God.—Jesus took as the basis of His teaching the conception of God as it had been developed and moralized by the prophets from the 8th to the 6th centuries B.C. He was a God who is one, who has character and whose character is known—"a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth . . . and that will by no means clear the guilty," a God who for very love demanded goodness in His worshippers. Sin was not less truly sin because, as we have seen, Jesus em phasized those aspects of it which infringed the happiness of men rather than the honour of God. And the Divine reaction against it was not to be thought less stringent when Jesus completed the work of the prophets by concentrating men's thought on the Fatherhood of God and making that central to His interpretation of life. The idea of divine Fatherhood had not failed to make its appearance in the Jewish scriptures, canonical and uncanonical, as indeed it appears in many religions. But the allusions are rare, and most of these perfunctory. Jesus does not appear to have made the Fatherhood of God the subject of definite teaching. He did not argue about it ; He did not attempt to prove it ; but He recognized and employed the conception as no one had ever done before Him, as the dominating and normative aspect of God in His relation to men. On His lips the name ("the Father," "My Father," "your Father") displaces almost entirely every other name for God. And that it is no mere title appears from the two facts—first, that the gratuitous love and faithfulness which the name connotes represent precisely the aspect of the Divine charac ter which finds special emphasis and illustration in His teaching, and, secondly, it is the further and ultimately the complete realiza tion of Sonship to this Father in which His followers are invited to find the motive and goal of Christian conduct. For while Jesus assumes that God is the Father of all men, He does not assume that all men are His sons. The relationship is for men potential. It requires to be realized in thought and practice, recovered through "repentance." One aspect of the highest good was to "know the Father," and of this knowledge Jesus Himself was the indispensable organ and mediator. He and He alone had the power to communicate it, and it lay with Him to determine to whom the revelation should be made. The fourth Gospel crystallizes the whole situation when it reports Jesus as saying "He that hath seen me bath seen the Father." Jesus' Ethical Teaching.—The ethical ideals of Jesus differed radically from those of Moses in that they were not embodied in any code of commandments or prohibitions. He ought never to have been presented to the world as a lawgiver or a Paul, in fact, shows profound affinity with his Master when he so emphatically lays down the principle, "the written code killeth." Jesus promulgated only one law which was of universal applica tion, binding on all men in all circumstances—"thou shalt love." This was a demand for the complete reversal of the current of natural human interest and ambition. Hitherto directed to the self, its well-being, safety and happiness, it is now to be directed to the not-self. And the not-self is comprehensively analysed into two objects, God and our "neighbour," that is to say, the man who is thrown across our path. The sole universal demand or command of Jesus is that men shall care for God with all their heart and mind, and that they shall care for their "neighbour" as they care for themselves. Other utterances which take the form of precepts or commandments either convey in reality urgent advice ("Seek ye first the kingdom of God") or apply like "Sell that thou hast" to the case, any case, where earthly possessions are choking spiritual instincts ; or, like "Turn to him the other cheek also," are startlingly vivid illustrations of the kind of conduct which may be expected of one who truly cares for his neighbour as he does for himself. For such a one the motive of personal rancour or revenge has ceased to operate. He will no longer claim what is granted to him by the Mosaic legislation, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Once more Paul has seized the real meaning of this teaching, "Why do ye not rather put up with injury, why do ye not rather submit to being defrauded?" The ambition of Christ's followers in such circumstances is expressed in the saying "if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother." It follows also that it is mistaken and vain to look to the recorded teaching of Christ for rules to guide men in circumstances which He did not contemplate, and in par ticular, in respect of political and economic problems which were non-existent in His time. That is not to say that Jesus has no
guidance to give in these matters. He has left no written code, but those who have accepted His one commandment can have conscience and judgment so educated by His spirit that the appli cation of the law of love to any given circumstances is within reach of their discovery.
The Future.—Under the influence of the Apocalypses the Jewish religious hopes of the future had taken a largely conven tional form. The final scene in a series of dramatic pictures represented the catastrophic end of the present Age or World order. It was associated with a day of judgment when the righteous would be finally separated from the unrighteous, and was to be connected with or preceded by the coming of the Messianic Son of Man "with the clouds of heaven." Prior to that however, there was to be a time of terrible trial and tribula tion for God's people, the "woes" antecedent to the Messiah's coming. The reward of the righteous was conceived largely in terms of material prosperity and happiness, the punishment of the wicked in terms of physical suffering. It is exceedingly difficult to bring all the recorded utterances of Jesus on the subject into any single and coherent view. It is far from improbable that even bef ore the material for our Gospels was collected there were two schools of thought in the Church, the one predominantly inter ested in the catastrophic aspect of the Kingdom's coming, the other in the evolutionary and ethical aspect ; and that according to the prevailing interest the material received emphasis and ex pansion. Still, it is not possible to eliminate entirely either the catastrophic or the evolutionary form of expectation from the teaching of Jesus, and we must be prepared to recognize a para dox or seeming contradiction in the view which He held. But these points are to be noticed. Jesus no doubt began by sharing the conventional anticipations of His time. But up to a certain point in the unfolding picture (and that was the point reached in His experience) He was able to criticize these anticipations, and did so in the light of two convictions. The first was that the Kingdom was essentially and wholly spiritual ; this led Him to discard firmly and completely all forms of nationalistic and of eudaemonistic hope. The second, which would be a corollary from His Messianic consciousness, was that in a true sense the King dom had already arrived. The conditions and methods of its growth were evidently dictated by its spiritual character. Never theless, it was obviously incomplete, whether it were looked at extensively or intensively. And it was also part of its character that it comes from the other world. It is not the result of human activity, but a gift of God. It need not surprise us if, the ex perience of Jesus stopping where it did, He continued to expect a consummation which would be sudden and catastrophic and would include His own visible return. He described the coming of the Kingdom as impending, yet not immediate, and clothed the expectation of His own return in the traditional symbolism of the Danielic Son of Man.
His Self-consciousness.—How Jesus thought of Himself is a question of great difficulty and delicacy, and we must be prepared to find some promising lines of approach yielding disappointing results. That He ranked Himself as a prophet appears from a few passages such as "It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." He frequently referred to Himself as the Son of Man; but while this must be maintained in face of influential opinions to the contrary, the result for our purpose is less impor tant than we might expect, for the possible meanings of the phrase are as numerous as the sources from which it may possibly have been derived. They range from simple "man" through "man in his human weakness" and the representative "Man" to the supernatural man from heaven foreshadowed in Daniel. If we had to postulate one source and one meaning for the phrase as used by Jesus of Himself, it would probably be found in Psalm lxxx., where the poignant appeal to God for the redemption of Israel runs out on the hope of a "son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself." But possibly what commended the title to Jesus was just the manysidedness of its meaning; it set men questioning about Him and sent them to seek for an answer in the literature of Jewish hope.