THE MASTER AND THE DISCIPLES.

The fame of the things Jesus had done " at Jerusalem at the feast "¹ went before Him into Galilee, and He was welcomed for His works' sake. He avoided Nazareth the Prophet was not as yet received in His own country² and settled beside the lake of Gennesareth, near the homes of the men that formed the noblest legacy bequeathed to Him by John. There, beside the bright waters, in the shadow of the graceful palms, within sight of the cornfields and vineyards that sloped from the blue lake till they seemed to touch the blue sky, He breathed a purer air, enjoyed a happier life, looked upon wiser, because simpler, men than at Jerusalem. And these stiller and sweeter surroundings were but the conditions He needed to perform and perfect His great constructive work.

There are certain moments and scenes that profoundly touch the imagination. Abraham, his back to Chaldsea, his face to Canaan, setting out with his young and beautiful Sarah from the cradle of the great worldempires to seek a land where they could found an empire of the Spirit, become the progenitors of the people of the Book, who, while despised and hated as a nation, were yet to be, as the apostles and prophets of Jahveh, supreme legislators in religion; the first rude settlers building their huts on the hills beside the Tiber, tending their flocks, praying to their gods, spoiling their enemies, laying in the blind and unconscious way common to men doing greater things than they dream of the foundations of a city whose dominion was to be for centuries coextensive with civilization; Columbus leaving Europe, or standing on the deck of his ship watching the new world, with all its boundless hope and promise to the old, rising from below the horizon; are scenes which mark so great moments in the life of man that the imagination feels equally awed and inspired in their presence. But the return of Jesus to Galilee was a moment that far transcended these alike in seeming insignificance and real immensity of issue. He entered it apparently a fugitive from Judaea, really the conscious Creator of the new yet eternal City of God. The society He was there to create was never to die; was to spread through every land as through all time; was to bind the ages in a wonderful harmony of spirit and purpose, man in a mystic brotherhood of faith and love. If we can conceive the marvellous vision of the future as open to the prescience of the Master, His soul may well have been cheered by the joy that was set before Him; while the men that were being, all unconsciously, fashioned into the agents of His great will, must have been to His mind a present rich in the rarest meanings, the grandest promises, a sort of new infant humanity, with all its infinite possibilities open to the eye of God, but concealed from its own innocent and dependent gaze.

We have been accustomed to associate the miraculous with action in the sphere of things physical, but a physical miracle is often only a marvel to the senses. The distinctive miracles of Christ are spiritual. His living, penetrative, permanent power over man is like a standing miracle within the order known to our experience. There is nothing in history like the change Jesus wrought in the Galileans He called into His society unless, indeed, it be the similar changes He has been working ever since. Later, a proud Roman³ and a cultured Greek⁴ were to pour contempt on a religion whose Founder had been a crucified carpenter, whose earliest preachers had been wretched publicans, ignorant fishermen, itinerant tent-makers. But what they thought its shame, after and wiser ages were to think its glory. For the power to make the mean noble, the wretched happy, the ignorant more enlightened and beneficent than the wise, the wandering workman an unresting preacher of great and inspiring truths, is the divinest power that has yet been known to act within the region of the spirit. And this is the power Christ exercised while He lived, and has never since ceased to exercise. He elected men into His society, not as made, but that they might be made. The men He chose were only masses of latent capabilities, full of meaning to no eye but His, and to it the latent was more real and more precious than the. patent. His selection, superficially regarded, might seem a studied offence to the authorities of His day; fundamentally regarded, it proves His pure and prescient wisdom. The world has not been inclined to seek its " mute inglorious Miltons " among its fishermen. As a class they are simple, superstitious, unintellectual, accustomed to exercise the senses rather than the reason. Publicans, too, have not been an admired class: the men that extorted money for a hated state have always been hated as personifying its worst vices. To select men from these classes for a great religious mission, looked like selecting the worst persons possible, the most disqualified for the work, the least able to command success. Yet from these classes Christ selected men that He penetrated., permeated, possessed with His spirit, in a personal, yet real, sense Christianized. They became vehicles of His influence, carried, as implanted, the life that lived in Him as original and innate. What He communicated to them they communicated to the race. They became in Christ's society the patriarchs of a new Israel, the founders of a new faith. Association with Him was a Divine education which qualified not only for citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, but also for creating citizens, the institution of the churches that were to extend and realize the reign of God. The marvel is, not that the fishermen of Galilee conquered the world, but that Jesus of Nazareth made them its conquerors. The wonder lies in the making of the men, not in their doings. The Inspirer is more extraordinary than the inspired, especially when they were men so little susceptible of His influence that He had to create the very capacity to receive His inspiration, with the consequent ability to realize His ends.

