ing. It did not merely break up here and there irrepressibly out of the depths of a rich and fundamentally sound nature, which was however unfortunately obsessed either habitually or at least towards the close of his days, by the final judgment and the last things. It was, on the contrary, the result of his powerful grasp of those same last things and indeed one with that. For the achievement of Jesus consisted just in this, that under the traditional dogmas of his people his spiritual heritage from the past, derived from the law and the prophets, which he could no more escape from than he could from the air he breathed, or from the language he learned from his mother -which he did not wish to escape from!-he did penetrate to the last things, the living things, the ultimate realities, the inner substance and soul, "the mighty God" there "that grows not old." Anyone can see at a glance with what power and lucidity he did so in his interpretation of their Law. He did the very same thing though not quite so obviously in his treatment of the promises. In both cases he had given him a great mass of very disparate material; in both cases the mighty alembic of his spirit extracted the gold. His Eschatology, his doctrine of the last things, however much the shapes in which it set itself for him were conditioned-and could not possibly help being so conditioned, if they were to be intelligible to the people he spoke to, or vital to his own mind-by the current thoughts of his time, and by the immediate task before him— this "doctrine of the last things" was really a doctrine of the last things, of the really last things, the things which alone and always matter. His Eschatology corresponded precisely with the universal morality to which he reduced the Jewish law, corresponded in point of clearness no less than in earnestness. It was in fact the plastic expression in an imagery unequalled both in power and in purity of the earnestness which was quite inseparable from that clearness, and really identical with it.

It would be surprising, indeed, were it not so. Heat and light go together. Smoke means loss of power. If a man is thoroughly in earnest he is surely more likely to be clear; and if his mind is clear in a world such as this is, with the immense issues that are always at stake in it, and the enormous demands that lie in the one simple word duty which none but a

fool can help but bow to, why then he cannot fail to be in earnest or to feel that he is always in the presence of the last things. To be in earnest is to have an instinctive power of repelling irrelevancies. It is the sure way of getting to the heart of the matter, to perceive unerringly what does and what does not signify. It is to It is to clear one's mind of "cant." It is to know what the prophets have always known, and what no one knew or made others know as Jesus did, the one great truth that counts. Here it is, well put in modern phrase:

"Life is mostly froth and bubble;
Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another's trouble,

Courage in your own."

Or in Paul's language which means exactly the same thing: "Now abideth Faith, Hope and Charity, these three. But the greatest of these is Charity."

The sad thing about the Pharisees of all times, in all departments of human activity every one of which is constantly liable to their pestilential invasion, the tragic comedy of these respectable half-awake conventional people who thought Jesus mad-that was what they meant by saying that he was possessed by the devil-is just this, that in spite of or rather because of their deadly solemnity they are not really or not sufficiently in earnest at all. They are not like a man who works. hard and is therefore necessarily hungry. Such a man must have bread. He soon finds that he cannot get on without it. And therefore he does not need to wait for a chemist's formula before he can tell the difference between the real thing and patent breakfast foods. He who hungers after righteousness has the same kind of instinctive lucidity, however poor a theologian he may be, however unsatisfactory his chemistry of religion and ethics. That is where his blessedness comes in. He is too busy a bird to take chaff for grain for long; he will surely wing his way to the realities which alone can feed his soul. But the Pharisee is not a workman; he is a dilettante, a hypocrite that is an actor, a tritagonist who takes the heavy tragedy mostly, and being an artist in illusions he can get from illusions all the nourishment he needs in order to produce them. Whereas to apply obversely the witty tale, it takes a real mon

goose to kill real snakes. It is hard to say whether the peculiar iridescence of this creature which lives in all of us more or less, comes most from the dark streak of partly honest inborn muddle-headedness improved by his own elaboration into a dullness quite beyond nature, that seems to form its ground, or from the gaudy yellow play of frivolity shooting across this from the lighter-coloured end of the spectrum. The fact is, both things go together. Stupidity and levity though they seem to be at opposite poles are a single undivided phenomenon, just as earnestness and charity, love and light, are really one thing. No wonder the Pharisees hated Jesus and thought him a dangerous lunatic who left them no choice but to exterminate him. No wonder that on his part he came to see more and more plainly that there was nothing for him to do but to fight them to the bitter end. No more sharp or deep antithesis was ever seen. Either they were mad or he was. Which was which? There can be no doubt at this time of day. They died in their beds most of them, full of years and honours. They had their reward. Having never lived at all, at last they reached their goal, the decent burial long past due. In their case truly the dead buried their dead. But their works followed them. The evil which they did lived after them. Not many years after they had been laid with the rich in their graves the poor people who had chosen them and the zealot Barabbas their true kinsman for leaders went down in the most miserable ruin which has ever wound up God's accounts with a great people. Jesus died on the Cross, died young, having lived every moment of his manhood to the very end like a man, with clear head, firm will and loving heart. He refused all narcotics to the last. He would not touch the sponge dipped mercifully in lethe. He chose the agony instead that left his mind unclouded. He died young but finished his work. No broken column was the fit symbol for his life but an eternal temple whole as the granite founded as the rock, and yet "as broad and general as the casing air" and as fluent and flexible as the forms of cloud and sky. And he lives now, the unquenchable impulse and still infinitely distant goal of all our higher life in head and heart.

