vious interpretation of the narrative, the early portion of Jesus' ministry is best described as the natural activity of a teacher who was filled without measure with the spirit of Hebrew prophetism, and whose immediate purpose was the genuinely prophetic one of communicating to the world the clear insights of his own pure soul.

"

We enter next upon the period which may be called the period of opposition and conflict. Of Jesus as he appears in this part of his career, Renan has boldly asserted, that he was no longer free;" that "the fatal law which condemns the idea to sink so soon as it seeks to convert men, began to apply to him, and contact with men reduced him to their level." Such extravagant assertions as these are supported by scarcely a shadow of proof from the gospel records. As a true prophet and leader of the people, Jesus had been in continual contact with men; and, so far from having fallen to the level of others, he had raised his disciples towards his own plane of spiritual elevation. But it was inevitable, that, sooner or later, his Messianic consciousness should exert an influence upon his life and teachings. The very aim of that higher Hebrew Messianism, with whose spirit he was so deeply imbued, was "to reconcile the Hebrew idea of the world with the disappointing phenomena which seemed to contradict it." The eternal justice was made clear by drawing on the future. How natural, then, that Jesus, as the conflict with his countrymen deepened, as the opposition of the higher classes increased, as the unrepentant and unpromising character of the cities where he had worked so mightily became more apparent, and the hostile designs of bitter sectaries beset him on every side, should turn to that Messianic ideal so vividly portrayed in the visions of the great seers and apocalyptists of former times! As Schiller says of the Ideal,

Though in life the battle still is pending,
Here 'tis always VICTORY."

It is impossible to understand why a prophet like Jesus, who came to bear the simple messages of God's truth and do

the Father's will, should have taken the Messianic name and entered upon the Messianic office, unless he were profoundly moved by the ideas connected with that name and office. The usual conjectures on this point, however plausible they may seem, fail, as we have already shown, to explain the intensity of the Messianic conviction of Jesus, as witnessed both by his words and deeds during this memorable period of his conflict. He wanted no bridge, as the accommodation theory supposes, to connect the worldly views of his country. men with his own more, spiritual conceptions; for, at the very beginning, he had lifted the kingdom of heaven into the domain of spirit. Nor is his language to be explained away as hyperbole, since he employed the exact words of a fully formed system of Messianic beliefs. To a people whose heart was waxed gross, and whose ears were dull of hearing, Jesus began to speak in parables of the mysteries of his coming kingdom. In his explanation of one of these parables,— that of the tares, he introduces details of Apocalyptic imagery, which belong only to an accepted and well-understood Messianic doctrine. We see no longer the "Son of man" as prophet, having no place where to lay his head, who came eating and drinking, and who broke the sabbath as the prophets of old were wont to dash idols to pieces; but there appears another Son of man, who announces his future coming on the clouds, in the glory of a Judge, and with angels to gather out of his kingdom all things which offend. If language like this, which is common to the Gospels and the later Hebrew Apocalypse, expressed merely the delusive hopes of idle dreamers, we might be justified in seeking, by all legitimate uses of conjecture and interpretation, to deliver the clear-eyed intellect of Jesus from contact with it. But Hebrew Messianism, in its purest form, was no mere vision. It was the attempt to reveal in advance the philosophy of universal history. It sought to trace the Divine idea through all the vicissitudes of human affairs. Yet it was not so much. a speculation as a conviction; an apocalypse of faith rather than a revelation of the pure reason. Its outward form was continually changing, as all doctrine changes by progressive

development; but its underlying idea, that of a Providence in history, has come down through the ages, and is imperishable.

In thus tracing the influence of Jesus' Messianic beliefs during the period of his conflict, we are not to lose sight of the fact, that he was still essentially a prophet. Many things relating to his work and teachings have their source in his prophetic consciousness, though connected in their development with his mission as Messiah. From this source were derived his clear anticipations of his sufferings and death. A dying Messiah contradicted all the expectations of the Jews; but we have seen how far the Jews of Jesus' time had fallen behind the spiritual conceptions of their prophets, and how, "without the vision," they were nearly perished. They erred in many respects concerning the Messiah of the psalmists and prophets, "not knowing the Scripture." But the clear insight of Jesus read, in the glowing language of David and Isaiah, the glory which can come only from sacrifice and acquaintance with grief; and he hardly needed the example of the earlier prophets to become certain of his own inevitable doom. The idea, then, of a dying Messiah came from Jesus' prophetic consciousness, from the underlying stratum of his profoundest convictions. Yet is this idea not irreconcilable with the Messianic hopes of the later Hebrew Apocalypse, which Jesus held. In our modern and philosophical antithesis between earth and heaven, this life and the next, we are apt to forget how near to each other, in the visions of Hebrew seers and apocalyptists, appeared the seen and the unseen worlds. "The Hebrew theology and physics," says Mr. Martineau, "hang closely together. In a kosmos, which makes the earth the base of heaven, and unites them as the lower and upper stories of the same house, the inhabitants of each level are drawn into the life of the other; the council-chamber is above, but all the realizations are below." We are wont to ascribe to Jesus the frequent use of hyperbole; but, in our anxiety lest his intellectual horizon shall appear to be bounded by human limitation, we do not hesitate to take from him that fervent imagination which char

