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Gospel in Galilee. To realize this ideal He had come into the world. But this was also the Messianic ideal which occupied the minds of prophets and seers of old. What was the prophetic ideal of life, as we find it in Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the rest of Israel's great teachers? It was the ideal of humanity and love, over against a hard and cruel materialism that ruled the time. At the time when Hosea and Amos prophesied in Israel there was "great prosperity" in Samaria. The princes and rich nobles, with their fine ladies, extorted the sweat and blood of the poor for their own profit, and themselves fared sumptuously every day, while they carefully and scrupulously performed their religious rites, and offered their sacrifices out of their bloody gains. That was their ideal. And for that the prophets denounced against them the judgments of Jahveh; for though Jahveh is a God of mercy, yet mercy must be just. Hence the prophet exclaims: "Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan that are in the Mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say unto their lords, Bring and let us drink. The Lord hath sworn by His holiness that, lo, the day shall come upon you, that they shall take you away with hooks, and your residue with fish hooks." And again another: "Hear this, O ye that would swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail, saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat? making the ephah small and the shekel great, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit; that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes, and sell the refuse of the wheat. The Lord has sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works." But it is needless to multiply quotations. The careful reader of Scripture knows the story by heart. He knows what the spirit of prophecy is it is the spirit of humanity, of equity, of love, of mercy, of judgment and of truth. And this spirit is the witness of Jesus. But the Jews received not this witness. They had made for themselves another Messianic ideal. They expected their Messiah to be a great earthly king, after the manner of David or Solo

mon, who should exalt their nation, bring honor and distinction to their priests, and add to the wealth of their rich and worldly Sadducees; and Jesus they crucified. And what has the church done since? Has she always received the witness of Scripture to her Lord? Or has she not likewise failed to comprehend the Christian ideal, and so come short of the fullfillment of her mission among men? If the synagogue turned the king of hearts into a king of arms, the church has too often turned Him into a theory-a theory that was hard and cold, and had no moral power over the hearts of men. Abstract theories of two natures, theories of two wills, and the like metaphysical subtleties have engaged her attention to the neglect of His spirit. While He felt called to preach the Gospel to the poor and to lift up the down-trodden and oppressed, the preachers of "apostolic succession," alas, have too often felt themselves called to apologize for the grasping greed and oppressive cruelty of the rich and mighty. This is the Gospel which the church has too often preached; and the result is loss of influence and power.

But another fundamental trait in the prophetic ideal of the Messiah, is the picture of suffering and sacrifice. The suffering servant of the Lord, as he is portrayed in Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament, in accordance with the universal law of human history and of moral progress bearing the sins of His people, and by suffering and death winning for men the blessing of life and happiness-that is the image of the Christ in the Old Testament. And how perfect is the counterpart in the New? And wherever that image appears, in the writings of the Old Testament, in the works of modern literature, or in the actual scenes of life, there we have the witness of Christ. The early church saw this witness everywhere, not merely in scripture, but in the life and economy of nature as well. To the early Christian imagination nature was full of types or figures of the cross. There was in all this doubtless much that was fanciful; but it involved the correct feeling after all of the universal significance of vicarious sacrifice. Wherever we look, in the world of nature or of history, we find the law of vicarious sacrifice to be the law of

life and progress. And wherever there is self-sacrifice in behalf of others, as in the case of the mother giving birth to offspring, or of the warrior laying down his life on the field of battle for the benefit of his country, and home, and kindred, there we have a witness of Christ. And of this witness not only our sacred scriptures, but all moral history is full. But see now what the most pretentious and the most intolerant of our traditional theologies have made of all this. They have turned it into an incredible doctrine of substitution, imputation, and expiation, that is dishonoring to God, and repulsive to human reason, and have persecuted honest Christians for not accepting the wretched caricature of a sublime truth. For a sublime truth there is hidden under all the mass of error, namely, the truth that "he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." With His stripes we are healed: not puta. tively, not fictitiously, for in that there would be no redemption, but really and truly. Giving His life as a sacrifice of love for sinful men, He has brought the divine life and love into our life, so as to redeem us, in fact and not in fiction, from the law of sin and death.

