The importance of what is here positively advanced may be seen if we again contrast our own view with the view of Christ's relation to prophecy advanced by a very careful scholar, Baldensperger. Valuable as Baldensperger's scientific work is, his Christianity is extremely negative. He seems to me, as I have already said, to err in recognising only one form of Messianic hope in Christ's time-the hope of the Judge, who was to introduce the epoch of Resurrection. And hence he seems to me to attach too much importance to the Jewish doctrine of Messiah's pre-existence. I think the Gospels show us that the pictures of the Messianic king had a warm influence on many hearts; and also that Messiah's pre-existence, so far as believed, was a sort of theological curiosity. But if we grant Baldensperger's conception of Messiahship, how does he connect Christ with it? Merely externally. Jesus in His youth was filled, we are told, with the most profound piety, which necessarily led Him, as a Jew, to long for Messiah's coming. Equally naturally, at His baptism, He conceived the thought that He was Himself called of God to be the Messiah; that, says Baldensperger, is the meaning of the recorded miracle. While He waited for the Day of Judgment and the Resurrection of the Dead, He employed Himself in moral teaching. This is the more original side of Jesus' thought; it fills the less Jewish period of His life. For a time His Messianic postulates remained in the background. But all this time there was a contradiction between His outward condition or His outward employments and His inward destiny, as He Himself conceived it. So that, when His death grew imminent, the prospect came as a relief to His overstrained, anxious mind. Now He was able to project His dignity as Messianic judge into a supernatural [and unreal] future. Now He was again at harmony with Himself; but also He was now more Jewish, less original, less Christian; fondly dwelling on eschatological images, He forgot the moralities of the Sermon on the Mount. From this time forward He freely uses the title 'Son of Man.' This has invariably a reference to His coming glory.

When our Gospels represent the title as used before Christ had foretold His death and resurrection, we must suppose that their materials (even-though less than others—those drawn from the Collection of Discourses') are in confusion.1

Surely this is pitiable folly. The pious, bewildered peasant who is here described, with his unfortunate, though innocent and unavoidable, delusion that he is a semi-supernatural Being called the Messiah, with his anxious computations, and ingenious compromises, and illusory solutions, is a very different person from the Jesus of history. To Baldensperger the whole Messianic idea is a hallucination. It induced Jesus to speak out; but, except for that, it was a pure misfortune, leading Him into false paths, from which only death could release Him. And, if Christ dramatised His death, that also to Baldensperger is hallucination.

But observe where the source of Jesus Christ's greatness is found. Confessedly it is His personal character-it is His personal religious experience which makes Christ supreme, and which induces and enables Him to give Himself out as the Messiah. Again, it is confessedly His claim of Messiahship which makes way for Christ's Gospel among the Jews, and even among the Gentiles. Was it then mere chance which brought together the unique Person and the unique office? To us the prediction is of God, and the fulfilment is of God; the meeting between the Elect Person and that measure of belief which made His work possible is also of God; and the crowning of His work by death is from God; very peculiarly it is of God. These are not a mass of accidentally related fragments; they are elements in a Divine and spiritual unity. Christ did not grope His way through circumstances, as Baldensperger maintains. No life gives one more fully the impression of harmony and homogeneity than the life of Christ. And why was this? Because Christ was indeed, before His public ministry began, in such fellowship with God as no circumstances could disturb, and because, going forward

1 Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, p. 180.

hand in hand with God, in clearest spiritual vision, He went safely, seeking not His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him, recognising God's appointment in every circumstance, so that nothing was opaque to Him, but all was transparent and irradiated with glory. If we deny that Sonship meant with Christ no more than a Messianic predicate, we do so because Christ's Messianic ministry was the flowering of a life of experience of God's Fatherhood and of the practice of Sonship during Christ's silent years in early life. If we say that Christ claimed' to be the Messiah, we do not mean that Christ sought great things for Himself, but that Messiahship was a mysterious Divine idea-not a hallucination, not a historical accident-something about which Jesus Christ may be expected to know more than we do, and in regard to which His statements are final. If, again, we agree with Baldensperger, that the ascription of Messiahship to Christ has ceased to be of supreme interest to Christians, it is not because, like Baldensperger, we held Jesus to be less than a Jewish Messiah, but because He is far greater; because when the world recognised Him as Messiah, it only passed through an initial lesson to train it for recognising Him as God and Saviour.-As a point of mere detail, it is impossible to carry through Baldensperger's rearrangement of the passages where Jesus calls Himself 'Son of Man,' so as to throw them into a late period, when the image of the coming Judge may have filled His mind. The real Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath-seeks and saves that which is lost-forgives sins on earth. According to Baldensperger, the Son of Man' and 'earth' have nothing to do with each other. But in Christ's life the phrase is not merely eschatological; it implies eschatological predicates, no doubt, but, like everything else in Christ, it is chiefly concerned with the living spiritual relations into which He conducts men.

