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night to startle us with factitious splendor. The process of spiritually illumining the world is like the gradual brightening of dawn into the full flood of day.

We grant that at first this could not seem so. The Jews of Jesus' time had lapsed far from the pure teachings of their prophets. Those gracious appeals which he made to their own religious consciousness came with new and unwonted authority to souls that had known only a worship of the letter, a service of dead works. To their ears, his heavenly beatitudes sounded strangely new; but we may now trace therein many a strain of ancient melody from Hebrew psalm and prophecy. How full, too, of gentleness and grace his tender invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor"! Yet he himself declared that he was but fulfilling a scripture once spoken by another prophet, whom the Spirit of the Lord had anointed "to preach the gospel to the poor," and "heal the brokenhearted."

Jesus is, then, first and pre-eminently, a prophet. The school in which he was educated was the prophetic scripture he loved so well, and the undying traditions of ancient truth. This is far from denying originality to Jesus. He were no true prophet, had he not drunk deeply at the fountain-head of all prophetism. "That which is new in Jesus," says Keim, "is the genial synthesis of the loftiest Old-Testament ideas, without alloy of grosser elements." It is in the growth and development of his prophetic consciousness that we trace the increase of Christ. A Hebrew of the Hebrews in a higher sense than Paul, he is yet so genuine a prophet, that he receives the Spirit without measure, breaks away from all barriers of nationality, and becomes the moral regenerator and Saviour of mankind, founder of a Christian civilization, type and ideal of our perfect humanity.

But we have said, that not only Hebrew prophetism, but also Hebrew Messianism, produced its richest fruit in the life and teachings of Jesus; and we have next to consider the question of his Messianic consciousness. We are not blind to the difficulties which here lie in the way; nor would we presume to be too confident where so many scholars whom we

respect have chosen to suspend their judgment. Yet the inquiry is wholly legitimate, and indeed there seems to be at the present time no question relating to the human development of Jesus more interesting or important.

We first meet with a distinctly formed Messianic doctrine in the Book of Daniel; but we shall fail to apprehend the great underlying truth of this doctrine, until we have traced its roots far back into Hebrew prophetism itself. "It is the peculiarity and glory of the Hebrew faith," says Mr. Martineau, “that in its view all history fell into the form of a moral problem on the highest scale, and appeared not simply as the play of human passions, but as the stately march of a Divine thought." In the doctrine of divine retribution, which lay at the foundation of all the prophetic teachings, the future is held up as sure to bring redress for present evil, and usher in the better kingdom. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the earlier prophets announcing those general warnings and promises which, in their double character of historians and seers, they could hardly have failed to deliver. The prophets of the Exile painted the future in still brighter colors against the dark background of present humiliation and sorrow; and, in the prophets who came after the Captivity, we trace still further changes in the form which this hope of the future assumed.

It is obviously impossible, within our present limits, to give any thing like a history of Hebrew Messianism. The labors of modern scholars and critics have laid bare the process of its growth, "from misconstrued and overstrained passages of Jeremiah and Isaiah, through the successive stages of its development in Daniel, in the Sibyl, and in the progressive sections of the Book of Enoch; its absorption of fresh mythological and legendary matter, and its shifting form and boundaries to suit the relentless progress of history and the wearisome delay of the end." For our present purpose it is sufficient to establish the fact of a completely formed Messianism before the time of Jesus, and to show that, humanly

*National Review for 1864, p. 554.

speaking, such a belief could not fail to influence a religious teacher like Jesus whose prophetic consciousness was founded, as we have seen, on the venerable sanctities of Judaism.

But, to understand the real influence of this Hebrew Messianism upon the mind of Jesus, we must dismiss at once that narrow view which sees no other Messianic doctrine but that which was held by the Jews of Jesus' time. That Sundayschool lesson which teaches that the Jews were looking for a merely temporal deliverer, the founder of an earthly kingdom, is true enough as far as it goes; but it signifies nothing more than the fact, that the Jews at the time of Christ had lapsed from the lofty visions of their seers, as they had fallen away from the sublime moral teachings of their prophets. We shall search history in vain for the records of another nation which presents so wide a gulf between the highest utterances and aspirations of its leading minds, and the lives and opinions of the great mass of the people. On the one side, a pure monotheism; on the other, a continual sinking into idolatrous notions and practices. On the side of the teachers, the doctrine of the true inward fellowship of God and man; on the side of the people, a practical devotion to ceremonial observances and priestly requirements. Here mercy proclaimed; there sacrifices offered. Here the hope of a theocracy, which should bring heaven to earth; there only the vulgar belief in a sudden advent of worldly splendor and power. It is therefore one thing to affirm, that the clear insight of Jesus quickly passed beyond the gross expectations of his contemporaries, and saw a heavenly vision where their dull eyes could only perceive the earthly; and quite another thing to maintain that, in his human development, Jesus was wholly unaffected by that form of Messianic doctrine in which the spiritual hopes of the great seers of his race were embodied. If not only the words but the essential ideas of the higher Jewish Messianism appear in the teachings of Jesus, however modified in certain directions by his own great personality, then, though prejudice oppose the inference, and we find it hard to loosen our hold on the ideal Jesus of our theology, we are forced to conclude, that

