Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

people were impending. These prophets continued to be disturbers of religious pleasure. To the people this seemed hot only unpatriotic and disagreeable pessimism, but treason and blasphemy combined, for the nation and Jchovah were one, and the downfall of the one implied the downfall of the other. Amos came close to denying that Israel had any special religious prerogative at all. As Amos and Hosea proclaimed the doom of the Northern kingdom in the eighth century, Jeremiah proclaimed the fall of the Southern kingdom a century and a half later. After the great reformation under Josiah (623 B.C.), the pcople were full of confidence. They had the temple; they had the Law. Jeremiah called their faith a delusion. Their temple would surfer the saine fate as the ancient sanctuary of Shiloh. He denied that Judah was any better than the sister-kingdom had been. He ridiculed the optimistic prophets who prophesied the "smooth things" which the people loved to hear. He set it up as a general principle that the truc prophets had always been prophets of disaster. Ezekiel continued the same strain. He had been among the first prominent exiles deported in 597 B.c. These mon were full of hope for their own speedy return. Those who were left in Jerusalem were also full of confidence because they were now the sifted remnant. As long as Jerusalem was standing, Ezekiel ruade it his task to batter down and discourage this complacent confidence and to foretell the complete destruction of the national life. How would we feel if a preacher should use a public gathering on Decoration Day or Thanksgiving Day to predict that our country for its mammonism and oppression was cast off by God and was to be parcelled out to the Mexicans, the Chinese and the negroes? In the sense of our security and strength we should probably simply laugh at him. But suppose that our country was bleeding through disastrous foreign wars and invasions, shaken by internal anarchy, terrified and angry at blows too powerful for us to avert, and in that condition a preacher should "weaken public confidence" still further by such a message? The vivid Oriental imagery of the prophets must hot give us the impression that the injustice and corruption of that day were unique. It is impossible to make accurate comparisons of human misery, but it rnay well be that the conditions against which the moral sensibility of the prophets revolted could be equallcd in any modern industrial centre. And the saine sins ought to seem blacker nineteen centuries airer Christ than eight centuries before Christ. Our prophetic books contain constant reference to the "false prophets." These were not the preachers of an idolatrous religion, but rnen who clairned to deliver the word of Jehovah. Neither were they always conscious bars. They were the mouthpiece of the average popular opinion, and they drew their inspiration frorn the self-satisfied patriotism which seemed so very identical with trust in Jehovah and his sanctuary. They were apparently the great majority of the prophetic order; the prophets of our Bible were the exceptional rnen. 1 The "false prophets" corresponded to those modern preachers who act as eulogists of existing conditions, hot because they desire to deceive the people, but because they are really so charmed with things as they are and have never had a vision from God to shake their illusion. The logic of events proved to be on the side of those great Hebrews who asserted that black is really black, even if you call it  Kuenen, "Prophets and Prophecy in Israel," 60.

white, and that a wall built with unternpered rnortar and built out of plurnb is likely to topple. Because history backed their predictions, they are now in the Bible and revered as inspired. It is well to note, however, that the prophets took no vindictive pleasure in prophesying evil, as sorne rnodern prophets enjoy beating the broorn of God's vengeance about the ears of the people. While Jererniah was foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, his heart was breaking. It is significant that as soon as the disaster had corne, the tone of prophecy changed. At long as the people were falsely optirnistic, the prophets persisted in destroying their illusions. When the people were despairing, the prophets opposed their false hopelessness. On the ruins of the temple Jererniah foretold its restoration, the return of the people, and a new era for his desolated country. As soon as the news of the destruction of the temple reached Ezekicl in exile, his threats changed to comfort and promises. This was not instability; it was loyalty to facts and hostility to illusions. Because they believed in the irnrnutability of the moral law, they had to tremble at any departure frorn it, but they could also feel its unshaken strength under their feet when all things went to pieces about thern. These pessirnists were really profoundly and magnificently optirnistic. They never doubted the ultimate victory of Jehovah, of his righteousness, and of his people. The rime rnay corne in our own country, when the smiling optirnists will be the rnost frightened and helpless of all, and when the present "pessirnists" will be the only ones who have any hopes to cheer and any clear convictions to guide. The great prophets whorn we revere were hot those whom their own age regarded most. They were the men of the opposition and of the radical minority. They probably had more influence over posterity than over their own generation. Their attacks on existing conditions brought dangerous attacks upon them in return. A later day can always study with complacency the attacks ruade on the vested interests in a previous epoch, and the championship of eternal principles always seems divine to a generation that is hot hurt by them. Jesus summed up the impression left on him by Old Testament history by saying that prophets have no honor in their own country and in their own generation. It is always posterity which builds their sepulchres and garnishes their tombs. The Hebrew prophets shared the fate of all leaders who are far ahead of their times. They did not themselves achieve the triumph of their ideas. It was achieved for them by men who did hOt share their spirit, and who insensibly debased their ideals in realizing them. The ethical monotheism of the prophets did not become common property in Judah till the priests and scribes enforced it. That is part of the Divine Comedy of history. The Tories carry out the Liberal programmes. The ideas preached by Socialists and Single Taxers are adopted by Populists, radical Democrats, and conservative Republicans successively, and in coming years the great parties will take credit for championing ideas which they did their best to stifle and then to betray. It is a beneficent scheme by which the joy of life is evened up. The "practical men" and conservatives have the pleasure of feeling that they are the only ones who can really make reforms work. The prophetic minds have the satisfaction of knowing that the world must corne t.heir way whether it will or not, because they are on the way to justice, and justice is on the way to God.