Now, this making of the men is what is here to be studied. It was, indeed, a process that continued throughout Christ's ministry; but the creative period was the period of intimate and tender association in Galilee, when the Master lived in humble and beautiful beneficence, and the disciples grew and rejoiced in His light. It was to His and their souls a time of fine and fruitful rest, of activities that played while they worked in the glad sunshine. The discourses belonging to it show a calm and almost joyous spirit, untouched as yet by the shadow of the cross. They do not speak of the decease to be accomplished at Jerusalem, are not concerned with controversy or conflict, do not gloomily forecast troubles to come. These qualities were to mark the discourses of later and darker times. Meanwhile all was sunny in His spirit and speech. Heaven was about Him, as within; His truth and wisdom were subduing His little society unto Himself. His words seem fragrant of the vineyard, the meadow, and the grove; full of the love that turns into glory the light of common day, the spirit that changes into music its most familiar sounds. His haunts were not the great cities, but the towns and villages that stood round the lake He loved, or the hills that overlooked the plains where, with the open and beautiful sky above and the fragrant fruitful earth around, He could speak to His disciples of their Father in heaven, of His care for all that lived and breathed, of the truths the soul could hear spoken by the lovely and modest lily, or sung by the soaring and singing bird. This quiet and beautiful time, when the Master lived with and for His disciples, was the time when He instituted His society by creating its creative citizens, the men that were to stand round the King.

The method of Christ was twofold: His great formative agencies were speech and fellowship. His words created a new world within and around His disciples, filled their minds with new thought, aims, ideals, hopes. We know how His speech has embodied and embalmed His truth, made God a new Being to man, made man a new being to God and to himself; but we can ill imagine the influence exercised by His living speech, by His words as interpreted by voice and eye, by the invisible soul that yet looked visibly out from every feature and sense. To hear His daily speech was not simply to receive His thoughts, but to share, as it were, the inmost life of His Spirit to stand within the holy of holies, and listen to the soft yet awful voice telling the highest mysteries, speaking the last secrets of the Unknown. It was to the disciples a sudden elevation, a being lifted from a twilight more delusive than darkness to the sunlit, glory-crowned Mount of God a revelation that must have dazzled the men who received it, had it not been subdued into softest yet purest light by the medium through which it streamed. His speech is, after eighteen centuries, exceeding wonderful to the world, and humanity still listens to it as one listens to a tale he cannot choose but hear, yet to the men who first heard it it was made finely intelligible by His person. To hear His speech was to enjoy His fellowship, and His fellowship created the sense that understood His speech. His words came to them explained by a living and articulate commentary; their edition was, as it were, illustrated, the illustrations being tableaux vivants composed from the acts, character, and conduct of the Speaker. The men might not understand the text, but they understood the illustrations; they might find the saying hard, but the commentary was entirely intelligible. Fellowship is the most potent of educative agencies, and its highest potency was realized in the society which knew by experience what spiritual forces were embodied in the Christ.

