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i THE
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THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TEACHING

BY

Pte NKY BARCLAY SWETE, D.D.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
HON. CANON OF ELY

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 TO THE MEMORY OF
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School of Theology
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 FOREWORD

THIS little book has been written as a sequel to

Appearances of our Lord after the Passion. Like
its predecessor, it has grown out of a course of
lectures given to candidates for Holy Orders. My
hope is that in its present form it may be of some
service to the younger clergy, and also to the
increasing class of Church workers among the laity.
The subject is one which, I am persuaded, ought
to be kept prominently before the minds of those
who take part in Christian work of any kind, and
indeed of all whose ambition it is to live their lives
in Christ.
The Resurrection of our Lord would have. been
an event of comparatively small significance from
the standpoint of the religious life, if it had been |
no more than a return to life on earth for a shorter
or a longer space of time. Its supreme importance
lies in this, that it was the first stage of His with-
 viii FOREWORD

drawal into the spiritual order, and His preparation

for it. From the moment that He rose He could
say, [ ascend; the upward journey had begun.
Easter is preliminary to Ascension-tide, and
Ascension-tide opens before our faith the full glory
of the life of Christ with God. With that life in
heaven the life of the Church on earth is inseparably
bound up. I shall be thankful if these pages are
permitted to set forward in any measure the revival
of the great Ascension festival in parishes where the
Church bell is silent or awakens a feeble response on
the day when our Lord entered into His glory.

CAMBRIDGE,
Advent, 1910.
 CONTENTS
PAGE

INTRODUCTION” - - = = = : = = xi
CHAPTER
I. THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION - - - I

MEMPRRTKING =) e ew
Dita) Ht PRIEST - - - - - Z = 34

IV. THE PROPHET - - - = 5 2 52

V. THE HEAD - oe e Z A AP 68

VI. THE MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, AND ADVOCATE 87

VII. THE FORERUNNER - - - - - - IO!

VIII. THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST - - - 116 |

IX. THE COMING ONE - - . - - = 8

X. THE JUDGE - - - - - - - I40

POSTSCRIPT = - - c = - - Se Ly

INDEX - - - - = - - - - 167
 INTRODUCTION

1. The human life of the Incarnate Son, between the

Nativity and the Return, divides itself into two unequal
and dissimilar parts. The first is the short period during
which the Lord lived on earth in the flesh; the second,
the heavenly life, which according to our measure of time
already approaches nineteen centuries. In the first He is
the Christ of human history; in the second, the Christ of
spiritual experience. The dividing line is the Ascension.
At the moment when the Lord ascended, there lay behind
Him His completed earthly life—the Infancy and the Child-
hood, the Manhood and the Ministry, the Crucifixion and the
Resurrection ; while before Him there opened the whole
length of the life in heaven, which to His humanity was a
new experience, bringing new fields of thought and work
and an outlook on the still more splendid future reserved
for Him in the ages to come.
2. Of this greater and higher life of our Lord the many
“Lives of Jesus’ which are current do not treat; they stop
short either at the Ascension, or before it—at the Death of
the Cross. No blame can attach to their writers for limiting
themselves to the earthly life, unless they assume that
materials do not exist for a study of the life beyond. The
Gospels draw the same limit, not assuredly from an agnostic
reserve, but because for obvious reasons their scope does not
nat THE ASCENDED CHRIST
admit of facts which lie outside the field of human observa-
tion. But the Gospels are not our only authorities for the
Life of our Lord, if we use the phrase in the larger sense as
including the life which the Church believes Him to be
now living with God.
3. Circumstances have led our age to concentrate its
studies upon the earthly life of Jesus Christ, and a great revival
of interest in the records of that life is among the best signs
of the time. But we pay too great a price for the enthusiasm
which has been awakened by the reconstructed portrait of
the historical Jesus, if our attention is diverted by it from the
glorified Christ to whom witness is borne in the later books
of the New Testament. Since the Day of Pentecost the
Church has seen and heard greater things than even those
which are related in the Synoptic Gospels, as the Fourth
Gospel, with its fuller insight into the mystery of Christ,
plainly hints! If kings and righteous men desired to see
the things which the Twelve saw and to hear what they
heard, yet the experiences of the ministry have been surpassed
by the revelations of the Spirit. ven though we have known
Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him no more.*
S. Paul was in no danger of undervaluing the importance
of the historical basis of Christianity ; the gospel which he
preached at Corinth was the gospel of the Cross and the
Resurrection. But the Christ he knew was not a man
whose life was ended by the Cross and whose claim to
pre-eminence rested only on a unique life and the ineffaceable
marks of his influence on human thought and conduct.
The Christ of the Epistles is a living Person who exists
in the fulness of human nature behind the veil of sense,
and is actively engaged in the shaping of events and the
1Cf. Jo. i. 50f., xiv. 12, xvi. 14, 25 f. 22 Cor. v. 16,
5) Cor <va Litt,
 INTRODUCTION xiii
salvation ofmen. Thehistorical Christ has from the Apostle’s
point of view passed into the mystical, and the works and
teaching of the ministry are surpassed, almost eclipsed, by the
wonders of the life with God. If this thought lies in the
background of the Apostle’s difficult saying, it represents a
position which to a less balanced mind might easily become
hazardous. But it calls attention sharply and usefully to
the supreme importance of the glorified life of our Lord,
which an exclusive study of the earthly life may tempt us to
neglect.
4. The purpose of these pages is to follow our Lord so
far as we may into this higher life of the Spirit. In this
attempt there will be no need to resort to speculation. If
the Gospels fail us here, their place is taken by the Acts,
the Epistles, and the Apocalypse, which contain the testi-
mony of the Spirit of Jesus to the Ascended Christ. The
Spirit of Jesus is the Spirit of Truth, and we are assured
that in the Apostolic writings we are face to face with
realities. What we are taught in the Epistles as to the
glories of our Lord’s life in heaven is no less matter of fact
than the most certain features of the tradition preserved
by the Synoptics. But the former are facts of another
order, of which men on earth have no experience ; and they
could only be conveyed to the minds of the writers or made
intelligible to their readers through symbolical language.
Symbolism has been well defined as ‘indirect description,’
‘description or expression by a system of equivalents’;* and
the symbolism of Scripture conveys to us the transcendent
in terms of the phenomenal, and the higher things of the
Spirit in terms of our own spiritual experience. For the
time the symbol is our nearest approach to the reality,
when heavenly things are presented to our minds ; however
1Sanday, Life of Christ in Recent Research, p. 3.
xiv THE ASCENDED CHRIST

much we may endeavour to ‘dematerialize’ symbols and

get to the naked facts which lie behind them, as, for
instance, by substituting modern philosophical terms for the
Biblical words, we do little more than substitute one set of
symbols for another; the ultimate truths remain impene-
trable while we are here.!_ With symbols, then, we must be
content in this high region of Christian faith. Yet the
symbolical need not be fanciful, and in the teaching of the
Spirit we are assured that it is not so; here it presents to us
certainties as substantial as the physical or historical facts
which can be described directly in the terms of common
experience. The reader of these pages, then, is asked not to
suffer the symbolism in which the New Testament doctrine
of the ascended life of our Lord is draped to interfere with
his sense of the actuality of the things that it represents.
5. Though the heavenly life of our Lord does not admit
of historical treatment or of being presented to our thought
in any but an indirect or symbolical method, our materials
for forming a conception of its scope and purpose are
abundant, and indeed not less ample than those which we
possess for the study of His life on earth. Few persons who
examine the second half of the New Testamént with the
purpose of collecting all that it teaches upon this subject
will rise from the task without surprise at the wealth and
variety of these revelations. It is certainly not through any
want of Apostolic guidance if the glorified life of our Lord
fills a relatively small place in modern preaching and thought.
The Creeds of Christendom, it may be said, do not
encourage thought in this direction. They are content to
confess that Jesus Christ has ascended to heaven and is on
the right hand of God; of the life He lives there or the
work with which He is occupied they have nothing to say.
1See G. Tyrrell, Christeantty at the Cross-roads, p. 103.
 INTRODUCTION ~
But the Creeds are equally silent as to the contents of
His earthly life, going straight from xatus to passus, from
évavOpwrjcavta to otavpwHévra, without a hint of the
momentous events that intervened.! In both cases the omis-
sion is doubtless deliberate. The Creeds are not summaries
of Christian doctrine, but bare cvedenda, consisting of the
fundamental facts of Christianity; the filling up of the
framework is left to the judgement of the Christian teacher,
or to the study and reflexion of the individual believer.
6. The doctrine of the Ascended Life is among the spiritual
things of the Christian Faith which cannot be received
or assimilated unless the Spirit Himself interprets them to
the inner man. Where there is no interior sympathy with the
spiritual order, this whole side of Apostolic teaching, as
S. Paul frankly confesses, cannot but incur the charge of
‘foolishness,’2 even though it may be received in respectful
silence or find a conventional recognition. A study of the
Heavenly Life calls for some uplifting of the heart to the
Ascended Christ, some union with Him through the indwell-
ing of His Spirit, or at the least some seeking of the things
that are above, where He is seated on the right hand of God.
In proportion as we thus ascend in heart and mind the
Exalted Manhood becomes to us a present reality, and its
great functions and energies stand out before our eyes with
ever-growing distinctness, till the whole glorious vision takes
its place among the deepest convictions and the most
powerful motives of our lives.
1The words kal év dvOpwmos modreveduevov, which Eusebius of
Caesarea (Socr. H.£, i. 8), quotes in his appeal to the ancient creed of
his own Church, stand alone as a reference to the Lord’s life in
Palestine. See Dean Stanley’s remark upon them in astern Church,
Pp. 157-
alr Cor, i; 14:
© KAOHMEHOC EN AE=IS TOY TraTpdc,
€AEHCON HMAC.
 i
niHE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION.

