251

CHAPTER X.

THE MESSIAH.

THE Messianic teaching of Jesus was originally restricted to the ideas borrowed from John-(i.) Repentance and Remission of sins; (ii.) the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

(i.) There was nothing novel to Hebrew ears in the first announcement, as it had been the theme of antecedent prophets; but Jesus introduced the innovation of personally forgiving sins. When a man was brought to him suffering from palsy, he said, 'Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' This announcement was made on merely human authority, for to his auditors, whether friends or foes, he was nothing more than man; and thus the precedent was unhappily established which invited the future priesthood of Christianity to usurp the power of absolution, and even traffic in human guilt. If Jesus could have foreseen the mediæval practice of selling the forgiveness of sins, he would have assuredly taught all men to make a direct appeal to his Father in heaven, for the pardon of their transgressions.

(ii.) As the Kingdom of Heaven was abruptly proclaimed by John without any definition of its meaning, he had obviously adopted a popular term expressive of the approaching advent of the Messiah. And when

Jesus first preached on the Kingdom of Heaven, the scope of his sermon did not exceed the design of publishing his own views on a subject with which his auditors were already familiar.

All Jews had heard of and hoped for the great social and political advantages awaiting them in futurity, and the multitude listened with pleasure to the views of a Lecturer who awakened their curiosity and interest by the impressive authority of his manner ; but if Jesus then believed that he himself was the promised Messiah of Judah, the momentous fact was carefully concealed from the multitude. The announcement of John had, in fact, been too abrupt and startling to admit of Jesus promptly accepting the rôle of Messiah; and when the Baptist was cast into prison, he adopted the compromise of simply occupying the vacant ground, and beginning to preach and say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' The lapse of nearly nineteen centuries has disclosed to us that his views of the Kingdom were quite as visionary as national expectation of the throne of David.

6

When, however, Jesus had grasped the gravity of his position as the nominee of John the Baptist to the Messianic office, he naturally experienced doubt and perplexity in considering his future career. His countrymen expected a king who, occupying with royal splendour the throne of David, would overwhelm their enemies with swift destruction, and permanently restore a temporal kingdom exceeding in majesty and power the glorious empire of Solomon. But temporal power is won and held by the sword; what affinity could therefore exist between the gentle consciousness of Jesus and

the fierce energy of a warrior king? He, in the feminine softness of his nature, would not shed a drop of human blood, much less take part in the cruel carnage of a battle-field, to gain for himself a throne, or for his race an empire. What, therefore, could mean this strange antagonism between his peaceful disposition and the warlike aspirations of the nation? If he were indeed the Messiah of the prophets, must not his countrymen have mistaken the true meaning of Scripture? He concentrates his attention on the entire range of Hebrew literature, ardently inquiring what was the career predestined for him by the prophets of Judah.

John had attained absolute conviction that he was the predestined forerunner of the Messiah, by arbitrarily identifying himself with the imaginary voice which Isaiah had heard crying in the wilderness; why should not Jesus also discover in sacred Scripture his prophetic destiny as the man in whom the Baptist had recognised the Messiah? He studies Moses, Joshua, and Samuel; weighs every sentence of Job, David, and Solomon; and passes on, without result, through the vague declamation of the prophets, until his attention is suddenly riveted on the anonymous bard of the Captivity, whose poems have been published in the name of Isaiah:1He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities:

1 Isaiah liii.

the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of My people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.'

Modern criticism detects in this language of the bard, a poetic description of the unmerited sufferings of that unhappy fanatic, Jeremiah; but, as Jesus reads the words of the prophet, controlled by the superstition of his age, his heart throbs with one of those sudden and startling convictions which flash through men's minds in the supreme crisis of their career. If he is indeed the Messiah-and who can doubt the declaration of the inspired Baptist ?-away with illusory dreams of earthly thrones and kingdoms! His heavenly Father would not have bestowed on him the soul of a martyr to accomplish the triumphs of a warrior king. The words of Isaiah depict the career of the true Messiah, and the prophetic decree has gone forth dooming him to humiliation, suffering, and death. Now, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, evangelical theologians, sustaining the dogma of the atonement, dwell on this passage of the Hebrew bard as a definite and cir

cumstantial forecast of the sufferings and death of Jesus, as the predestined sacrifice for the sins of the world; but as we gaze across intervening centuries, and see Jesus rise up from the study of Isaiah with the sad smile of a doomed man on his lips, we know that he has fallen under the dominion of that most pernicious superstition-prophetic fatalism—and will inevitably follow the example of John by fulfilling prophecy, under the fatal delusion of submission to the will of his Father in heaven, as expressed in his reproof of Peter in the garden of Gethsemane: But how then shall the Scripture be fulfilled, that thus it must be ?'-words of fatal import, which briefly define the true nature of the superstition in which the religion of Christianity originated.

If Isaiah forecast a crown of martyrdom, from which prophet did Jesus borrow the triumphant glories of futurity? We answer, from the visions of Enoch, which depict with glowing imagery the advent of the 'Son of Man sitting upon the throne of his glory;' before whom the book of life is opened, the wicked condemned, and driven forth with shame and confusion to the vengeance of eternal fire,' in the companionship of fallen angels who had been cast into the lowest depths of the fire in torments, and in confinement shall they be shut up for ever;' and the righteous rewarded by eternal happiness in the presence of the Son of Man.

We annex the following passages from Archbishop Laurence's translation of the Book of Enoch :—' Behold, he comes with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon them, and destroy the wicked, and re