tion. Jesus, Himself, the greatest, is the first to serve. Finally, to our enemies and to those that oppress us, we must show love, even so far as to pray for our enemies and to be the first to give way. There is something petty in bearing spite and ill-will. Let the disciple strive after God's magnanimity, the love that embraces bad as well as good.

In each one of these relations Jesus demands love as something rich, boundless, and extraordinary. All that is petty, timorous, and calculating is to be banished far away. Love is to be revealed as a sovereign power that no external law can resist. Yet He is not even aiming herein at any extraordinary actions or exceptional works, but just at that love which can be realized in the ordinary intercourse of every day. The sovereign power of love is a thing to be experienced in the simple everyday relations of

men.

This demand for an all-prevailing love appears also to form the basis of the need that we feel in modern times for the reform of society, but it is something entirely different. Jesus did nothing for society as a whole. He did not want to reform it. If we look into them closely, His demands are unpractical for any form of society. No social organization can ever dispense with law, without falling into a state of anarchy. Boundless generosity would imply the abolition of property; boundless forgiveness, the abolition of all punishment; boundless humility, the abolition of every idea of honour and of order. Even in the oldest Christian communities that set up some such ideal, the claims of reality soon made themselves felt again and the limits of the possible were restored

once more.

But Jesus entirely ignores the question whether His demands suit society or not. And that not merely because it was impossible for Him to think of any reform of society while the end of the world was so near at hand, but above all because it was the individual and his inner life that was His aim and object. Enmity, anger, hatred, jealousy, implacability, are ungodly and wicked. No one can appear before God with them. On the other hand, love is that which is truly Godlike. It ennobles and elevates one's own soul and helps one's brother to draw nearer to God. Love, that is, not for the sake of the consequent effects upon society, but because it alone deserves love.

This, too, is the reason why Jesus entirely neglects social ethics in His demand upon men. There is at first sight something paradoxical in the fact that the genius of love showed no interest in the outward forms of human society. The state is, of course, out of the question, being the rule of a foreign power. Jesus saw therein chiefly the love of rule and dominion on the part of the great of the earth. His disciples should look upon politics as a deterrent example. But even into the ethics of family life Jesus does not enter further than to proclaim the indissolubility of the marriage tie in opposition to the practice of divorce for frivolous reasons. In so doing He sets up an ideal for the individual without further troubling Himself how it can be maintained in this present evil world. He said nothing

He even

as to the relation of master and servant. showed no desire to remove poverty out of the world: "The poor ye have always with you." The

reform of the laws of the land is a matter of complete indifference to Him; in His parables He reckons with existent injustice as with something that must needs be in this world. There is a characteristic little story, too, of a man who asked Jesus to settle a dispute as to an inheritance and receives the answer, "Who made Me to be a judge over you?" At the present day every clergyman has to pay far more attention to such questions than Jesus ever did. But if we rightly look upon these matters as coming within the scope of Christian love, we are not for all that to distort the picture of Jesus into that of a social reformer. His work was to awaken the individual to love, and to make the individual realize his responsibility towards his brother. And thus Jesus did a work which, beyond all others, was for eternity, and still to-day He calls us back from the distracting maze of programmes and panaceas for the reform of the world to the reform of our own selves, which is the thing that is chiefly needed.

Lastly, we come to the question, What is Jesus' demand upon man as regards his duty towards God? There are exceedingly few sayings in the Gospels which refer to the direct relation of man to God. This observation leads us straight to the centre of the question. Jesus is naturally far removed from every kind of speculation as to God, simply because He is of a Semitic race. In spite of the apparent exception in the case of Spinoza, the men of that race have had to forego indulgence in the speculative flights of the imagination. Neither, however, is Jesus a mystic, nor does He claim of

anyone a mystic absorption in God. There is not even the slightest suggestion of such a thing. Each one of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer deals with a single concrete blessing. It never rises into that sphere where world and time and space are forgotten. Never in any one of His demands does Jesus leave the circle of the active daily life as it lies spread out before eternity. He demands no life with God alone, by the side of one's work and intercourse with one's neighbour. Hence it is that the gnostics already found nothing very congenial in the Gospel. Everything with God and under God, but nothing in God alone. And a proof of this is that even the kingdom of God, towards which the soul is to uplift itself in longing, is no mystic heaven, but something concrete, a social organization. The watchword God and the soul-the soul and its God-may apply to St Augustine; it does not apply to Jesus.

But the ordinary everyday life is to be lived under the influence of the principles of self-mastery and love with the constant upward look to God, in fear and in confidence, in faith and in longing. Jesus laid the very greatest emphasis on the fear of God, for our Father is the Lord of heaven and earth and the judge of every evil word, who can condemn body and soul to hell. In forbidding men to judge; in bidding them have no fear of men; in His parable of the talents, Jesus reveals a fear of God such as no Old Testament saint expressed more strongly. The fear of God is always the foundation on which those features of the Divine character, which inspire confidence and

trust as to a friend, are built up. Where there is no fear, there Jesus' faith in God exists not. And yet Jesus brought the love of God home to His disciples with the greatest heartiness and simplicity. He teaches them to pray to Him just as children to a father, bringing to Him definite wishes in simple and earnest tones, full of confidence, feeling sure that they will be heard. They are to cast all their cares upon Him and to trust Him that watches over them more than over the flowers of the field or the fowls of heaven. They are to believe Him—that is, they are to endure all difficulties as children under His protection, and that bravely. So shall they (even in the present, in the midst of trouble and distress) make trial of God's love, and soon He shall grant them the attainment of the object of their desires-the kingdom of God. Hoping and possessing are inseparably connected. The simple belief in Providence does not stand by itself alone, but draws its greatest strength from the sure expectation of the glorious future that awaits it.

However certain it is that the difficulty of the great demand which Jesus made was substantially lessened by the limitation of His outlook on the world, of which this earth and Israel were the centre, and by the boundless belief in the miraculous, it would still be a mistake to exaggerate the distance which separates Him from us. Even to His disciples it seemed very strange that Jesus was able to sleep in the midst of the storm. In fact, they and others with whom Jesus had to do, constantly reflect our own weak faith. When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane He knew full well that His enemies were plotting