If, then, we are to understand Christ's method of educating His disciples or founding His society, it must be through His two great agencies His Speech and Fellowship. His mode of using the first may be best seen in His Sermon on the Mount. Matthew and Luke both recognize it as essentially a discourse to the disciples.⁵ To both Evangelists it is an inaugural sermon, but Matthew alone perceives its proper place and value, and reports it at length. In it Christ explains His conception of the kingdom, imparts His own mind to His disciples. It implied faith, but aimed at creating knowledge, and the obedience and sympathy knowledge alone can evoke. The discourse is in itself remarkable enough. It contains the most weighty, because the most weighed, words of Jesus; is His most deliberate deliverance the set speech, as it were, fruit of forethought, for which He made rather than found occasion. The parables were for the most part opportune words, drawn from Him by the suggestion or necessities of the moment, intended to rebuke, to warn, to encourage, or instruct particular men or classes. The sayings that pointed the moral of miracle or event, that expressed the joy or sorrow caused by incident or outlook; the answers called forth by disciples or seekers after truth or health, by Pharisee or Sadducee anxious to entangle Him in His talk, or by Pilate flinging out in a question that jested His heart-sick doubt were, one and all, occasional, even where most divinely significant. But here Jesus does not wait to be found by event or inquiry: He stands forward to institute His kingdom by revealing its nature and proclaiming its laws. He speaks to the men He had chosen to be its first and creative citizens, that they might know His purpose and mission, know where they themselves stood, to what they had been called, and what they ought to become and to do.

We do not regard this sermon, then, especially as it exists in Matthew, as a mere agglomeration of disconnected and isolated sayings, or a patchwork made up of fragments from various forgotten discourses.⁶ We believe that it is an unity, harmonious in all its parts, coherent throughout, progressing in the most rational order from beginning to end. We believe, too, that it has been set in its right place, that it is an inaugural sermon, delivered soon after the return to Galilee, bearing evidences of the recent visit to Jerusalem, expressly designed to make the consciousness of Christ an open secret to His disciples, His kingdom a reality to intellect and conscience. It is evidently an early discourse, expository, not apologetic save, indeed, as regards one most significant point; and so belongs to a period while opposition was still future, before contradiction had assailed His doctrine, or hatred threatened or maligned His person. The one apologetic point is where He declares He has " not come to destroy the law and the prophets."⁷ His words imply that there were suspicions or charges on this matter, but the only thing that could occasion these belongs to His Judsean, not to His Galilean, ministry His saying, " Destroy this temple."⁸ Matthew⁹ and Luke¹⁰ significantly mention, just before reporting the sermon, that "there followed Him great multitudes from Jerusalem and Judaea: " and may not their presence in Galilee be best explained as the result of His presence at the feast and the interest it had caused? Then, too, the manner in which He describes and contrasts real and unreal worship seems to indicate an imagination vividly impressed by recent scenes, too freshly touched to be altogether calm; and the scenes that could so move could be witnessed only at Jerusalem. The sermon appears, too, to be subtly and variously related to the discourse to the Samaritan woman. They differ thus: the one is a discourse on worship, the other on obedience. Their subjects are, respectively, How ought God to be worshipped? and, How ought God to be served? But these differences are due to the accidents of time and audience, and must not be allowed to conceal their essential affinity. The attitude, as we may call it, of Christ's mind is the same in both cases: in the one He enjoins spiritual worship, in the other He inculcates spiritual obedience, each in contrast to its sensuous and formal opposite. The discourse exhibits the new and perfect as opposed to the old and imperfect worship; the sermon, the new and spiritual as opposed to the old outer and ceremonial law. As is the new worship, so is the new obedience; each is, and for the same reason, "in spirit" and "in truth." In the one case, as in the other, the Divine Paternity is the determinating idea; the worship and obedience must, to be real, be agreeable to the nature and character of the Father. Then, too, Christ's sense of the Divine sufficiency is the same in both cases. In the one He speaks of the harvest as present though distant, as so contained in spring that sower and reaper can rejoice together; in the other, He speaks of the happy faith that is satisfied with to-day, that can work in the present, certain that its fruits and the future are safe in the hands of God. Spiritual worship and spiritual obedience alike proceed from a spiritual and filial conception of God: where such a conception exists there is certain to be a faith victorious over sense.

