66 hated Him without a cause, and determined to get rid of Him. "I adjure thee by the living God," said the high priest, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." What was the effect of this plain avowal of His Divinity and Messiahship? A charge of blasphemy and a sentence of death! The clear utterances of their prophets availed nothing against their malignity. Hateful prejudice had blinded their eyes. It was in the very nature of those predictions to defeat themselves-to prevent their own accomplishment; for the people thus forewarned, had they attended to the warning, would have shrunk back in horror at the bare possibility of such a deed of infamy. Remember, we are speaking now exclusively from the human side of the question, the side of man's freedom of action; the Divine side, the side of God's sovereignty, will come before us hereafter, and the reconciliation of both will be found no insuperable difficulty. It is here, therefore, that the question arises, How came the Jew to be ignorant of the many utterances of his prophets respecting the sufferings of the Messiah? We have said. that he gazed with fond imaginings on the sunlit mountain tops of prophetic scenery, and that he was divinely justified in so doing, but he failed to look at the valley of humiliation that lay at his feet; and for this omission, for which he has no justification, he is held up to all generations as the murderer of the King of Israel. He saw the glorious Prince, but he would not see the " man of sorrows; he gazed on the kingly side of the vision, but he averted his eye from the victim-Lamb led to the slaughter; he exulted in the magnificence of Israel's future in consequence of the peerless character of her coming Sovereign, but he shunned as incredible the picture of that Sovereign "despised and rejected of men," and "cut off out of the land of the living." These, then, are the leading facts of this unparalleled case, stated simply as facts, without reference to any theological theory. Do we blame the Jews for their neglect of so momentously important a part of the testimony of their inspired teachers? The great Master Himself did so. "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken" (Luke xxiv. 25). Had they believed all, they would have seen that depth of sorrow, crucifixion, and the grave were limned on the prophet's canvas, as well as a crown of glory, a sceptre, and an empire. Let the Master's rebuke stand. We need not add to it; for assuredly if we do the rebound will come upon us in full force. We Christians have for many centuries copied the men we blame, with this difference-that we have reversed their choice. Like them, we deserve the rebuke, "O senseless men, whose heart is slow in believing all that the prophets have said!" The royal rights of the Heir formed the theme of Jewish thought and speech to the exclusion of His foreshown sorrows and death. His sorrows and death, to the exclusion of His royal rights, form the subjects of the sermons of Christendom. To bring evidence in support of this statement would be absurd, for it is undeniably and universally true, and has been true ever since the Church left her first love and lost her yearning desire for the return of her Lord and His accession to the throne. With few exceptions the Church is dead to the royal rights of Jesus. The grave and the cross alone meet our eye. Christ" our life," Christ in resurrection, Christ coming to raise His sleeping saints, to change the living in the twinkling of an eye, and to make both immortal and perfect human beings, preparatory to the inauguration of His world-wide kingdom-who preaches these grand verities of the blessed revelation of the ever-blessed God? Here and there a man who understands the holy Book to mean just what it says; but the overwhelming majority stand aloof from the so-called contagion, and will not commit themselves to anything so unpopular as the regal rights of God's Anointed! Well! Is the King to be rejected a second time? It would seem so. Nay, it has been done already,-done for some fifteen centuries, at least, throughout the length and breadth of the cluster of nations called Christendom. "Jesus is not good enough for the world," said Judea; "therefore cast Him out." "The world is not good enough for Jesus," says Christendom ; "therefore keep Him out." And so the royal rights of the King are rejected by Christendom as they were by Judea. The Christian has united with the Jew in the protest against the reign of "this man." As the Jew explained away the prophetic descriptions of the Messiah's sufferings, or applied them to some other person, so the Christian has explained away the prophetic descriptions of Messiah's kingdom, or applied them to another world. The Jew thought he honoured his promised King by refusing to believe that he should be poor, and lowly, and despised; the Christian thinks he honours his Redeemer by refusing to believe that the "Son of man is coming in His glory" to rule over His own world. In the former case the Divine testimony was set aside to make room for a predilection; in the latter case it is set aside to make room for a false canon of interpretation. In both cases the word of God is made void by tradition; and in both the will of man blinds the eye to the meaning of inspiration. The eye of the Jew was dazzled with the glory of the King, so that he saw no Priest offering sacrifice; the eye of the Christian is fixed on Gethsemane, Calvary, and the Cross, so that he sees no victorious Prince ruling the nations, and receiving the homage of all mankind. A portion of the truth separated from the rest was the cause of Israel's blindness; a portion of the truth separated from the rest is the cause of the sleep of Christendom. Let Messiah come, said the Jews, and we shall expel the Romans and be masters of the world. Let Him stay where He is, say Christians, and we shall bring the world to His feet. "The unbelieving Jew," indeed! A thousand facts entitle Him to retort, "The unbelieving Christian!" for as the King was rejected by Judea, so the King is rejected by Christendom. It is in vain to tell us that Christians admit the regal rights of Jesus, by saying that He "reigns in their hearts," for that is not the question under review; and it is equally irrelevant to say that He reigns in heaven, for that is not the locality in which the prophets of both Testaments behold Him on His throne. Nor is it any nearer the mark to say that Christians are anxious to see Him in possession of His rights by their efforts to convert the world to His truth, because from our hands he could not accept the kingdom even if we had it to offer. Twice already has He had the offer of royalty and refused it, because it came not from the proper quarter. On one occasion a great multitude were so deeply impressed by His miracles of mercy that they exclaimed, "This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world." And the historian immediately adds, "When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force to make Him a king, He departed again into a mountain Himself alone" (John vi. 14, 15). He would not accept the throne of David, though He was Heir to it, through any popular movement of this kind. The other occasion was when the Devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and said that he would give them all to Him on the condition of doing him homage (Matt. iv. 8, 9); but though Jesus was truly Heir of all that appeared in that magnificent vision, He indignantly rejected the offer. Not from the people, not from Satan, will He receive His throne. And neither from the hands of the Church can He accept the regalia of His great empire. Indeed, so far is this from being possible, she is a constant dependent upon His grace, and can take no step in the right direction without His constant guidance. In her case boasting is most effectually excluded, and she will never call His attention to a restored world with the words, "See, I have recovered this for Thee." Only from the hands of the Father, who hath appointed unto Him a kingdom, will He receive that kingdom, and all its glory. It is clear, then, that neither the reign of Jesus over the hearts of His people, nor the fancy that heaven is the locality the prophets assign for His kingdom, nor the theory that the Church is bringing the world to His feet, meets the charge that the teaching of Christendom is a rejection of God's Anointed. In fact, the doctrine of the pre-millennial return of the Lord is not only discredited by the great majority; it is opposed, scorned, maligned, hated, laughed at, caricatured by Christian ministers, just as the regal rights of Jesus were opposed, scorned, maligned, hated, laughed at, caricatured by Jewish priests. I am not quite a stranger to the literature of this subject; and, were it not that I find the fact predicted in Scripture, I should be amazed at the extreme enmity with which it is regarded. So intense is the prejudice against it that the pulpit in assailing it forgets its dignity, and the religious press its courtesy. Men will not reason with it, and look at it as a possibility in the all-wise arrangements of the all-wise God, touching the future of humanity; but they denounce, scorn, mock, as if these were legitimate weapons of Christian logic, just as Herod and his soldiers set at nought and mocked our gracious Saviour. All this would be to me a matter of indifference, were it not that I consider the question at issue one of supreme and all-embracing importance. To this great world of sinning, suffering, and sorrowing human beings, it cannot be a question of slight moment whether its deliverance from the Devil and his angels is to be at the beginning or the end of ten centuries of time. And now, what has been the result of this rejection of Christ's royal rights by the Church, this departure from a cardinal article of the primitive faith? Alas! a terrible apostasy, a huge and domineering ecclesiastical corruption, which has crushed and polluted the nations by its sway. Had believers, during all the generations since God's Anointed was rejected by the Jews, cherished the blessed hope of His return in glory, the evil thing we call Popery would have been utterly impossible. The triple crown, symbolic of royal and Divine authority, would never have been placed upon the head of a sinful mortal; for such sovereignty belongs only to the Anointed of Jehovah. This blasphemous usurpation of His royal prerogatives could not have taken place had professing Christians kept "the faith once delivered to the saints," and looked for the coming of the Son of God from heaven. And the horrors of the Inquisition, which make the blood of every reader of ecclesiastical history curdle, would have been unknown; for in that case the servants would not have begun to smite each other, and to eat and drink with the drunken. In one word, the denial of this great truth opened the door for the entire series of Papal abominations; and Protestantism, in general, follows the lead of the triplecrowned imposture in this matter. Alas! the Reformation left untouched the very source of that fell disease which has made Christendom such a blot upon the face of the earth, that nothing now remains for it but those tremendous judgments which shall herald the glorious kingdom of the twice-rejected Sovereign of humanity, and glorious Son of God. EDITOR. WE STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF CHRIST. No. VIII. A Flash of Divinity. E have already said that the entire life of Christ was unique, and we return to emphasise this statement because we find that with that shallow insight which is often the accompaniment of depth of learning, some authors would identify Jesus in His long obscurity at Nazareth with any peasant boy or artisan then living in Galilee. He played their games, clubbed with them, wrought with them, giving no indications of His high origin and destiny. And there was nothing but peace and joy and righteousness in that village community, for His days "passed peacefully and happily away." Thus another contribution is made to the long list of authors who have conspired to fill the minds of thoughtless readers with totally false conceptions of the lot of the poor—a lot which is hypocritically commended for its freedom from the temptations and corruptions of wealth, and consistently praised at a distance, whence its enchantment is obvious, but those who laud it no doubt feel themselves unworthy to make it the subject of a close and experimental investigation. And the distance which separated Jesus from His companions mentally, was immense, which would alone be productive of painful isolation. We are expressly told that He "waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom." The examples of youthful precocity are numerous, but in the child. Jesus there was not exhibited the partial and abnormal development of children like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Pope, Bidder, and Sir Thomas Lawrence-neither a prodigy of early culture, such as John Stuart Mill-but an all-round comprehensive development of every high endowment, which in the lack of any parallel we may just indicate as of the Miltonian and Baconian order, only that in breadth and depth and intensity it was divinely greater. And all these faculties were budding and blooming in the mind of Jesus at the very time in life when curiosity is liveliest, when desire is keenest, when questionings are most impetuous, when the heart and reason of things are probed after, with the invariable sequel of a deposit of sadness within the bright young soul, and a high purpose begotten of attempting some alteration somewhere where so much is wrong. Moreover, no man has ever yet lived to make an epoch in the world, or even a considerable mark upon its history, upon whom the shadow of his destiny did not fall in youth. "All his life, the charm did talk About his path, and hover near In the case of Jesus there was the shadow of the cross, and the glitter of many crowns, and the vision of a worshipping and regenerated world. How grotesque it is to relegate the long thirty years which were substantially the human life of Christ to the category of ordinary peasant and artisan existence, as though to this wondrous and exquisite Being, who was the very flower of human perfection in all its capacities, there was given a narrow, dim-sighted, take-for-granted soul, suited to a cage, and without even a song to sing in it; as though we had here little more than an actual lamb, |