Here then we have a succession of men perhaps unique in religious history for their moral heroïsm and spiritual insight. They were the moving spirits in the religious progress of their nation; the creators, directly or indirectly, of its law, its historical and poefical literature, and its piety; the men to whose personality and teaching Jesus felt most kinship; the men who still kindle modern religious enthusiasm. Most of us believe that their insight was divinely given and that the course they steered was set for them by the Captain of history. We have seen that these men were almost indifferent, if not contemptuous, about the ceremonial side of customary religlon, but turned with passionate enthusiasm to moral righteousness as the true domain of religion. Where would their interest lie if they lived to-day? We have seen that their religious concern was not restricted to private religion and morality, but dealt preëminently with the social and political lire of their nation. Would they limit its range to-day? We have seen that their sympathy was wholly and passionately with the poor and oppressed. If they lived to-day, would they place the chief blame for poverty on the poor and give their admiration to the strong? We have seen that they gradually rose above the kindred prophets of other nations through their moral interest in national affairs, and that their spiritual progress and education were intimately connected with their open-eyed comprehension of the larger questions of contemporary history. Is it likely that the saine attitude of mind which enlarged and purified the religion of the Hebrew leaders would deteriorate and endanger the religion of Christian leaders? We have seen that the religious concem in politics ceased only when politics ceased; that religious individualism was a triumph of faith under abnormal conditions and nota normal type of religious life; and that the enforced withdraval of religion from the wider life was one cause for the later narrowness of Judaism. Does this warrant the assumption that religion is most normal when it is most the affair of the individual? We have seen that the sane political programme and the wise historical insight of the great prophets turned into apocalyptic dreams and bookish calculations when the nation lost its political self-government and training. How wise is it for the Christian leaders of a democratic nation to take their intcrpretation of God's purposes in history and their theories about the coming of the kingdom of God from the feeblest and most decadent age of Hebrew thought? We have seen that the true prophets opposed the coinplacent optimism of the people and of their popular spokesmen, and gave warning of disaster as long as it was coming. If they lived among the present symptgms of social and moral decay, would they sing a lullaby or sound the reveille? No true prophet will copy a prophet. Their garb, their mannerisms of language, the vehemence of their style, belong to their age and not to ours. But if we believe in their divine mission and in the divine origin of the religion in which they were the chief factors, we cannot repudiate what was fundamental in their lives. If any one holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he rnust prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with hirn.

For the ordinary reader who may wish to follow up the subject, ¥ know no book more genera]ly accessible and more delightful than the two volumes in the "Expositor's Bible" on "The Book of the Twelve Prophets," by George Adam Smith; especia][y the introductory chapters in each volume. I think it is only honest fo state that the OId Testament has never been my professional specialty and the foregoing discussion lays no daim fo authority. Doubtless the expert student will notice înaccurades in detail. But if he differs in fundamenta]s, the difference is hot likely to be due to such minor points of information, but fo his general conceptions of history and religion.

'he new »cial inght into Le Gospel.

A MAN was walking through the woods in springtime. The air was thrilling and throbbing with the passion of little hearts, with the love-wooing, the parent pride, and the deadly fear of the birds. But the man never noticed that there was a bird in the woods. He was a botanist and was looking for plants. A man was walking through the streets of a city, pondering the problems of wealth and national ¥«ell-being. He saw a child sitting on the curbstone and crying. He met children at play. He sav a young mother with her child and an old man with his grandchild. But it never occurred to him that little children are the foundation of society, a chier motive power in economic effort, the most influential teachers, the source of the purest pleasures, the embodiment of form and color and grace. The man had never had a child and his eyes were not opened. A man read through the New Testament. He felt no vibration of social hope in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the shouts of the crowd when Jesus entered J'erusalem. I Those who read only English are fortunate in having at their command two excellent books on the subject of this chapter: "Jesus Christ and the ocial Question," by Professor Francis G. Peabody of Harvard, and "The Social Teaching of Jesus," by Professor Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago. The former is ver',, sympathetic in its treatment; the latter perhaps more incisive in its methods.

