His death, and yet He accepted it as God's cup. The demand of Jesus was therefore hard or easy, even in His own time, according as it was received. The difference between the religious and the irreligious man is ever this the one thinks more of God, the other of the world. Jesus called upon His disciples to think so greatly of God that the fate even of the smallest was embraced by His love and His forethought. Whether they understood that or not did not matter. Enough if they believed it, paradoxical as it seemed, and thus made their way as pilgrims through this world to the kingdom of God.

Such, then, was the will of God which Jesus preached—a life of righteousness in the three great realities. As often as He sent forth His glad invitation to enter the kingdom of heaven-whether He were speaking in the open air or in a crowded room -He brought these simple conditions home to His hearers. The right conduct of the individual in the present was of greater importance to Him than the joys of the future. He aroused the frivolous, softened the hard-hearted, and gave courage and comfort to the sorrowful. Just as He Himself insisted, with the greatest possible emphasis, on the simplest of duties, so He would allow no other standard to be set up either before God or man. On the judgment day God Himself will measure men by their self-control, their love and their trust in Him, and men too are to take these for their criteria. True, the heart is concealed from them-only God's eye can pierce as far as that—but they have the fullest right to demand deeds as the fruits of the heart. Goodness must come to the light. If it shuns the light it is non-existent.

Thus far we have come across no suggestion of Church, sacrament or dogma. The will of God, as it is fully and completely contained in the Sermon on the Mount, is no less entirely distinguished from the claims of the later Church than from the Jewish law, and it ought really to produce an impression of entire novelty amongst us at the present day. But towards the end of Jesus' activity on earth, there is a fresh addition the claim of the confession of adherence to Jesus. This was the starting-point of the later development, and so it appears at first as if Jesus Himself was the cause of that fateful dogmatic aftergrowth, and burdened the simple and eternal will of God with a minimum of dogma and ecclesiastical organization.

It is therefore very important to gain a clear idea of the particular kind of faith that was demanded, and of the circumstances under which Jesus called for it. Jesus wants no confession in the later ecclesiastical sense. He did not even insist upon the words "Thou art the Messiah or the Son of God," but simply on the recognition that God had sent Him, and that His words were God's words. "He that heareth you heareth Me, and he that heareth Me heareth Him that sent me." Hence the frequent connection, "I and My words," "I and the Gospel," and that just in the passages relating to the confession. This simple recognition that Jesus was sent by God, was really a matter of course for all that accepted His message, for the cause and the person were one. Jesus was His message. More than this He did not ask. He would have no faith in Himself that in anywise competed with the reverence to be felt for

God. God remains God and Jesus His messenger, through whom He could speak.

Now it is one of the grandest features in Jesus' character that He only came forward with this claim for confession after Cæsarea Philippi, i.e. only from the time when danger approached His disciples and Himself.

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He would have set no value upon a confession unattended by danger and suffering. Such would have come under the category of the mere lip worship Lord, Lord.' But now that danger approaches, confession becomes necessary, so that the cause should not perish together with the person. Jesus does not shrink from laying this readiness to suffer martyrdom upon each disciple as a positive duty. That is the original sense of the words 'self-denial' and carrying one's cross': no ascetic practices, but suffering in the following of Jesus. In fact to follow' Jesus means in the Gospels to suffer with and for Him. Jesus' prayer for those that confess His name shows us how important this new condition was felt to be. Martyrdom thereby acquires the power indirectly to atone for sin. But the first demands that Jesus makes still hold good. No different conception is attached to the doing of the will of God. It becomes more serious, that is all; it implies greater sacrifices, since he who sets out to do it, thereby enrols himself a member of the fellowship of those that suffer with Jesus. Surely this readiness to face death on the part of men who had cut themselves off from their families and had refused to obey their ecclesiastical superiors for Jesus' sake, was something entirely different from the zeal for

creeds of present-day comfortably - situated and illiberal theologians.

The demand that Jesus makes is something so completely simple and positive that it can be described in its entirety without any reference to the law, the Pharisees, or Jewish ethics. Jesus was not one of those who can criticize the work of others but produce nothing of their own. Nevertheless we shall realize His work better if we compare it with the above-mentioned tendencies and forces.

When we examine the relation of Jesus to the Jewish law, we shall do well to leave on one side the statement in the Sermon on the Mount: "I am not come to destroy but to fulfil," and simply to look at the facts. For that statement belongs in its present form to the age after St Paul, and is intended to formulate the result of the struggles of the apostolic age possibly already from an early catholic standpoint. One reason is sufficient to show that it cannot be ascribed to Jesus, for its form betrays a theologian for whom the question destruction or fulfilment of the law" implied a problem to be solved.

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For Jesus there was no such question, no question at all regarding the law in the strict sense of the word, for He was a layman and was in any case but moderately acquainted with the law,—had perchance never studied it at all. Hence He always believed Himself to be in agreement with the law. In the law stood the commandments to love God and one's neighbour; there stood the decalogue; there, too, stood the words that one should serve God alone. In

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the law, again, righteousness and love and truth were commanded. There was thus sufficient reason for Jesus to recognize in the law God's will. So He could see the way to everlasting life directly marked out in the law. Keep the commandments," He says in answer to the question as to how salvation is to be obtained. Thus Jesus found His own demands sanctioned by the sacred book. He even found support in the law against the decrees of the elders. In comparison with them it proved itself to be the will of God as yet not overlaid by human additions. Jesus spent the whole of His life in the faith that He had the law on His side and that He Himself was its true interpreter.

At times, it is true, He came to a certain extent into collision here and there with this or that passage in the law. He could not approve of the granting of the bill of divorcement, in spite of Moses, who authorised it. But here there was a simple way out of the difficulty. It was one law against the other— God in Paradise against Moses on Sinai. The reason of the contradiction was the consideration which Moses showed for the hard-heartedness of the people. If the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, "Ye' have heard that it hath been said to them of old time, but I say unto you," are to be ascribed to Jesus Himself and do not (which is just possible) owe their present form to the early Church, then He set himself still more frequently against the letter of the law, namely, whenever He showed that the inner disposition was what really mattered and so removed narrowness and imperfection. But all these were exceptions. For Jesus God's will never contradicted the law.