phraseology, sought gradually and indirectly to do away with the prevalent Jewish conceptions, and fill out the language with his own higher truth? We shall look in vain in the Gospels for any such gradual metamorphosis of a purely earthly into a purely spiritual Messianism. On the contrary, in the Sermon on the Mount, and in other of the highest utterances of Jesus, we find a direct and immediate use of certain Messianic phrases-for example, the "kingdom of heaven"in their exclusively spiritual sense. Here is no dallying with customary phraseology. At a single stroke, Jesus blots out the national Jehovah of the Jews, and writes the Father of spirits. For the glory of the earthly kingdom, he substitutes the peace and goodwill of a kingdom of heaven. As suddenly as he drove out the money-changers from the visible temple, so suddenly did he banish from the heavenly communion all aspirants for worldly honor, and filled the seats at Messiah's table with the meek and pure-hearted. But in other, and generally later, discourses and conversations, where the picture before us no longer represents the ideal kingdom, but portrays the plan of its coming, we trace, not merely the coloring, but the actual features, of the higher Hebrew Messianism. We attribute, therefore, to Jesus himself most of the Messianic expressions found in the Gospels; and, denying that he was thereby accommodating his words to the gross conceptions of those whom he addressed, we affirm that he inherited and taught the highest Messianic beliefs of the Hebrew apocalyptists, as he inherited and taught the loftiest truths of the Hebrew prophets.

This united prophetic and Messianic mission is distinctly announced in the favorite expression by which Jesus so often called himself, the Son of Man. Dr. Palfrey, in his work on Judaism and Christianity, maintains that Jesus chose this title as a politic expression, since it had both an exoteric and an esoteric sense. Those who believed him to be the Messiah "would understand him as giving an intimation to that effect as often as he called himself the Son of man;" the negligent and unbelieving would attach no peculiar force to such an expression; "to the seditiously disposed, so indefinite a

phrase would not sound as a fit watchword of rebellion; while his adversaries "would have no pretence for founding upon it a charge against him"! Truly, accommodation can go no farther, when the noble enthusiasm of Jesus is thus degraded into the shrewd and cautious policy of a modern demagogue. Better by far, because nearer the reality, the view of Jesus, given by Dr. Furness in his charming descriptions, which represent him as unconscious of any purpose, speaking with artless simplicity the truths that filled his soul, just as, from its own light heart, the wood-bird sings his carol of joy. But how much truer to the facts of the history, to say that a mind like that of Jesus, thoroughly imbued with the thoughts of psalmist and prophet, no less than with the ideas of the Hebrew Apocalypse, was naturally led to employ a title which is found not infrequently in both these classes of writings. In the same spirit in which David had declared that Jehovah had made the son of man but little lower than God, Jesus could express, by this title, his profound humility, and his joyous assurance that he was in the very bosom of the Father. As "son of man," Ezekiel had received his prophet's commission from the Lord; and, in like manner, Jesus, though conscious of bearing a diviner message, might well call himself the Son of man, feeling so tenderly the human ties which bound him to his fellows, and being in very truth only a poor mortal, who "had not where to lay his head." As a true prophet, also, could Jesus say of himself, "The Son of man came eating and drinking;" for while John the Baptist came "neither eating nor drinking," and some of the elder prophets seem to have observed a strict mode of living, the prophets, as a class, were neither ascetics nor fanatics. But the title, "Son of man," had more than a merely prophetic import. In the vision of the author of the Book of Daniel, the restorer of the kingdom appears as "one like the son of man." This expression probably denotes in Daniel, not an individual, but the collective saints of the Most High, - the Hebrew people in their righteous sway. But Jesus, using the common exegesis of his age, which we see so abundantly illustrated in the New Testament,

would very naturally connect this phrase with his own mission as the true Messiah. In the discourse to the disciples on the Mount of Olives (Matt. xxiv. 3, seq.), he refers expressly to the "abomination of desolation," spoken of in Daniel, as one of the signs of his own coming as the Son of man. In the section of the Book of Enoch, which gives the most highly developed form of the Messianic doctrine, the term "Son of man" is the one most frequently applied to the Messiah. Here the vagueness of the vision in Daniel disappears, and the human figure stands for an individual person. He is the "Son of man, who has righteousness, ... who reveals all the treasures of that which is hid. He will be a staff to the righteous and holy,.... the light of the peoples, and the hope of those who are troubled in heart." We maintain, then, that Jesus called himself Son of man, from no motives of policy, but simply because this title most naturally expressed both his prophetic and his Messianic character. He was the Son of man, as being the truest of the prophets, and as realizing the purest Messianic visions of the later Apocalypse.