He caught no revolutionary note in the Book of Revelation. The social movement had hOt yet reached him. Jesus knew human nature when he reiterated: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." We see in the Bible what we have been taught to see there. We drop out great sets of facts from our field of vision. We read other things into the Bible which are not there. During the Middle Ages men thought they saw their abstruse scholastic philosophy and theology amid the simplicity of the gospels. They round in the epistles the priests and bishops whom they knew, with robe and tonsure, living a celibate lire and obeying the pope. When the Revival of Learning taught men to read all books with literary a-ppreciation and historic insight, many things disappeared from the Bible for their eyes, and new things appeared. A new language was abroad and the Bible began to speak that language. If the Bible was not a living power before the Reformation, it was hot because the Bible was chaîned up and forbidden, as we are told, but because their minds were chained by preconceived ideas, and when they read, they failed to read. We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. ,Vhere we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court haflots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of historv. The Bible shares in that new social reinterpretation. The stories of the patriarchs bave a new lifelikeness when they are read in the setting of primitive social lire. There are texts and allusions in the New Testament which had been passed by as of slight significance; now they are like windows through which we see miles of landscape. But it is a slow process. The men who write commentaries are usual.ly of ripe age and tlaeir lines of interest were fixed before the social movement awoke men. They follow the traditions of their çraft and deal with the same questions that engaged their predecesors. Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a laurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property. The first scientific lire of Clarist was written in 1829 by Karl Hase. Claristians had always bowed in worship before their Master, but they had never undertaken to understand his lire in its own historical environment and lais teachings in the sense in which Jesus meant them to be understood by lais hearers. He had stood like one of his pictures in Byzantine art, splendid against its background of gold, but unreal and unhuman. Slowly, and still with many uncertainties in detail, his figure is coming out of the past to meet us. He bas begun to talk to us as he did to his Galilean friends, and the better we know Jesus, the more social do his thoughts and aires become.

Under the influence of this new historical study of Christ, and under the pressure of the intense new social interest in contemporary Iife, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. Men are seizing on Jesus as the exponent of their own social convictions. They all daim him. "He was the first socialist." "Nay, he was a Tolstoian anarchist." "Not at gll; he was an upholder of law and order, a funàamental opponent of the closed shop." It is a great tribute to his power over men and to the many-sidedness of his thought that all seek shelter in his great shadow. But in truth Jesus was nota social reformer of the modern type. Sociology and political economy were just as far outside of his range of thought as organic chemistry or the geography of America. He saw the evil in the life of men and their sufferings, but he approached these facts purely from the moral, and hot from the economic or historical point of view. He wanted men to live a right life in common, and only in so far as the social questions are moral questions did he deal with them as they confronted him. And he was more than a teacher of morality. Jesus had learned the greatest and deepest and rarest secret of allhow to live a religious life. When the question of economic wants is solved for the individual and all his outward adjustments are as comfortable as possible, he may still be haunted by the horrible emptiness of his life and feel that existence is a meaningless riddle and delusion. If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change. Universal prosperity would not bc incompatible with universal, ennu and Weltschmer.

Beyond the question of economic distribution lies the question of moral relations; and beyond the moral relations fo men lies the question of the religious communion with that spiritual reality in which we live and move and have our deepest being—with God, the Father of out spirits. Jesus had realized the lire of God in the soul of man and the life of man in the love of God. That was the real secret of his lire, the well-spring of his purity, his compassion, his unwearied courage, his unquenchable idealism: he knew the Father. But if he had that greatest of all possessions, the real key to the secret of lire, it was his highest social duty to share it and help others to gain what he had. He had to teach men to live as children in the presence of their Father, and no longer as slaves cringing before a despot. He had to show them that the ordinary lire of selfishness and hate and anxiety and chafing ambition and covetousness is no lire at all, and that they must enter into a new world of love and solidarity and inward contentment. There was no service that he could render to men whicb would equal that. All other help lay in concentric circles about that redemption of the spirit and flowed out from it. No comprehension of Jesus is even approximately true which fails to understand that the heurt of his heart was religion. No man is a follower of Jesus in the full sense who has not through him entered into the saine lire with God. But on the other hand no man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his lire and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social lire has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious lire over the social relations and institutions of rnen, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

