experiences and unique prerogatives. And certainly our Lord Himself put a deeper meaning into Messiahship by the whole course of His life. Not that Christ merely accommodated Himself to the popular belief. We have every reason to suppose that His human consciousness was even helped to the conception of His mission by the Old Testament, used, not critically, but spiritually. "The King of the Jews' is necessarily the title under which He claims to be head of the human race. Thus when His own convictions (may we say it?) echoed back to Him from the Baptist, He perceived that the promised forerunner had come, and began His own labours. Having to alter men's views of what Messiah should be, He did not openly announce Himself, but found a not less fruitful point of view in expounding to men 'the kingdom of God' which was at hand.' Perhaps we shall not greatly err if we say that, while speaking chiefly of its near approach, Christ was actually establishing the spiritual fellowship which He spoke of under that title. By His very presence in the world, and by the whole of His influence on men, Christ was introducing the final ideal relation between God and His children. Yet this relation had vast possibilities unrealised. The kingdom of God must come in greater 'power.' Whether you say, with the favourite modern view, that the completed Atonement must be the foundation of the Church of Christ-or whether you take the Millenarian view, that Jesus Christ is coming back even yet, in future days, to reign at Jerusalem-or whether you take the view which is implied in the First Gospel, that Jesus, rejected by His own people, was to be rewarded by His heavenly Father with a celestial in place of an earthly crown—at any rate, it is plain that the Spirit of Christ was in the world with Christ, but not in the fulness of His power,that the work of Christ was truly begun, but not finished. How was it to be finished? How should Christ undertake its completion? By moral means, and by these only. He had found in prophecy, especially in the second Isaiah, this ideal of His ministry. Hence His text in the synagogue sermon at

Nazareth. Hence His message to the doubting Baptist, where we see the new view in sharp contrast with the best form of the popular view. Hence Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem as prince of peace, and no warrior, an entry followed up by no decisive action,-an appeal to men for faith, and not an instalment of royal state. I do not know that we need object to the view taken in some modern lives of Christ, that at first the destined issue of His life was unknown, or only most dimly known, to the Master, and that, while He would grasp nothing for Himself, He would have joyfully accepted a kingship in brighter and cheerfuller forms had His Father led Him to such a kingship. Only we must not admit that our Lord counted on such a kingship, or that its coming was to Him a mere question of time. When He waited for His Father's hand, He was waiting till the moral fruits of His ministry should appear. He performed the mighty works given Him to do, only as signs.' This was the mysterious thing about Christ, the offence and the glory of His cross,—that a life overflowingly supernatural, making the most startling claims on men's faith, was yet lived, and was ended in violent death, as any other human life might be. It was a life of faith, depending on God's providence, accepting God's will.

6

But it will be manifest that the dogmatic assertion of His Messiahship was vital to Christ. He died for it. When no evidence could incriminate Him, He incriminated Himself. This is Christian dogma, that Jesus is Christ. Of course that confession is naught apart from Christ's new spirit of faith and from His new spirit of self-sacrifice. Apart from these, professed faith in Jesus as the Messiah is a barren opinion, if not a falsehood. But these things are not promised to us except through faith in Christ. God's Fatherhood is a Christian truth; 'the way of the holy cross' is a Christian law of life. Not that we would imply that Christ turns God into our Father from being something else, or that self-sacrifice would not be a duty if Christianity were untrue. The New Testament does not reflect on such questions. We must frame our own natural

B

theology, our own speculative ethics, or else go without them. But whatever we do, we must not regard Christ as a teacher of moral or religious generalities. He is founder of a fellowship within which the truths which He lived out in His own life may become realities, forces, powers, in other lives also. Hence He asserts Himself, along with the Father and with the law of Sacrifice, because He is the only way to the Father and the only sure source of moral strength. At least, so Christ Himself believed; and for believing that He died. The Christianity which He lived in His own life, and which He died to put in circulation, is simply the Christianity of the Lord's prayer, plus, faith in Himself as Christ. The claim to be future judge of quick and dead seems an original trait1 in the conception of Messiah,—a trait which startlingly reveals the dignity of Christ's self-consciousness, and the universality of the 'glad tidings' which were to be testified of Him.