Our somewhat extended but necessarily imperfect survey of the human development of Jesus, leads to the conclusion, that, since in him was effected the consummation of Hebrew prophetism and Hebrew Messianism, the plan of his public ministry was simply to teach and to do all those things which he conceived to belong to his double mission as prophet and Messiah. We are not, however, to find in this double mission any thing analogous to the work of the God-man of the old. theology, acting and speaking at one time in a divine, and at another in a human, capacity. Jesus was the Messiah, because he felt that he was the greatest of the prophets;

See sections 46 and 48 of the Book of Enoch. Hilgenfeld has argued very ably in favor of the post-Christian date of that portion of the Book of Enoch from which we have quoted. Some of the arguments on the other side are given by Mr. Martineau in his articles on "Messianism," in the "National Review" for 1864. Even if Hilgenfeld's view of the Book of Enoch be correct, the fact of the pre-Christian use of the phrase "Son of man," is put beyond controversy by the passage we have cited from Daniel.

*

and he was the greatest of the prophets, because he believed that he, and not one who had been or who was to come, most fully comprehended, and most truly realized, the loftiest Messianic hopes of his race. We cannot, therefore, distinguish Jesus' Messianic from his prophetic consciousness, as Baur has done; for the two were indissolubly united, and, strengthening each the other, became the source of his incomparable greatness. Still less can it be maintained, we think, that "the mind of Jesus was divided between God's thought revealed to him by the Spirit, and a thought of his own suggested in his outward life." If ever a thought of his personal advancement flashed upon the mind of Jesus, it faded as quickly away. It was his meat and drink-not an occasional refreshment or a final repast-to do the Father's will. No suggestions from his outward life determined either his prophetic purpose or his Messianic hope. His character was developed essentially from within, outwardly, and not by any process the reverse of this. He was indeed educated, as we have seen, in the loftiest ideas and most spiritual conceptions of Hebrew prophetism and Messianism; but it was a true education, in which the quicker intuition and profounder insight of the pupil left every master and every text-book behind. To assert, with Renan, that the desert revealed to Jesus a God severe and terrible, while only the green hills and clear springs of Galilee showed him the heavenly Father; or to affirm that Jesus, following the suggestions of his outward life, "pursued the thought and purpose of his own mind," till, at the very close of his activity, he "encountered in full career the will of God, and was forced . . . to surrender the first aim and chief hope of his life," is to contradict, however unconsciously, the plainest facts of his history, and the clearest deliverances of any but a purely materialistic philosophy. What "results of modern criticism" lend support to such a view we can hardly imagine, when even Strauss declares, that, "in the case of a personality of such immeasurable historical power, there can be no question of accommo

* See "Christian Examiner" for March, 1867, p. 135.

dation, of playing a part, or of any room in his consciousness that is not filled with the impelling idea." *

It remains for us to test the explanation we have given of Jesus' plan by a brief survey of the principal events of his life.

It was not, we believe, the Messianic hopes of Jesus, however naturally he had come by them, and however strong their influence upon his mind at a later period, that sent him forth from the seclusion of his private life to preach “the acceptable year of the Lord." He came forward, as the Baptist had come before him, and as God's prophets have always come, to protest, to warn, to denounce; to awaken man's better nature, and declare anew the eternal obligations of natural morality. Hase has well described his appearance, during the first period of his ministry, as "thoroughly national, and not essentially different from the position of a travelling country rabbi." It was during this time also that he perfected the national idea of the prophet's office, by showing in his own activity its truly human character. Nothing belonging to humanity was indifferent to him. He was the Son of man, not now as Messianic judge, but as sympathizing with all human joys and sorrows; present at weddings and feasts, and eating at the table of publicans and sinners. So also as true prophet, rather than as founder of a Messianic kingdom, did he oppose the formalism of the Jewish ritual law, breaking the sabbath with a prophet's zeal, that he might thereby express the vital antagonism between his own free soul and all arbitrary rules of an external morality. We need not examine in detail the familiar records of this first period of Jesus' public career. Its events and its teachings point to a prophet's work and a prophet's words. The sentimentalism of M. Renan may characterize it as "a perpetual holiday," "childhood in its divine spontaneity taking possession of the earth;" and the loving imagination of Furness may dwell upon the "bird-like freedom" of Jesus, and "his almost unconscious self-poise:" but, in the simplest and most ob

Das Leben Jesu für das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet, S. 229.