Son of David'. -as much as to say, A very different person from you. But it was not easy to gain an advantage over this Jesus. Whether or not He had expected the answer they gave—whether or not He had wished it-He had a Scripture quotation in reserve for this very answer. The Book of Psalms was regarded on all hands as being mainly of Davidic authorship; and tradition had explicitly assigned No. cx. to the royal singer. How then, asks Jesus, can David speak of Messiah-if He be David's son-as his Lord,' and how can he describe Messiah's royalty in terms of such supernatural greatness, as is involved in a seat at God's right hand? That, He hints, is the nature of His own kingship. He refuses to resemble David in external things, not because He is less than David, but because He is incomparably greater. His leaving the world, even though He submits to the cross, is really a coronation, an accession to the fulness of His royalty.

This quotation had a great career in the early Church. St. Peter, at Pentecost, combined it with an immortality Psalm (xvi.), which he interpreted as a direct prediction of Christ's resurrection. The Messiah, seated at God's right hand 'till the Lord make His enemies the footstool of His feet,' has not been left in Hades,' or 'given to see corruption,' but is made 'full of gladness with God's countenance,' and at His 'right hand' finds 'pleasure for evermore.' It is true our text of Acts ii. does not make St. Peter quote the last clause of Ps. xvi.; but surely that clause constitutes too valuable a link with Ps. cx. to have been overlooked by him; and in his Epistle (1 Peter iii. 22) he unquestionably refers to this prophetic Psalm in describing Christ's exaltation. Again, St. Paul takes up the quotation. From the truth, that 'He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet,' St. Paul infers that the resurrection of the dead, Christ's triumph over 'the last enemy,' will usher in the end, when He shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father' (1 Cor. xv. 24 sq.). Elsewhere (Eph. i. 20; Col. iii. 1), he refers more fully to the character of Christ's reign; and in Rom. viii. 34 adds

Yet surely that thought,

the thought, that Jesus Christ, as a priestly king, uses His position at God's right hand to make intercession for us (cf. Isa. liii. 12). Perhaps, also, his doctrine of Christ's humiliation and exaltation (Phil. ii.) is partly based on the same text. With the author to the Hebrews, the value of the Psalm as a proof-text for Christ's exaltation and glory (i. 3, viii. 1, x. 12, xii. 2) is very marked; and he again emphasises (vii. 25) the thought of Christ's intercession. Finally, we might, perhaps, connect with this text the representation in the Apocalypse (v. 1 sq.) that the slain Lamb, and He alone, is worthy to take the book of destiny out of the right hand of Him that sitteth on the throne. In other words: the Psalm, which Christ had laid hold of, was a great help to His disciples when they had to learn to think of Him in His Divine glory. But perhaps it may be objected, that Christ's use of the phrase emphasises nothing more than the fact that the Messianic King is Lord of David. so wonderful to a Jew,1 cannot be kept apart from the further description of the Messianic King, as one seated at God's right hand. And, in Jesus's reply (Matt. xxvi. 64, pars.) to the adjuration of the high priest, we find that He, as we might almost say, goes out of His way to refer to Ps. cx., 'I am the Son of God; but for a last warning-'I say unto you, Henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' The expression seems to be a zeugma: Henceforth you shall have cause to know that the Son of Man is at God's right hand; and you shall one day see Him coming in the clouds. This twofold prophecy is vouched for more or less by each of the three Synoptics. A merely apocalyptic doctrine would have been, 'Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds.' The title Son of Man in all three Gospels, and the quotation from Daniel, vouched for by Matthew and Mark, contain Christ's eschatology. He plainly gives His enemies to

1 Weber quotes a characteristic piece of rabbinical profanity regarding Abraham's jealousy of the Messiah, p. 342.

understand, that He is to be judge at the last day; but, along with this, He works in a reference to His place as 'Lord' seated at the right hand of power." Thus, when Christ went to His death, He looked forward not to a millenarian reign, but to what theologians have come to term 'mediatorial sovereignty.' Beyond that, He places the last judgment; the concluding scene in the revealed programme of the world's history. But Christ thinks it important to name, along with and before the last judgment, His reign from heaven over the history of the world.