If we want to understand the real airns of Jesus, we must watch him in his relation to his own tirnes. He was hOt a tirneless religious teacher, philosophizing vaguely on hunmn generalities. He spoke for his own age, about concrete conditions, responding to the stirrings of the life that surged about him. We Inust follow hirn in his djustrnent to the tendencies of the tirne, in his affinity for sorne rnen and his repulsion of others. That is the rnethod by which we classify and locate a rnodem thinker or statesrnan. The Christian rnovement began with John the Baptist. All the evangelists so understood it. 1 John hirnself accepted Jesus as the one who was to continue and consurnrnate his own work. Jesus linked John closely to hirnself. He paid tribute to the rugged bravery and power of the man, and asserted that the new religious era had begun with John as an era of strenuous rnovernent and stir. "The Law and the prophets were until John; frorn that tirne the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and every man entereth violently into it." 2 Both Jesus and the people generally felt that in John they had an incarnation of the spirit of the ancient prophets. He wore their austere garb; he shared their utter fearlessness, their ringing directness of speech, their consciousness of speaking an inward message of God. The substance of his message was also the sarne. It vas the old prophetic dernand for ethical obedience. He and his disciples fasted  and he

His relati to contera porarv movelent taught them certain forms of prayer, 1 but in his recorded teaching to the people there is nota word about the customary ritual of religion, about increased Sabbath observance, about stricter washings and sacrifices, or the ordinary exercises of piety. He spoke only of repentance, of ceasing from wrongdoing. He hailed the professional exponents of religion who came to hear him, as a brood of snakes wriggling away from the flames of the judgment. He demolished the self-confidence of the Jew and his pride of descent and religious monopoly, just as Amos or Jeremiah did. If God wanted children of Abraham, they were cheap and easy to get; God could turn the pebbles of the Jordan valley into children of Abraham by the million. But what God wanted, and found hard to get, was men who would quit evil. Yet God was bound to get such and would destroy all others. Now was the time to repent and by the badge of baptism to enroll with the purified remnant. 2 The people asked for details. What would repentance involve? "What then must we do?" He replied: "He that hath two coats, let him share with him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise." The way to prepare for the Messianic era and to escape the wrath of the. Messiah was to institute a brotherly life and to equalize social inequalities. If Jolm thus conceived of the proper preparation for the Messianic salvation, how did he conceive of the Messianic era itself? Luke records his advice to two special classes of men, the tax-gatherers and the soldiers. The taxgatherers had used their legal powers for grafting and lining their pockets with the excess extorted from the people. The soldiers had used their physical force for the saine ends, like x Luke Ix. i. 2 Matthew 3- 5 -I2- a New York policeman taklng a banana from the push-cart while the Italian tries to look pleasant. John told them to stop being parasites and to live on their honest earnings. 1 Would any preacher bave defined repentance in these terms if his eyes had hot been open to the social inequality about him and to the exploitation of the people by the representatives of organized society? Luke characterized John's purpose by quoting the call of Isaiah to make ready the way o the Lord by levelling down the hills and levelling up the valleys and making the crooked things straight. John would got have been so silent about the ordinary requirements of piety, and so terribly emphatic in demanding the abolition of social wrongs, if he had not felt that here were the real obstacles to the coming of the "kingdom of God. From this preaching, coupled with our gcneral knÇwledge of the times, we can infer what his points of view and his hopes and expectations were, and also what the real spring of the remarkable popular movement was which he initiated. It was the national hope of Israel that carried the multitudes into the desert to hear John. The judgment which he proclaimed was hot the individual judgment of later Christian theology, but the sifting of the Jewish people preparatory to establishing the renewed Jewish theocracy. The kingdom of God which he announced as close at hand was the old hope of the people, and that embraced the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, the reign of social justice, and the triumph of the true religion. John was a true descendant of the prophets in denying that Jewish descent constituted a claim to share in the good time coming. He put the kingdom on  Luke 3- Io-14.

