ingenuity; He had not only extricated Himself, but had succeeded in putting them in the wrong. The Pharisees, in the light of Jesus' answer, had acknowledged the imperial government by using Roman coins; and the crowd would readily identify the Herodians as those who did not give God His due.

But Jesus' answer was no mere quibble; the Pharisees and Herodians were insincere, but their question raised a real difficulty, which Jesus met by providing, once for all, a solution for such problems-the secular authority might be obeyed in its merely material demands; its decrees must be ignored when they clash with the diviner dictates of the quickened conscience and the enlightened soul.

(e) The Sadducees' Question; xii. 18-27. Later on Jesus was assailed by another set of soi-disant anxious inquirers; this time the company were Sadducees-the name occurs only here in Mark; but the Sadducees were the dominant element of the Jerusalem priesthood, and the party must have been represented in the first deputation. But the officials, and the Pharisees too in their way, were men of affairs and ecclesiastics; they, therefore, did not suppose that a prophet in the flood tide of his popularity would be upset by theological conundrums; their questions turned on practical politics, and an incautious answer would have meant disaster to Jesus and to the cause of the Kingdom.

But the new problem submitted to Him was comparatively trivial; these Sadducees represented the scholarly rather than the political wing of the party; they may have taken a real interest in speculative theology. Now in matters of doctrine the Sadducees represented an older orthodoxy, which stigmatized the Pharisees as heretical innovators. Jesus, it seems, had accepted the Alexandrine and Pharisaic doctrine of the Resurrection, which the Sadducees rejected as an unsound novelty. It was on this

point that they attacked Him; they were in happy possession of an ingenious puzzle, by which they had often posed bewildered Pharisees, at any rate, in their own estimation. They now looked forward to a similar triumph over the Galilæan prophet.

"Teacher," said they," Moses wrote that if a man died childless, his brother should marry his widow, and that the dead man's family should be continued by the children of this new marriage. There were seven brothers; the first married and died childless; the second took his wife, and also died childless; so also the third, and the rest of the seven. None of them had any children by her. Last of all the woman died also. In the Resurrection whose wife shall she be ? She was married in turn to each of the seven."

There is a touch of scorn in the answer of Jesus, which is given with a fulness and freedom in marked contrast to the cautious reserve shown towards the priests and Pharisees.

"Surely you fall into error because you do not understand the Scriptures or the power of God; when the dead rise they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven. And concerning the raising of the dead, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the section of the Bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob'? He is not the God of dead men, but of living men. Your views are quite wrong."

Jesus does not hesitate to give a prompt, authoritative decision as to the conditions of the future life, but it is not clear whether the decision is given as a new obiter dictum, or as following some authority. Probably it was a new decision, otherwise it would have been known to the Sadducees. On the general question of the future life the passage cited is less explicit than the last chapter of

Daniel. Jesus did not use this book, because the canon of the Sadducees, the representatives of a stricter and more ancient orthodoxy than that of the Pharisees, did not recognise Daniel as Scripture.

W. H. BENNETT.

137

IS THE NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

OPTIMISTIC?

CHRISTIANITY," says Von Hartmann, "like every genuine religion, grew out of a pessimistic view of the universe and, rooted in this Christian religiosity, has continued to draw thence its nourishment until the Renaissance, with its pagan delight in things of the world, came into conflict with the Christian contempt for, and effort to escape from the world; when a dwindling faith in transcendent bliss made the outlook of terrestrial happiness more attractive." Then it was that the process of dissolution in Christianity began, and thence the necessity of finding a new form of religion,1 in the opinion of this writer.

It will be our aim in the present paper to show, on the contrary, that pessimism is not a distinguishing mark of Christianity, as in a former paper we discussed the subject of Hebrew pessimism by way of proving indirectly that it is not true that the Old Testament is essentially optimistic. We shall here endeavour to show that although sorrow and sadness are predominating notes in the utterances of Christ and His immediate followers, the sounds of joy and gladness are by no means wanting, that Christ's message was an Evangel, a message of joy, that the occurrence of such words as χαρά, ἀγαλλίαν, μακαρίζειν, or such expressions as" sorrowful yet always rejoicing," "joyful in tribulation," warnings against the tendency to succumb under a weight of care (μépiμva) and exhortations against despondency in the Epistles (a recent writer in the Spectator speaks of the optimism in the Epistle to the Hebrews) display a harmonious blending of sadness with gladness, of cheerfulness in suffering, and a hopeful assurance of a final victory in the conflict with the world—the thirteen parables of the

1 Die Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums und die Religion der Zukunft, p. 88.

Kingdom of God indicate the triumph of good over evil the survival of the fittest (see Mathew x. 22, and xiii. 43)-which are utterly at variance with the principles of thoroughgoing pessimism. True, in the later developments of mediaeval Christianity, and in the writings of such as Buonaventura and Thomas à Kempis, pessimistic mysticism makes its appearance. But the fathers of the first four centuries and the Reformers, like Luther, manifest optimistic tendencies. In fact, Protestantism is condemned by modern pessimists together with Rationalism for its advocacy of optimistic views of life and its alliances with the forces of material progress. This easy accommodation to the spirit of worldliness, it is said, is in complete contrast with the selfdenying asceticism and rule of self-mortification which are the true marks of primitive Christianity. Here it is forgotten that in its beginnings Christianity was une force régénératrice, reviving the drooping spirit of the ancient world, sunk into pessimistic despondency, as the works of Tacitus, M. Aurelius, Pliny, and Seneca amply testify.

As it was pessimistic scepticism which brought about the decay of the ancient civilization, so it was the vigour of the new faith in the healing power of Christ, applied to the needs of suffering humanity, which effected a moral and social regeneration. Christianity fully recognizes the existence of physical and spiritual evils, but suggests at the same time the means for their removal; it accentuates the ennobling and refining power of pain, and in its promise of a future life deprives death of its sting. It is, indeed, optimistic so far as it regards the world as the object of redemption and sees a teleological aim in the course of nature, "that far-off event to which the whole creation moves,” and a remedy of universal evil in the promise of "a new heaven and a new earth in which dwelleth righteousness." Thus every πálos becomes an eos, as Dr. Gass