Of all these spiritual relations, and of the facts on which they rest, the Bible witnesses to us. It is not an unerring witness. It speaks in the dialect of its time, and falls into the blunders of its age. But the Bible is a sufficient witness. For,

when one reads it with an awakened conscience, and with dawning belief that Jesus as a fact is Christ-in other words, when God gives us His Holy Spirit-we are borne past the inadequate intellectual forms of the Bible's witness to Christ, and find ourselves in touch with Christ Himself, and with God in Him. And, adequate or inadequate, no intellectual statement of Christianity is food for the soul. But, adequate or inadequate, any witness-bearing is sufficient which refers us to the Master; any sign-post answers its purpose if it guides us home. Why will men idolise the Book, or quarrel over the Book? God has left blots in the Book that we may not stop short at it, or make of it an idol, but may apprehend its true use that it testifies to us of Christ.

Another objection will be made here-Are you wiser then than the inspired writers? Yes, in some respects I think we are. We are eighteen hundred years older than they; we have seen for all that time new displays of God's wonderful works; we have the modern revelation of science, as well as the age-long revelation of nature and conscience, and the supreme revelation of Christ. If the human authors of the New Testament had been men of science, their book would no doubt have been stronger than it is, and a certain class of very real difficulties in the way of Christian faith would have been obviated. But we have seen, again and again, that God has not chosen to minimise difficulties; He prefers to overcome them. In this instance, it is God's will to bestow inspiration upon men who are spiritually and morally qualified for His service, and whose position in history fits them for bearing witness to His great deeds, and to the great principles which underlie His deeds. But it is not God's will to work prodigies in the sphere of intellect. Most evidently He did not make the Bible writers infallible, but used them, fallible as they were, errors and all, 'that the exceeding greatness of the power might be of God, and not from ourselves.' We may truthfully say that 'Divine oversight prevented any serious intrusion into the New Testament of elements which would detract from its spiritual power

and sublimity';1 but further than this we had better not go. What does it matter? The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.' Through God's indwelling, the Bible writers, though fallible, are wiser than all their critics.

VII.

6

The work of the Baptist, out of which Christ's public ministry quickly grew, put ethical content again into the feverish eschatological hopes which filled the nation, even while it stimulated these hopes. He gave knowledge of salvation unto God's people in the remission of their sins' (Luke i. 77). His message was 'Repent'; his motive was 'the Messianic Judge is near at hand' (Matt. iii. 10, 12). His symbolism of baptism shows that he revived the hope of the gift of the Holy Spirit. And, finally, he was enabled to testify that Jesus was the destined Messiah (John i. 29 sq., 32 sq.; cf. Matt. xxi. 25 pars). His subsequent message to Jesus (Matt. xi. 3 Luke vii. 19) has been absurdly interpreted as disproving this. Surely the reasons why John should vacillate are plain to the dullest eye. Surely that message itself implies a hesitating belief in Jesus' Messiahship; it betrays no fixed impression that Jesus is anything else than Messiah, although it suggests that He may possibly be only a second prophetic forerunner-and that is obviously a new thought to the anxious questioner. The truth is, gentlemen who are not much troubled themselves with religious belief-and therefore not much troubled with religious doubt-must see faith removing mountains, or they will insist that it is not faith at all. The message really proves to us just these two things, first, that the Baptist's conception of the Messiah's work was different from Christ's, and, secondly, that the Baptist was human.

The chief peculiarity in the Baptist's work was the rite which he administered. Jeremiah (xxxi. 31) had prophesied that, under the new covenant, all should know the Lord;

1 Stanton, p. 349.