an ethical basis. But it was still a social hope and it re, quired social morality. According to out evangelists the work of John came to an end because he had attacked tterod Antipas for his marriage with Herodias. 1 According to Josephus 2 it was because Herod feared the great influence of John over the people and wanted to forestall a revolutionary rising under his impulse. The two explanations are not incompatible. Josephus had very direct lines of information about John 3 and his intimation deserves the more weight because his book was written for a Roman audience and his general tendency was to pass with discreet silence the revolutionary tendencies in his people. Now Jesus accepted John as the forerunner of his own work. It was the popular moxement created by John which brought Jesus out of the seclusion of Nazareth. He received John's baptism as the badge of the new Messianic hope and repentance. His contact with John and the events at the Jordan were evidently of decisive importance in the progress of his own inner life and his Messianic consciousness. When he left the Jordan the power of his own mission was upon him. He took up the formula of John: "The kingdom of God has corne nigh; repent!" He continued the saine baptism. He drew his earliest and choicest disciples from the followers of John. When John was dead, some thought Jesus nas John risen from the dead. He realized clearly the difference between the stern ascetic spirit of the Baptist and his o'n sunny trust and simple human love/ but to the end of his lire he championed John and dared the Pharisees to deny his divine mission.  It seems impossible to assume that his own fundamental purpose, at least in the beginning of his ministry, was wholly divergent from that of John. In the main he shared John's national and social hope. His aire too was the realization of the theocracy.  Moreover, in joining hands with John, Jesus clasped hands with the entire succession of the prophets with whom he classed John. Their words were his favorite quotations. Like them he disregarded or opposed the ceremonial elements of religion and insisted on the ethical. Like them he sided with the poor and oppressed. As Amos and Jeremiah foresaw tl-,e conflict of their people with the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, so Jesus foresaw his nation drifting toward the conflict with Rome, and like them he foretold disaster, the fall of the temple and of the holy city. That prophetic type of religion which we have tried to set forth in the previous chapter, and which constituted the chief religious heritage of his nation, had laid hold on Jesus and he had laid hold of it and had appropriated its essential spirit. In the poise and calm of his mind and manner, and in the love of his heart, he was infinitely above them all.  But the greatest of all prophets was still one of the prophets, and that large interest in the national and social life which had been inseparable from the religion of the prophets was part of his life too. The presumption is that Jesus shared the fundamental religious purpose of the prophets. If any one asserts that he abandoned the collective hope and gave his faith solely to religious

I Mark ii. 27-33. 2 This superiority is beautifully expressed in Wellhausen's "Israelitische und Jidische Geschichte," Chapter XXIV.

m purse of sus: the dom of

54 CH.KISTIANITY AND TI:II SOCIAL CRISlS individualism, he will bave to furnish express statements in which Jesus disavows the religious past of his people.

The historical background which we have just.sketched must ever be kept in mind in understanding the life and purpose of Jesus. He was not merely an initiator, but a consummator. Like all great minds that do hot merely imagine Utopias, but actually advance humanity to a new epoch, he took the situation and material furnished to him by the past and moulded that into a fuller approximation to the divine conception within him. He embodied the prophetic stream of faith and hope. He linked his work to that of John the Baptist as the one contemporary fact to which he felt most inward ai:finity. Jesus began his preaching with the call: "The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is now close at hand; repent and believe in the glad news. ''t The kingdom of God continued to be the centre of all his teaching as recorded by the synoptic gospels. His parables, his moral instructions, and his prophetic predictions all bear on that. We bave no definition of what he meant by the phrase. His audience needed no definition. It was then a familiar conception and phrase. The new thing w..s simply that this kingdom was at last on the point of coming. We are hOt at all in that situation to-day. Any one who bas tried to grasp the idea will bave realized how vague and elusive it seems. It stands to-day for quite a catalogue of ideas. 2 To the ordinary reader of the Bible, "inheriting t Mark I, 15. 2 See the list of definitions in Shailer Mathews «The Social Teaching of Jesus," 53 note i.

the kingdom of heaven " simply means being saved and going to heaven. For others it means the millennium. For some the organized Church; for others "the invisible Church." For the mystic it means the hidden life with God. The truth is that the idea in the sense in which Jesus and his audiences understood it almost completely passed out of Christian thought as soon as Christianity passed from the Jewish people and round its spiritual home within the great Graeco-Roman world. The historical basis for the idea was wanting there. The phrase was taken along, just as an emiant will carry a water-jar with him; but the water from the well of Bethlehem evaporated and it was now used to dip water from the wells of Ephesus or from the Nile and Tiber. The Greek world cherished no such national religious hope as the prophets had ingrained in Jewish thought; on the other hand it was intensely interested in the future life for the individual, and in the ascetic triumph over flesh and matter. Thus the idea which had been the centre of Christ's thought was hot at all the centre of the Church's thought, and even the comprehension of his meaning was lost and overlaid. Only some remnants of it persisted in the millennial hope and in the organic conception of the Church. The historicaI study of our own day bas ruade the first thorough attempt to understand this fundamental thought of Jesus in the sense in which he used it, but the results of this investigation are hot at all completed. There are a hundred critical difficulties in the way of a sure and consistent interpretation hat would be acceptable to all investigators. The limits of space and the purpose of this book will not permit me to do justice to the conflicting views. I shall have to set clown my own results with only an occasional reference t« the difficulties that beset them. We saw in the previous chapter that the hope of the Jewish people underwent changes in the course of its history. 1 It took a wider and more universal outlook as the political horizon of the people widened. It became more individual in its blessings. It grew more transcendent, more purely future, more apocalyptic and detached from present events, as the people were deprived of their political autonomy and health. Moreover it was variously understood by the different classes and persons that beld it. Because this hope was so comprehensive and all-embracing, every man could select and emphasize that aspect which appealed to him. Some thought chiefly of the expulsion of the Roman power with its despotic officiais, its tax-extorters, and its hated symbols. Others dwelt on the complete obedience to the Law which would prevail when all the apostates were cast out and all true Israelites gathered to their ovn. And some quiet religious souls hoped for a great outflow of grace from God and a revival of true piety; as the hynm of Zacharias expresses it: "that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, should serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days." 2 But even in this spiritual ideal the deliverance from the national enemies was a condition of a holy life for the nation. Vhatever aspect any man emphasized, it was still a national and collective idea. It involved the restoration of Israel as a nation to outward