These affinities seem to indicate that the Discourse in Samaria and the Sermon on the Mount stand in point of time near each other. Similar thoughts and associations seem to be active in the mind of the Speaker, His speech differing because place and purpose are different. If our inference is right, it helps us not only to define the time of the sermon as soon after the return to Galilee, but also the better to describe its design. The disciples had been made to know His mission that He had come to establish a kingdom, that His kingdom stood in antagonism to Judaism, the only theocratic system they knew: but what His kingdom was, its essential nature and laws, they did not know. Their faith was, in a sense, blind a faith in Himself alone. Of the things He had come to do, and purposed doing, they knew nothing. But an ignorant trust was not to His mind; they must know His idea if they were ever to realize His ideal; must possess His thoughts if they were to be possessed of His Spirit and aims. The men who were to constitute His State could do so only as they understood its constitution and laws.

From this standpoint, let us attempt to interpret in, rough outline this great sermon. The Introduction (Chap. v. 3-16) presents discipleship, or rather citizenship, under two great aspects: first, as regards its rewards and privileges the Beatitudes (Verses 3-12); second, as regards its essential functions and duties (Verses 13-16). The Introduction is a glorious vestibule, altogether seemly and suitable to this new yet eternal palace of truth. The Beatitudes significantly stand first. The strength of the old law lay in its stern sanctions, but the strength of the new is to be its benedictions. Moses constrained to obedience by pronouncing the disobedient accursed, but Christ invites to loving loyalty by pronouncing the citizen of His kingdom blessed. This alone was a new thing in the world. Men were to be no more made religious by terror, but were to be won to righteousness by sweetly winsome hope and happiness. Obedience, as Jesus conceived it, could not proceed from fear; the obedience of fear was but disguised disobedience. The man that obeyed God through terror would have obeyed His opposite had he been still more terrible. But to Jesus obedience is love, a sweet and welcome necessity to a heart that knows God as its Father and itself as His child. And so religion is beatitude, love active and exercised; the kingdom which makes righteous makes blessed. And the blessedness is not uniform, all of one kind: it exists in many varieties, adapted to every degree of love, to every quality and condition of soul. The God who made men to differ creates for each man a happiness of his own, allows no loyal citizen to go empty away. The Beatitudes fall into two great classes those of resignation and those of hope, or blessings for those who learn obedience through suffering, and blessings for those whose obedience is active, though hated and persecuted, beneficence. To the first class belong the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the men who hunger and thirst after righteousness; to the second class, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted for righteousness' sake. Each has his appropriate blessing. The poor in spirit, vacant of self, waiting for God, conscious of a poverty that only the Divine indwelling can change into wealth, feeling, like the wondrous beggar of Meister Eckhart, that they " would sooner be in hell and have God, than in heaven and not have Him,"¹¹ are already citizens; " theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The mourners, who feel the evil of sin and the sanctity of sorrow, who are, like the man of the " marred visage," "acquainted with grief," but only so as to be "made perfect through suffering," are " to be comforted," their " sorrow shall be turned into joy," transformed by the soft and silent comfort of God. The meek, conscious of human littleness and Divine greatness, sweetly reasonable with man, humbly reverent and obedient towards God, are to " inherit the earth: " their patience, the muffled gentleness of Divine strength, shall yet prevail over boisterous pride. The men who hunger and thirst after righteousness, who seek the living God, conscious that they were made for Him, are to be filled, are to be satisfied with the object of their desire and search. The merciful, generous to the fallen, gentle to the weak, gracious to the offender, are to " obtain mercy," are to be twice blessed; blessed as givers and receivers of the grace that " droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath." The pure in heart are, as light-ful, able to receive more light, to enjoy that beatitude which has been the hope and passion of the devout in every age, " to see God; " because, being like Him, "they shall see Him as He is." The peacemakers, creating brotherhood, making our troubled earth the home of love, are to be " the children of God," like in spirit and in work to their Father in heaven. The persecuted for righteousness' sake are not to be vanquished by persecution, but to have the reward of the righteous theirs is to be the final good, the kingdom of heaven. So, at length, there is hope of happiness for man. It has ceased to be an outer, has been made an inner, good. The happy man is to make the happy world, not the happy world the happy man. The kingdom and its rewards are spiritual, " not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, joy, in the Holy Ghost."¹²

