that was the most important. The one thing which Paul puts in the forefront as of more significance than anything else was the resurrection. Jesus is the Messiah; he is alive this is the great informing, inspiring faith of the early Church.

And now we must just glance a moment at how many a parallel this belief has in the world. If you think it pertains simply to Jesus, you are mistaken. Thousands of years before Christ, in Egypt, the doctrine had grown up that Horus, the son of a god and a virgin, had lived until he was twenty-eight years of age, was put to death in a struggle with Typhon, the Devil, the Prince of Evil,— that he was raised again from the dead, and was made king of all the departed souls. This belief in the disappearance and return again of some hero who has come for the deliverance of man has not been confined to any age or to any nation. You find it in ancient India. To come to comparatively modern times, it was believed concerning Nero; it was believed concerning Charlemagne, concerning King Arthur, concerning Merlin, concerning the sun-god of the Aztecs of Mexico, and Hiawatha, the great hero of the northern tribes of Indians. It has been believed even in the most modern times concerning Napoleon I. There is a religious sect alive to-day who believe that Napoleon is not dead, that he has only disappeared in the Far East, and that by and by he is coming back to conquer and rule the earth again. This belief, then, I say, is wide-spread and common, and is simply an illustration of the saying of the poet, that

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

We cannot believe that our great hopes have died. They spring up again by the law of their very nature, for they are immortal; and we must look forward to something grander yet to be.

The whole New Testament, if you will read it in the light of what I have said, you will find all alive with the expectation of this coming. Paul teaches that Jesus is to come before those that were then living should die. And he comforts some of the friends of those who have died, by telling them they are not to be troubled, for, when Jesus comes, they will be raised again to life, and be permitted to share in the glory of his Messianic reign. And the last book of the New Testament- as it stands to-day, the Revelation —is all alive and on tiptoe with this expectation. Everywhere, all through, throbs the belief that Jesus is coming quickly. And you find, as you read the history of the canon of the New Testament, that, after their expectation had been disappointed and Jesus did not come, this book was discredited, and came very near being thrown out of the Bible. But, after a time, it was reinstated again. As late as the year 1000, all Europe was thrilled and convulsed with the expectation of the immediate coming of Jesus; and men went so far as to put away their property, and to do all sorts of things in the way of getting ready. And, from that day to this, the old belief occasionally in sublime or ridiculous fashionflames out again. You remember only two or three years ago there was a Convention of all the Evangelical Churches of America in New York, to take up and treat this subject; and leading men in all the churches expressed their belief that Jesus might be expected to return any day. And yet so vital is a baseless superstition when once it is in possession of the imaginations of men - Jesus himself, who ought to be regarded as authority on the subject, says that this coming is to be before the generation to which he was then speaking had passed away.

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These, then, are the facts, so far as we can find them, concerning the story of the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

This discussion does not touch the question of our immortality one way or the other. Our hope and our faith do not rest upon any of these things. All nations, even those who lived hundreds and thousands of years before Jesus was born, have believed in immortality. The belief has never been so vigorous and so real among any people under heaven as it was in ancient Egypt. It is a belief that springs out of the human heart; and I, for one, trust that it is the whisper of the eternal truth of God.

THE MESSIANIC IDEA.

ANY series of talks about Jesus, however brief or fragmentary, that should forget to treat the Messianic idea in its bearing upon his life and teaching, would be fatally defective. For, however strange the statement may seem to some of you that have not studied it and looked into its bearings, it is unquestionably true that but for the Messianic idea, wrought out and organized by the thought, the genius, and the energy of Paul, there would have been no historic, instituted Christianity in the world. This Messianic idea, then, is all-important; and yet the thought of its reality, of its significance, has almost faded out of the modern mind. Except on the part of a very few narrow-minded and bigoted among the Hebrews, the literal expectation of the fulfilment of their old national hope has long since passed away. Many of them mean by it only the general progress and development of mankind. Some of them hold that the Jewish race personified is God's Messiah to the world, holding up among the nations the conception of the unity and the moral perfection of God; and that this is the mission of their race. When we

come among Christians, and ask what they still believe about the Messiah, we find that there is, underneath the surface, a smouldering belief in the original New Testament idea; and that, if the oxygen of certain conditions of thought can only get access to it, this latent faith is ready to flame up in a

nineteenth century enthusiasm almost as vivid and real as that of the first. But, on the part of most Christians, the belief in any literal coming of Jesus, unless it be by and by, in some very indefinite future, at the end of the world, is entirely surrendered. And on the part of many of them, as it finds utterance in sermon, in song, in hymn, in poem, it has come to be transformed into the idea that, when each believer dies, Jesus, in some figurative way, comes to him then.

The second coming of Christ, then, has almost passed out of the thought of the modern world, in any real and literal sense; and yet once it was the most vital thing in Christianity. There are two main questions that we must now consider; and my purpose is simply to place these as clearly as I can before you, and answer them as concisely as possible.

It has been the standing charge of Christendom against the Jewish people that they wilfully and wickedly rejected. and cast out their own Messiah, the one that they had been for a long time expecting; and that, if they had been willing to have known the truth, they had light enough to teach them what they were doing. And this charge has grown to such stupendous and incomprehensible proportions, that there have been those among the leading thinkers of the world, and those by hundreds, who have even charged this Jewish race with the one grandest crime that the human mind can conceive,— of even putting to death God himself. Only now and then do men stop to see what the logic of their common belief is. But only a few years ago I was reading a sermon of Mr. Beecher's, in which he went this length of clearly and simply saying that, when the Jews put Jesus to death on the cross, God died. This, then, must be the first question for us to consider, as to whether Jesus did really fulfil the Messianic expectation of the Jews in any