Yet Christ died as a conqueror, when sin had wreaked its worst upon Him. For this very end He had encountered death, to brave the worst of sin and to overcome it. For Him, as for His followers, the commandment ran, 'Be thou faithful unto death.' To Himself He may have said, as well as to the disciples, ‘Be not afraid of them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.'-To ordinary human feeling, death is the end of all hope; to Christ it was only the end of suffering, the beginning of a truer life.—Christ had been faithful; He had confessed His Messiahship; He had borne witness to the truth; in suffering—all that was left Him -He accepted the Father's will. Hence the apostle leads us to say that He died to sin,' a phrase which we may perhaps break up into these two-He died rather than sin, and by death He escaped out of the power of sin. But Christ, in His escape, made a way by which others may escape. Through faith in Him we likewise are dead to sin; we likewise are set free from its power.

For Christ's work was followed by resurrection; and the Bible does not encourage us to separate any part of the meaning of Christ's work from this fact. The resurrection is the only fitting end for the history of the Saviour. But it has other reasons which commend it to us. We cannot value it rightly apart from the Old Testament record of the Hebrew yearning after immortality—its toilsome search, its fluttering hopes, its frequent deep dejection. The resurrection had indeed become a dogmatic trait in the picture of the Messianic age; but such a resurrection, so conceived, was very far from being a real spiritual power, satisfying and saving the hearts of men. 'I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day'; how dull a dogma! Now Christ, who had transformed and glorified the idea of His own work as Messiah, was in God's providence to transform the hopes which devout people had formed of the Messianic salvation. Resurrection was to come-although, as yet, only in Christ the first-fruits.' But He must rise; or else hope must die.

This we may allow to sceptical criticism, that, if an illusory belief in the return of a dead man to life was to spring up in Judæa at the time of Christ, it would take the form of belief in his resurrection. This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead.' Even a life translated to heavenly glory would be spoken of as a risen life. Such was the dialect of the current theology. The Alexandrians who spoke of the naked immortality of the soul were a sect, and a heterodox sect. There was a general expectation of resurrection at the miraculous era of the Messiah. But not of the Messiah's own resurrection! any more than of the Messiah's atoning death. Thus, when Christ died, no one of His disciples-in spite of all He had said-dreamed of His really rising again. Grief and love led certain women to the sepulchre-but not hope. Yet He rose again. If we accept John's Gospel, John himself saw the empty grave. If we accept even the earlier tradition of Mark, the women saw the empty grave. If we accept the tradition of the whole Church, He showed Himself alive after His passion by many proofs.' And, if we accept the judgment of Paul, the risen Jesus appeared to him also on the Damascus road once, and once only, in a way totally different from those visions and revelations' which ran through the whole of his Christian life. At any rate, all admit that the belief in Christ's resurrection saved the Church alive. Was a false belief at the heart of the world's moral progress? Sceptics may think so; I do not understand their ways of thinking. They must claim, I presume, to have reached a superior moral elevation to that of Jesus, who achieved all that He did achieve in the strength of an intense religious faith. But how sceptics construe the history of moral growth I do not pretend to understand. Nor can I enter into the motives of Keim's view (shared by so distinguished a thinker as Hermann Lotze 1) that the resurrection was a real event in so far as the celestial Christ supernaturally produced a series of visions in men's minds—but that, meanwhile, Christ's body rotted in the 1 Microcosmus, tr. ii. p. 480.

grave, and saw corruption.' This is contrary to history.1 And what can it be but a step towards believing the visions illusory? If one critic makes every miracle a vision, the next critic makes every vision a hallucination. The anti-miraculous bias explains the visions by morbid conditions: it explains them as illusions. How will Keim's followers keep some brilliant critic from disposing of all the visions of the risen Christ as Holsten has endeavoured to do? They will fight at a terrible disadvantage. No: if we believe in Christ, it is not for us to say, 'It is impossible that His body should have risen.' We cannot roll back the stone, and seal up the hopes of mankind in sad uncertainty. He is not dead; He is risen; He has appeared to chosen witnesses; death as much as life is subject to His rule; whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord's.'