Two steps brought the risen Lord to the full glory

of His life with God. He was received up into
heaven, and there He sat down at the right hand of
God."
The two great creeds of the Western Church
confess the Ascension and Session in almost identi-
cal words: ‘He ascended into heaven, and sitteth
on the right hand of [God] the Father [Almighty].’?
Their witness goes further back than the existing
forms, for the Apostles’ Creed rests on the Roman
baptismal creed of the second century, and the
‘Nicene, ze. the Constantinopolitan, Creed reflects
the early creed of the Church of Jerusalem. Belief
in the Ascension and Session was universal in the
early Church, both in East and West. ‘The
Church,’ writes Irenaeus,® ‘though scattered through-
1¢Mc.’ xvi. 19.
- 2¢Ascendit ad caelos, sedit ad dexteram dei ‘patris omnipotentis.’
*AvehObvra els Tods ovpavods, Kal Kabefbuevov éx dekav Tod maTpés.
2 C. haer. 1. 9.5.
AaCe A
2 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

out the whole world to the ends of the earth, has

received from the Apostles and their disciples her
faith...in One Christ Jesus...and His assumption
in the flesh! into the heavens. ‘The rule of faith,’
says Tertullian,” ‘teaches us to believe that... Jesus
Christ... was carried up into heaven and sat at the
right hand of the Father.’ Sometimes the Ascension
only is mentioned, sometimes the Session; but
either suggests the other, and the great majority
of ancient creed-forms expressly acknowledge both.
The same belief meets us when we go back to the
writings of the Apostolic age. The Synoptic Gospels
indeed, if we except the appendix to S. Mark, are
nearly silent® on the subject, probably because, as
Dr. Hort pointed out, ‘the Ascension did not lie
within the proper scope of the Gospels...its true
place was at the head of the Acts of the Apostles,
as the preparation for the Day of Pentecost, and
thus the beginning of the history of the Church,’
There, accordingly, we find a full account of the
event; the writer of Acts, whose ‘former treatise’
had recorded the acts and teaching of the Lord
until the dayin which he was received up (aveAnupOn),
relates how after a last instruction to the Eleven,
1rhy évoapkov avddnyuw.
2 De praescr. 13: ‘In caelos ereptum sedisse ad dexteram patris.’
3 Le. xxiv. 51, if we accept the Westcott-Hort theory of ‘ Western
non-interpolations,’ has only diéo7n dx’ abr&v (Notes on Select Readings,
P: 73)
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 3

as they were looking he was taken up (énnp0n),

and a cloud received him out of their sight. Ve
beheld him going (mopevopuevov) into heaven, is the inter-
pretation put upon His ascent by a vision of angels
which presently appeared.! Under the teaching of
the Spirit the event assumed a further significance.
Jesus had been dy the right hand of God exalted;
the Psalm had been fulfilled which said, Szt thou
on my right hand. The heavens must receive Him
until the times of restoration of all things? In the
heavens, accordingly, Stephen saw Him standing on
the right hand of God; out of heaven the light of
the persecuted Lord fell on the persecutor Saul.’
The Epistles assume the Ascension as they assume
the Resurrection; facts so familiar to the new
Churches are not often expressly rehearsed in the
brief letters which deal with the many pressing
problems of the first age. Yet there is ample evi-
dence that the Ascension and Session were not
overlooked by any of the great writers of the
second half of the New Testament. /esus Chrzst,
S. Peter writes, zs on the right hand of God,
having gone into heaven It ts Christ Jesus, says
S. Paul, that died, yea rather, that was raised from the
dead ; who ts at the right hand of God. God raised
him from the dead, and made him to sit at his right
1 Acts i. 2, 9, II. 2 Acts ii. 33f., iii. 21.
SActsivil. 55'f., 1X- 3, XXii, 0, XXvi- 12. 47 Peter iii. 22,
4 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

hand in the heavenlies (év Tois émovpaviows). He that

descended ts the same also that ascended far above
all the heavens. God highly exalted him. He was
received up in glory. The Epistle to the Hebrews,
which is occupied with the heavenly life of the Lord,
rests on the historical fact of the Ascension, which
it enunciates many times.” The life and work of
the Ascended Christ are its chief themes. He
is a great high priest who has passed through
the heavens. We have such a high priest, who
sat down on the right hand of the throne of the
Majesty in the heavens. He entered in once for all
into the holy place...into heaven itself, now to appear
before the face of God for us. He sat down on the
right hand of God. The Johannine writings are not
less explicit. Though the fourth Gospel does not
embrace the Ascension, it presupposes the fact again
and again:* What if ye should behold the Son
of Man ascending where he was before? TI go unto
him that sent me; I go to the Father and ye behold me
no more. Iamno more in the world...I come to thee.
I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my
God and your God. The first Epistle echoes these
sayings of the Gospel when it says that we have an
Advocate with the Father (xpos tov marépa);* and
1Rom. viii. 34; Eph. i. 20, iv. 10; Phil. ii. 9 ; 1 Tim. iii. 6,
2Heb. iv. 14, viii. I, ix. 12, 24, x. 12, xil. 2.
3Jo. vi. 62, xvi. 5, 10, xvii. 11, xx. 17.
oor [Omen
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 5

the Apocalypse, like the Epistle to the Hebrews,

owes its motzf to the Ascension and Session, which
are presupposed in every page of the book.

What conception of these events may be gained

from references made to them in the New Testa-
ment ?.
1. Zhe Ascension. From one point of view the
Ascension was the last parting of the risen Lord
from His disciples. He parted from them when He
ascended, as He had parted from them at the end
of each of His appearances after the Resurrection.
But whereas the previous partings had been instan-
taneous, through the sudden vanishing of the human
form, this was as they were looking;’ the process could
be observed up to a certain point; and whereas
the other separations were for a few hours or days,
this was final and beyond recall. It was followed by
no fresh appearances, or by none of the same kind—
none which placed the Lord evidently in their midst,
or brought them into such contact with Him that He
could be handled by them, and on one occasion even
ate and drank in their presence? The Ascension
put an end to all intercourse of this nature: it was a
departing from the world, a withdrawal once for all

1Lc. xxiv. 31 ddpavros éyévero am’ abrav.

2Actsi. Of. Brerdvrwv avirav... ws arevifovTes joay.
3 Lec. xxiv. 42, Acts x. 41.
6 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

from the whole order under which men live on this

side of the grave. It completed the alienation from
the things of sense which the Resurrection began.’
But the manner of this final departure—the lifting
up of the human form from the earth, and the
apparent passing upwards of the cloud which received
it out of sight—suggested a further aspect of the
event. Jesus left the world because the time had
come for Him to go to the Father. His ‘departure
was a ‘going up, as His entrance into the world had
been a ‘ coming down.’ - He who had descended now
ascended where He was before.”
‘Ascended’ in our English creed has come from
the ascendit of the Latin, apparently by way of
the Prymer of 1538 and the Mecessary Doctrine of
1543.2 In the English New Testament ‘ascend’
seems to appear first in Tyndale’s version of 1534
as the equivalent of dvaBaiver. But dvaBaivew,
ascendere, is not the only word used by the New
Testament writers in connexion with the Ascension
of our Lord; another and slightly more frequent
term is avadapBaverOa, adsumi The ‘going up’
1Cf. Jo. xx. 17 ow dvaBéBnxa mpds Tov warépa.
2 Jo. vi. 41, 51 6 xaraBds. Jb. 62. Cf. [Link]. 10 6 xaraBas abrés
éoTw kal 6 dvaBds.
3 Karlier English versions of the Credo had for ascendit, astah or steih
(stezch, stiged, steig, steyed) ; see Heurtley, Creeds ofthe Western Church,
pp. 87-99.
‘’AvaBalvew occurs in this reference, Jo. vi. 62, xx. 17 ; Eph. iv. 8f.;
dvahauBdverOa, ‘Mc.’ xvi. 19; Actsi. 2, 11, 22; 1 Tim. iii. 16.
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 7
of the Son of Man into heaven was also His ‘being
taken up, the Ascension was an Assumption; and the
words answer to two complementary aspects of the
event. The one represents Jesus Christ as entering
the Presence of the Father of His own will and right ;
the other lays the emphasis on the Father’s act by
which He was exalted as the reward of His obedience
unto death. Both words had been prepared for the
use of the Gospel by their employment in the Greek
Old Testament. Who shall ascend (LXX avaPijoerTat)
anto the hill of the Lord? the Psalmist asks, and answers
himself, He that hath clean hands and a pure heart,
Elijah, we read, was taken up? (LXX avedjuOn)
in a whirlwind into heaven® Both passages are
appropriately used by the Church on Ascension Day ;
our Lord is at once the Sinless Man who was able to
ascend into the celestial city and stand in the holy
place, and the great Prophet of Israel who, His work
accomplished, was taken up to His place on high.
The Lord ‘went up, or ‘was taken up, into
heaven. Both our creeds in the original have the
plural ‘into the heavens.’* It is amply justified
by S. Paul’s words, He that ascended far above all

1Ps, xxiv. (xxiii.) 3. 22 Kings ii, 11.

3 The Heb. has simply bye, “went up;’ but cf. ii. 1 nibyna (LXX év
Te avdyew). In reference to Enoch the Lxx (Gen. v. 24) uses seré-
Onxev (mp2) ; cf. Heb. xi. 5.

4¢Tn caelos,’ els rovs ovpavovs.

8 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

the heavens, and by those of the writer of Hebrews:

passed through the heavens,... made higher than the
heavens? On the other hand, in our only full
account of the Ascension Jesus Christ is described
simply as going into heaven (eis Tov ovpavov).3 The
difference is perhaps not without significance ; as seen
by the spectators, the ascent was bounded by the sky,
but viewed in the light of the Spirit, it carried the
Lord beyond all the bounds of space. A conception
which limits His ascent to any region however remote
from the earth, or locates His ascended life in any
part of the material universe, falls vastly short of
the primitive belief; no third heaven, no seventh
heaven of Jewish speculation, no central sun of later
conjecture, meets the requirements of an exaltation
to the Throne of God. As the Incarnation was not
a physical descent, so the return of the Incarnate to
the Father was not a physical elevation ;* the
momentary lifting up of the risen Christ in the sight
of the Eleven can only be regarded as a symbol of
the lifting up of our humanity in Him to that spiritual
order which is as far above our present life as the
visible heaven is above the earth. It is true that our
Lord returned to the Father not as he came, but for

1Eph. iv. 10, 2 Heb. iv. 14, vii. 26. 3 Acts i, II.
4¢We are not to think of this Ascension of Christ as of a change of
position... it is rather a change of the mode of existence ’ (Westcott,
Historic Faith, p. 80).
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION g

ever united with human nature, the Word made Flesh.

