own experience: who has not sighed to be another creature than he is? The heavenly thing which it is so hard to understand that the speaker may well despair of finding faith for it, is the possibility and the method of the new birth. No one can explain this heavenly thing 'but Jesus, and he does it in two sentences. One is that in which he describes it as a being born of water and of the spirit, where there is a reference, which it is not possible for the present writer to question, to Christian baptism and to the reception of the spirit which was its normal accompaniment in the apostolic age. The other is that in which he says, 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Apart from the suggestion of the figure, we know what the evangelist meant by the lifting up of the Son of Man: Jesus used this word, he tells us plainly elsewhere (12 33), to signify by what death He should die. Unless we are prepared to accuse the author of a rambling incoherence, and of tumbling out sentences which have no connexion with each other and could never find an intelligible context in the mind of his readers, we shall remember that the baptism alluded to in ver. 5 is baptism in the name of Jesus, and specifically, as ver. 14 reminds us, in the name of Jesus who died for us upon the Cross. It is baptism, as Paul expresses it, looking to His death (Rom. 6). The new birth is mysterious, but not magical. As the evangelist understood it, in its specifically Christian character, it is normally coincident with baptism; it is an experience which comes to men when in penitent faith they cast themselves upon the Son of God uplifted on the Cross-in other words, when they commit themselves to the love which in the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world by becoming a propitiation

for it. Apart from such a combination of ideas, the discourse with Nicodemus is chaotic and unintelligible, and the mere fact that it is thus made lucid and coherent is sufficient to vindicate this construction. It secures for regeneration a genuinely Christian character by making it depend upon the death of Jesus, and it only gives to that death in this passage the significance claimed for it from 1" to 19 34.

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Mutatis mutandis, all that has been said of the third chapter in John may be said of the sixth. The Supper is in the author's mind in the one as Baptism is in the other. The subject is Jesus as the bread of life, and the burden of the discourse is put with the utmost generality in ver. 56: As the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so he that eateth me, he shall live because of me.' But the evangelist passes, voluntarily or involuntarily, into the liturgical terminology of the sacrament when he speaks of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man; and once this is recognised, there can be no question as to the reference of such words. Their reference was fixed in the Christian community before this gospel was written, and they connect the life of the Christian with the death of Christ. It is not a passing idea that there is such a connexion; it is a truth embodied in a rite perpetually celebrated-a truth, therefore, never absent from the Christian mind, regarded as of primary and vital importance, recurring to the thoughts spontaneously on the strangest occasions (11 49 ff.), asserted with the most solemn emphasis (1934, 653). It is not serious criticism which finds in the fourth gospel a Christ whose significance for faith, as a propitiation for sin, is other than that which meets us in the first epistle of John. The Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world-the Son of Man uplifted on the Cross as Moses lifted up the Serpent in

the Wilderness-the Only-begotten sent of God as a propitiation for our sins: these are one figure, dominating thought and inspiring faith to precisely the same intent in the epistle and in the gospel. And in this character, as in every other, Jesus stands alone. It is in Him and in His death, in no other person and no other act, that for the New Testament Christian sin is annulled. Here above all, we may say, for New Testament faith, there is none other name.

Summary and Transition

Our investigation of the place which Jesus occupied in the faith of those who wrote the New Testament, and of those whom they addressed, is now complete. To the present writer it is conclusive evidence that in spite of the various modes of thought and feeling which the canonical Christian writings exhibit, there is really such a thing as a self-consistent New Testament, and a selfconsistent Christian religion. There is a unity in all these early Christian books which is powerful enough to absorb and subdue their differences, and that unity is to be found in a common religious relation to Christ, a common debt to Him, a common sense that everything in the relations of God and man must be and is determined by Him. We may even go further and say that in all the great types of Christianity represented in the New Testament the relations of God and man are regarded as profoundly affected by sin, and that the sense of a common debt to Christ is the sense of what Christians owe to Him in dealing with the situation which sin has created. This may not involve either a formally identical Christology, or a formally identical doctrine of Propitiation, in every part of the New Testament; but it is the justification of every effort of Christian intelli

gence to define to itself more clearly who Jesus is and what He has done for our salvation from sin. The New Testament writers did not think of Christology and of the Atonement without sufficient motives, and as long as their sense of debt to Christ survives, the motive for thinking on the same subjects, and surely in the main on the same lines, will survive also. But this is not our interest here. What we have now to ask is whether the religion of the New Testament, consisting as it does in such a peculiar relation to Him as we have seen illustrated in all the documents, can be justified by appeal to Christ Himself. With all its peculiarities, New Testament Christianity claims to rest on a historical basis, and it is a question of supreme importance whether the historical basis which can be provided is adequate to support it. The question is at the present time not only important, but urgent, for the existing Christian Churches, in which the relation of faith to Jesus perpetuates on the whole the New Testament type, are perplexed by voices which call them away from it in different directions. On the one hand, we have our philosophical persons who, on the specious pretext of lifting religion into its proper atmosphere of universal and eternal truth, invite us, as has been already noticed, to dismiss historical considerations entirely. The truths by which Christianity lives are true, it is argued, whatever we may or may not be able to find out about Jesus; they are true, not in Him, but in themselves and in God. It is a mere failure in intelligence- a sort of cowardice, to speak plainly-which makes people nervous about Jesus and the gospels. The Christian religion belongs to a world to which the historical and contingent, even though they should be represented by the life of Jesus, are matters of indifference. It will survive in all that is essential to it though Jesus should entirely disappear.

On the other hand, we have our historical persons, whose views are very different. To get back to Jesus, they tell us, is not the unimportant thing which philosophy would make it. It is vital to get back. But when we do get back, what do we find? Not, according to many of them, anything which justifies the New Testament attitude to Jesus, or which supports what we have just seen to be the New Testament religion. What we find in the historical Jesus is not the author or the object of the Christian faith known to history, but a child of God like ourselves-a pious, humble, good man, who called others to trust the Father as He trusted, and to be children of God like Him. The Christian religion is not thus left to us, with the added advantage that it is historically secured; when the historical basis is laid bare, it is seen that the Christian religion cannot be sustained upon it. The Christian religion has been a mistake, a delusion, from the beginning; our duty is to revert from it to the religion of Jesus Himself, to cast away the primitive Christian faith and its testimony, and to fall back upon the pattern believer. It is obvious that there is something dogmatic in both these appeals to the Church; there is a theory of religion, of history, and of reality in general, implied alike in the philosophical appeal which would give us a Christianity without Jesus, and in the historical one which would give us a Jesus who could take no responsibility for anything that has ever been called Christian. The writer has no such confidence in either theory as would justify him in assenting off-hand to the stupendous impeachment of Providence which is implied in both. It is easy enough to admit that there may have been errors of every kind in the historical development of Christianity. The adherents of the new religion may have made intellectual blunders and moral ones, and no doubt made