Let us sum up our study of Christ's life so far as it has now carried us. We find Christ to be a religious teacher, revealing God as a Father and self-sacrifice as the law and spring of daily life. We find Christ to be a worker of miracles-chiefly miracles of healing,-using them as signs of His mission, but never using them for personal ends. And, finally, Christ claims to be the expected Messiah, a conception which He broadens and deepens till it has world-wide and age-long significance. Such is Christ's life. He is a teacher-king,-not otherwise a king at all, in visible seeming; a king of truth, as He said to Pilate. How His life is further to take shape, and how it is to issue, He commits to His Father's providence.

But we, looking back upon Christ's finished history, with something of His holy Spirit in our hearts, can see that, even in the light of those elements of His lifework which we have already enumerated, it is morally fitting and seemly that His life should be crowned by death. He has come to reveal the Father and to reveal righteousness before the whole world. He

1 Stanton, p. 153; Drummond, Jewish Messiah, p. 390. Baldensperger denies this (Selbstbewusstsein Jesu). See Essay II. infra.

has come to be perfected in faith and in self-sacrifice, that all men may believe with His faith, and deny themselves with His self-denial. How can the Father's love be revealed so well as in the extremest gift? How can righteousness be fully known unless it is tested with the sorest tests? If it is a struggle in us, must we not see it costing our Deliverer a struggle? 1 How can the perfecting of the world's redemption exempt the Redeemer from the last agony of death?

But death, violent death, is only possible for the Christ through the sin of man. Let us turn therefore to study the life of Christ as it is determined in relation to sin.

B. Hitherto sin has been in some sort the negative presupposition of our study of Christ's life. We have seen Christ making good man's deficiencies of ignorance and weakness. These we cannot doubt are in large measure the effect of sin; though it may be impossible to say how a sinless humanity would have been led into that living knowledge of God which alone constitutes salvation. But now we have to remind ourselves that sin is no mere defect. It is a virulent cancer. It brings with it guilt, which destroys the soul's inner peace, and frightens it away from God. It mars and distorts that growth of character which is the chief end of human life and of the history of the race. Christ, in the strength of His moral purity, evoked the enmity of sin, met in conflict the sin of the world, and conquered it.

The first feature we note in Christ's relation to sin is His personal sinlessness. At the very core of His humble, gracious heart, when we look to find the customary confession of unworthiness and moral defeat, we look, and we seem to be looking into a blank space; but it is really full of the soft radiance of heaven's pure light and of heaven's holy peace. No doubt sinlessness is an inadequate term2 by which to describe the

1 This point is well put in St. Paul and Protestantism,—the most Christian of Arnold's writings.

2 * Stalker, Life of Jesus Christ, § 114.

character of Jesus Christ. But for all that it is a very significant term. It is the term by which the sinful man naturally expresses his sense of the Master's peculiar glory. Others there were, before Christ, who were in great measure heroes— men of faith, patience, virtue; others there have been, since Christ, with much of Christ's own spirit of trust in the Father, and of self-spending for the Father's sake and for the brethren's but of sinless natures there has not been one, and the best of Christ's followers have been the most keenly aware of sin. Doubtless the sinlessness was only possible because goodness in Christ was no pale, negative quality, but an aggressive energy of love and holiness. But Christ communicates this aggressive energy before He communicates sinlessness. Men are to recognise Christians by the spirit of love that is in them; but only God's eye can see in His struggling children in this world the promise of sinlessness.

Nor can the significance of Christ's 'knowing no sin' be evaded or attenuated by any fair arguments. There are sometimes good men-e.g. pious Unitarians-who are little aware of sin and do not attend to it,-men of a sweet and enthusiastic but rather shrill and thin moral nature. Christ was no such maimed character. He came in a race which had been studying sin for centuries. No shortsighted idealist could have given Christ's terrible description of the things which come from within, out of the heart.' Yet the author of that description was the Man who never once joined in confessing personal sin. And the author of that list, knowing what was in man,' loved men!

The second point which we note in Christ's relation to sin is, that He appeared upon the earth forgiving sin. Hebrew prophecy, in a distinct branch from either of the Messianic doctrines which we noted above, had spoken of forgiveness in an emphatic sense, as being one of the blessings of the coming golden age (Jer. xxxi. 34). And Jesus acted the Messiah by once and again (Matt. ix. 2; Luke vii. 48) intimating to a penitent soul the forgiveness of sin. Can we grasp the significance of