But the Resurrection had placed the Flesh of the
Word so far under the control of the Spirit that His
body, as the Gospels shew, was, even before, the
Ascension, independent, when He so willed, of the
laws that govern matter.! In the glorified Body, as
we must suppose, the contrast is complete; and while
the Sacred Humanity retains all that is essential to
human nature, it must needs be free from all the
conditions of space. Our Lord indeed likens His
Ascension to a journey to a far country ;? the distance
between the human life of even the great Son of Man
upon earth and the perfect life of God is immeasurable.
But it is not such a distance as can be crossed by any
physical movement, nor was the journey by which
it was covered one that needed days or hours or even
minutes to accomplish. The cloud which seemed
to mark the Lord’s upward way lingered in sight
perhaps for long, and the Eleven, from their place
upon the hillside, watched it gradually disappear.
But the Lord’s journey was surely completed in the
momentary act of will by which He finally left the
world, and went to the Father; that instant all the
glory of God shone about Him, and He was in heaven.
The sight was not altogether new to Him; in the
depth of His Divine consciousness the Son of Man had
1Cf. Gore, Body of Christ, p. 128 ft.
2Lc. xix. 12 éropev0n els xwpay waxpav.
10 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

memories of the glory which in His pre-incarnate life

he had had with the Father before the world was}
But the human soul of Christ up to the moment of
the Ascension had had no experience of the full
vision of God which burst upon it when He was taken
up. This was the goal of His human life, the joy set
before His human soul ; and in the moment of the
Ascension it was attained.
2. The Session. ‘He ascended...and sitteth’—
so say the Apostles’ and ‘Nicene’ Creeds; ‘He
ascended... He sat down’ is the reading of the best
text of the Quicumque. Both present and past can
claim support from the New Testament,’ and it is
obvious that they are not inconsistent ; the Session,
which began at the Ascension, continues to the
present hour.
All references to the Session of the Ascended Christ
rest ultimately on the 110th Psalm, 7he Lord satth unto
my lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine
enemies thy footstool. That our Lord had this Psalm
in mind during the last week of His life and applied
it to Himself as Messiah is clear from the questions

1Jo. xvii. 5: cf. the remarkable words of Jo. iii. 13, where, however,
6 py év T@ ovpay@ is probably an insertion; see Westcott’s Additional
Note.
2 Ascendit... sedet; dvedOovta kat xabefouevov. On the Quicumque
text see C. H. Turner, in 7. 7.S. xi. p. 410. ,
3For sitteth, see Mc. xiv. 62, Col. iii. 1, 1 Pet. iti, 22; for ‘sat,’
‘Mc.’ xvi. 19, Eph. i. 21, Heb. i.3, viii. 1, xii. 2 (kexdOuxev).
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 11
which He put to the Temple crowd on the Tuesday
of Holy Week; nor can it be doubted that He
referred to it again when in the grey dawn of Good
Friday He warned the High Priest and Sanhedrin, Ve
shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of
power’ That this Psalm found its fulfilment at the
Ascension was the fixed belief of the Apostolic age,
as we see from its use by S. Peter on the Day of
Pentecost, and the indirect reference to it in nearly
a dozen other passages of the Acts, Epistles and
Apocalypse.”
To the 110th Psalm, then, we must look for a
clue to the interpretation of the phrase. A king is
addressed,® who is made by Divine decree assessor
of Jahveh, and is seated at His right hand until such
time as all his enemies have been subjugated. The
same person is also appointed to be permanently
priest after the archetype of the priest-king
Melchizedek. Is the Psalmist a writer of the
Maccabean age who has in view Jonathan, or perhaps
Simon the successor of Jonathan, of whom we read
in 1 Maccabees that the Jews and the priests were
1Mc. xii. 36, xiv. 62. In the latter place the imagery is partly
drawn from Dan. vii. 11, but éx dev Kabefduevoy is clearly from
Psalm cx.
2 Acts ii. 33 ft.: cf. Acts vii. 55f., Rom. viii. 34, Eph. i. 20, Col.
Diet ble ies, 13, Vill. ¥, xX. 22, Xu..2, 1 Pet. ii, 22, Apoc. ili. 21,
xii. 5.
3 For an exposition of the Psalm see Dr. Driver in the xfositor for
March, 1910, and for another study Dr. Emery Barnes in Lex i corde.
12 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
well pleased that he should be their leader and high
priest for ever?» Oris the Priest-King of the Psalms ~
simply an idealizing picture of the theocratic King,
drawn by a late Psalmist who had caught the inspira-
tion of the Messianic hope? In any case the general
purpose of the writer is clear, The ideal King is
seen seated on the right of Jahveh Himself, or next
in honour to Him ;? he is assured of complete victory
over his enemies, on whose necks he will one day,
after the manner of victorious captains, place his
feet.?
The use of this Psalm in the New Testament in
reference to the Session of Our Lord at the right
hand of God invites us to contemplate Him
as invested with the highest honour of which
humanity is capable, recognized as the Father’s
Viceroy, and assured of final victory over all who
oppose His rule. We behold him... crowned with glory
and honour... from henceforth expecting till his enemzes
be made his footstool4 The Son of Man has heard
the oracle, Sz¢ thou at my right hand, and has taken
His seat on the Father’s throne. It is not difficult
here to distinguish symbol from fact. The Throne, the
Right Hand, the act of sitting down, the posture of

1] Macc. xiv. 41. For the difficulties presented by this view, see
Kirkpatrick, Psalms, p. 6643 Driver, /.c.
2 See the remarkable illustration in 1 Macc. x. 63.
3 Cf. Josh. x. 24, 1 Kings v. 3. 4 Heb. ii. 9, x. 13.
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 13

the seated King, are as clearly symbolical as the final

placing of the Lord’s enemies under His feet. But
the exaltation and glorification of the Sacred Man-
hood of our Lord, the exercise by Him of all authority
in heaven and on earth, the certainty of His final
triumph over sin and death, are facts, and the most
potent facts in the life of the human race.
Other thoughts to which neither the Psalmist nor
his Apostolic interpreters point may be suggested by
the seated posture of the Ascended Christ. ‘The
notion of sitting (so writes Bishop Pearson) implieth
rest, quietness, and indisturbance. .. Christ is ascended
into heaven, where resting from all pains and sorrows
He is seated free from all disturbance and opposition.’!
The weariness of the ministry and the sufferings
of the Cross were for ever at an end when he sat
down at the right hand of God. As after the
creation God is said to have vested on the seventh day
from all his work which he had made, so, it may be
conceived, the Incarnate Son rests now with God
from the work of His mission to the world. But
this analogy does not present itself to the mind of
the author of Hebrews, when he discourses on the
sabbath rest of the Creator in close connexion with
the Ascension of our Lord. Nor is it more than
superficial, for the rest of the Creator was merely

1Similarly Bishop Westcott, Historic Faith, p. 52: ‘the image of

Christ’s Session is that of perfect rest.’
14 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
a ceasing to create; weariness and pain have no
place in the life of unincarnate Godhead. If the Incar-
nate Son kept sabbath after the Cross, it was during
His brief abode in Hades that He did so, when His
flesh rested in hope of the Resurrection.’ It seems
precarious, then, to connect the idea of repose with
our Lord’s Session in heaven. Victory is no doubt
represented by it: he that overcometh, the Spirit
says to the Churches, J will give to him to sit down
with me in my throne,as I also overcame, and sat
down with my Father in his throne2 But our Lord’s
victory over the world in the days of His flesh was
but an earnest of the longer warfare and the more
complete conquest which are the work of His ascended
lifee When He sat down at the right hand of
power, it was not for a brief cessation from warfare,
but for an age-long conflict with the powers of evil.
‘Sitting’ is not always the posture of rest. Some
of the hardest work of life is done by the monarch
seated in his cabinet, and the statesman at his
desk; and the seated Christ, like the four living
creatures round about Him, rests not day nor night
from the unintermitting energies of heaven.
When the Apostolic Church thought of the
ascended Lord as seated in heaven, she had in her

1 Ps, xvi. 9. But neither the Heb, (]2¥%) nor the Lxx (karacknvacet)
suggests a reference to the sabbath.
2 Apoc. iii. 21.
 THE ASCENSION AND THE SESSION 15
hands a corrective to the tendency to expect His
immediate return. The Psalm which painted the
figure of the Seated Christ might well have warned
her that the end was not yet ; further, the words ‘ Sz¢
... until, while limiting the Session to a period oftime,
suggest that the period will not be brief. Stephen,
indeed, saw the Son of Man in heaven standing, as if
ready to go forth at a moment’s notice; and such a
picture might well have been drawn in view of His
ignorance of the time of His Coming. But the
Psalmist’s description dominated Christian thought
in the Apostolic age, and through the influence of the
first age has moulded the creed of Christendom; and
certainly it agrees better with the facts of history. As
the interval between the Ascension and the Return
lengthens century by century, the Church takes heart
when she remembers the Seated Figure of the expec-
tant Christ. He waits, seated on the Throne; we
wait with Him, busy with our watch and our service
on earth.
1 Me. xili. 32 od6é 6 vids,
 II.
THE KING.

