failed. Not only His plans were transformed; His very aim perished, in its outward form-died, and rose again, reshaped by God's will. Even when God has given a man his aim, man must surrender it back to God if God so choose. His thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways are not our ways. If God fulfils Himself, then ultimately God will fulfil, in its deepest sense, the aim, the hope, the longing of every child of His. But meantime we must learn to pray, 'Not my will, but Thine be done.' This is part of man's lot; it is part of man's salvation; and Christ had become a man.

With such an aim before Him as the conversion of His people, Christ naturally did not begin His ministry by predicting His own death. Doubtless-if we are to speculate on what might have happened-though Christ had found a welcome in Israel, He might have been rejected and slain by Gentile unbelief. But it would seem scarcely natural that Christ should look past His present efforts in Israel-past His present hopes to that remote and contingent event. The Fourth Gospel stands alone in making the Baptist hail Christ as the sin-removing Lamb of God, and in making Christ speak, at an early stage in His ministry, of His destined 'lifting up' (John i. 29, 36, iii. 14). On such points we cannot well accept the unsupported testimony of John's Gospel; for, though we believe it rests in the main on true recollections, different periods of time are apt to be mingled together in its highly idealising treatment of the discourses which it contains. Subsequently, we know that the Baptist's faith wavered (Matt. xi. 2, 3= Luke vii. 19); that is intelligible enough if he recognised Jesus as Messianic Judge-less intelligible if, like a Christian after Pentecost, he recognised Jesus as the propitiation for the world's sin. Besides, the peculiar phrase, which is attributed to the Baptist in John i. 29, belongs to the vocabulary of the evangelist himself (1 John iii. 5). It is possible that a historical reminiscence may lie at the basis of his record of the Baptist's words; but it is improbable that any mind except that of Jesus Christ conceived the thought of the Atonement before the fact

of the Atonement was complete. The other phrase, attributed by St. John to our Lord Himself during His early Judæan ministry—a reference to His 'lifting up'-is in itself vaguer, and may have been used without implying death on the cross; though probably the evangelist, when he incorporated it in his record, understood it in the most pregnant sense (cf. viii. 28, xii. 32). There are traces of Synoptic phraseology in the conversation with Nicodemus, which go to vindicate its general correctness (vv. 3, 5, 13, 14).

We may hold, then, that Christ did not come before the Jewish world as one destined to death. And some will go further. Some will hold that His ministry is not psychologically intelligible if He knew it to be foredoomed to failure. He might, as we have already said, have looked for death elsewhere, if not at the hands of Israel. He might have done so; but, in the Gospels, the death of Christ is intimately bound up with Israel's sin in rejecting Him.

After a considerable time, when the signs of enmity were thickening around Him, Christ began to teach His disciples about His approaching death. He inferred it, or at least He proved it to them, by the fate of the Baptist (Matt. xvii. 12), by the signs of the times (Matt. xvi. 3?), and by the witness of Old Testament Scripture. It does not follow that, because prophecy and psalms tell us much of the suffering servant of God, or because ritual typology confirms their message, therefore their message had been plain even to Christ Himself from His youth. His contemporaries evaded the force of such a passage as Isa. liii., even when their exegesis compelled them to refer it to the Messiah; and it is quite in the analogy of Providence if Christ Himself, who learned obedience by the things which He suffered,' learned to read the Bible by what He Himself endured. But from the first Christ announces His death as exemplifying a law of His kingdom (Matt. xvi. 25), and as appointed by the Father's will (ib. v. 23) for the salvation of many. This truth rings out more and more clearly, down to the last. There is grief and anguish in

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it at times; strong crying and tears'; but there is no faltering.

This truth, of the necessity of His death, is the second great point in Christ's teaching. Previously He had announced to Israel that Judgment and the Kingdom of God were drawing nigh-He the judge, and the head of God's kingdom. Now that room has to be made for the announcement of His death, the whole Gospel message has to be recast. We distinguish four great doctrines which are now made prominent.

