for the apostle that, with his immediate knowledge of it, he feels no want of the particular experiences of the earlier apostles in their attendance upon the ministry of Jesus: to have known him as "the Son of David," as born at Bethlehem, as duly registered under the law, as in conflict with scribes and Pharisees, and with tempters worse than they, is but familiarity with the detail of his incarnation,—a γιγνώσκειν κατὰ σάρκα χριστόν,—such matters of biographical concern for a person defined by the national, family, individual incidents of his earthly lot, vanish from the foreground, where behind them the glory of a heavenly essence is kindled, and draws the eye to their only meaning: one to whom it is revealed that Christ has died and lives in heaven for all, knows him κατὰ πνεῦμα, and knows him no more κατὰ σαρκα.*

Thus it was that, from the hour of his conversion, the Apostle of the Gentiles consciously stood in an immediate relation with the glorified Son of God,t his commissioned servant in the winding up of the long design of history; and, impelled forwards by the inspiration of that trust, set little store by the past, whether national or personal, which had done its work and shown that it was there chiefly in order to be humbled and transcended. Thus it was that when called to serve, not the Messiah of Israel, but God's living ideal of humanity, he cared not to "confer with flesh and blood," and learn his lesson from those who were apostles before him, but retired into Arabia, to conform his startled thought and affections to the scale of the universal gospel, and the deeper insight of the Spirit. The companions of Jesus, "the Son of David,” in his journeyings, could "add nothing unto him: "§ they had seen the mortal form; had he not seen the immortal Christ? The incarnate life belongs also to the past, like Israel's prophecy, and was all summed up in the cross and the resurrection, which established the present open com

* 2 Cor. vi. 15, 16, i.e., "in his Sarkical character," e.g., as Son of David: had it been karà rǹv σapкà, the meaning would have been "in my fleshly character," e.g., with my bodily eyes: for, with a similar arrangement of the words, the article usually appropriates the flesh to the Subject, not to the Object. 1 Cor. ix. 1.

† Gal. i. 11, 12.

Ib. i. 16, 17.

Ib. ii. 6.

munion between the saints on earth and the home in heaven.

The full significance of this variation on the doctrine of the earlier disciples will become more evident after treating the Pauline interpretation of the cross. Meanwhile, one feature which goes deep into it is already evident. The identification of Jesus with Messiah by his original followers, lifted him into an indefinite distance from them, as their king, hid for awhile among the host of heaven, but coming back on the clouds with power and great glory to gather his elect, indeed, under his beneficent sway, but to rule the nations with a rod of iron. A few "who had been with him in his temptations might be in office under him, with functions of delegated judgment; but the multitude were to be subjects under sovereignty, he on the throne, they at the footstool; the majesty to be his, the obedience theirs. Though human in his first experience, he had been invested with the supernatural prerogatives of a god. Here, an original community of nature is practically lost by a miraculous leap of exaltation, amounting to virtual apotheosis. Paul, on the other hand, instead of identifying an individual man with Messiah, identifies Messiah with the spiritual essence of ideal humanity; so that all through, he is what man is meant to be; and, to bring it to pass in spite of baffling failures, takes all the hindrances upon himself, and having made them null, returns to heaven as the spiritual Adam, made perfect through suffering, and henceforth drawing all men into his likeness by the quickening affinity of his spirit. In the Palestinian gospel he begins from a level indistinguishable from that of his disciples, limited to the same nature and the same nation, but is promoted, without change of either, to an unapproachable elevation of rank. In the Pauline, he lives at first among heavenly natures, to which the children of the earthly Adam could only distantly look up; but only to show, by change of form to theirs, that they may change to his, and to plant them consciously on the same plane of being, as one family in God. The one induces the dependence of willing obedience: the other inspires the blending enthusiasm of divine affections.

In this latter aspect of his being, Christ, whether in his

heavenly or in his earthly life, is no mere individual. He is a representative personality at the junction of two ages;-the suffering medium in whom the miseries of the one expire; the divine energy from whom flows the free and glorious life into the other. He stood for mankind, as children of Adam, below; stood in the flesh which was foreign to his original self, and died in it, that God might condemn it and have done with it, and let the spiritual essence emerge from it to its native home. He stands for mankind, as sons of God, above; to dispense among them, by the awakening affinities of faith and love, the power of the Spirit which henceforth is to make all akin and form one family in earth and heaven. Of this new family, not gathered by lineage or lying as a clan between the river and the sea, but linked to each other by the invisible sympathies of pure affection, and to God by the trust and aspiration of them all, he is the founder and head: the "Spirit of holiness" is the common element of life for them and him, as it has been eternally the perfection of the heavenly Father himself.