TuHeE Ascension was the coronation of the Christ,

and the Session His enthronement. Crowned with
glory and honour,’ He sat down with His Father in
the Father’s throne.2 There Ze must reign till the
Father has put all enemies under his feet?
In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is the King’s Son *
rather than the King; once, indeed, He assumes the
royal title, but with reference to the final scene in
the world’s history, when before the eyes of the
world the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his
glory. The postponement is the more remarkable,
since kingship was a chief feature in the portrait of
Messiah as it is drawn both in the Old Testament
and in post-canonical Jewish writings. His proto-
type is David or Solomon, the anointed King of
Israel. When in the second Psalm the kings of the
earth set themselves against Jahveh and against his
1 Heb. ii. 9. 2 Apoe. iii. 21.
31 Cor, xv. 25. 4Mt. xxii. 23 cf. xxv. 34.
 THE KING 17
Anotnted, the answer comes, Vet J have set my King
upon my holy hill of Zion.’ Isaiah foretells, Behold
_@ king shall reign in righteousness;* Ezekiel, My
servant David shall be prince among them and king
over them ;* Zechariah, Behold, thy king, cometh unto
thee The Messianic hope of the last half century
before Christ was the hope of a King, and the
Psalms of Solomon see in the coming reign of
Messiah the salvation of Israel: ° vazse up unto them
their King, the son of David...and there shall be no
iniquity im his days tn their midst, for all shall
be holy, and their King ts the Lord Messiah® The
charge laid against Jesus before the procurator
was that, acting on these expectations, He had
made Himself a king, and thus posed as a rival
of Caesar.’ As a matter of fact He had withdrawn
from the multitudes when they would have forced
Him into that false position.® Yet before Pilate He
did not deny His kingly character, only affirming, Wy
kingdom 1s not of this world, or not from hence?
The title on the Cross, therefore, though inexact,
was not radically untrue; a king lay dying there,
though not one who was in any exclusive or earthly

TPs, ii. 2, 6. 2Tsa, xxxii. I. 3 Ezek. xxxiv. 24, xxxvi. 24.

@Zechaix. 0. > Ps. Sol. xvii. 23, 36.
8So the Greek, xtpuos xpuordv ; Heb. probably 77 1, the Lord’s
Anointed. ' See Ryle and James ad Joc.
UE Geexxile, 24° ['On -XIXy 125 So. vie 15. ®Jo. xviii. 36.
ALC. B
18 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
sense the King of the Jews. The penitent robber
came nearer to the truth when he said, Jesus, remember
me, when thou comest in thy kingdom. It was
borne in upon his mind that in some mysterious way
the kingdom was to be reached through the Cross,
and lay beyond it; and his words almost echo the
Lord’s description of Himself as about to go zuto a
far country, to receive for himself a Kingdom and
to return?
The Kingdom was received at the Ascension, the
far journey which carried Jesus from earth to heaven.
This was at once realized by the Apostles, so soon as
they came under the teaching of the Spirit. Their
Master, they openly preached, was David’s son, raised
up ¢o sit upon his throne® Or, with fuller insight into
the nature of the Kingdom, they taught that God
had exalted Him to be a Prince and a Saviour, for
to give repentance to Israel and remission of sins4
When it became clear that these gifts were not
restricted to Israel, the missionaries of the Gospel
carried to the Gentiles the doctrine of the Christ-
King. At Thessalonica the old charge of disloyalty
towards Caesar was brought against S. Paul’s dis-
ciples: these all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar,
saying that there is another king, one Jesus.” It may
have been through fear of exciting the suspicions of
1 Le. xxiii. 42. ALG, S40 > 3 Acts ii. 30.
4 Actsv. 31. ® Acts xvii. 7.
 THE KING 19
the heathen that S. Paul henceforth abstained from
applying the title of ‘King’ or ‘Emperor’ (GaciAevs)
to the ascended Christ; certainly the equivalent term
‘Lord’ (képtos) seems to be everywhere preferred in
his Epistles, and the short creed of the first genera-
tion of believers ran ‘ Jesus is Lord,’! and not, as it
well might have run, ‘Jesus is King” The Empire
had hitherto shewn no hostility to the Church, and
was still restraining the forces of evil which the
Apostle foresaw would quickly gather if it were
taken out of the way.2 It would have been impolitic
to hasten the catastrophe by the use of language
which would evidently give offence, and S. Paul
refrained accordingly. But before the Apocalypse
was written, the position of affairs had changed: the
Empire was already openly antichristian; Rome
under Nero had already drunk the blood of the
saints, and Domitian seemed on the point to repeat
the atrocities of his predecessor ; in Asia, at all events,
there was a prospect of immediate and ruthless
persecution. Moreover, the cult of Caesar had now
assumed the character of a heathen Messianism ; the
alternative, ‘Christ or Caesar,’ could no longer have
been avoided had Domitian lived and the Caesar-
priests carried out their plans. In S, John’s belief,

11 Cor. xii. 3 elmetv Kupwos "Inoods. gy Boe Sie

3 Apoc. ii. 10, iii. 10, xii, 13, xili. 7, ete.
4Apoc. xiii. 17, xiv. 9, xix. 19.
20 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

then, the time had come to accept the challenge, and

to proclaim the Empire of Jesus Christ. This is done
by the Seer of the Apocalypse without reserve. The
Ascended Christ is Ruler of the kings of the earth; He
is King of kings, and Lord of lords; His elect shall
reign wth Christ a thousand years A great voice
in heaven is heard to say, Vow zs come the Kingdom
of our God, and the authority of his Christ; another
voice cries, Zhe Kingdom of the world zs become the
Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ? With
Domitian at Rome claiming to be called ‘our Lord
and God,’® there could no longer be any hesitation on
the part of the Church as to the duty of proclaiming
the Ascended Christ as the Overlord of the Emperor,
the true Ruler of the world and Viceroy of God.
Were these magnificent titles mere echoes of the
Jewish Messianic Hope, or empty claims flung in the
face of the Roman persecutor by men who had been
driven to desperation by his cruelty? Or, do they
correspond to actual functions which the Seer knew
to have been committed to the Ascended Christ?
And if so, what are these functions, and how are
they discharged? The New Testament supplies the
answer.
We begin with the words of the risen Christ,
spoken, it seems, as the forty days were approaching
1 Apoc. i. 5, xix. 16, xx. 4. 2 Apoc, xi. 15, xii. Io.
3Sueton. Domitian, 13: ‘dominus et deus noster hoc fieri iubet.’
 THE KING 21
an end. AW authority was given (é00n) unto me
in heaven and on earth." The past tense carries
our thoughts back to the pre-incarnate life of the
Son and the eternal purpose of the Father. The
grant was made before time began.” But it was
conditioned by the acts in time of the Incarnate Son
—the long obedience which culminated in the Sacrifice
of the Cross: the change which began with the
Resurrection and was completed by the Ascension.
Then at length the Father’s gift was realized in full;
the authority of the Christ over all created persons
and things, visible and invisible, became an accom-
plished fact.
It was ‘authority’ (€Eoveta) which the Father granted
and the Son received: the right to act accompanied
by the requisite power. Authority was no new
claim on the part of our Lord. He had asserted it
at the outset of His ministry: the Son of Man hath
authority on earth to forgive sins® The same note
was heard in all His teaching, and seen in all His
works. Moreover, He claimed the right to delegate
His authority, and did so both before and after the

1Mt. xxviii. 18. Dan. vii. 14 was perhaps in the Lord’s mind:
there was given him dominion (LXx ééovela) and glory and a kingdom,
that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him ; his dominion
(Lxx and Th. 7 éfovcla avrod) zs an everlasting dominzon.
2Cf. Mt. xi. 27 mdvTa por mapeds0n mapa Tod marpds mov, and see
W. C. Allen ad loc,
3 Mc, ii. 10. 4Mt. vii. 29, Mc. i. 27.
22 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
Resurrection! Even before the Passion He was
conscious that, for the purposes of His mission, His
authority extended over all filesh.2 What was new
in the final assertion of this claim which He made
on the eve of the Ascension was the inclusion of
the whole creation within the scope of His power.
All previous claims of authority to speak in the
Father’s Name, to remit sins, to expel the forces of
evil, to give eternal life to all whom the Father had
given Him, fall vastly short of one which covers both
earth and heaven.
1. All authority in heaven. How is this tremen-
dous phrase to be interpreted? We may begin with
a great text from S. Paul where this side of the
Lord’s present exaltation comes under review. God,
we read, made Christ Zo s¢t at his right hand in the
heavenlies (év ois éroupavios), far above all rule and
authority and power and dominion, and every name
that 1s named, not only in this world, but also in that
which is to come® Here, as elsewhere, the Apostle
assumes the existence of a graded ‘hierarchy in the
heavenly world, corresponding to the successive
grades of official life at an earthly court. But far
above all these he sees Jesus Christ, invested with a
dignity which has no parallel even in the court of
heaven. S. Peter has the same conception: Jesus
Christ zs on the right hand of God. .. angels and
1Mc. vi. 7, Jo. xx. 2rf. 2 Jo. xvii. 2. 8 Eph. i. 20f,
 THE KING ’ 23
authorities and powers being made subject unto him}
So also the author of Hebrews: He has become by so
much superior to the angels, as he hath inherited a more
excellent name than they. They are ministering spirits,
He is the Incarnate Son; the name of Son belongs
to Him by inheritance, and by the Ascension He has
come into His own.? The other heavenly authorities
recognize this and do Him homage: it was the
purpose of the Father that zz the name of Jesus every
knee should bow, of things in heaven (érovpaviwy)...,
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ
zs Lord, to the glory of God the Father? We see
the King’s Son, invested with the King’s authority,
passing through the ranks of the great nobles of the
heavenly order ; and, as He passes, every one of these
spiritual powers does obeisance, while from the whole
assembly there rises the creed of the primitive Church,
jesus ts Lord. S. John’s ears are opened to hear
the hymn of praise that follows: Z heard a voice of
many angels round about the throne... and the number
of them was ten thousand times ten thousand... saying
with a great voice, Worthy ts the Lamb that hath been
slain to receive the power and riches and wisdom and
might and honour and glory and blessings
Ty Pets iii) 22,
2Heb. i. 4. Cf. Westcott ad loc.: ‘Probably not the name of
“Son,” simply... but the Name in which was gathered up all that
Christ was found to be by believers.’
§ Phil. ii. 9 ff. * Apoc. v. 11 f.
24 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