(1) First of all: the Atoning Death is to be followed by resurrection. This is Christ's way of satisfying the general expectation that Messiah would be-somehow-connected with resurrection, and with the gift of immortality. Or rather, this is God's way of fulfilling His promises in the peculiar circumstances of Divine suffering and human unbelief, under which Christ's work was accomplished-in the Divinely permitted and providentially ordered circumstances under which Christ's work was accomplished. Such a doctrine as this-the resurrection of Messiah, and His resurrection after a shameful death on behalf of sinners-was a novelty. It failed to penetrate the minds of Christ's disciples till after the resurrection. Possibly, as the left wing of critics urge, the Gospels make His predictions more explicit and detailed than they really were. But their general drift is natural enough-Christ told His friends what was to happen, but they could not take it in. We shall endeavour by and by to dispose of the theory (Weiffenbach) that Christ's prediction of resurrection was the same thing as His prediction of His Second Advent.

(2) The second effect of Christ's rejection was the ruin of Jerusalem and of the Jewish state. Their attitude towards Christ necessarily determined their destiny (Matt. xxii. 8= Luke xiv. 24; Matt. xxi. 41 and pars). For His position was qualitatively greater than that of all His forerunners (ib. v. 37 pars). Hence His rejection was a sin above all other acts of sin, and should be visited upon the very generation which had been guilty of it (Matt. xxiii. 36=Luke xi. 51).

And history confirms this prediction. The degraded type of Messianic expectations, to which the Jewish people turned when they rejected Jesus, hurried on their fate.

(3) The third effect which Christ prophesied would result from His death was the transition of His gospel from the Jews to the Gentiles. This is intimately bound up with the previous point. When the mission of Christ took on an aspect of mere judgment towards Israel, its more proper and more gracious aspects must necessarily be turned towards others, or perish altogether. Could they perish? Could the apocalyptic Christ, the judge, utterly supersede the human Christ, our brother and Saviour? The prophets had foretold that the Gentiles should share Israel's blessing; was Israel's unbelief to disinherit the Gentiles? Christ Himself had turned away from the judge's office to assume the office first of a prophet, then of a priest; even in His death He 'shed His blood for many unto remission of sins,' and 'gave His life a ransom for many.' How, or where, was His work to take effect? No doubt, it was a revolutionary thought for any servant of God within Israel that the gospel should pass to Gentiles. But Christ's mission was without a parallel; and the sin of his rejection was an event without parallel.

Even in His earlier teaching, much occurs which prepares us for this last decree.

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(a) Comparatively early in His ministry (Matt. viii. 5 sq. Luke vii. 2 sq.), our Lord had been very forcibly struck by the faith of a Gentile centurion. Requested to heal the man's servant, Christ was on His way to visit the patient, in order to work a cure, when He was arrested by a remonstrance from the Gentile. It was too great an honour, he said, that the Master should come under his roof. And was it necessary? He himself, as a soldier, knew what it was to obey, what it was to command: would it not be enough, without visiting the patient, if the Master commanded the mysterious powers subject to Him that the patient must be cured? As I read the story, Jesus was equally surprised and pleased by this bold

suggestion. It is no doubt possible that the Roman may have had unwarranted superstitious fancies as to the agencies through whom Christ wrought His cures. But at heart the man's belief was right. He had faith in Christ-greater faith than Christ had found in any of His countrymen by blood. May we conjecture that Christ had never thought of working a cure from a distance? Normally, it would be more characteristic of His loving nature, moved with compassion, to visit the sick, to speak with them, to touch them. But exceptional faith is sure of an exceptional response from Christ. Having the warrant of such marvellous faith in the sick man's master, Christ spoke the word, and the man was instantly cured, without even seeing his benefactor. Subsequently, cures at a distance figure repeatedly in Christ's biography. Christ associated with this cure the promise, that many such Gentiles should enter into the kingdom of God (Luke xiii. 29 transfers this promise elsewhere). If we may believe the First Gospel, Christ already formulated the threat that unbelieving Israel should be expelled from that kingdom (Matt. viii. 12).

Now this is an instance of miracle with which sceptical criticism, I think, will be at a loss to deal. Of course it is possible to exclaim at the fantastic reverence attributed to the centurion. But, in that age, there were not many enlightened sceptics; men's errors were in a different direction; and the officer's message must be judged as a devout heathen's attempt to conceive the astonishing new spiritual forces which were breaking in upon his life. They affect him, I think, naturally : his message is in character. And Jesus' surprise and pleasure are also in character. What then? Did 'moral therapeutics' work at a distance? That is out of the question. Is miracle a reality, then? Or,-what?

This at any rate is a reality, that Jesus Christ, the wisest and best of men, who professed to be sent from God, believed that part of His commission was to work miracles, and joyfully welcomed devout confidence in these powers as a beginning of faith in God.