 On the later Messianic hope of the Jewish people, see Shailer 1V[athews, "The Messianic Hope in the New Testament"; Schiirer, "The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ," § 29; also § 32, V.  Luke i. 74-75- independence, security, and power, such as it had under the Davidic kings. It involved that social justice, prosperity, and happiness for which the Law and the prophets called, and for which the common peoplc always long. It involved that religious purity and holiness of which the nation had always fallen short. And all this was to corne in an ideal degree, such as God alone by direct intervention could bestow. When Jesus used the phrase "the kingdom of God," it inevitably evoked that whole sphere of thought in the minds of his hearers. If he did hot mean by it the substance of what they meant by it, it was a mistake to use the terre. If he did hot mean the consummation of the theocratic hope, but merely an internal blessedness for individuals with the hope of getting to heaven, why did he use the words around which ail the collective hopes clustered? In that case it was hOt only a misleading but a dangerous phrase. It unfettered the political hopes of the crowd; it drew down on him the suspicion of the government; it actually led to his death. Unless we bave clear proof to the contrary, we must assume that in the main the words meant the saine thing to him and to his audiences. But it is very possible that he scriously modified and corrected the popular conception. That is in fact the process with every great, creative religious mind: the connection with the past is maintained and the old terms are used, but they are set in new connections and filled with new qualities. In the teaching of Jesus we find that he consclously opposed some features of the popular hope and sought to make it truer. For one thing he would bave nothing to do with bloodshed and violence. When the crowds that were on their way to the Passover gathered around him in the solitude on the Eastern shore of the lake and wanted to make him king and march on the capital, he eluded them by sending his inflammable disciples away in the boat, and himself going up among the rocks to pray till the darkness dispersed the crowd. 1 Alliance with the Messianic force-revolution was one of the temptations which he confronted at the outset and repudiated;  he would not set up God's kingdom by using the devil's means of hatred and blood. With the glorious idealism of faith and love Jesus threw away the sword and advanced on the intrenchments of wrong with hand outstretched and heart exposed. He repudiated not only human violence, he even put aside the force which the common hope expected from heaven. He refused to summon the twelve legions of angels either to save his life or to set up the kingdom by slaying the wicked. John the Baptist had expected the activity of the Messiah to begin with the judgment. The fruitless tree would be hewn down; the chaff would be winnowed out and burned; and there was barely rime to escape this. 3 Jesus felt no call to that sort of Messiahship. He reversed the programme; the judgment would corne at the end and not at the beginning. First the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, and at the very last the harvest. Only at the end would the tares be collected; only when the net got to shore would the good fish be separated from the useless creatures of the seao Thus the divine finale of the judgment was relegated to the distance; the only task calling for present action was to sow the seed. 4

The popu|ar hope was all for a divine catastrophe. The kingdom of God was to corne by a beneficent earthquake. Some day it would corne like the blaze of a meteor, "with outward observation," and they could say: "Lo, there it is!" t We have seen that the prophetic hope had become catastrophic and apocalyptic when the capacity for political self-help was paralyzed. When the nation was pinned down helplessly by the crushing weight of the oppressors, it had to believe in a divine catastrophe that bore no causal relation to human action. The higher spiritual insight of Jesus reverted to the earlier and nobler prophetic view that the future was to grow out of the present by divine help. While they were waiting for the Messianic cataclysm that would bring the kingdom of C-od ready-made from heaven, he saw it growing up among coming from organic the peasant, growing them. He took his illustrations of its life. It was like the seed scattered by slowly and silently, night and day, by its own germinating force and the food furnished by the earth. The people had the impatience of the uneducated rnind which does not see processes, but clamors for results, big, thunderous, miraculous results. Jesus had the scientific insight which cornes to most men only by training, but to the elect few by divine girl. He grasped the substance of that law of organic development in nature and history which out own day at last has begun to elaborate systematically. His parables of the sower, the tares, the net, the nmstard-seed, and the leaven are all polemical in character. He was seeking to displace the crude and misleading catastrophic conceptions by a saner theory about the coming of the kingdom. This conception of growth demanded not only a finer insight, but a  Luke 17. 2o—2x.