In the two moments of the Lord’s deepest humilia-

tion angels ministered to Him, and they would, had He
so willed, have hastened in their legions to save Him
from the Cross.! So, since His exaltation, they ‘alway
do Him service in heaven,’ even as they serve the
Father whose authority He wields. Made a little
lower than the angels, seen of angels in His agony,? He
now receives their worship; they are His, and they do
His will? Nothing is done in that great unknown
world, which we commonly call ‘heaven,’ without His
initiating, guiding, determining authority. Processes
inconceivable by our minds are being carried forward
beyond the veil by agencies equally inconceivable.
It is enough for the Church to know that all which is
being done there is done by the authority of her Lord.
Yet, if ‘heaven’ be used in the wider sense of
‘the spiritual world, S. Paul does not hide from us
that there are intelligences in it which not only refuse
to submit to the rule of the Christ, but actively resist
it. Hesaw them at work in the great struggle which
had already begun between the Church and the World.
Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but
against the principalities, against the powers, against
the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual
hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. The dark-
ness of the heathen world was under the control of |
1Mc. i. 13, Le. xxii. 43, Mt. xxvi. 53. 2Heb. ii. 7, 1 Tim. iii. 16.
3 Mt. xiii. a1. MDala yey ey:
 THE KING 25
rulers stronger than the Proconsul or the Emperor.
There was a hierarchy of evil as well as of good,
immaterial and unseen, forces which had at their
command all the worst passions of men; and these
were all leagued against the Kingdom of Christ on
earth. S. John in Patmos saw the struggle begin in
the spiritual world itself: ¢here was war in heaven:
the archangel Mzchael (the great prince who, accord-
ing to Daniel, stands for the children of the holy
people)! and his angels going forth to war with the
Dragon. The Seer heard the din of principality
clashing arms with principality, and power with
power, and he saw Satan and his angels cast out of
heaven to the earth and in the end out of the earth
into the lake of fire? Meanwhile the very air
seemed to be infested by the evil spiritual force,
which worked in the enemies of the Christ and
sought to overwhelm His friends.’ If such language
is difficult for us to understand, who live in an age of
dominant Christianity, it is to be remembered that
our difficulty bears witness to the extent of the
victory which has been gained over the forces of
evil since the first century. The sfzrztual hosts of
wickedness * are not yet under the feet of Christ, but
they are fighting, as history shews, a losing battle.
2 Dan-exti. Ie AVADOCE Kil 7, thes XX) LO:
3 Eph. ii. 2 rdv dpxovra ris efovalas Tob dépos, Too mvevpuaros Tod viv
évepryoovros év Tots viots THs amecOlas.
4Eph. vi. 12.
26 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

2, But to leave the spiritual world, and turn to

the phenomenal. A// authority, the ascending Christ
said, was given to me...on earth. What is the
meaning of this claim to exercise supreme control
over visible nature and mankind?
No Christian, who follows the teaching of S. Paul
and S. John, can doubt that the Eternal Word or
Son is supreme in the Kingdom of Nature. Ad/
things have been created through him and unto him,
and he ts before all things, and in him all things
consist All things were made by him, and without
him was made not even one single thing (ovde ey),
That which hath been made was life in him (6 yéyovev
év alto Cw jv). The two greatest teachers of the
Apostolic age agree in representing the Son as not
only the Agent of Creation, but its immanent vital
force and its ‘principle of cohesion, the source of
‘that unity and solidarity which makes it a cosmos
instead of a chaos. * He upholds, or rather, bears
(pépwr), all things by the word of his power;* and
the support He gives to the universe is not that of
‘an Atlas sustaining the dead weight of the world,
but of a living immanent Power; and it includes
movement, progress towards an end.

1 Col. i. 16 f.
*Jo. i. 3 f. On the punctuation, see Westcott’s Additional Note.
8 Lightfoot on Col. i. 17.
“Heb. i. 3 (see Westcott ad /oc.).
 THE KING | 27

Even in His earthly humiliation the Incarnate Word

manifested unique power over Nature. No reasonable
criticism can resolve all the works which none other
did* into efforts of the imagination on the part of
those who witnessed His ministry or of those who
reported or recorded their testimony. Psychological
considerations are certainly pressed too far when they
are made to account for the supernatural element
which pervades all the Gospels in almost every
page. The personality of the Christ may suffice to
explain the general impression of superhuman power
which was left on the minds of the men who were
associated with Him, but it fails to explain either the
greater miracles which are described in detail, or the
vast scale on which the unrecorded ‘ signs’ were given.
We feel ourselves to be in the presence of One who,
unless the records are the wildest of romances, does
by whatever means impress His will on the forces
of Nature after a fashion which even in this age of
physical discovery is impossible to ourselves. Plain
men, as they read the Gospels, still ask themselves
the question, Whence hath this man these things...
what mean such mighty works wrought by his
hands ?? .
But if in the days of His flesh the Incarnate Son
through the Spirit exercised powers over Nature
such as no other man ever possessed, what limit
PT OwxVn2 4s 2 Mies vie 2s
28 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

shall be put to the authority of the glorified man-

hood? ‘His ascension, it has been well said, ‘is
the enlargement of His human capacities to a degree
that we cannot measure, and it carries with it a corre-
sponding increase of the content of His consciousness
and of the exercise of His power. The Epistle to
the Hebrews” has brought us to see in the Ascended
Humanity a fulfilment of the glowing words in which
the eighth Psalm describes the supremacy of man
over the rest of creation: thou madest him to have
dominion over the works of thy hands ; thou hast put
all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and
the beasts of the field ; the fowl of the atr, and the fish
of the sea Modern knowledge has almost indefi-
nitely extended the limits of this control, making
man master of natural forces the very existence of
which was unknown to the Biblical writers, or in
some instances to the last generation ; and it is not
improbable that the coming years will witness an
enormous enlargement of such human powers. But
in Jesus Christ humanity has already entered upon
the fulness of its inheritance : whatever can be done
by a human nature which from the first was free from
sin and has now been perfected in all its powers
is within the reach of the glorified manhood of our
Lord. How far such a nature may carry its control
1 Bp. Weston, The One Christ, p. 290. 2 Heb. ii. 5 ff.
3 Ps, viii. 6 ff.
 THE KING 29
over the physical world we have no means of
judging. Moreover, it is to be remembered that
the glorified humanity is, so far as manhood can
be this, a perfect medium for the self-expression of
the Divine Word, The personal Force which lies
behind the forces of Nature, carrying them on to
the accomplishment of their destiny, works through
the human mind and will of the Ascended Christ,
so far as the human in its perfected state is able to
respond to the Divine.
In Christ, then, Nature is already under the feet of
Man. But what shall be said of Man’s submission
to the authority of Christ?
Another Psalm led the Apostolic Church to the
true answer here. When for the first time the
Apostles were threatened by the Sanhedrin, their
thoughts turned to the familiar words, The rulers
take counsel together against Jahveh and against his
Anointed. But as they read on, there came the words
of promise to the Christ, Ask of me, and I will give
thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the utter-
most parts of the earth for thy possession ; thou shalt
break them with a rod of tron; thou shalt dash them
in pieces like a potter's vessel. Christ, they knew,
had been set as God’s King upon the holy hill of
the celestial Zion; He had asked of the Father, and
had received the heathen nations of the world for
Pps! i. 21. 3 cf. Acts iv. 23 ff.
30 THE ASCENDED. CHRIST

His own. A rough and intractable flock, needing

often to feel the sharpness of the iron with which
the shepherd’s staff was tipped! A misshapen
vessel not meet for the Master’s use, needing to be
broken up into a thousand fragments that a new
and. better might take its place! As the first genera-
tion looked out upon the world of which the Christ-
King had gone to take possession, these words of the
second Psalm seemed exactly to describe the process
by which His authority would be established. He
was born to rule al! the nations with the iron rod,
and even to smite them with the sharp sword of His
mouth ;? it was to be the reward of victory for
members of the Church to bear their part in the grim
work that lay before Him: he that overcometh and
keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give
authority over the nations; and he shall rule them
with a rod of iron, as the vessels of the potter are
broken to' shivers, as [ also have received of my Father?
There is nothing in the Apocalypse more magni-
ficent than its repeated acceptance of the difficult
conditions under which the world was to be won by
Christ, and by those faithful members of His Church
to whom He should delegate His authority. Wherever
the Seer looked, he saw either the hostile Empire,
or beyond its borders fierce untamed tribes who
inspired the provincials with alarm. But the reign
PApoce xiivns. +Apocu xixa 05s 3 Apoc. ii. 26 f.
 THE KING 31
of Christ must go forwards,! and the Church con-
tinue her work on earth until all nations, within the
Empire or beyond it, were subjugated to the obedi-
ence of faith. It may be an outburst of human
impatience that demands to see within a single
generation the world strewn with the wreckage
of a shattered heathenism, but it is a Divine
inspiration that will not let men rest till this
has been accomplished. Meanwhile there is in the
best Christian lives a power which, within narrow
limits and on a small scale, exerts Christ’s authority
—the power of His Spirit which, in itself indomit-
able, bears down all opposition and in the end
triumphs over it. This is never. more remarkable
than when it is seen in obscure unambitious lives,
which, while following in the steps of Christ’s
sufferings, are at the same time marked by a dignity,
a strength, and a victorious purpose that tell of their
union with His life in heaven.
To S. John at the end of the first century a
thousand years seemed an epoch long enough to
allow for the reign of the Saints with Christ on
earth. Now that the history of the Church is
running to the end of its second millennium, there
are those who tell us that the human race is but
just entering upon its life, and has before it countless
1QOne after another of the early Acta martyrum, after dating the
martyr’s death by the years of the reigning Emperor, ends with the
inspiring words regnante Jesu Christo,
32 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

ages of developement. Believers in the Ascension

can entertain this possibility without uneasiness.
They can witness the material progress of the
world without the suspicion that it may supersede
the spiritual sovereignty of Christ. They know that
He must reign till His rod of iron has done its work
on earth, and all enemies are put under His feet.
The reign of the Ascended Christ has a time limit.
This point has been worked out by S. Paul in a
passage which is not without difficulty. Then (ae.
at the Parousia) cometh the end, when he shall deliver
up the kingdom to God, even the Father... for he must
reign till he (the Father) hath put all his enemies
under his feet.... And when all things have been
subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be
subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that
God may be all in all. With the foreseen end there
comes into view in this place the purpose of our
Lord’s present reign. It is seen to be a temporary
economy, a parenthesis in God’s great scheme of
things, called for by the lapse of a part of the
creation from its obedience to the Divine King. It
is a regency rather than a reign, a vice-royalty, .
taking for the time the place of direct government.’
11 Cor. xv. 24 ff.
* This temporary kingdom is, of course, to be distinguished from the
kingdom which belongs to the Son as one with the Father, of which
the Creed, following Le. i. 33, says: ‘ Of whose kingdom there shall be
no end.’ See Pearson (ed. Burton, i. p. 3353 ii. p. 240f.).
 THE KING 33
Had not Sin entered the cosmos, and Death, in its
spiritual significance, followed Sin, no such episode in
the eternal Regnum Dez would have been necessary.
The circumstances demanded, it appears, a delegation
of the Father’s authority over all creation to the
Incarnate Son, for the purpose of reducing His
rebel creatures to their obedience. The Son, having
entered the creation by taking our flesh, and having
in that flesh overcome Sin and Death, completes His
mission by receiving the submission of all creatures
to Himself as the Father's Representative and Pleni-
potentiary. But the submission completed, or the
enemies that refuse submission destroyed, He will no
longer retain the authority which He received as the
Christ; and as the Incarnate Son, He will lead
Creation in the final subjection to the Father, which
fulfils the purpose of the Christian economy. Then the
great end will have been reached, and God will again
be afl zn all—God, not the Father alone, but in the
fulness of the Divine Name—Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit; His Name hallowed, His Kingdom come,
His will done, as in heaven so on earth.
This is the goal to which all history and life are
moving, and for which the Ascension and the Session
were the starting-point. The reign of the Ascended
Christ is preparatory to the Eternal Reign of God.
 Ill.

