Scripture, was achieved in Him. The hope of the sinful world lay in the repentance and remission of sins preached in His name. The spiritual power-in other words, the power of God-which accompanied the apostles' testimony and evoked new life in the souls of men, was His gift. The words in ch. 24 52—they worshipped Him'are possibly not part of the original text, but there is nothing in them out of harmony with this representation of Jesus. The person whose origin and career are such as the evangelist describes-the Person who is now exalted to God's right hand, and who sends the promised Spirit is not a member of the Church but its Head. Luke has a peculiar interest in His humanity; on six separate occasions he tells us of His prayers, besides referring to His habit of withdrawing to desert places for devotion; but side by side with this simple human dependence on God there is that transcendent something which is fully revealed in His exaltation, in His gift of the Spirit, and in His mission of the apostles to all the world. It is not the particular way in which Luke conceived this or any part of it-in other words, it is not his Christology as an intellectual construction-with which we are concerned; it is the fact that Jesus had in the religious life of the evangelist the place and the importance which are here implied. Not that there is anything in it which we have not seen elsewhere, but it shows us once more, and if possible more clearly than ever, how incomparable is the significance of Jesus for Christian faith.

It is natural for us to examine the synoptic gospels separately, yet we must not overlook the fact that they are not independent, and that it is not the personal peculiarities of their authors which make them important. In point of fact they are anonymous writings, and though there are excellent reasons for connecting them with the

persons whose names they bear, it is not on this that their value depends. It lies greatly in the fact that they were produced in the Church, for the Church, and by men who were members of the Church, so that they are witnesses to us not of the individual peculiarities of their writers, but of the common faith. They were all written in the generation which followed the death of St. Paul, and what we see in them, speaking broadly, is Jesus as He was apprehended by the Church of those early days. The Jesus whom we see here is the Jesus on which the Christian community over all the world depended for its being. As far as He lived at all for the early Catholic Church he lived in the character in which He is here exhibited. In other words, He lived not as another good man, however distinguished his goodness might be, but as one who confronted men in the saving power, and therefore in the truth and reality of God. Whether the words in Luke 24" are genuine or not, the fact remains that at no date can we find any trace of a Church which did not worship Him.

VIII

CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS

The New Testament writings which bear the name of John are certainly connected somehow, though how it is not easy to determine. It is not so long ago since the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel were regarded as the opposite extremes of early Christianity, representative of modes of thought and feeling so remote and antagonistic as to be virtually exclusive of each other; but deeper study has brought them in some respects into closer mutual relation than any books of the New Tes

tament. In both there is the same passionate uncompromising temper, the same sense of the absolute distinction between that which is and that which is not Christian. In the Apocalypse it is manifested on the field of history and of conduct; there is war without truce and without quarter between the followers of the Lamb and those of the beast, and the supreme, we might almost say the sole, Christian virtue is fidelity unto death. In the gospel it sometimes seems to be put more abstractly; it is exhibited in the antitheses of light and darkness, life and death, love and hatred. These antitheses, however, are absolute, and they centre round Christ. He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son has not the life. He who believes on the Son is not condemned; he who believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God. In spite, however, of the fundamental affinity of these writings in temper, it will be convenient to examine them apart and to see in each in turn the significance of Christ for the writer's faith.

(a) The Apocalypse

There is a sense in which the Apocalypse might be called the most Christian book in the New Testament. Written at a time of persecution and conflict, every feeling in it is strained and intense; there is a passion in all it asserts of Christ, and in all its longings for Christ, which can hardly be paralleled elsewhere. If what we had to do was to reconstruct the Christology of the writer we might have a difficult task. His picture of Jesus has features which seem to come from the most various sources--Jewish Messianic expectations, resting on the book of Daniel or apocalyptic books of the same kind; the earthly life and the passion of Jesus; the epis

tles of Paul, and possibly even the Jewish speculation of Alexandria. Bousset refers only to one part of the book-the epistles to the seven churches-but his words hold good of the whole when he writes: 'What we have here is a layman's faith, undisturbed by any theological reflexion, a faith which, with untroubled naïveté, simply identifies Christ in His predicates and attributes with God, and on the other hand also calmly takes over quite archaic elements.' It is the writer's faith in Christ we wish to define, and the absence of theology should make our task the easier.

The book is described as the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to Him. The subordination of Jesus Christ to God is assumed, but Jesus Christ is for the Church the source and in some sense also the subject of all that is revealed. This is part at least of what is meant in 1910: the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. The inspired voices which are heard in the Christian community are moved by Him and bear witness to Him. But passing from this point, we find at once the fullest revelation of the seer's faith in Christ in what may be called his covering letter, enclosing the epistles of cc. 2 and 3: 'John, to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace, from him which is and which was and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne; and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they which pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall

'Die Offenbarung Johannis, 280.

mourn over Him. Even so, Amen.' What first strikes us here, as it has so often done already, is the co-ordination of Jesus Christ with God and His Spirit. We may say 'His Spirit' quite freely; for whatever may be the genealogy of the expression, 'the seven spirits which are before His throne'-and it can hardly be questioned that it is connected with the Persian Amshaspands-the seven spirits are never separated in the Apocalypse; they have not, as in the Persian mythology, proper names; they are treated as a unity in which the fulness of the divine power is gathered up. The eternal God, the Spirit in its plenitude, and Jesus Christ: this is the sum of the divine reality from which grace and peace come to the churches. No one has in his mind all that a Christian means when he says God unless he has in his mind all that is covered in these three names. For the writer of the Apocalypse, and for the faith by which he lives, Jesus Christ belongs to the sphere of the divine. After naming Jesus he proceeds to describe Him as 'the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth.' Possibly all these words describe Jesus in His exaltation: He is the faithful witness as bearing from heaven that true testimony to God (or to Himself) by which, as we have seen, the prophets of the Christian Church are inspired. But in the doxology which follows there is more than this. The writer turns from the exaltation of Jesus to His passion, and it is the passion, in its motive and its fruits, which inspires his praise. Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins in His blood . . . be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever.' Nothing could be conceived in worship more intense, more passionate and unreserved, than this: it gives to Jesus Christ, with irrepressible abandonment, the utmost that the soul can ever give to God. This is not theology, but worship, and it is here