which speak of Christ as judge is itself due to a similar misunderstanding. We find in the Gospels as they stand a distinct tendency to heighten apocalyptic, and there is nothing a priori unreasonable in the supposition that this tendency is to be traced further back. The record of Christ's teaching as we have it represents a stage in a process. The starting-point of the process will be the words as actually spoken, with the impression made at the moment on hearers capable of what we cannot but call stupid misunderstandings.' There is the possibility of further modification in the course of oral tradition, as the sayings are constantly repeated by catechists and others; there is influence of translation from Aramaic to Greek; there were early attempts to reduce the teaching to writing. All this comes before our Gospels as we have them to-day, and there is ample room in all this process for the growth of misunderstandings. If then our Lord had spoken of himself as Son of Man in the Old Testament sense and with special reference to Psalm viii ('all things to be put under his feet,' to be 'crowned with glory and worship'), it would only need a slight modification of the sayings to assimilate them to the Enoch passages which represent the Son of Man as the judge coming on the clouds to reward the righteous and destroy the ungodly. Dr. Gore thinks that this turn was given to the phrase by Christ Himself towards the end of His life; I venture to suggest that it was given shortly after the Resurrection in the earliest Christian tradition. This is not the place to enter into the details of the evidence, but reference may be made to the predictions of the Passion. These are nearly always connected specifically with the Son of Man, yet the climax is not that He shall return on the clouds of heaven, but that He shall rise again the third day.

But, while a good case may be made out for this position on the literary side, it will be agreed that the final verdict must be given on ethical and religious grounds by our sense of what is really in harmony with the central and undisputed teaching of Christ. Here there is a fundamental difference between two schools, which perhaps correspond

very roughly to an older and a younger generation, with opposing views of the nature and function of punishment, of force, and of anger. Some words written by Bishop Gore, commenting on a remark made by the present writer, have been widely quoted as significant of his attitude :

"I believe," writes one of our modernists, that we shall come to see that it is precisely those contemporary ideas of the wrath of God and His ultimate avenging activity as destroying Judge, which are the unauthentic elements in the teaching ascribed to Jesus." Language like this, I confess, makes me shiver. I feel sure in my conscience that if God is really as the prophets disclose Him, and sin is essentially what the Bible represents it as being-and the deepest spiritual experience of Christendom has given its assent to the representation—the wrath of God against sin and the awfulness of final judgment remain a quite essential and permanent element of "the truth as it is in Jesus." Thus I read our Lord's tremendous" dooms with awe and terror indeed, but not with any expectation that the enlightened conscience of men will ever have cause to wish them away. Without them the picture of Jesus would fail altogether to represent the whole truth about God.' 1

Similarly, he apparently accepts the presentation, given by the Book of Revelation, in which 'the tremendous God of Justice-God the almighty, and God the avengeroccupies the whole stage.' 2

'This Day, like all the preparatory and partial "days of judgment," will speak the divine doom on all corrupt civilizations and godless and inhuman forms of power and institutions of cruelty and lust, and on all rebels against God and right, only now not partially and locally, but universally, in the whole created world.' 3

Now there is no question of the Christian belief that God will one day come to His own, that sin and violence and lust will cease to be, that right will be seen to be right. And it is this hope which constitutes the spiritual truth lying behind the dramatic picture of the Second Advent

1 P. 185.

& P. 125.

P. 150.

But sin and violence and lust are not entities existing in themselves; they mean a state of will found in self-conscious beings. And the question is, what becomes of these beings? Can even God Himself really conquer sin in the last resort by any other method than by turning the sinner into something better? To destroy the sinner is not to solve the problem of sin: it is simply the short cut which is the confession of failure. If the rebel against God' is to be transformed into what God from the first meant him to be, a free spirit willingly co-operating with God, this can only be done by the attractive compulsion of love. Love may indeed as a means to this end use methods of discipline, though we note that an advance in civilization and morals always means an amelioration in these methods. But its purpose is always the conversion of the offender, not the putting him out of sight and mind, or his annihilation. What Christ did and taught and suffered means that God is love, and that God is prepared to shew Himself love and use the proper methods of love to the very end. Is it really consistent to believe that after an interval, long or short, the Father will abandon these methods and fall back on another kind of power, separating the rebellious ones of His family from the rest for eternal punishment or for destruction? This is the element in the conception of the Last Day which seems to many so out of harmony with the teaching of One who came to seek the lost until He find it; unless compelled by cogent evidence they refuse to believe that Christ taught it. They hold that sin is so tremendous and awful a fact that God cannot be content with anything short of its complete conquest, and that it can only be conquered by the conversion of the sinner. They hold also that the Cross reveals the secret which lies at the heart of reality, that there is no power but love, and that love is all-powerful to those who are willing to trust it to the end and to wait the ultimate issue.