THE VPRIESi:

THE Christ-King is also the Christ-Priest. That the

two offices should meet in one person belongs to the
Hebrew ideal both of priesthood and of kingship.
This comes to light first in the old story of Mel-
chizedek, King of Salem and priest of God most High,
‘The intention of the passage seems to be to
represent him as the forerunner and prototype of the
Israelite monarchy and Israelite priesthood.’” One
prototype served for both, as if to shew that monarchy
and priesthood are essentially one. There was a
period in the history of the Jewish people when this
ideal was nearly realized. From B.c. 142 till the
rise of the Herod dynasty Judaea was ruled by a
succession of High Priests, who were also civil
governors—the priest-princes of the Hasmonaean
line. In Christian times the mediaeval Papacy —
claimed to gather into its own hands the reins of
all authority, temporal and ecclesiastical ; for although
1Gen. xiv. 18 ff. 2Driver, Genesis, ad loc.
 THE PRIEST 35
the exercise of the temporal power was usually
committed to the Emperor, the Pope, it was said,
held both swords." Both experiments, the Jewish
and the Christian, failed; and so far as can be
judged from these examples, neither the temporal
nor the spiritual interests of men are promoted by
entrusting them to the care of the same representa-
tive. The double task is too great for mere man to
discharge.
Yet it was precisely this union of sovereignty and
priesthood, of the zmperium and the sacerdotium, that
the writer of the 110th Psalm in the. Spirit foresaw
to be the distinguishing mark of the Messianic
Kingdom. He attributes this policy to Jahveh
Himself:
JSahveh saith unto niy Lord,
* S7¢t thou at my right hand,
Until I make thine enemies thy footstool,

Jahveh hath sworn and will not repent,

‘Thou art a priest for ever,
After the order of Melchizedek.*

In other words, in the good time which is coming

there is to be a reversion to the original type of
priest-kingship. The union of the two offices in one
man was good, if only the man could be found who
1See this point well worked out in Canon Hobhouse’s Bampton
Lectures, Zhe Church and the World, p. 190 ff,
2 Psalm cx. I, 4.
36 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

could bear the double burden. Such a man would

be found, the Psalmist believed, in the ideal King of
Israel. He has been found, the Church knows, in
the Ascended Christ.
As the Apocalypse is largely a vision of Christ the
King, so the Epistle to the Hebrews is our chief
guide in all things relating to Christ the Priest. It is
remarkable that S. Paul, notwithstanding his frequent
insistence on the mediatorial work of our Lord, does
not once call him ‘ High Priest’ or ‘ Priest, nor does
he in any passage examine at length the relation of
the Ascension to our Lord’s priestly functions. It is
possible that he was kept from developing his soter-
iology in this direction by the danger of misappre-
hension on the part of his Gentile readers, to whom
sacrificial and hierarchical terms might have conveyed
impressions reflected from their heathen surroundings.
The author of Hebrews had no such fear; the Old
Testament account of the Tabernacle and its ritual
supplied illustrations of his argument, and there were
no memories of pagan sacrifices or priesthood that
could be awakened in the minds of Hebrew Christian
readers. In any case, it was to this unknown
teacher, and not to S. Paul, that it was given to
deliver to the Church the great Christian doctrine
of the High Priesthood of the Ascended Christ.
We will endeavour to follow his guidance.
1. At the outset of the Epistle the Priest-King is
 THE PRIEST 37
seen preparing for His priestly work in heaven.
Before the Ascension He offered His one great
Sacrifice, and thus made purification of sins’ But
the preparation began further back, with the Incarna-
tion. The Eternal Son partook of our flesh and
blood, laying hold not on the nature of angels, but
on the seed of Abraham.” He could not represent
man to God, or offer sacrifice for man, unless He
Himself were made man; nor could He succour
tempted humanity unless He knew by experience
what temptation meant.
The author next proceeds to connect the Incarna-
tion and the Sacrifice with the Ascension.® Our
High Priest passed through the heavens (StednrvOdra
Tovs ovpavovs), through court after court of the
spiritual precincts, the Tabernacle not made with
hands, until He reached the presence-chamber of God.
There, in the inmost sanctuary, He now ministers.
But His sinlessness and present remoteness from
human infirmity imply no want of sympathy with
our moral weaknesses (uy Ouvapevoy ovv7rabjoa Tats
acOevetats yuwv); although He is now on the Throne,
it is a throne of grace to which the tempted and
sinful may come with confidence.
2. The way is now cleared for a nearer view of
our High Priest’s functions and life in heaven.*
WIiKeloy He BF 2 Heb. ii. 14 ff.
3 Heb. iv. 14 f. 4 Heb. v. 1, viii. 3.
 38 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Speaking generally, (2) a high priest in earthly

communities is a person appointed to deal represen-
tatively with man’s relations to God (ta pos Tov
Oedv), and his chief business is to offer sacrifices both
eucharistic and propitiatory (d@pa te Kat Ovaias Trept
apaptiov). (6) In the case of all merely human
priests, the holder of the office has need to offer for
his own sins as well as for those of his people.
(c) Although in later Jewish history high priests
- were made and deposed by popular vote or at the will
of the civil ruler, the office originally and properly
rests upon Divine appointment, and cannot be rightly
assumed without a Divine call.
Now (to take the last point first), the Messiah had
received such a call, being xamed of God (in the
Psalter) a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
But, as the analogy of Melchizedek suggests, He
differs in many respects from other high priests. He
is, like Melchizedek, a unique Person, not a member
of a sacerdotal caste, but the solitary representative
of His order. Like Melchizedek, again, He has no
successor, because He is endowed with an endless
life, and His priesthood is perpetual (els Tov atava).?
So it appears why the Psalm does not call Him a
priest ‘after the order of Aaron.” The Aaronic order
was a succession of dying men who administered a
transitory system, whereas the Risen and Ascended
1 Heb. v. Io. 2 Heb. vii. 8-109.
 THE PRIEST 39
Christ is alive for evermore, and all His acts have the
note of an indissoluble vitality (kara dvvauw Cwis
advadvTov). Thus this one utterance of the r1oth
Psalm sweeps away the whole structure of the
Levitical ministry, substituting for it the undying life
and work of the Royal Priest of the Gospel. It
involves, on the one hand, the abolition of a Law
which could bring nothing to perfection, and, on the
other hand, the introduction into human life of some-
thing infinitely better, the great Hope through which
we draw nigh to God in Christ (a0éryo1s wey yiverat
. vTOARS ... eweicaywyy de éX7ri0os).
Further, our High Priest is not like the Levitical
high priests, a sinner, but “oly, gudleless, undefiled.
Je is not on earth, but made higher than the
heavens, a minister of the Sanctuary and of the True
Tabernacle. There He serves not that which ts a copy
and shadow of the heavenly things, but the heavenly
things themselves, which needed to be cleansed wh
better sacrifices® than the blood of bulls and goats.
His Sacrifice is one, and once offered. But if the
sacrificial offering is not to be repeated, the Sacrifice
remains, for it is identical with the Priest, and the
Priest lives and ministers age after age in the heavenly
Sanctuary of which the earthly was the antitype?
3. Hence, although our Lord’s priesthood is of the
1 Heb. vii. 26. 2 Heb. viii. 5 (ix. 23).
3 Heb. ix. 24 dvtituma Tov &\nOwar.
40 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Melchizedekian and not the Aaronic type, yet we

may look to the ritual of the. Levitical sanctuary to
throw light upon His priestly work in heaven. Even
the structure of the Tabernacle has something to
teach us. ‘Cosmic’ though it was,’ it betokened
that which is above and beyond the cosmos. It
consisted of two tents in one, an outer and an inner.
Before the entrance of each there hung a curtain ;
when you passed the first curtain, you were in the
Holies (ra dy); when you passed the second,
you entered the Holiest (dyia ayiwv). The first
had a lamp-stand, the second was left in darkness,
and it was entered by no one but by the High
Priest, and by him but once a year. In neither
of these compartments was there ever any victim
sacrificed ; the place of sacrifice was in an outer
enclosure which shut off the Tent of Meeting from
the wilderness that lay around it.”
Such a sanctuary must have been to some
extent symbolical, for it was clearly more elaborate
than the exigencies of the wilderness-life demanded.
Its name gives the clue to the meaning of the design.
The Tent of Meeting; as it is often called in Exodus
and Numbers, is usually interpreted as the place
1 Heb. ix. 1 76 Te dytov Koopukédv.
-2See Westcott ‘on the general significance of the Tabernacle.’ (Add.
Note on Heb. viii. 5.)
3See Exod. xxv. 22, xxix. 42, xxx. 36. For other explanations of
Typ Sq& see Driver on Deut. xxxi. 14f., and M‘Neil on Exod. xxxiii. 7.
 Sei PRIEST 41