But we cannot go further into details on this subject now. Enough has been said to enable us to see that Christ is in the Old Testament in very truth, and to give us a sufficiently clear idea of the manner in which He is there. He is there in the form of the moral ideal of humanity that breathes upon us from its pages. And He is there on every page. He is not there merely where theologians have discovered some "direct" or "indirect" prophecy or type of Him. In fact, as we have already seen, there is not much of that kind of prophecy or type; for generally, when these direct and indirect prophecies, which are supposed to yield such fine metaphysical systems of divinity, are closely examined in the light of modern biblical knowledge, they are found to vanish into thin air. But this is not true of the spirit of Jesus, which is in the whole of scripture-not merely where His name is found, but everywhere. Even in Even in passages of

the Old Testament which have not at all been labeled Messianic, the spirit of Jesus will be present for our instruction and Christiancation, if only we have not been educated out of the power of perceiving it. What Jesus says of men's personal relation to Him, is true here: " He that is not against us is for us." So whatsoever in nature, in history, and above all in scripture, is not contrary to Jesus, must be regarded as a witness; and whereever this witness is, there is Jesus Himself, and there is His spirit. Let it not be said that the "spirit of Christ," as here understood, is something too airy and subtle to be of any benefit for our spiritual life. It is something subtle and delicate, of course; but so is the whole matter of religion. Religion is something spiritual, something at any rate that cannot be touched with hands and feet, or screwed into stiff and unyielding theological formulas. Formulas may not be without their value; but one may have the formulas about Christ, and yet not have the spirit of Christ. And, on the other hand, it is quite possible that Christ may be preached where there are no changes wrung on the orthodox theory of His person a statement, however, which we would not have regarded as putting a low value upon orthodoxy, or correctness of Christian belief. Only to be able to discern the spirit of Christ in everything directly, is something greater than to be able to pronounce correct doctrinal propositions. Let this spirit be seized in the Old Testament, as well as in the New, and made the object of Christian preaching; and then those ancient Scriptures will again become instinct with life and power, as they were in the days of the apostles. And such result will not depend upon the question of the authorship of those ancient scriptures; nor will it depend upon the question of their historicity. The ideal embodied in a picture, which speaks to the sensibility of the beholder, does not depend upon the historical character of the picture at all. All that is required in order to this end is that it be true to nature. And so it will be with the scriptures of the Old Testament, with which we are now particularly concerned. This Christian character and influence will depend, not upon the veritable accuracy of all their statements

concerning miracles and other strange things, but upon the presence and power of the living ideal of Christ therein. And we believe that the present eager study of the Old Testament is more and more enforcing this truth. The criticism, even the higher criticism, of which many are now so much afraid, is not making faith in the Old Testament more difficult, but more easy. It is not an enemy to faith, but a friend, which Christians will no longer want to fight, when they have learned better to understand it. For while it has put an end to the notion of the Old Testament as a collection of oracles which the ordinary reason of men cannot comprehend, it has advanced the idea that it is a body of literature which in all its diversity of form and charac ter presents essentially one ideal and one spirit, namely, the ideal and spirit of Jesus Christ; and it is this ideal and this spirit that form the bond between the Old Testament and the New, and between the whole of sacred Scripture and the modern Christian mind. The Christian mind can consider any Scripture as sacred only because it finds therein something of the spirit of Christ.

THE NEED AND VALUE OF CHRISTOLOGY.

As may be inferred from the preceding article, we are entirely in sympathy with the position that theology, or religious philosophy, is not religion. As dogma is not gospel, so philosophical and theological knowledge is not piety or godliness. To confound these things can not be otherwise than disastrous to the spiritual interests of human souls. There may be true Christian religion and sound Christian faith without much theological knowledge. There are multitudes of Christians who could not recite a creed, nor repeat the articles of a confession. On the other hand, there may be much religious and theological knowledge, based merely on outward report and tradition, without much real religion in the soul. Men may be able to deal readily with cut-and-dried dogmatic conceptions, as children may deal with algebraic symbols, without having any real consciousness of what these conceptions stand for. Religion itself is a feeling of

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