Man seems feeble by comparison with worldly forces, and men seriously believe that He would be worsted if He lost the revenues of the Church, or if these engines of tyranny were not employed to make men think alike. But the Roman Empire perished, and the reign of Jesus survived. This gentle impalpable power of meekness, sympathy, love, is stronger than armies of State. The reign of the Son of Man will be the only government which ultimately survives.

For, to touch one more suggestion, the sovereign is the Son of Man coming out of heaven; that is to say that ideal man is in heaven, cherished there in prophetic assurance. The blessed region of the Unveiled Face, that shining hierarchy of

Thrones, dominations, virtues, princedoms, powers,

where the bright ranks of unfallen spirits lead up to the central Being of Light and Love unapproachable, is not complete without man. In the heart of God, man has a place of which he cannot be disseized. Out of heaven issues the Son of Man to fetch men thither. To that upper air we in a sense belong. His very name delivers a message to us: Dark, defiled, demon-haunted spirit, black with venom and despair, you, the worst of men, you are a man therefore the Son of Man does not despair of you. Rather, He has set His heart on saving you. has come to seek and to save that which is lost."

"

He

This is no wrathful prophet, no mouth of denunciation and' anathema. It is the Son of Man. All hope, all comfort, all divine redemption nestles in the word.

THE

THE FATHER

MATT. xi. 27

HE difference between Jesus and us-one might say, if we see what it implies, the whole difference is that He is sinless, and we are sinful. Humanum est errare. Sin enters so essentially into the very definition of man, that but for the one historical exception we should be inclined to say that wherever man is, sin is. In the abstract it does not seem beyond the range of fancy to conceive a sinless human being. But to give it concrete expression appears to be impossible. One cannot find details to embody the idea. There is in the pigments and the brush some element which vitiates the portrait. While, therefore, we may maintain as a theory that a man might be sinless, experience is too strong for us, and we are convinced that no one actually is.

But, as Ullmann showed, in that treatise of his which remains of permanent value, the sinlessness of Jesus is established in the region of history at once by the faithful photographic portrait presented in the Gospels, and by the self-consciousness of Jesus expressed or implied by all His recorded

words. Here then can be no question of invention, or legendary growth, or mythical construction, because the idea itself is not conceivable except as the reflection of a concrete fact. It is not an idea that one brings to the Gospels: rather it is an idea which comes for the first time out of the Gospels. It does not lie on the surface. But slowly the impression gains upon the student as he seriously and reflectively handles the material: This is a man without sin. It is misleading to quote texts. Nothing but a detailed examination, such as Ullmann has given, conveys the proof in its impressive completeness. It is but the epitome of all He did and said, when He exclaims This is my blood shed for the remission of sins, implying that sin of His own was not in His thought, but that He was free to undertake the redemption of the world from sin, unembarrassed by those hindrances which other men would find in their own sinfulness.

Now when we meet with this one life, which, contrary to all human experience, is free from sin, we are tempted to say, Surely He is not human. We take refuge in an indefinite term; we say He is superhuman. That, historically speaking, was the first thought of the Church. In Docetism and Apollinarianism the conviction found different expressions, that His human life was more or less illusory. The Logos took the place of the human soul; the flesh and blood were not realities, but phantasmal. Conscious of sin ingrained in us, we look with incredulity on a nature like our own which is yet unconscious of sin.

But the Church had firm ground to tread on when she met these heretical tendencies by the assertion of Christ's full humanity. The Gospel narratives put this point beyond question. Indeed,) the strongest argument against the view that the Gospels are a product of the second century lies in the fact that no writer of that period would have ventured to represent Jesus in so thoroughly human a way as the Evangelists represent Him in the Gospels. In these documents He is seen tempted like as we are, subject to all the infirmities of the flesh; not laying claim to omniscience, since He frankly says that He knows not the day or the hour of His return; nor yet to omnipotence, since He affirms that to sit on His right hand and His left is not His to give. Nay, startling as it sounds to a dogmatic orthodoxy, He declines even the title Good, which is incidentally addressed to Him, not, of course, that any could convince Him of sin, still less that He was conscious of it Himself, but because He was so thoroughly aware of His humanity, and of the divine nature which stood over against it, that He could not allow for Himself an appellation which is only appropriate to God. It would have been impossible for Him in any way to express more emphatically His true humanity.

And, indeed, as is coming to be more and more recognised, the dazzling effect produced upon us by the story of His life is not due to superhuman or miraculous elements but to the fact that as a man He lived; that, according to the words of an apostolic writer, "God made Him perfect through