May we also quote in this connection Christ's words to the penitent robber? It is not a future glory in this world, but an immediately impending glory in a better world, of which Christ promises him a share. To-day,' He says, ' thou shalt be with me in Paradise' (Luke xxiii. 43).

And, after His resurrection, all our authorities-Matthew, Luke, John; Mark deest-agree in telling us that Jesus renewed to the disciples the promise of the Holy Spirit. That is involved in the command to 'baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' For, since the days of John the Baptizer, baptism with water was understood as a symbol or pledge of the Messianic outpouring of the Holy Spirit. (Cf. Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xxiv. 49; John xx. 22; Acts i. 5, 8.)

Hence, even if we do not press the words which affirm that the risen Lord in person gave His disciples commandment to go to the Gentiles, He turned their thoughts, not to a future compensation in a millennial age for the troubles they should have to bear, but to the present indwelling of His Spirit-a gift which implicitly separated the Church of the New Covenant from that of the Old.

VIII.

In spite of the predictions of destruction which He had launched against unbelieving Israel, it was the will of the risen Christ that His Gospel should first be published at Jerusalem

(Luke xxiv. 47). For God's will is not a fate, but a conscious, flexible purpose. God is moral through and through; the Lord is righteous in all His ways.' Long before the parable of the potter and the clay was used by St. Paul to teach a crushing doctrine of Divine sovereignty, it had been used by the prophet Jeremiah to teach the very opposite doctrine. 'Behold, as clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them' (xviii. 6-8). The clay is still in the hand of the righteous Master and Lord of all; if, at the eleventh hour, He sees cause to change the purpose which is already half executed, He will change it-and will verify His own unchangeableness by doing so. For He is to the merciful, merciful, to the upright upright; pure to the pure, but froward to the froward.' We are not puppets, going through destined parts in a stage-play, will we, nill we. We are subjects of a righteous moral government. This is the presupposition of all grace on God's part towards men.

Nevertheless the moral destiny of Israel as a whole was not to be changed even by the message of forgiveness from the risen Saviour. Individuals were to be saved; and, since communities are composed of individuals, the work of the apostles at Jerusalem was justified by the kind of its results, if not altogether by their amount. Still, Jewish converts to the apostolic Church seem to have been mainly pilgrims from the Dispersion. Israel persisted in those sad moral traits which had drawn forth Christ's condemnation; and His sentence, though delayed, was finally executed.

The greater part of our New Testament falls into the period before the destruction of Jerusalem. In other words, it falls into a period of strained eschatological expectations: for the destruction of Jerusalem, without a personal advent, was God's final reply to the feverish prayers of the Christian Church—a

reply conditioned, no doubt, by the special circumstances of the Church and world, yet, as we may hold, one expressing the inner mind of God, as it also harmonises with the central portions of Christ's teaching. Meantime, the ethical contents of the Gospel had been hard pushed by its eschatological hopes. The two are not necessarily inconsistent. Yet there is risk in believing that the world is almost at an end, and that every true Christian is on the eve of being rapt into a state of glory --visibly triumphant over all his critics, and enemies, and oppressors. That is not a belief very suitable for such a being as man is, in such a world as the present.' We may provisionally define the New Testament literature as the record of the process by which the ethical faith of Christ's Gospel maintained its ground against this particular danger, and gradually worked its way back towards the mind of Christ.

We may group the New Testament writings into classes by their attitude towards what we call broadly the doctrine of Antichrist. In our Lord's own teaching, we may say that impenitent Israel was the antichristian force. But in apostolic times the doctrine of Antichrist is one form-not the only form of conceiving Christianity as a drama rather than as a redemption-of conceiving its victory as one gained at the expense of human enemies, rather than as a victory which includes the salvation of its enemies.

The first group of New Testament writings-Peter (early speeches of Acts, 1 Peter), James, and Hebrews—are JewishChristian writings dominated by the hope of Israel's conversion, or, at any rate, confining their outlook to Israel. Here there is no Antichrist. Unbelieving Israel is struck out of the prophetic picture of the future, and nothing has taken its place. But the Lord's return-whether in judgment only to the outlying world, or in mercy as well as in judgment—is looked for with strained expectation and earnest hope.

6

Our second group of writings is the main body of the Pauline epistles Thessalonians, the principal epistles' (chiefly two), and the captivity' epistles (three out of four).-Without