higher faith. It takes more faith to see God in the little begin. nings than in the completed results; more faith to say that God is now working than to say that he will SOlne day work. Because Jesus believed in the organic grewth of the new society, he patiently fostered its growth, cell by cell. Every human lire brought under control of the new spirit v«hich he himself embodied and revealed was an advance of the kingdom of God. Evcry rime the new thought of the Father and of the right life among men gained firmer hold of a human mind and brought it to the point of action, it meant progress. It is just as when human tissues have been broken doxxqa by disease or external force, and new tissue is silently forming under the old and weaving a new web of lire. Jesus incamated a new type of human life and he was conscious of that. By 1Mng with men and thinking and feeling in their presence, he reproduced his own life in others and they gained faith to risk this new wav of living. This process of assimilation vent on by the natural capacities inherent in thc social organism, just as fresh blood will flow along the established arterics and capillaries. When a nucleus of like-minded men was gathered about him, the assimilating power was greatly reënforced. Jesus joyously felt that the most insignificant man in his company who shared in this new social spirit was superior to the grandest exemplification of the old era, John the Baptist." Thus Jesus worked on individuals and through individuals, but his rem end was not individualistic, but social, and in his method he employed strong social forces. He "k_new that a new view of lire would bave to be implanted before the new lire could be lived and that the new society would have to nucleate around personal  Matthew x. I .

centres of renewal. But his end vas not the new soul, but the new society; not man, but Man. The popular hope was a Jewish national hope. Under the hands of Jesus it became human and therefore universal. John the Baptist had contradicted the idea that a Jew was entitled to participation in the good time coming by virtue of his national descent. Every time Jesus met a Gentile, we can see the Jewish prejudices melt away and he gladly discovered the human brotherhood and spiritual capacity in the alien. "Verily I say unto you, I have not round so great faith, no, not in Israel," and he immediately makes room at the Messianic table-round for those who shall corne from the east and the west to sit down with the patriarchs, while the sons of the kingdom, the Jews who were properly entitled to it, would be cast out) He reminded the indignant audience at Nazareth that the great Elijah had found his refuge with a heathen Phoenician and Elisha had hialed only a Syrian leper. 2 When one leper out of ten thanked him, he took pains to point out that this one was a Samaritan foreigner, 3 and when he wanted to hold up a model of human neighborliness, he went out of his way to make him a Samaritan, an alien, and a heretic. 4 Thus into Jews and Gemiles began new dividing line ran between those who opened their heart closed it. He approached the the old division of humanity to fade out in his mind, and a the good and the evil, between to the new lire and those who bold cosmopolitanism of Paul, that "in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek. '' But as soon as religion was thus based, not on national prerogatives, but on human needs and capacities, the ldng. dom of God became universal in scope, an affair of all humanity. This was a modification of immense importance. Another subtle and significant change in the conception of the kingdom came through the combination of all these changes. If the kingdom was not dependent on human force nor on divine catastrophes, but could quietly grow by organic processes; if it was hot dependent on national reconstruction, but could work along from man to man, from group to group, creating a new lire as it went along; then the kingdom in one sense was already here. Its consummation, of course, was in the future, but its fundamental realities were already present. This is the point on which scholars are most at odds. Was the kingdom in Christ's conception something eschatological, all in the future, to be inaugurated only by a heavenly catastrophe? Or was it a present reality? There is material for both views in his sayings. It is important here to remember that the sayings of Jesus were handed down by oral repetition among Christians for thirty or forty years before they were recorded in our gospcls. But any one can test for himself the fact that with the best intentions of veracity, a message or story changes a little when it passes from one mind to another, or even when itis repeated often by the saine man. Something of his tastes and presuppositions flows into it. Unless we assume an absolute divine prevention of any such change, we must allow that it is wholly probable that the Church which told and retold the sayings of Jesus insensibly moulded them by its own ideas and hopes. And if that is true, then no part of the sayings of Christ would be so sure tobe affected as lais sayings about lais return and the final consummation of the kingdom. That was the hottest part of the faith of the primitive Church and anything coming in contact with it would run fluid. But any modifications on this question would all be likely to be in the direction of the catastrophic hope. That was the form of the Jewish hope before Christ touched it; he certainly did not succeed in weaning his disciples from it; it was the form most congenial to cruder minds; it chimed best with the fervid impatience of the earliest days; its prevalence is attested by the wide circulation of the Jewish apocalyptic literature among Christians. It is thus exceedingly probable that the Church spilled a little of the lurid colors of its own apocalypticism over the loftier conceptions of its Master, and when we read his sayings to-day, we must allow for that and be on the watch against it. Like the old prophets, Jesus believed that God was the real creator of the kingdom; it was not to be set up by manruade evolution. It is one of the axioms of religious faith to believe that. He certainly believed in a divine consummation at the close. But the more he believed in the supreme value of its spiritual and moral blessings, and in the power of spiritual forces to mould human lire, the more would the final act of consummation recede in importance and the present facts and processes grow more concrete and important to his mind. It was an act of religious faith for John the Baptist to assert that the long-desired kingdom was almost here. It was a vastly higher act of faith for Jesus to say that it was actually here. Others were scanning the horizon with the telescope to see it corne; he said, "It is already here, right in the midst of you." 1 Any one who t Luke i7. I"