In this Pauline doctrine we have the second form of the Christian theory respecting the person of Messiah; separated by a vast interval from the first; and remaining, to this hour, the depository and monument of some of the deepest truths and most awakening influences of religion. Whatever the historic and logical critic may have to say of its technical form, of the adequacy of its premisses, the security of its reasoning, and its selection and application of historical analogies, it is impossible to deny the grandeur of its main conception, or the depth of insight and pure passion of aspiration with which, when once free from the tangle of its dialectics, it rushes upon its sublime conclusions. It resolutely makes over to humanity at large whatever was glorious and divine in the personality of Christ, and claims for all a participation in the spirit of his heavenly life. It vindicates the marvellous power of a free faith and trustful love to transcend the achievements of the labouring will, and to give at once atmosphere and wings to the spirit in its upward ascent. And it carries in it the principle which lies beneath all the communion of souls, that minds, wherever

placed, and however ranked, are blended into one kind by the divine element of all, living upon the same truth, owning the same righteousness, thrilled with the same affections, and folded within the same eternal love.

§ 4. As "the Word."

A. The Alexandrine Logos.

It is hardly possible to appreciate the change of intellectual climate which every reader feels on entering upon the fourth Gospel, without adverting to the contrasted position of the Israelites at home and their settlers abroad. In the religion of the two, nominally the same, the fixed and fluid elements were curiously different. The monotheism which both of them inherited was in its origin a privilege of race, an ignoring of "strange gods," and undivided loyalty to Jehovah, as the divine Guardian of their fathers and their tribes; and by slow degrees alone did the national God become, not only the greatest but the only one. Thus revealed to them as author and director of their family drama, he was traced chiefly in its vicissitudes, as for ever weaving the pattern of history, and mingling with human affairs as the field of his living will. His agency moved through Time as its scene, and worked out the idea of Man as its central object, intending to realize its aim in a society brought at last to complete righteousness. In this faith the dominant ideas are given in the One Righteous Will, evolving through the ages the type of perfected Humanity, reflecting the Divine. They are the measure of every value in the universe; the heavens and the earth, with all their contents, are but the theatre on which their denouement is wrought out; and whoever and whatever is too intractable to subserve the end will have to perish. On this mode of thought, founded in the conception of a Moral Government, the Palestinian Jew retained an unrelenting hold. He could let the cosmos burn and go out like a firework in the night,* and see "the armies of heaven" wade in blood even unto the bridles of the horses,t and "the false 2 Pet. iii. 10. + Rev. xiv. 20.

99 66

prophet and them that worshipped the image cast alive into the lake of fire,"* and all would be right, if only God were just and true to his promise. That promise was of a final kingdom of righteousness, a heavenly Jerusalem, where nothing that defileth should ever enter, and for the glory of which the doom of myriads would not pay too dear. This national vision the apostle Paul also shared and cherished, but, carrying it with him into an Hellenic city, found its limits intolerable and its sacrifices too great. He could not part off the fellow-citizens greeting him in the streets of Tarsus into the eternal light and the outer darkness: he was tempted to feel that, of the two, he would rather consort for ever with this young heathen poet than with that priggish Hebrew scribe, and would save the wrong one, if it were left to him. The working of such thoughts incessantly chafed away for him the hard lines of national election, and supplied an interpretation of the Law and Prophets of his people which universalized the hope of Israel, by transferring its conditions from the flesh to the spirit.. This expansion made him the Apostle of the Gentiles; but, except in the widening of his panorama of salvation, it left him still, in his whole cast of thought, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; with a Messiah who was indeed no stranger in heaven, yet only such an image of God as Adam ought to have been; with a Law which, though no longer binding, had never been repealed, but came to an end by using its received provisions for its own release; with an eschatology which would bring back Christ to this world for judgment at the last assize, and for union with his disciples of the living and the dead, to be for ever with them till he surrendered all to God. To the last as to the first of the apostles, the whole scenery was that of a supernatural drama, the winding up of human history, in which all the agents, whether on earth or in heaven, are distant by an infinite dependence from the One eternal and invisible Spirit whose will they subserve: although the Messianic personality, from the great part it plays in evolving the design, is lifted "above every name," and called the "Son of God."

For the Jews of the dispersion, natives of non-Semitic lands,

Rev. xix. 20.