acterized all the great seers of his race. To be to-day in Paradise; thence to come, in the lifetime of many who had seen him; and, as suddenly as the lightning comes out of the east, so suddenly to appear on the judgment-seat of the great terrestrial assize, - these are the glowing utterances of a deep heart-belief in the closeness of this world to the next.

We pass to the final period of Jesus' life, that of his sufferings and glory. Rightly to understand the significance of many of the events and discourses of this period, we must keep in view the fact, which we have so often emphasized, that Jesus' Messianic hopes were closely interwoven with his convictions as prophet. During the whole of this final scene, both his prophetic and his Messianic consciousness were intensely active. If the public entry into Jerusalem may be called an announcement of Messiahship, yet the words and works which followed are those of a true prophet. The temple is cleared of all who were profaning it, and made to ring with the strains of ancient prophecy. "Have ye not read, 'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise'?"—"Did ye never read in the Scriptures, 'The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner'?"- these are the grand restatements of ancient oracles, which, as a prophet, Jesus was ever making; and with a prophet's sternness he adds the terrible denunciation, “On whomsoever this stone shall fall, it will grind him to powder." It was words like these, rather than any attempt to found a kingdom, which led Jesus to the cross. Reinhard, in his "Plan of the Founder of Christianity," replies to the charge made in the "Wolfenbüttel Fragments," "that Jesus designed to carry out by force his purpose of establishing a worldly Messiahship," by an assertion which we cannot but regard as equally erroneous. Jesus, he affirms, wished to suffer a death which should excite great attention, and so produced a movement which gave his enemies at Jerusalem an opportunity to kill him. Colani also maintains, that Jesus took upon himself the resolution to meet his death; and Dr. Furness thinks he had resolved that his career "should terminate only under such circumstances as should give the greatest possible pub

licity and effect to truth and his labors." But God's heroes do not thus seek martyrdom. Death with them is not something they are to go to meet; but merely incidental, and bravely to be endured whenever it may come. However clearly Jesus may have foreseen his death, we can find no evidence of his having contributed in the least degree to bring it about.*

The influence of Jesus' Messianic consciousness, during this last period of his life, is seen in his discourses and con. versations, rather than in his public acts. Mingled with some of the profoundest moral truths that prophet ever taught, are found the predictions of the Messianic future. In the city which was to be the scene of his coming triumph and glory, surrounded by the enemies of all spiritual truth, descendants in moral lineage of those who had murdered the elder proph ets, the splendid ideals of the great seers of his race were to him at once a solace and an inspiration. "In holy awe, before the stupendous images of the future in the Old Testament, he spoke repeatedly of a future supernatural fulfilment of them that should come from heaven. Even while engaged in a deadly conflict with the world, he bore his opposed ideal ever new into a future full of change; and, without giving up his belief in the present existence of the kingdom, expected, from the future help of the Almighty power of the judging

The agony in Gethsemane is wholly inexplicable on the supposition, that Jesus had designedly produced a movement to bring on his death; that this bravest of the prophets was proceeding with a conscious purpose to meet his fate. The approaching horror had been vaguely forefelt, rather than absolutely foreseen, by Jesus. If the scene in the garden were that of a martyr on his way to the stake, we might say with Bushnell of this agony, this terrible intensity of sorrow, that there was "something unmanly in it; something unworthy of a really great soul." But how natural this sudden revulsion of feeling appears, when we call to mind the prophet who had borne witness to the truth, heedless of all consequences, sustained by an unfaltering trust in God, and cheered by those Messianic ideals whose fulfilment no human power could prevent nor long delay, standing now, in utter solitude and loneliness of soul, in sight of the cross, whose cruelty and tortures he had never before conceived or imagined! "Agonizing as the moment was," says Dr. Furness, "the agony was not in vain. It could not overcome-it only strengthened - his disposition to submit himself unreservedly to the Eternal Will."

VOL. LXXXIII.—NEW SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. I.

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