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the historical Jesus was a child of the synagogue in his Messianic, no less than in his prophetic, convictions.

Whether this antecedent probability, that the more spiritual apocalypse of the great Hebrew seers exercised a strong influence upon the mind of Jesus, is confirmed by the gospel records, is the question we have next to consider. On the threshold we meet two opposite theories concerning the Messianic phraseology of the Gospels. The first of these theories has many defenders among modern critics, and is most ably maintained by M. Colani, who derives all the Messianic language put into the mouth of Jesus in the Gospels from the views of the evangelists themselves. So, too, Schenkel holds that the language of Jesus was misunderstood by his disciples, who transferred their own Jewish ideas to their Master; and Dr. Furness goes so far as to affirm, that a genuine Messianism on the part of Jesus "cannot be supposed consistently with the pre-eminent spirituality of his teachings and his character. It is much more likely," he adds, "that he was misunderstood by his disciples, whose minds were teeming with visions of Messianic magnificence." But to this theory, plausible as it seems, there are many strong objections. The Messianic phraseology is so extensively employed by Jesus, it stands in such intimate connection with many of his teachings, and is so closely interwoven with the thread of the gospel narrative, that to shift it all upon the evangelists is to impair very seriously the value of their testimony to the essential facts of the history. It is, besides, a theory which can be turned to a directly opposite use. The author of the famous "Wolfenbüttel Fragments," asserting that a worldly Messiahship was in the mind of Jesus; that for this he labored, and was finally put to death, maintains that many passages in the Gospels, which denote a moral and spiritual Messiahship, were put into the record by the evangelists. It was, he says, the disappointment of their hopes, occasioned by the death of Jesus, which led them to the conviction, that the true Messiah was

* Jésus Christ et les Croyances Messianiques de son Temps. Par T. COLANI. Deuxième édition, revue et augmentée. Strasbourg et Paris.

a moral deliverer; and so they put into the mouth of the Master the expressions of that higher spiritual hope which came from their own experience. We do not deny, that the evangelists may have specialized, and made more definite, many of the sayings of Jesus; but we have no proof that they introduced into the gospel records either the spiritual or the Messianic conceptions which we find there.

The other method which is adopted to account for the Messianic language of Jesus, is by means of the theory of accommodation; a theory very ably defended by Mr. Norton, and received, we suppose, by the majority of liberal Christians to-day. This theory starts from the admitted fact of the eager expectation, in the minds of the Jews, of a worldly Messiah; and, affirming the purely spiritual Messiahship of Jesus, represents his use of the Messianic phraseology as merely an accommodation to the views of those who heard him. Jesus transformed the idea of the Messiahship, but retained its language; and, having spiritualized the conception of the Messianic kingdom, adapted himself, in his discourses and conversations, to the purely materialistic notions of his countrymen. It will readily be granted, that Jesus was obliged to employ existing phraseology as the vehicle of the truths he taught. To a certain extent, therefore, he may be said to have spoken in accommodation to existing opinions. But it is in its general application to all the details of a complete system of Messianic doctrine, such as we find in the Gospels, that the theory of accommodation fails to satisfy the earnest inquirer. We say that Jesus held the common belief of his time in respect to demoniacal possession; not because he spoke of diseased men as demoniacs, as we now call insane men lunatics, but because we cannot reconcile with any other view of the case his language and conduct in many recorded instances of healing, described in the Gospels as the casting out of devils. In like manner, we believe it is contrary to all the laws of human character, that Jesus should have used so extensively the expressions which belong to a fixed scheme of Messianic doctrine, without holding in some degree the doctrine itself. Is it said, that Jesus, in employing this Messianic

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