"In heart! Perhaps yes," it will be said. "But such a general way of establishing the other part of the double headship claimed for him by St. Paul is mere assertion. Like him and

all the other apologists you would "make short work of turning us into Christians." We need a closer tackling of very plain and hard obstacles before we acknowledge his primacy-"the primacy of the practical reason"-so far as "the head" is concerned. The remainder of this paper must therefore be devoted to an endeavour towards working out the answer already indicated in more concrete detail. This question has been raised by history. It is not an idealistic gliding over the facts of history which can solve it, but only a closer and more critical examination of history itself. The wound inflicted by the spear of Achilles can be healed only by the self-same steel which caused it.

To begin with, there is a certain very obvious fact which most people, even the most negative critics of Christianity who ought to be least oppressed by it, are too apt to forget. Unconsciously inflenced by that wooden Docetism from which the Church has never yet been able to clear her skirts, they do not bear in mind that Jesus was not Man with a capital letter. He was not an abstraction, a wax-work ideal from the limbo where "entities and quiddities and ghosts of defunct bodies be." He was a man, a real man of flesh and blood, of very marked individual temperament and idiosyncrasy, living at an entirely unique moment in the course of our human story which is one coherent drama, not a congeries of episodes, and has a beginning, middle and end, living in a very well-marked and specific environment of time and place, and therefore with a very definite task before him. What was that task and how did he conceive it? What work did he find cut out for him at that point where he stood? What colour and quality of fruit was possible and called for on that twig of the great tree of life from which he hung? It seems to me to be quite possible to get a fairly well-certified picture, at least in outline, of this, and that such a picture will throw light on many things. If as some think it is not possible, there is obviously no use in troubling ourselves about Jesus. In that case he is a mere phantom, not an historical appearance at all. He becomes what no doubt may have its uses, but certainly has no great interest or authority, a catalogue of imaginary excellences like that moral monster Aristotle's High-minded man, the Stoic beau ideal of the Sage, Lavater's detestably judicious union of all the tem

peraments. Well, in the first place, we are too apt, I think, to forget a very important fact indeed about Jesus, namely, that up to the age of about thirty or so, that is to say all his life long except for perhaps a few months or at most a very few years, the task assigned to him was to follow the trade of a carpenter. He was happy in that task and did it well. How happy he

was in it, how little the elasticity of his spirit suffered from its toils and anxieties, what large leisure it left him, how much of a man and of a gentleman he contrived to be in the midst of it, what endless interest and delight he took in the living and penetrating study of his people's noble literature, and in contemplating the spectacle of nature and life that opened out before him from the coign of vantage he had in his carpenter's bench and his cottage home among the hills of Nazareth-all his whole subsequent teaching is there to show us, above all his parables, mirrors clear as his native lake of all the world around him.

"Love he had seen in huts where poor men lie,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

The silence that is in the starry sky

The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

How happy he was in that task we can partly guess too by the way in which it rent his life to leave it, by the enormity of the sacrifice which he felt that he had made himself in turning his back upon it and of the like sacrifice which he was compelled, well knowing what it meant, to ask others to make. "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." He was happy in it and did it well; we may be sure; so well that when a vastly larger and more laborious task was laid upon him by a compulsion which it would have been much worse than death to disobey, he proved himself entirely and increasingly equal to it from step to step as it expanded indefinitely before him, and met every one of its exigencies as it arose with an absolutely sovereign response of comprehension and power. The yokes and ploughs which Justin Martyr tells us he made were well made, his houses were built true upon the rock; had it not been so his Church would have been built upon the sand. He had been faithful in few things; he was made master of many things. And the obedience he learnt in the years of his humble service