where God met Moses and His people, and the

structure, it would seem, represented the process
by which God draws near to man and man to God.
The Court, the Holies, the Holiest, symbolized suc-
cessive stages in the approach; the curtains which
veiled the Court from the outer world, the Holies
from the Court and the Holiest from the Holies,
and the darkness and inaccessibility of the Holiest, all
proclaimed that the way into the presence of God
was not yet made manifest to the world or, in
its completeness, even to Israel or to the priests
of the Law. On the other hand, the yearly entrance
of the High Priest pointed to some great revelation
in the future, some breaking of bounds and rending
of veils, after which access to the Holiest would be-
come general, and all Israel be free to enter at all
times where their representative hitherto had entered
but once in the twelve months.
Three great writers of the first century set them-
selves to the task of reading the symbolism of
the Tabernacle. To Josephus’ it was a representa-
tion of the mystery of earth, sea, and sky. Philo of
Alexandria? saw further ; in his view the outer court
is the phenomenal world (ta aicOyrd), and the
sanctuary, the intellectual (ra voy7d); in the person
of the high priest, the cosmos is seen feeling its
lJosephus, Antt. iii. 7.73; Bell. Jud. v. 5. 4 ff.
2Philo, vita Moysis, iii. 14. I owe the references to Westcott, of. cit.
42 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

way into that which lies beyond both sensation and

the province of the intellect. Lastly, the Christian
writer of Hebrews finds the key to the puzzle in the
Christian faith. But in his use of the key he limits:
himself almost entirely to a single point, the ritual
of the Day of Atonement, and to such details of the
ritual as are directly illustrative of the Lord’s priestly
work in heaven.
4. The sacrifices of that day, as of every other day
throughout the year, were offered in the outer court:
the blood of the sacrificed animals alone was carried
by the high priest within the Holiest. So our Lord’s
great Sacrifice was offered by Him on earth, not,
however, in heathen lands, but within the enclosure
of the land of Israel. But having offered it, He passed
in right of the atoning blood into heaven itself,
there to appear before the face of God for us. The
entrance was made, as the Sacrifice was offered, once
for all; the whole period of time from the Ascension
to the Return is one age-long Day of Atonement.
The true Atonement for sin exceeds the figure in
every particular; it is permanent and does not
need yearly renewal; it avails for the sins of the
whole world and not only of a single people; it
effects a moral and not only a ceremonial taking
away of sin, purifying the conscience from the
deadness that paralyses spiritual activity.’ But if
1 Heb. ix. 24.
 THE PRIEST 43
the Blood of Christ is potent in the lives of men
on earth, it is yet more potent in heaven, in the
hands of the Great High Priest. Heaven is not
a place of sacrifice, and our Lord is no longer a
Sacrificing Priest; He has offered one sacrifice for sins
for ever But His presence in the Holiest is a
perpetual and effective presentation before God of
the Sacrifice once offered, which is no less needful
for our acceptance than the actual death upon the
Cross. He has indeed somewhat to offer in His
heavenly priesthood,” for He offers Himself as repre-
senting to God man reconciled, and as claiming for
man the right of access to the Divine presence. He
Himself, as He sits on the Throne, in the perfected
and glorified Manhood which has been obedient
unto death, is the living Propitiation for our sins,
and the standing guarantee of acceptance to all
that draw near unto God through him.
5. In one other respect the analogy of the Jewish
high priest falls far short of the Christian counter-
part. The high priest of Israel entered the Holiest
alone, the congregation remaining in the outer court
till he came back to them: if they had access
Peby x. 12.
2See Dr. W. Milligan, Ascension of our Lord, p. 120.
3See Westcott on ‘the present work of Christ as High Priest’ (Add.
Note on Heb. viii. 1f.); Prof. G. Milligan, Zheology of Hebrews,
p- 141 ff.
4Heb. vii. 25.
44. THE ASCENDED CHRIST
to God meanwhile, this was only through their repre-
sentative. But the author of Hebrews will not allow
that the Church, while awaiting the Return of her
High Priest, is compelled to remain without. Not
only have believers entered the Holiest in the person
of their Representative, but they themselves may
enter in His Name. The thick curtain still hangs
before the Sanctuary: the Holiest is still dark and
inscrutable; the Christian faith has not yet illum-
inated the ultimate mysteries of life. But since the
Ascension there is a way through the veil: a
Way new and living (rpdcpatos Kat Céoa), the
Incarnate, Sacrificed, Risen, Ascended Christ. Thus
the author can end his long exposition with the
practical counsel: Having therefore, brethren, bold-
ness to enter tnto the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by
the way which he dedicated for us...and having a
great Priest over the House of God, let us draw near
with a true heart in fulness of faith This is the
issue of the whole doctrine of our Lord’s high-
priestly life in heaven. It has secured to every
human being free and direct access to God. This
access is not, indeed, immediate, as it is sometimes
represented to be; it is mediated by Christ, and
in ways of His appointment. But it is so real
and falls so well within the range of Christian
experience that every believer can test for himself
1 Heb. x. 19 ff.
 THE PRIEST 45
the truth of our Lord’s work in heaven, however '
little he can discern its nature. Communion with
God through Christ in the Holy Spirit is not a
theory or a dogma, but a fact of personal know-
ledge to which tens of thousands of living Christians
can testify as the most certain of actualities.
6. Yet this freedom of access to God is not all that
our Lord’s priesthood has gained for us. The New
Testament—for here we need not limit ourselves
to the Epistle to the Hebrews—claims that He has
made us sharers in His priestly life. We come to
God through Him, not merely as suppliants or
worshippers, but as priests. The new Israel, like the
Israel of the Exodus, is a consecrated race, a holy
priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to
God through Jesus Christ He not only loosed us from
our sins by his blood, but made us... priests unto his
God and Father. Thou... didst purchase unto God
weth thy blood, the Elders sing before the Throne, sex
of every tongue and people and nation, and madest them
to be unto our God ... priests. The saints of the First
Resurrection shall be priests of God and of Christ,
ministering both to the Father and to the Incarnate
and glorified Son.” They offer themselves, their
souls and bodies, a hving sacrifice, holy, acceptable
to Got, their spiritual (Noytry) service® They
offer the sacrifice of praise continually, that ts, the
11 Pet. ii. 5. PIA DOC aie 5 vel Var Ose xk O- 3Rom. xii. 1.
46 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

fruit of lips which make confession to his name.

They offer all good and unselfish actions,’ for
with such sacrifices God is well pleased” Thus the
whole Christian life is a succession of priestly acts,
of sacrifices which the Church is privileged to offer
to God through Christ. The Church is a _ priest-
hood, but not a sacerdotal caste ;Jew and Gentile,
bond and free, nations of all tongues and habits
of life, are admitted to it on the sole condition of
faith in Jesus Christ and baptism into Him. The
special priesthood of the Christian clergy is the
priesthood of the Body exercised through its officers,
and expressing itself in official acts, especially in
those of common worship and its culminating rite,
the Holy Eucharist.
7. There can be no reasonable doubt that the
Eucharist stands in a very special relation both to
the Sacrifice of the Death of Christ and to His
priestly Self-presentation in heaven. Our Lord’s own:
words of instruction give this great Sacrament a
double character. On one side it is an act of
Communion: ‘fake, eat... drink ye all of it, can
leave no doubt upon this point. One of the
greatest blessings which the Reformation of the
sixteenth century brought to the Church of England
was the restoration to the laity of the Cup which
is the Blood of the Covenant; perhaps the most
lofs edrrolas kal Kowwvlas, 2Heb. xiii. 15 f.
 THE PRIEST 47
hopeful factor in the religious movements of the
nineteenth century has been the widespread return of
religious Church-people to the primitive practice of
weekly Communion. But the emphasis thus laid
upon the act of Communion must not be suffered to
divert attention from the other revealed purpose of
the Sacrament. It is also an act of Commemoration;
He who said Take, eat... drink, said also, This do for
my memortal (els Thy éuny avayyyow) This act of
Commemoration, so far as we can see, is intended to
be the Church’s counterpart on earth to the Self-
presentation of our Lord in heaven.” Neither in
heaven nor on earth can there be any repetition of
the Sacrifice, but only a presentation before God
of the One full, perfect, and sufficient Offering. In
heaven this presentation is made by the Ascended
Christ Himself. J saw in the midst of the Throne
. a Lamb standing as though it had been slain.
Worthy art thou... for thou wast slain... worthy
as the Lamb that hath been slain:® so the Elders and
the Angels recognize the abiding sacrificial value of
the Ascended Life. On earth the Church, by Christ’s

1So dvdurnots is used in Lev. xxiv. 7, Num. x. 10. But the usual
word for a memorial before God in the LXx is pvnpdovvor, so that it is
precarious to press dvduynous in thissense. Nor is it so used liturgically :
see Gore, Body of Christ, p. 315 f.
2W. Milligan, Ascension, p. 266: [communicants] “transact here
below what He is transacting in the heavenly Sanctuary.”
3 Apoc. v. 6, 9, 12.
48 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

ordinance, commemorates the Sacrifice under the form

of Bread and Wine, and thus proclaims the Lord’s
death till he come. The presentation in heaven, the
commemoration on earth, will go on simultaneously
up to the moment of the Lord’s Return. The
Eucharistic commemoration is not, indeed, described
in Scripture as a presentation of our Lord’s sacrifice
to God: S. Paul’s proclaim (katayyédXeTe) refers
rather to the witness borne by it to the world and
the Church. But our solemn memorial is assuredly
made in the presence of God, and before all the
company of heaven; and it proclaims the Death of
the Lord, not as a past event, as we might com-
memorate the death of a martyr, but as a Sacrifice
which lives on and is perpetually presented by Christ
Himself in heaven. We have an altar which
answers to the heavenly Altar at which the Great
High Priest officiates. The Eucharistic rite is the
nearest approach which the priestly Body of Christ
on earth can make to a participation in the High-
priestly Self-presentation of her Head in heaven.
Hence it is that all spiritual sacrifices meet in this
supreme Christian service—the offering of alms and

1The words of Heb. xiii. 10, though admitting of a wider interpreta-

tion, cannot but have an Eucharistic reference. ‘‘The ‘Table’ of the
Lord (1 Cor. x. 21), the Bread and Wine, enabled the believers to
‘show forth Christ’s Death’... in this Sacrament, thus, ... the
Christian has that which more than fulfils the types of the Jewish
ritual ” (Westcott, ad loc.).
 THE PRIEST 49
oblations, the offering of praise and thanksgiving,
the offering of souls and bodies. No Liturgy has
more fully emphasized this concurrence of sacrificial
acts in the Eucharist than the Anglican Order of Holy
Communion, though the circumstances of the sixteenth
century imposed upon our Reformers some necessary
reserve as to the use of sacrificial language which the
ancient Church could freely employ.