When Christ left the world, only a few hundred disciples remained as the fruit of the Divine life and passion. They seemed a dwindling remnant. Had Jesus failed? Nay: the root of the new humanity is in that little company; pardon, joy, faith, love will spread from them till the whole world shares the blessing. They thought of Christ's speedy return in visible glory to end the world; God meant that they should be the beginning of a new epoch.

But in order to study this, we must pass on to the second part of our subject.

III.

The subject of Christ's religious value might also be described under the old heading of the offices which Christ executes. If so, Christ's revelations might be referred to His prophetic office; though part of what is generally called prophetic will be with us kingly. Reconciliation might be referred to His priestly office, though it is our study of Christ's life which

1 Matthew's guard of soldiers must however be given up as a traditional embellishment. Compare Weiss's Life of Christ.

brings out the value of His work for God; and redemption in the narrower sense might be attributed to His kingly office. But Eusebius of Cæsarea has no binding authority on our consciences; and his vague metaphorical categories offer no advantages over a fresh and literal terminology. Perhaps it is more important to notice that the first three heads-that of Christ as revealer, and the two which are embraced under Christ as reconciler-describe Christian faith, while the last head, on redemption, describes Christian virtue. It may also be observed that the whole remainder of our subject might be treated as an account of the work of the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and works within the sphere of Christ's influence. In fact, Christ's influence is spiritual. And nothing will redeem the doctrine of the Holy Spirit from barrenness so well as to show that He takes of the things of Christ' and thus 'glorifies Him.' Finally, we may observe that the separate topics are not distinct compartments in one physical whole, but different aspects of a moral whole, each aspect involving more or less reference to all the others. The first head, for instance, in a manner includes the other three. God is revealed in Christ as forgiving sin, comforting us in sorrow, and redeeming the world. And again, the last head recapitulates the three which precede it. Christ's redemptive work not only makes God's will the law of man's will, but denotes the actual operation of all those saving influences which are brought to bear upon us in the Gospel. But these relations will explain themselves as we go on.

We begin with considering Christ's revelations. Man as a spiritual being, rational and moral, if approached by God in grace, must be approached with revelations. Reason in man is responsible for what influences it will permit to play upon the character and affections. A true friend will commend himself to our consciences in the sight of God.' It is a false friend and false man who uses the tricks of a mesmerist, 'creeping into houses, and leading captive silly women.' If

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goodness takes to fighting badness with such sly strategy, it deserves to fail. And it will fail. There is no element of permanence in the irrational influence which a strong willreligious or irreligious-may easily establish over weak wills. Those who build for eternity must build on the rock of truth. Therefore God Himself does so. He approaches us in the first instance with revelations, appealing to our reason, asking for our scrutiny, submitting to our judgment. No doubt the response comes from our whole nature. With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.' Nevertheless reason is God's trustee in charge of our hearts; and, though the heart may give the inclination, the head must give authorisation.

But, in a spiritual religion, revelation is not a preliminary part of the whole, but a primary aspect of the whole. What we deal with under our first head, as God's revelation in Christ, will come up again and again in a different shape under subsequent heads. Man is rational in his affections, in his conscience, in his will; although in these God-having paved the way by revelation-approaches man differently, and invites man to a different sort of co-operation with the Father through His Spirit.

In revealing God to the world, Christ did not find Himself confronted by an entirely irreligious, or by an entirely sceptical world. Neither of individual men, nor of human society as a whole, could such assertions be truly made. Early human societies are very devout in their purblind way. And for a time, as civilisation advances, there seems to be a distinct movement towards monotheism. But natural religions have no moral stamina, and cannot keep in this groove. We need not brand them as out-and-out false religions. In so far as they ever tended to make their votaries better men, they were not false but true, containing stray gleams from the Father of lights-scattered rays from Him who lighteth every man. But, on the whole, and in the immense majority of cases, they were unsuccessful religions. And when Christ came the disease of scepticism was sweeping through the Greek and Roman