The second section of the Introduction is intimately related to the first. The essential functions are, in a sort, the Beatitudes in their outward aspect the men who are saintly exercising the influence inseparable from sainted men. The functions are not voluntary duties, are but the action of qualities already possessed. So the men who are " blessed" are "the salt of the earth " preserve it; are "the light of the world " guide and teach it. Conscious beatitude is necessary beneficence; to make a man good is to do good to man. Personal vice is social disintegration; the virtue of individuals is the strength of a nation. In the alleys and slums of our crowded cities cleanly families are sanitary powers, are not only witnesses for physical cleanliness, but prevent the circle they influence from falling complete victims to impurity. So in morals a good man is not simply a witness for virtue, but a means of repressing vice, of keeping alive in men a sense of duty, a consciousness of right, an ideal of the good and the true. " Ye are the salt of the earth." But the citizens of the kingdom are more than preservative, they are dynamical and directive forces. Their faith is a faith in progress, in a world governed by righteousness and love. They are never satisfied with the actual, must ever strive towards the ideal. They keep alive the knowledge of God, and all that God represents, both as to the present and future of the race, as to what is the worst evil and what the greatest good alike to the individual and the nation. " Ye are the light of the world." The sun, so long as it is a sun, cannot but shine; it is of its very essence to give light, and light is the mother of life. We are all the children of the sun. " Even so let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

The body of the discourse (Chap. v. 17-48, and Chap, vi.) is a discussion of the new law in its relations and contrasts to the old, and in its essential principles, duties, and aims. He begins by defining His relation to the old: " I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil." He is the end of the law, abolishes by fulfilling it, is at once its consummation and cessation. He is the end of prophecy; for Him it lived, to Him it pointed, in Him is fulfilled. The law and the prophets were (1) predictive, and (2) enactive and creative of righteousness, and in both senses they were fulfilled by Christ. The law was prophecy in act; prophecy was law articulated or proclaimed. Each affirmed in its own way, " God reigns in righteousness; man owes Him obedience; the Holy can only be worshipped by the good, cannot be worshipped by the evil as evil; they must approach Him by sacrifice, and sacrifice that involves renunciation of sin, the quest after clean hands and a pure heart." And what each thus declared, Christ fulfilled. He was humanity become holy, perfect before God. And in Him perfect holiness was perfect sacrifice. Every truth as to God and His righteousness, every duty, hope, and aspiration as to man embodied in the law, proclaimed by the prophets, was fulfilled by Christ. But the end of the old is the beginning of the new, the reXo? is here an apxn. Every function possessed- and discharged by law and prophecy He possesses and discharges, realizing their essential end, carrying into grandest performance their every endeavour and dream. The righteousness they attempt to enact and create He causes to exist. He succeeds where they failed. The righteous man is dutiful towards men and reverent towards God; righteousness is but right action as regards man and right worship as regards God. Legal righteousness, which ought to be distinguished from the righteousness of the law and the prophets, had, as exemplified in the scribes and Pharisees, become a gross caricature of the great reality. Jesus exhibits His in contrast to legal righteousness, first, as regards murder (Verses 21-26); second, as regards adultery (Verses 2730); third, as regards divorce (Verses 31, 32); fourth, as regards perjury, or rather the conditions and forms of veracity in soul and speech (Verses 33-37); fifth, as regards retaliation (Verses 38-42); sixth, as regards social feelings, sympathies, and antipathies. And then He finally expresses and enforces His grand ideal in the words, " Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Duty done to man is God imitated. Obedience is imitation of God. The law of God is just His spoken character, His expressed righteousness. To do His will is to become as He is, like Him in character, righteous as He is righteous. God's perfection is not physical, but moral; and the moral is ever the imitable. Were Satan Almighty, he would not cease to be Satan, would be none the less, rather all the more, the evil opposite of God. Might can never make right is great only as the arm of righteousness. To know all things were not to be perfect, for an infinite eye that saw misery unpitied were but the serene cruelty that is so cruel because so cold. To be everywhere at every moment were not to be perfect, for an omnipresence that had neither the will nor the hand to help were a presence of mockery and insult. The perfection of God is the sovereignty of His moral attributes the rule they exercise over His physical, making His omnipotence strength clothed in gentleness, His omniscience the herald of swift-footed mercy, His omnipresence the ever-active body of reigning and restoring righteousness. And a perfection that is moral is a perfection that can be imitated. Man has been made in the image, that he may live after the mind of God. Our spirits bear His likeness that our characters may embody His righteousness. We are His sons that we may love as He loves, be good as He is good, perfect as He is perfect, strenuous in the spiritual service that alone can please and honour a spiritual God. Christ in creating the spirit of a son creates the desire to imitate God, to act as we think He would act did He live as we live under the conditions of space and time.

