certain qualification. Matthew (264) has: Henceforth (am' aρr) ye shall see the Son of Man seated; and Luke (2269), But from this time (ảπò тоû vûv) shall the Son of 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