and the necessity of the Incarnation; and this in the effort to magnify the divine by minimising the human.

When we are told in the first chapter of Genesis that the Spirit of God brooded over the face of chaos, we have the prophecy of the virgin birth. The virgin universe conceived through the Spirit of God Almighty, and the Old Testament is the story of the pre-natal growth, if I may so speak, of the Divine Child, which, in the fulness of time, is to be born in the form of Jesus Christ, of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost.

Below the statement that Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary lies a depth of truth which is altogether lost if the mind is allowed to dwell exclusively on the external side of that statement, and to imagine that that is all that it covers. Rather, it is a statement of the whole plan of God's dealing with man, of the perfect union of divinity and humanity which is to be found in the whole course of His dealing with the world from the creation onward.

CHAPTER IV

OUR LORD'S TREATMENT OF THE

PER

OLD TESTAMENT

ERHAPS the easiest way to obtain a correct view of our Lord's treatment of the Old Testament is to take up the Gospel of St. Matthew, and, following it from beginning to end, to note those passages in which reference is made by our Lord to the Old Testament, comparing them with parallel passages in other Gospels, so far as such parallels exist. It is true that this will not cover every single use of the Old Testament made, nor will it present to us Christ's use in a systematic manner; but it will, I think, give us a good and sufficiently complete picture for the purposes of argument from His use to the proper use to be made by ourselves.

The story of the Temptations, contained both in Matthew iv. and Luke iv., may be regarded as a summary of Christ's attitude toward earlier views of divine revelation, held both by the Jews and also by other peoples. In Exodus xix. we have a description of the theophany at Sinai. The mountain is to be guarded with bounds round about, because "whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death." The presence of God upon the mount is indicated by "thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud," and the mount was "altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly." And the Lord bids Moses to "go down and charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish. And let

the priests also, who come near to the Lord, sanctify themselves, lest the Lord break forth upon them."

At the time of our Lord this was commonly regarded among Jewish theologians as the highest revelation of Himself by God to man. To be sure, we have in the Prophets indications of a higher and better conception, as when in the story of Elijah we are told that the Lord is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, nor in the thunder, but in the still small voice; or, as in Jeremiah, when we are told that it is not on tables of stone, but on the fleshly tablets of the heart that God really writes His highest law. Nevertheless, among Jewish theologians of our Lord's time, the manifestation on Sinai was considered to be a typical and the highest revelation of God's nature made to man. Now the general conception of a divine revelation which we find here was not peculiar to the Jews. It is the view of the way in which God must manifest Himself to man common in its general features to many religions, and you can parallel the essential features of this theophany out of the theology or mythology of many nations. This being regarded as the highest method of the manifestation of God to man, the expectation of the manner of the coming of the Messiah was naturally based among Jewish theologians upon this general conception of the method of manifestation of Divinity, rather than upon those really higher views of Divine manifestation referred to above, which are represented in many prophetical passages, and especially in Isaiah liii.

In His attitude toward the Temptations our Lord expressly and flatly contradicts this conception of the Jewish theologians based upon Exodus xix. and similar passages. The devil that comes to Him in the theology of the Jews would bid Him cast Himself from the pinnacle of the temple and descend upborne by angels. That theology demands of Him the same general method of manifestation which is narrated in Exodus xix. To this He opposed the conception of the Son of Man, of God in man. He will not turn the stones to bread, He will not cast Himself down from the pinnacle of

the temple, He will not seek to make Himself king of the nations of the earth, the most powerful ruler of His time, as David had been. The highest manifestation of God to man is, according to our Lord, the manifestation of Himself in man. It must be thoroughly human, and the Divine must be exhibited, not in clouds and thunder and outward manifestations of might and terror, but in the perfection in man of the divine attributes of love and truth. The Temptations are a mystical setting forth of our Lord's position in this matter, and of the conflict between that position and the conceptions of Jewish theologians. It may be said that in a broad way, not merely our Lord's attitude as described in the Temptations, but His attitude as a whole as described in the four Gospels, contradicts the conception of the highest manifestation of the Divine contained in Exodus xix. God in nature is what Exodus xix. sets forth; God in man is what our Lord in the New Testament sets forth. Not that God does not cause the portents of nature, but He is not in those in the sense in which He is in the still small voice, speaking within the hearts of men. Comparatively speaking, the theophany at Sinai is a low conception of God. The presence of God is to be sought not in the lightning and the thunderstorm, where the Hebrews in common with other peoples had sought for it, but in the perfection of the moral attributes in God's highest creation-man.

To turn from the general to the more particular. We find in the story of the Temptations our Lord answering the tempter by quotations from the Old Testament, introduced by the words, "It is written." I wish to call attention to the fact that this is a phrase which may be used not only of the Old Testament, but practically of any writing, and that the attitude of the Jewish mind towards the Old Testament as an ancient written document was in part at least the same as that existing everywhere among ancient peoples regarding written documents, and which you will find at the present time among most Orientals. For instance, if in speaking to an ordinary Oriental of the Turkish Empire with reference

to any fact, I am able to take any book in his own language, or in Arabic if he is a Moslem-it really matters very little what-and show him that what I have stated is written in this book, it will have upon his mind almost the effect of proof. So St. Paul, wishing to confirm what he says to the Athenians, is reported as quoting from a Stoic poet (Acts xvii. 28, “As certain also of your own poets have said "), as though it were Scripture, because that for which he could refer to a written document had a double force to the minds of his hearers, or in fact was regarded by most of them as proved if documentary evidence could be cited for it. In the same way, in the Epistle of St. Jude (v. 14), we find the quotation from the apocryphal book of Enoch, in the words, "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of this," etc. One of our Lord's expressions as quoted in the Gospels is, "It is said or written by the ancients."

This general attitude of the mind towards written documents must be carefully borne in mind in studying the quotations from the Old Testament in the New. In regard to our Lord's own quotations I really do not need to enter this caveat; but in the consideration of the use which St. Matthew and other New Testament writers make of the Old Testament it should be very carefully borne in mind.

The next passage to which I wish to call attention is the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew v. 17 our Lord is represented as saying, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." And in verse 18 it is added, "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." This is frequently quoted as an assertion of what is ordinarily known as literal, or verbal, inspiration; as though every jot and tittle of the words of the Law were sacred and eternal. But our Lord's treatment of the Pentateuch in His expositions of the Law, as recorded in that same document of discourses which we know as the Sermon on the Mount, should show the most casual reader that, so far from maintaining any such