Christ then turns to the duties that are more specifically religious, and pursues the same method of contrast as regards three alms (Chap vi. 1-4), prayer (Verses. 5-15), fasting (Verses 16-18). Almsgiving was a religious act, a reminiscence of the truth that mercy to man was the best service of God. Jesus in effect says, " Do it as unto God; let it be a matter between thee and God, done for Him, approved by Him; then the act will be good like His mercy, and do good like His love." Prayer, too, concerns God and the soul alone; must be not formal, but filial, speech; speech that as filial is full of reverence, the consciousness of dependence, a sense of the brotherhood in which man is bound, of common sonship to the common Father, with all the love and tenderness to earth and heaven it involves. Prayer is the communion with God of a Godlike mind; where there is antipathy to man there cannot be affinity or intercourse with God. Hence prayer and forgiveness are so related that the one is the necessary condition of the other: only a forgiving spirit can ask to be forgiven. " Fasting," too, is a private and personal matter, to be done to and with God alone; without meaning, as seen, with meaning only as it enables the soul to meet and speak in secret with God. But prayer, intensified by the meditation which fasting allows, becomes the mother of desire God the supreme object, in whom alone our hearts can repose (Verses 19-21). The more man has of God the more he desires to possess: here possession but increases capacity and quickens desire. But where the heart is turned in desire towards God, there the light of God enters and abides (Verses 22, 23). And where light and love dwell, there perfect obedience and absolute trust ought to be (Verses 24-30). These can never be disjoined. There cannot be obedience without trust, or trust without obedience. The faith that is without care is expressed in unwearied activity, in a dutiful fulfilment of the little as. well as great obligations of life and time. The man who thinks Providence exists simply to make up his lack of service, despises Providence. The fowls of the air are diligent and unresting workers; our heavenly Father feedeth them by means of their own unweariedly exercised activities. But man's energies ought to be employed about dutiful and necessary things, ought not to be exhausted in anxiety about the possible, probable, or contingent. Duty done, all is done that man need be concerned about; God will mind the rest. And so Christ turns to the practical inferences (Verses 31-34). Do not spend your energies on distrustful and enervating conjectures as to things sensuous. Seek the kingdom of God, become citizens there,, realize righteousness, and then everything will be secured. The future can have nothing to alarm, no evil can happen that shall not be made a means of higher good. To trust in God is to believe that infinite righteousness can never allow the righteous to suffer any real or ultimate wrong.