The mind of man has always been ready to conceive of the ending of the conflict with evil by a sudden manifestation of divine power. The cry 'Lord, how long shall the ungodly, how long shall the unrighteous triumph.?' is

answered by the promise of their speedy destruction. It requires far more faith to believe that God shall one day be all in all because the unrighteous and ungodly shall themselves, under the compulsion of the divine love, come to hate iniquity and to love righteousness. The question 'what kind of God we believe in' is not an abstract question; the answer affects our whole attitude to the problems of life and society. The world has believed in a God compounded of love and of force, and has applied these principles to its own problems with a strong bias towards the latter. No one has felt more poignantly than Bishop Gore how unsatisfactory has been the result. The hope of the future lies in those who believe that love is the secret at the heart of the universe and are prepared to trust it to the uttermost. Why then should we shiver' at a criticism which believes that Christ realized this and seeks to shew that the comparatively small number of sayings which attribute to Him another point of view are really due to 'misunderstanding' ?

III

To pass to questions of Christology in general, the problem which faced the primitive Church is well stated by Bishop Gore:

'[Jesus] had for them "the values of God." Not indeed all the "values" of God, for they would not yet have thought of Him, as far as we can see, as the Creator or sustainer of the world. But with regard to all that concerned their spiritual relations to God, Jesus held towards them such a position as a mere man, however highly endowed, could not have held. How was this to be accounted for? It was an ambiguous moment. One can imagine an intelligent Greek, who knew the severity of the Jewish monotheism, and was accustomed to contrast it with the lax ascription of deity to eminent things or persons in the Hellenic or Roman world, watching the Christians in Jerusalem with interest, and taking note that these Jews were apparently abandoning what he had always regarded as their chief religious stronghold-their stubborn belief in one

only God and their stubborn refusal to worship any other being. What was to be the end of it? '1

Dr. Gore sketches the lines of development through the New Testament and the age of the Fathers with force and lucidity. He shews how the Church of the first five centuries solved its problem on certain presuppositions and in a certain way, and his object is to prove that both its way of approach and its conclusions are still the best for us to-day. Most students indeed will agree that, granting the presuppositions of the absolute gulf between divinity and humanity, the Church was right every time in its attitude towards successive heresies. The outcome was the Chalcedonian definition of two natures in one person, together with the later corollary of the two wills. Face to face with this conclusion, Dr. Gore himself is not altogether at ease. He is at pains to insist that the dogmatic decisions were primarily negative. It was not that definition of the faith was a thing good in itself, but that it was necessary to exclude certain misleading theories. The mistake has been that subsequently the love of intellectual definition for its own sake took possession to a dangerous extent of the Church both in East and West.' 2

'It [the Christian religion] ought always to have presented itself to mankind first of all as a way of life. While in fact, under the dominant influence of Greek intellectualism, the interest in the intellectual propositions and formulas became the foremost interest, and the Church presented itself to the world, not as a society called to live a life, but as a society maintaining a very elaborate system of doctrines, the propagation of which was its chief business. . . . The dogmatic decisions become premises to argue from, and Christ is represented not as He was but as, it was thought, He must have been. Thus, because it is laid down that there are to be recognized in Christ the two distinct natures, divine and human, what it is not unfair to call a fancy picture of Christ is drawn, as acting now in one nature and now in another, now as God and now as man, which does not really correspond to the picture in the Gospel.' 3

'We should deprecate the unguarded use of a phrase which

P. 79.

2 P. 218.

• Pp. 222 f.