not the belief that Jesus was the Christ, but the belief that He is the Christ. He was while on earth what all men had seen and known—a man approved of God by His might in word and deed; He is now what the preaching of the apostles declares Him to be-both Lord and Christ. This preaching is not, indeed, independent of the historical life of Jesus. When a man was chosen to take the place of Judas, and to be associated with the eleven as a witness of the Resurrection, he was chosen from the men who have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was received up from us' (Acts 1 21). from us' (Acts 1 21). The criticism which would have us believe that from the Resurrection onward the Jesus of history was practically displaced by an ideal Christ of faith is beside the mark. The Christ of faith was the Jesus of history, and no one was regarded as qualified to bear witness to the Christ unless he had had the fullest opportunity of knowing Jesus. Nevertheless, Jesus is demonstrated to be the Christ and is preached in that character, not merely or even mainly on the ground of what He had said and done on earth, but on the ground of His exaltation to God's right hand, and His gift of the Holy Spirit. It is in this exaltation and in this wonderful outpouring of divine life that He is seen to be what He is, and takes the place in human souls which establishes the Christian religion.

The Christ, of course, is a Jewish title, and it is easy to say impatient or petulant things about it. There are those who profess devotion to Jesus and tell us that they do not care whether He was (or is) the Christ or not;

those who thank God, not without complacency, that to them He is far more and far better than the Christ; those who assure us that Christianity is a misnomer, and that our religion should find a more descriptive name. Such superior persons betray a lack of historical discernment, and it is wiser on the whole to accept the world as God has made it than to reconstruct it on lines of our own. The conception of Jesus as the Christ, if we interpret it by the teaching of Peter in the early chapters of Acts, is not one which it is easy to disparage. It embodies at least two great truths about Jesus as the apostle regarded Him. The first is that Jesus is King. That is the very meaning of the term. The Christ is the Lord's Anointed, and the throne on which He has been set in His exaltation is the throne of God Himself. It is a translation of this part of the meaning of the term into less technical language when Peter says elsewhere: 'Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all' (Acts 10). Simple as it is, this assertion of the sovereignty of Jesus covers all that is characteristic in historical Christianity. If it disappeared, all that has ever been known to history as Christianity would disappear along with it. It belonged to Christian faith from the beginning that in it all men should stand on a level with one another, but all should at the same time confront Christ and do homage to Him as King. The second truth covered and guarded by the conception of Jesus as the Christ is this: that He is the Person through whom God's Kingdom comes, and through whom all God's promises are fulfilled. In this sense the name is a symbol of the continuity of the work of God, and a guarantee of its accomplishment. This is

the historical importance of it. 'To Him bear all the prophets witness' (Acts 10). All prophecy is in essence Messianic. All the hopes which God has inspired in the hearts of men, whether by articulate voices in the Old Testament, or by the providential guidance of the race, or by the very constitution of human nature, must look to Him to be made good. To borrow the language of Paul, 'How many soever are the promises of God, in him is the Yea' (2 Cor. 120). They must be fulfilled in Him, or not at all; or rather we should say, They have been fulfilled in Him, and in no other.

The exclusive place which is thus given to Jesus as the Christ is insisted upon from the first. Whether we regard Him as the King to whom all must do homage, or as the central and supreme figure in history, through whom God's final purpose is to be achieved, He stands alone. There cannot be another, who shares as He does the throne of God; there cannot be another to whom all the prophets bear witness, and on whom all the hopes of humanity depend. This is not only implied in the place taken by Jesus in the faith of the apostle; it has come to clear consciousness in the apostle's mind, and is explicitly asserted in his preaching. In none other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved' (Acts 412). If we can rely upon these words as representing the mind of Peter-and the writer can see no reason to question them—it is clear that Jesus had in the earliest preaching and the earliest faith of Christians that solitary and incommunicable place which the Church assigns Him still.

B

It is worth while, however, to bring out more distinctly the spiritual contents which the apostle found in his Christ. For those to whom he preached there was a hideous contradiction in the very idea that one should be the Christ who had died the accursed death of the Cross, and in so far as Peter's sermons are apologetic they deal with this difficulty. He meets it in two ways. On the one hand, the death of Jesus was divinely necessary; He was delivered up by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God. The evidence of this divine necessity was no doubt found in the Scriptures (Acts 223; 1 Cor. 153); and when we notice that in describing the death of Jesus Peter twice uses the Deuteronomic phrase 'hanged upon a tree,' which to Paul was the symbol of Christ made a curse for us (Acts 5 30, 10 39; Deut. 21 23; Gal. 3 18), it is perhaps not going too far to suggest that the atoning virtue of Christ's death was an idea as well as a power in the primitive Church. But however that may be, it is certain that the difficulties presented by His death to faith in the Messiahship of Jesus were practically annulled by His Resurrection and Exaltation. It was this which made Him both Lord and Christ, and in this character He determined for the apostles and for all believers their whole relation to God. To Him they owed already the gift of the Holy Spirit ; and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter argues elsewhere, is the sufficient and final proof that men are right with God (Acts 11 7, 15). To His coming again, or rather to His coming in His character of the Christ, they looked for times of refreshing, nay for the consummation of human history, 'the times of the restoration of all things

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whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been from of old' (Acts 3 21). Much stress has been laid on the eschatological aspects of the primitive faith in Jesus as the Christ, and they are not to be ignored; but neither may we ignore the spiritual character 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 238: '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

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