With the sixth chapter the expository part of the sermon ends; what remains is but a series of exhortations and admonitions. Hurried as our glance through it has been, it has sufficed to show certain of the more distinctive qualities in Christ's conception of the kingdom, of man's duties to God and man. His conception was throughout spiritual, had no sensuous, legal, or sacerdotal element. His worship could be as little embodied or conducted in symbols as His God could be represented by a graven image. The obedience He required stood as remote from ritual or ceremonial observances as He did from Judaism. But how could a conception so elevated, so unlike the notions then common and traditional, be made intelligible to men so simple and uncultured as His disciples? Here the action of His other great educative agency came in. His fellowship made His sermon luminous, interpreted His words, filled out their hidden and inarticulate meanings. The only religion the disciples had hitherto known had been one of symbols and symbolical acts. As exhibited in its acknowledged representatives, it was altogether a most manifest and mensurable thing. To fast twice in the week was to be eminently pious. To be an ostensible giver of alms was to be benevolent. To utter formal prayers in frequented places was to be devout. To wear phylacteries was to be full of faith. To despise and avoid publicans, to hate and shun sinners, to dislike and stand apart from the Gentiles, were evidences of sure fidelity to the Eternal and His law. Symbols and symbolical acts, sensuous distinctions and deeds, constituted the religion that then claimed to be the alone true. But now let us observe how Jesus lived, and what immense educative value belongs to certain too little studied acts of His. He did not fast, but lived a sweet and winsome, and, even in spite of His sorrows, a cheerful social life. He did not give alms, though He helped the poor in ways that lifted their spirits while lightening their poverty. He never prayed openly in the chief places of concourse, where men could see and hear, but rather on the still mountain side when alone with the Father, or when surrounded by His loved and trusted band, He implored that He and they might be one. His short, swift petitions, the cries, wrung from Him in His agony, that seemed to pierce the silent heaven like the sob of a heart grief had broken, were personal, came straight from Him, and went straight to His Father. He wore no phylactery, knew and loved Scripture too well to use it as an idol or a charm. He associated with publicans and sinners, became their " Friend," so familiar with their society as to be charged with being " gluttonous and a winebibber." He did not abjure the Gentiles, passed through and taught in Samaria, visited and preached in the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. Now all this must have made Him a great puzzle to those who saw Him only from without. The ordinary signs and acts of religion were absent, and men who judged by these would think He had none, just as later heathenism thought Christianity atheism, because the Christians were without images and temples, and refused to worship any of the recognized gods. But what bewildered His enemies instructed and informed His disciples. They saw that His religion neither consisted in, nor existed by, things external; that these might bury or betray, but could not make or express it. Instead, it was a state of the spirit expressed or revealed in conduct; a love to God that was equal to any service, making obedience, however seemingly hard, spontaneous; a love to man equal to any sacrifice, able with a truly Divine freedom to give self for the life of the world. And so just as the meaning of His person and life became through fellowship dimly intelligible to the disciples, His words would become full of the significance that made them the last and most perfect revelation of God.

We here touch a great subject, the relation of the person and words of Christ to each other. These are indeed inseparable. The words are, as it were, the expressed essence of the person; the person, the cause or source of the words. But the person is the greater; the cause must ever transcend the effect, the thinker be more and mightier than His thoughts. Without Jesus, the teaching of Jesus had been comparatively impotent. If His sayings had fallen from heaven like the great Ephesian goddess, they had never made for man a new faith and a diviner religion. The truths His words embodied His person incarnated,, and without the life lived the words preached had been but spoken into the air. This subtle essential relation of speaker and speech, experienced all along the Christian ages, was most deeply and resultfully experienced by the men Jesus found fishermen of Galilee, but made into apostles of a new faith, founders of the new and universal and absolute religion.

1) John iv. 45.

2) Luke iv. 24.

3) Tacitus, Anna!., xv. 44.

4) Celsus, in Origen, Contra Cels., lib. iii. cc. 44, 50, 52, 55.

5) Matt. v. 2: Luke vi. 20.

6) Renan, Les Evangiles, p. 177.

7) Matt. v. 17.

8) John ii. 19.

9) Matt. iv. 25.

10) Luke vi. 17.

11) Martensen's Meister Eckart, p. 107.

12) Rom. xiv. 17.