reversed the direction of his lire and became as a child could enter into it.' Any one who saw that love to God and man was more than the whole sacrificial ritual was not far from the kingdom. 2 The healing power going out to the demonized was proof that a stronger one had come upon the lord of this world and was stripping him of his property, and that the kingdom was already corne upon them. 3 Thus the future tense was changing to the present tense under the power of faith and insight into spiritual realities. In the gospel and epistle of John we have a confirmation of this translation of the future tense into the present. The expected antichrist is already here; the judgment is now quietly going on; the most important part of the resurrection is taking place now. The discourse about the future coming of the Lord in the Synoptists is replaced in John by the discourse about the immediate coming of the Comforter. 4 This, then, is our interpretation of the situation. Jesus, like all the prophets and like all his spiritually minded countrymen, lived in the hope of a great transformation of the national, social, and religious lire about him. He shared the substance of that hope with his people, but by his profounder insight and his loftier faith he elevated and transformed the common hope. He rejected all violent means and thereby transferred the inevitable conflict from the field of battle to the antagonism of mind against mind, and of heart against lack of heart. He postponed the divine catastrophe of judgment to the dim distance and put the emphasis on the growth of the new lire that was now going on. He thought less of changes made en masse, and more of the immediate 1 Matthew 18. I- 4. a Matthew 12. 28.  Mark 12. 28-34. 4 I John 2. 18. John 3- 16-21, 5- 10-29 transformation of single centres of influence and of social nuclei. The Jewish hope became a human hope with universal scope. The old intent gaze into the future was turned to faith in present realities and beginnings, and found its task here and now. Luke says that the boy Jesus "advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men"; that is, he grew in his intellectual, physical, religious, and social capacities. It is contrary to faith in the real humanity of out Lord to believe that he ever stopped growing. The story of his temptation is an account of a forward leap in his spiritual insight when he faced the problems of his Messianic task. When a growing and daring mind puts his hand to a great work, his experiences in that work are bound to enlarge and correct his conception of the purpose and methods of the work. It is wholly in harmony with any true conception of the lire of Jesus to believe that his conception of the kingdom became vaster and truer as he worked for the kingdom, and that he moved away from the inherited conceptions along the lines which our study has suggested. But after all this has been said, it still remained a social hope. The kingdom of God is still a collective conception, involving the whole social lire of man. It is nota matter of saving human atoms, but of saving the social organism. It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven. If he put his trust in spiritual forces for the founding of a righteous society, it only proved his sagacity as a society-builder. If he began his work with the smallest social nuclei, it proved his patience and skill. But Jesus never fell into the fundamental heresy of later theology; he never viewed the human individ- F ual apart from human soclety; he never forgot the gregarious nature of man. His first appeal was to his nation. When they flocked about him and followed him in the early Galilean days, it looked s if by the sheer power of his spirit he would swing the national soul around to obey him, and he was happy. There must hav'e been at least a possibility of that in his mind, for he counted it as guilt that the people failed to yield to him. He did not merely go through the motions of summoning the nation to fealty, knowing ail the while that such a thing lay outside of his real plan. No one will understand the lire of Jesus truly unless he has asked himself the question, What would have happened if the people as a whole had accepted the spiritual leadership of Jesus? The rejection of his reign involved the political doom of the Galilean cities and of Jerusalem; 1 would the acceptance of his reio'n have involved no political consequences? The tone of sadness in his later ministry was hOt due simply to the approach of his personal death, but to the consciousness that his purpose for his nation had failed. He began then to draw his disciples more closely about him and to create the nucleusof a new nation within the old; it was the best thing that remained for him to do, but he had hoped to do better. tte also rose then to the conviction that he would return and accomplish in the future what he had hoped to accomplish during his earthly lire. The hope of the Coming and the organization of the Church together enshrine the social element of Christianity; the one postpones it, the other partly realizes it. Both are the results of a faith that rose triumphan* over death, and laid the foundations of a new commonwealth of God even before the old had been shaken to ruins, i Matthew II. o-24; Luke 9. 41-44.