God, loyalty, obedience, love, such as Jesus manifests in His fellowship with the Father; second, a relation with men, unselfish, affectionate, rich in benignant service, such as Jesus displays in all His earthly life. That is the kingdom of God.

Thus from the moment that Jesus began, not only, like John the Baptist, to preach, but in His own flawless person to manifest, this ideal relation of the human soul with God and man, the kingdom began to come. Immediately eager souls were smitten with the love of it, and sought to possess it as besiegers seek to force their way into a walled city.1 For to see this kingdom is to desire. Already, from the first day of His manifestation, there are several in it, and the least in it is at once greater than John the Baptist, though he was the greatest born merely of woman. The prophets were not free from turgid, earthly, and unregenerate ideas.. But every one as he enters the kingdom lays these aside, and lives only in the Spirit.2

But while the coming of the kingdom began at once with Jesus, the kingdom could only come by slow degrees, by more and more. How could it be otherwise than gradual when whosoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein. Not many, and they only by throes and travail, become as children. Slowly, but surely, the kingdom will come and the end will be reached. The seed sown in weakness and secresy will be raised in power. Out of the piled sheaves 2 Matt. xi. II.

1 Luke xvi. 16.

3 Mark x. 15; Luke xviii. 17.

of human history the children of the kingdom will be gathered, and they will inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world.1

How lovely is the coming of the kingdom, utterly unlike the coming of earthly sovereigns, and the establishment of thrones on a land made slippery with blood.

A farmer whose fields lay on the undulating slopes of the Cheviots, a man careless, earthbound, sordid, was out early one spring morning, when the ploughs were in the furrow. In a hollow of the hills he found himself alone. All the hedgerows were quick and green. All the birds were singing. Soft white clouds moved across the sky like a procession of dancing children. Suddenly a thought smote him: "Everything I see and hear is praising God-everything except me-I am not, I know not how." It was the seed of the kingdom that had fallen into his heart from heaven:

God taught his heart

To bear its part

And join the praise of Spring.

In such a way, silent, potent, unobserved, as the spring works in the bound bosom of the ground, comes the kingdom of God.

1 Matt. xxv. 34.

W

THE SON OF MAN

DAN. vii. 13, 14

WHEN one dwells upon the exquisitely simple and convincing idea which is expressed in the purified term, kingdom of heaven, one might be tempted for a moment to suppose that the truth stands out of itself, on its own footing, sufficient, irrespective of Him who announced it. One does not immediately notice that the same truth enunciated by the Baptist, or preached by St. Paul, would not have accomplished the object. There has always been a danger of forgetting that the all-important factor was the manifestation of the kingdom in a person who completely embodied it. The world has not wanted prophets and apostles who have asserted that all religion lies in doing the will of God,

In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.

But what up to the time of Jesus was wanting to the world was the exhibition of the will of God done, and the religious power which flows out of it.

More than once in the Christian centuries men have attempted to preach the kingdom of God which

Jesus preached, leaving out Jesus who preached it. This disastrous omission, however, can never be allowed by one who is determined to study and to understand the teaching of Jesus in its entirety. For in that teaching, next to the constant exposition of the kingdom of heaven nothing occupies a more constant and a more prominent place than the exposition of Himself. Jesus is occupied in offering and explaining His own person to mankind. This is done with such modesty and with such exquisite delicacy-self-assertion is so remote from His character and His method-that a careless reader of the first three, or, as they are called, the Synoptic Gospels, might easily overlook this most remarkable feature of His teaching.

And here let us observe how humorously perverse the human mind is in arguing against its chief good. The divinity of Jesus is assailed in the same breath on two self-contradictory pretexts: first, because in the Synoptic Gospels He does not assert His divinity", and second, because in the Fourth Gospel He is represented as asserting it. In the latter case it is said, "This man bears record of Himself, His record is not true." In the former case it is said, "He does not bear record of Himself; if He were divine He would have done so." Wonderful to state, the course which He actually pursued was precisely adapted to meet both these objections.

We will at present leave the Fourth Gospel out of account, for it obviously stands in a category apart. But in the Synoptic Gospels He adopts a mode of self-designation, or self-revelation, which, from its