Matthew and Luke. These represent what was believed and taught of Jesus in the Christian Church during the sixties of the first century. This is a period at which many who knew Jesus must have survived, and there are sound reasons for believing that the two documents named were connected with two members of the apostolic circle-Mark being indirectly dependent on Peter, while the non-Marcan document was probably the work of Matthew. Even if we admit the process of idealising to be real, these are fair guarantees for a close connexion with history. But the process is often exaggerated and misconceived. If we start behind all the evidence, with an assumed Jesus who is exactly what other men are, of course there is an immense amount of idealising to be allowed for; everything in short, is idealising—that is, everything is imaginary and fictitious-by which Jesus is brought into a positive connexion with the Christian religion. Obviously this is an unsound mode of arguing. Jesus had unquestionably a positive connexion with the Christian religion. It owes its being to an impulse communicated by Him. But that impulse cannot have been alien to the phenomena which it generated; there must have been that in Jesus which was in some kind of keeping with the idealisation of Him in the Church's faith. To admit this, however, is to admit that the Jesus exactly like ourselves who is assumed to stand behind the gospel history, is an illegitimate assumption; if He had been no more than we are, the wonder of the Christian religion and of the New Testament would never have come to be. The necessity of maintaining continuity between Jesus and the movement which issued from Him, when taken in connexion with the closeness of the witnesses to the facts, creates a presumption in favour of the historical representation of the oldest sources which goes far to balance the idealising process referred to. Further,

as we have seen already, there is a self-guaranteeing power in the inner life of Jesus which assures us we are in contact with reality in the gospels; the spiritual truth is so unquestionable that it carries the conviction of historical truth along with it. The mind of Christ, as we have come in contact with it in those two ancient authorities, does not strike us at all as a product of idealising or theologising tendencies in the mind of the Church. We I know what theology is, we know what poetry is, and the most significant utterances in which Jesus reveals Himself have not the character of either the one or the other. They are vital, individual, unparalleled. The more closely they are studied, the more apparent it becomes that they must be taken at their full value if we are to see what Jesus was and what place He claimed in the relations of God and man. It is well worth observing, too, in a matter in which some minds are sure to be impressed by authorities, that the two most recent and searching studies of this subject by independent scholars have been entirely favourable to the historical character of the gospel picture, and entirely unfavourable to the idea that Jesus has been idealised, or theologised, by the evangelists, past recognition. Weiss asserts that the matter contained in Q-and Q as he has reconstructed it contains a vastly greater proportion of the gospel story than we have appealed to shows no trace whatever of being influenced by later Christological ideas; and in this he is substantially supported by Harnack. Harnack, indeed, thinks that Q represents Jesus as dominated by the sense of His Messiahship, from beginning to end of the gospel story, more strictly than the facts warrant; but the facts, as he himself expiscates them from Q's report of the words of Jesus, include these: that He who even in His present existence is more than a prophet and greater than John, He who is the Son, will be the future King and Judge.

If this was Jesus' consciousness of Himself, as we come into contact with it in history, there is clearly room to look for wonderful things without discounting them as idealising. It is indeed not the formal testimonies, in which high titles are assigned to Him, which impress us most with the sense of what Jesus is. In one place or another these may be due to misapprehension, even though it is admitted that He sometimes used them. It is the informal utterance of His greatness which is so arresting and inevitable, and no scepticism can shake our conviction that never man spake as this man-about Himself. He stands alone, not only in the faith of His followers, but in His own apprehension of what He is to God and man.

It is hardly possible to appreciate these conclusions unless we try to show their bearing on the religious conditions of the present. No one will deny that there is much confusion both within the Church and outside of it as to what the Christian religion essentially is. Nor is it only evangelic Churches that labour under such perplexities. As recent events have shown, even the Church of Rome, with all the emphasis it lays upon the principles of tradition and authority, is as sorely embarrassed as to the proper way of dealing with its modernist members, as any of the Protestant communions. Such an inquiry as we have just concluded ought to provide both the Churches and seeking souls outside the Churches with principles to steady themselves by in the present distress.

B. Weiss, Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung, 89. Ein Einfluss späterer christologischer Vorstellungen auf die Stoffe in Q ist in keiner Weise nachzuweisen. So also, in speaking of what he regards as an independent source-which he calls L-and which runs through Luke from beginning to end, he says: Auch die Lukasquelle geht nirgends ueber die urchristliche Auffassung von der Person Jesu hinaus ib. 80; and of Luke as a whole: Die Hauptsache ist, dass von einer irgendwie höher entwickelten Christologie im Lukasevangelium nicht die Rede sein kann. Cf. Harnack, Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 169.

On the one hand, the conclusions which we have reached are entirely reassuring to those who stand in the line of historical Christianity. Speaking of it, not as a theological system, but as a religious life, Christianity has always given to Jesus a supreme place in its faith. Christians have lived a life, or have aimed at least to live a life, in which all their relations both to God and man were determined by Christ. They owed to Him all that made their religion what it was: the knowledge of the Father, the forgiveness of their sins, the new life in the spirit, the assurance of immortality. Their faith in God was in the proper sense Christian faith, because it was in the first instance faith in Him. Now this is the conception of Christianity which our investigation of the New Testament has also discovered, and it is a conception which is vindicated when we look to Christ Himself as the oldest records disclose Him. Those who live in the faith which has just been described live in the line of New Testament Christianity, and of the mind of Christ about His own place in the relations of men and God. They have the same religion as those whose spiritual life is reflected in the New Testament. Their attitude to Christ is the same, and so is their attitude to God through Christ. This is the point at which evangelical Christianity is right, and at which all its protests against a broad churchism which would give Christ another or a lower place than He has in the New Testament faith are justified. It is the point at which evangelical Christianity even in the Church of Rome is justified in refusing to negotiate with a modernism which by assuming that Christ cannot possibly have been anything but what we are makes the ascription to Him of His supreme place in faith impossible. There can be no Christianity at all, in the only sense in which Christianity can be seen in the New Testament, in the only sense in which it is a

religion answering to the mind of Christ about His own place and calling, unless Christ is established in the place which the faith of the Church has always given Him. He must have His place because He claims it and because it is His due.

But there is more than this to say. What Christ claims and what is His due is a place in the faith of men -in other words, it is an attitude of the soul to Himself as He is presented to us in the gospel. We are bound to Him, in that wonderful significance which He has for the life of the soul, that unique and incommunicable power which He has to determine all our relations to God and man. To be true Christians, we are thus bound to Him; but we are not bound to anything else. But for what He is and for what He has done, we could not be Christians at all: but for our recognition of what He is, but for our acceptance of what He has done, and our sense of infinite obligation to Him as we realise the cost at which He has done it, we could not tell what Christianity means. But we are not bound to any man's or to any church's rendering of what He is or has done. We are not bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine of the work of Christ. No intellectual construction of what Christ's presence and work in the world mean is to be imposed beforehand as a law upon faith, or a condition of membership in the Church. It is faith which makes a Christian; and when the Christian attitude of the soul to Christ is found, it must be free to raise its own problems and to work out its own solutions. This is the point at which 'broad' churchism is in the right against an evangelical Christianity which has not learned to distinguish between its faith-in which it is unassailable -and inherited forms of doctrine which have been unreflectingly identified with it. Natural as such identification may be, and painful as it may be to separate