into exile. He meets it with the declaration, "If I by the finger of God cast out demons, then the divine sovereignty hath overtaken you unaware." This ap peal to a present reign of God is something more than apocalyptic eschatology. The reign of God, Jesus maintains, is not to be forecast with horoscope or observation, "neither shall they say, Lo, here; or Lo, there. For the reign of God is within you"- or, if you prefer so to render it, " among you.' The implication of the saying is that God is already at work. The overthrow of Satan is already begun. The kingdom is potentially present. If, then, Jesus failed in his endeavor to make ready for Jehovah in Galilee a people prepared for His coming, if the work of the second Elijah taken up by him did not issue in the reconciliation of God with His people, still his faith would not break down. The mustard seed was sown. The leaven was working. The good grain was cast into the earth.

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We can hardly do justice to the records and not admit that Jesus, like other prophets, did foreshorten the time. The day of harvest and the sending forth of the reapers was more distant than he thought. But his faith laid hold not of horoscopes and forecasts, but of the present, unseen power of God. It had a deeper root than the visions of apocalypse. It saw God's reign to be present as well as future, imminent as well as transcendent. Disappointment as to the mode and time would have left Jesus as it left the Church still saying, "Nevertheless the Kingdom of God is come nigh." 2

Still more certainly may we reason on analogous lines for the movement of Jesus' faith in the face of 2 Mk. 3: 22-27 and parallels. For some excellent remarks on Jesus' superiority to apocalyptic eschatology as such see the chapter on The Historical Jesus" by Canon Streeter in Founda

tions.

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rejection, desertion, and betrayal to death, in Jerusalem. He did not have superhuman foresight, but he did have insight. And he had the kind of faith in God which cries out with martyred Job, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him." If he had not, would the frightened, scattered handful of disciples who forsook him and fled in the last calamitous night ever have rallied again? So the faith of Jesus in his calling and his message was not cast down in the face of disaster, and assuredly it did not stand still. Like the faith of his people, disappointment only led it to higher forms. If what seemed to be the cause of God went down without His aid, then it did not follow that there is no cause of God to invite man's self-devotion, but only that man has not yet conceived it on the scale of its true grandeur. Therefore it is that in that same night in which he was betrayed Jesus instead of receding advanced. Instead of qualifying or explaining former promises, he made his very martyrdom subserve the end. He took bread as he was eating with his disciples, and when he had blessed he brake it and said, "This is my body that is given for you." And in like manner the cup, saying, "This is my blood that is shed for many, do this in remembrance of me." The people's faith that martyrdoms also advance the cause of God, a faith that flamed high in the heroic days of the Maccabees, had not been wholly stifled by legalism.3

The supreme problem in the history of our religion is how it could change so profoundly in the brief space that can be allowed between the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom by Jesus in Galilee, and the gospel that Paul referred to in First Corinthians as received by 3 Note the fact that the names of Jesus' predecessor, of his brothers, and of his closest disciples, are those of the Maccabean heroes, Judas, Simon, John. The resurrection hero of Maccabean times, Eleazar, the Arnold Winkelried and John Huss of Jewish Martyrology, becomes the "Lazarus" of the Gospels.

him in the beginning, the redemption faith he expressly says was common to all disciples. The one is a gospel of Jesus, and the other a gospel about Jesus. The one is concerned with the kingdom of God, the other with eternal life. The one is a religion of social salvation, the other a religion of personal salvation. The one seeks the reconciliation of Jehovah to a repentant people, the other proclaims atonement for the individual soul estranged from God. There are those who can see no inward development in the faith of Jesus himself, no deepening of his insight into the work he must do for the kingdom's sake, no transfiguration of his religious ideal in reaction against the stern reality of failure and martyrdom. Therefore they lay upon Paul all responsibility for the change. Arnold Meyer puts the case for these when he says in their name, "Paul has obscured the simple gospel of Jesus." He has "made another God of him who would bring us to God, and has set him between God and ourselves." He is "responsible for a tremendous, momentous, distorting transformation of a religion in its essence purely of the heart." 4 The marvel is that Peter and Paul, when they differed so widely and outspokenly on other things, should have worked as one in this. They seem to know no difference in respect to faith in the crucified and risen Lord as the common basis of their salvation.5 They have one Lord, of whose work of redemption they speak in terms of personal religion: "He loved me, and gave himself for me."

We need not minimize the expansive power of universalism in the soul of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, nor the significance of his struggle to emancipate the nascent faith from the swathing bands of Jewish particularism, when we maintain that the expansive 4 Jesus or Paul (Engl.), 1909, o. 3.

5 Cf. Gal. 2: 15-16; I Cor. 15: 3, 11.

urge was felt from within as well as from without, and that Jesus, as well as Paul, experienced enlargement in his vision of the purpose of God as regards the Gentiles. Neither need we minimize the effect of the religious atmosphere of the times on the soul of Paul, to say nothing of his forms of thought and expression, if we also maintain that Jesus could feel something of the same. Not indeed because of any Gentile origin or environment, but because all religion, that of his own people as well as the outside world, was driven by the yearning for personal redemption and fellowship with God. And this was not all. Jesus had his religious agony as well as Paul. His faith had to lift itself in the face of disaster to higher and surer ground. There fore it was not a mistake, but justice and truth, when not only Paul, but those who before him had come to the vision of the glorified Redeemer, refused after Calvary to go back to the mere gospel of Galilee, taking instead the new and larger gospel of Atonement in the blood of the Crucified, the gospel of self-dedication.

The Hegelian principle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, applied after the Tübingen method to the apostolic age as a conflict between particularism and universalism, is not enough to explain historical Christianity. There was an earlier impulse from within under the great law of action and reaction by which all moving bodies find their equilibrium. There was the backward swing of the pendulum removed from its first support till it found a new stability. We know how in the history of Israel's faith the forward sweep of great prophetic ideals met reaction, whether from mental and spiritual inertia, or the stern logic of events; but reaction only leads to resumption of the forward movement on a higher plane. We have seen how the career of Jesus, little as we can know of its detail, responds in the main to this same mode of apprehension.

His gospel, like Paul's, is a "gospel of reconciliation”; but it has progressive phases. Jesus begins by carrying the Baptist's work to its completion. He sets out to gather the lost sheep of Israel and by his message of repentance and faith to make ready for Jehovah a people prepared for Him. Certainly it was, as Meyer says, a "religion of the heart," a message of pure religion and undefiled before God the Father, the consummation of all that the law and the prophets had taught. The parable of the Prodigal Son embodies it. But it Idid not win Israel. Of all that work in Galilee there remains in Acts not one trace save the mention in a geographical formula that after the conversion of Paul "the Church throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria had rest." Driven out from Galilee Jesus took up a larger undertaking attended with far greater danger. And with it we see his message assuming a new form. It is now a message of individual life through death. It is addressed to a smaller group, and his own person becomes more central. Those that are faithful to the death will be confessed by him in the presence of his Father and the holy angels. Again there is disappointment, and still greater. His attempt at Jerusalem to win the nation to seek under his own leadership its historic ideal issued in disaster. But the movement is not arrested. Jesus seeks through his death to accomplish what he could not through his life. He becomes a leader for all who will follow through death itself into the very presence of the Father.

We have learned to isolate in our minds the gospel of Jesus from the gospel of Paul, the gospel of Jesus preached in Galilee of Israel's reconciliation with God by repentance and faith, to the realization of the kingdom and the gospel about Jesus preached from Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum, the gospel of reconciliation with God by the blood of his sacrifice, a gospel