and not at all in the form of a faith which has had Jesus simply as its living pattern? and the second: Can Christianity, as even the New Testament exhibits it, justify itself by appeal to Christ? To both questions the answer must be in the affirmative. The most careful scrutiny of the New Testament discloses no trace of a Christianity in which Jesus has any other place than that which is assigned Him in the faith of the historical Church. When the fullest allowance is made for the diversities of intellectual and even of moral interest which prevail in the different writers and the Christian societies which they address, there is one thing in which they are indistinguishable-the attitude of their souls to Christ. They all set Him in the same incomparable place. They all acknowledge to Him the same immeasurable debt. He determines, as no other does or can, all their relations to God and to each other. While His true manhood is unquestionably assumed, He is set as unquestionably on the side of reality which we call Divine and which confronts man; He embodies for faith that Divine love and power which work out man's salvation. It is the place thus assigned to Christ which gives its religious unity to the New Testament, and which has kept the Christian religion one all through its history. And so with regard

to the second question. When we look back from the Christian religion as the New Testament exhibits it, and as it is still exhibited in the Christian Church, to the historical Jesus, we see a Person, who is not only equal to the place which Christian faith assigns Him, but who assumes that place naturally and spontaneously as His own. Partly the inevitable ascendency which He exercised over those around Him, and the unspeakable obligations under which He laid them in their life toward God, evoked within them the sense of what was due to Jesus; but partly also Jesus revealed His consciousness of what He was, of what He was doing, and of what He claimed from men, in startling and unparalleled words. The resurrection of Jesus, and His consciousness of Himself as thus revealed, are at once the guarantee and justification of the historical Christian faith.

Before proceeding to what seem the inevitable inferences from this, it may be worth while to refer in passing to two objections which are sure to present themselves to some minds. On the one hand, there are those to whom the questions raised are in their very nature irksome; it seems to them absurd that religion, the higher life of the spirit, should be in any way entangled in such investigations, or dependent on their results. It must, they think, live upon immediate certainties of its own, be the answers what they may to questions of the kind we have been considering. This mental temper is widely diffused. It speaks, for example, in the broad distinction which is sometimes drawn between Faith and Knowledge. 'In Faith,' to quote Goethe as representing this view, 'everything depends on the fact of believing; what we believe is quite secondary. Faith is a profound sense of security, springing from confidence in the All-powerful, Inscrutable Being. The strength of this confidence is the main point. But what we think of this Being depends

on other faculties, or even on other circumstances, and is altogether indifferent.' What we are concerned with, however, is not faith indefinitely, faith as a profound sense of security springing from confidence in a Being of whom we know nothing, but faith in a specifically Christian sense that is, faith with characteristics or qualities or virtues which are somehow due to Christ. It is idle to say that this is independent of what we know of Christ. It is Christ known who makes it what it is: we have Christian faith only as we believe in God through Him. The same criticism is applicable to the famous aphorism of Lessing, to which so many have appealed as a way of shaking off the spiritual bondage (as they think it) of subjection to history: 'accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.' Christianity does not mean the recognition of necessary truths of reason, but an attitude of the soul to God, determined by Christ; and history is not to the religious man a chapter of accidents, but the stage on which a Divine purpose is achieved which could not be more ineptly described than by calling it accidental. Religion can no more be simplified by making it independent of history than respiration would be simplified by soaring beyond the atmosphere. What we have always to do, after making such distinctions as have been illustrated from Goethe and Lessing, is to transcend them. Our vital convictions, the faiths by which we live, are not formed in vacuo; they are generated in us by what has happened. If the past is eliminated from the present, the historical from the eternal, it is hard to say what is left. The historical realities which we have been considering-the Personality, the Self-consciousness, the Resurrection, the growing Ascendency of Jesus-are anything but 'contingent historical truths.' Whatever we mean when we speak of Divine necessity may be predicated of all. Al

though Christianity is a historical religion, its saving truth is not only in the past; it is here, in the living Christ and in the experience of Christians. It has its foundation laid in historical facts, no doubt; but it has at the same time its witness in itself, for the consciences of sinful men, needing and seeking God. It is the combination of the historical fact in the past with its Divine meaning and relevance in the present, in which the whole weight of the evidence lies; and it is the testimony of believers, speaking in the power of the spirit, which is used by God to make the historical eternal—that is, to make it living, present, and divinely strong to save.

On the other hand, there are those who on critical grounds, or what they believe to be such, will demur to the answer we have given to the second of our two questions. That answer, they will hold, ascribes to our gospels a higher historical value than they possess. The real way to look at these documents is that which recognises that they mark stages in a process which began with Jesus, but which terminates in the prologue to the fourth gospel, or even in the Nicene Creed. This process, which we may call that of idealising Jesus, or representing Him in history as acting in the rôle which He fills in Christian faith, was not indeed completed when our gospels were written, but it had gone a considerable way. It had gone so far, in fact, that the historical Jesus is irrecoverably lost to us; we do not know what He was, we only know how those who believed in Him represented Him to their own minds. The plausibility of such statements depends entirely upon their generality, and as soon as we come to close quarters with Him it disappears. In investigating our second question we did not appeal to the gospels without criticism, but to the two oldest documentary sources which criticism has recognised-Mark, and a non-Marcan source used by