what He is. There is nothing our Lord so insists upon as the necessary relation of the Son of man to the things He suffered. It became God, we may say reverently that it was necessary for God, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the captain of their salvation through suffering.

And finally, and perhaps most strikingly of all, it is impossible for any criticism to sever our Lord's own conception of Himself as Son of man from the truth in His mind of His second advent, His perpetual coming in the world, and the great final coming to judge the world. It is in metaphysical and logical sequence with all that has gone before, that St. John should represent our Lord as describing the two great functions of the Son of man as giving life, or raising the dead, and executing judgment. He Himself discharges these two functions because He is Son of man. As the divine end of humanity, its truth and reality and therefore its predestination, it belonged to Him not only to have come but to be always coming. It was His right to foresee not only His true coming begin soon after His apparent departure, but His complete coming consummated in a great and universal final Advent. And in the very nature of it His coming is a perpetual and an everlasting act or process of divine judgment. He came not into the world to condemn the world, but to give life to the world. His proper function is lifegiving, a life-giving that is both resurrection and regeneration. But if God sent not His Son into the world to judge but only to save it, it cannot but be that His coming is in itself a judgment. He that believeth

on Him is not judged, but he that believeth not is judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment, that men loved the darkness rather than the light. We cannot get around that reasoning. In some form or other, in some terms or other, it will always be coming home to us. Stripped of all conventional or ecclesiastical language, Jesus Christ means to every human being the truth, the reality, the worth and the blessedness of himself. That is always with him or before him for acceptance or rejection, for realization or ruin. All human life is judgment, which is primarily only separation between those who are and those who are not, those who do and those who do not what it is appointed for all in life to be and to do. If to live, to be ourselves, to do our part, is approbation, justification, blessedness, what can failure to do these be but reprobation, condemnation, and wretchedness?

The truth that final judgment is to be by the Son of man carries this further thought. Nothing is said in the New Testament of a divine wrath against sinfulness as a universal fact or condition. Nothing is said of a final condemnation of human transgression of the divine law. It is recognized that by nature we cannot but be sinners. It is recognized that our highest devotion to and aspiration after the law of God is weak through our human flesh.

There is infinite pity and compassion, infinite mercy and forgiveness, for sinners. Our Lord, or St. Paul, or St. John after Him, have no condemnation for sin

ners. All their condemnation is for those who are not sinners, who do not know themselves to be such, who do not know in themselves what it is to be such, who will not to be, and will not be, saved from their sin.

V

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

ALTHOUGH both John the Baptist and Jesus came in succession preaching in identical terms the kingdom of God, yet they preached it and meant it in a very different spirit. So much so that John to the last found it hard to recognize what he had himself prepared for in his successor. When he sent from his prison to inquire of Jesus whether He were indeed he that should come, or were they to look for another, Jesus answered him with signs of the kingdom, but it is by no means certain that those signs would satisfy John. He was cast in a severer and more legal mould. Jesus, while taking occasion, on the departure of the messengers, to speak in the highest possible terms of John as a prophet and representative of the old dispensation, seems to recognize that he had not been born anew of the spirit, or born into the new spirit, and so after all his preparation for the kingdom of God had not truly seen or entered into the kingdom of God. He was the friend of the bridegroom, who had prepared the bride for the heavenly nuptials, but he did not witness the union. And so Jesus declares that he who within the kingdom of God was least was greater than John.

The kingdom of God must therefore be something

very definite and very positive. And yet from Jesus' own preaching of it we find it very difficult to define it positively. Perhaps in this respect too the kingdom of God was to come "without observation," not in word but in deed, to be seen and judged only in its fruits. We must therefore, as before, collect its meaning and frame our definition of it as best we may from the whole tenor of our Lord's teaching and action.

We might say in general that the kingdom of God is simply and literally what the words express, not anything of God but God Himself in humanity. But if we should agree upon this, we should at once disagree upon what this means. With many it would mean no more than the prevalence and influence within each man of his own subjective conception of God. With others who have more of the sense of God as One with whom we may hold objective relations, the kingdom of God will be an actual presence and operation of God in us, as we say, by His Spirit. And still others may go the whole length of holding the kingdom of God to be that permanent and eternal incarnation of God in humanity which we see not only realized in the individual person of Jesus Christ, but to be consummated in the universal humanity of which He is the head. Leaving then for the present so general a definition as that, let us examine the matter more in detail.

Is it possible that that which was John's stumblingblock in the ministry of Jesus was that it seemed to him to lack positiveness and decision; that there was not enough in it of the Law which he knew, and too much of the Gospel which he could not understand?