No aspect of our Lord’s heavenly life is more to

be insisted upon than His priestly office and work.
Popular theology on all sides shews a tendency to
stop short at the Cross, that is, at the historical
moment when the Divine Sacrifice was offered.' The
blessings of our redemption are traced to the Passion
with such exclusive insistence as to suggest that they
would have been ours if Christ had neither risen from
the dead nor ascended into heaven. The whole
attitude of the Christian life is affected by this depar-
ture from the primitive teaching; a dead Christ instead
of a living Lord becomes the object of devotion : the
anchor of the soul is fixed in the past and not in
the present and future. The error, as in many
other instances, turns upon the disproportionate
weight which is attached to certain familiar words of
Holy Scripture, while others, which are necessary to
preserve the balance of truth, are strangely over-
1Cf, the remarks of W. Milligan, of. cz¢., p. 129.
A.C, D
50 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

looked. Thus the words, /¢ zs finished,) are supposed

to exclude atoning work of any kind subsequent to
the death of the Cross ; whereas they only announce
the completion of the particular work of obedience
unto death which was the purpose of our Lord’s
earthly life. Neither the analogy of the Old Testa-
ment Day of Atonement, nor the direct teaching of
the New Testament, sanctions the doctrine that the
priestly work of Christ was finished when He died.
If He was delivered for our trespasses, He was raised
for our justification; if we were reconciled to God
through the death of his Son, much more... shall we
be saved by his life.” With S. Paul not the Cross and
Passion, but the Ascension and the High-priestly
Intercession are the climax of our Lord’s saving work.
If we ask what are the forces making for the salva-
tion of men that flow from the priestly life of Christ in
heaven, the answer may well be, What saving powers
are there which do not proceed from it? All that
the sacrifice of His earthly life obtained for us men
and for our salvation, His heavenly High-priestly life
bestows upon us. The whole life of grace in the
Church on earth springs from this source ; the Sacra-
ments derive their whole efficacy from it; all the
greater works that the Church has done since the
Ascension—the baptism of the nations into Christ,
1Jo. xix. 30 (reréAeorat, consummatum est),
2 Rom. iy, 25, v. 10, viii,
 THE PRIEST 51

the interpenetration of hunian life and thought with

the mind of Christ, the splendid victories of Christian
faith and love, have been possible only because our
High Priest has gone on our behalf into the Holiest,
and there perpetually presents Himself to God, A
gospel which ended with the story of the Cross
would have had all the elevating power of infinite
pathos and love. But the power of an endless life
would have been wanting. It is the abiding life of
our High Priest which makes His atoning Sacrifice
operative, and is the unfailing spring of the life of
justification and grace in all His true members upon
earth.
 IV.
THE PROPHET.

THE Christ-offices are commonly reckoned as three ;

with the royal and the high-priestly life the Lord’s
Anointed unites the character of Prophet. There
are examples in the Old Testament of the Prophet-
King, the Prophet-Priest, and the Priest-King. But
the fulness of Christhood seems to have been reserved
for the ideal King and Priest and Prophet, who is able
in His human life to discharge the functions of all.
At first sight it might appear that the Lord’s office
of Prophet ceased when He left this earth. While His
kingdom is not of this world, and His High-priestly
work finds its proper sphere in the Holiest, the
prophetic office might seem to have no place in a
world where the full light of God streams upon all
the inhabitants, and no interpretation of the Divine
will can be needed. In the days of His flesh, on the

1There are, however, approaches to this exercise of the three

functions in the life of David, who was a prophet (2 Sam. xxiii. 2;
cf. Acts ii. 30), and on one occasion assumed the ephod (2 Sam. vi. 14).
 THE PROPHET 53
other hand, the Christ was pre-eminently Prophet;
even those who were outside the circle of His disciples
knew Him for this," and our Lord accepted the title,?
for, so far as it went, it was a true description of His
work. His whole teaching was prophetic—a new
teaching; if not in all its contents, yet in its
searching inwardness, in its creative power, in the
Divine authority which He manifestly claimed. It
must have been among the overwhelming sorrows
which lay upon the souls of the Eleven on the
night before the Passion, that the voice which
had spoken as never man spake was about to be
silenced in death. Jesus left nothing in writing, and
all that remained of the utterances of the greatest
prophet that Israel or the world had known was but
an uncertain memory preserved by a group of loyal
but imperfectly taught followers.
So indeed it seemed to the Apostles. But even
on that last night their Prophet taught them to look
forward to a renewal of His teaching. His previous
instructions had been but the first instalment of a
greater prophecy, fuller, plainer, and more satisfactory
than any hitherto uttered. These things have I spoken
unto you tn proverbs (ev Tmapotmtas) ; the hour cometh
when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but
shall tell you plainly (mappyoia amayyedo) of the
1Cf, Mc. vi. 15, Jo. iv. 19, vi. 14, ix. 17. 2Mc. vi. 4.
3 Mc. i, 27.
54 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Father’ The teaching of the Ministry had been on

the whole parabolic or paroemiac—a revelation half
revealed, draped in the wrappings of figure and
symbol that hid the brightness of the naked truth,
on which even the Eleven could not as yet bear to
look.22. When Christ was taken from them, the plainer
teaching of their Prophet would begin; not indeed
as they understood ‘plainness,’? that is, with an
apparent simplicity which veiled unapprehended
realities, but by way of a direct appeal to spiritually
enlightened understandings, giving them an insight
into the inmost truth of things. Thus, the Christ-
Prophet’s larger and directer teachings were to
belong to His life with the Father and not to His
brief Ministry among men.
The same discourse revealed to the Apostles the
means by which the Lord would continue to teach
after His departure. These things have I spoken unto
you while abiding with you; but the Paraclete, even
the Floly Spirit, whom the Father will send in my
name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to
your remembrance all things that I said unto you.
When he, the Spirit of truth, ts come, he shall guide
you into all the truth: for he shall not speak from

1Jo. xvi. 25. 2Jo. xvi. 12 ob divacbe Bacrdfew dpri.

° Cf. verse 29, viv év rappyaig \ade?s, though He had just used words
(€&APov—Ed7j vOe—aginu—mopevouar) which were really as hard to
understand as any of His earlier sayings.
 THE PROPHET 55
himself (ad’ éavrov) ; but what things soever he
shall hear, these shall he speak: and he shall declare
unto you the things that are to come If it be said
that according to these statements it is the Spirit
who is the Prophet of the present dispensation
and not the Son, the answer is that the Spirit of
Christ and Christ Himself are one in operation; for
though the Spirit is another Paraclete, and not'identical
with the Son, yet in the mysterious life of God the acts
and words of each Person of the Holy Trinity are
those of the Three, and the Spirit of the Son, as the
Teacher of truth, is not to be distinguished from the
Son whose Spirit He is. Jesus Christ, then, is still
the Prophet of the Church, teaching her now by His
Spirit as He taught during His earthly life by His
own human voice.
As far back as the earliest days of the Ministry, it
was recognized by John the Baptist that a greater
Baptist had arisen in the person of the Christ; Ze
shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit? The Synoptic
Gospels place this testimony at the beginning of their
record, but make no further reference to it, for the
fulfilment of John’s prediction did not fall within
their scope. The fourth Gospel, with other aims,
recurs frequently to the baptism of the Spirit, ending
with the anticipatory gift of the Spirit to the Church
Io. xiv. 25£, xvi. 13 f.
2Mc. i. 8 (Mt. iii. 11, Le. iii. 16).
56 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

on the night after the Resurrection.’ The writer is

conscious, however, that the gift could not be received
in its fulness till the Son had returned to the Father:
as yet (he says) there was no Spirit, because Jesus was
not as yet glorified (ovTw hv mvevpa Ste "Iycots ov7rw
edogarOn).?
The glorification of the Son of Man was succeeded
almost immediately by the Coming of the Spirit.
The world received visible and audible evidence of
the Ascension in the works and utterances of the
promised Paraclete: the Christ, S. Peter claims,
being... by the right hand of God exalted, and having
received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit,
he hath poured forth this, which ye now see and hear3
The Baptism of the Spirit had begun, to continue so
long as the Incarnate Son is with the Father. For
the presence of the Spirit with the Church is the
complement of the presence of the Son in heaven, a
“vicarious power” * which fills the place of the absent
Lord and makes Him spiritually present with us, and
by which He speaks and teaches to the end of time.
I come unto you.... I have yet many things to say
unto you.... IL will see you again® So the Lord

1¢¢. i., iii., iv., vi., Vil., xiv.—xvi., xx.

2Jo. vii. 39. 3 Acts ii. 33.
‘Tertullian, de praeser. 13 vicariam vim Spiritus sancti. De UUrg.
vel. i, vicario domini Spiritu sancto.
5Jo. xiv. 18, xvi. 12, 22,
 THE PROPHET 57
speaks in His last discourse, and the Spirit fulfils His
words. The prophetic office of the Ascended Christ
is realized in the experience of the Spirit-taught
Church.
1. In the first age this office manifested itself in a
new gift of prophecy. The Christian Prophets of the
first age were second only to the Apostles as founda-
tion stones in the building of the Church.’ It would
probably be an error to suppose that the somewhat
erratic and effusive manifestations which S. Paul
endeavoured to bring under control at Corinth were
the normal fruits of the prophetic Spirit. The first
efforts of Christianity to grapple with the problems of
Greek life were made under conditions which tended
to keep the standard of spiritual attainment low in
cities such as Corinth and Thessalonica.? Our estimate
of the place which prophecy held in the Apostolic
Church must be formed on a wider view of its work.
We must not forget the prophets and teachers in
the Church at Antioch who, as they mznistered to
the Lord and fasted, received the inspiration which
prompted the first great mission to the Gentile
world, nor the probability that Barnabas and Saul
themselves were of their number. Judas and Silas,
who were chosen to interpret to the Church at

1; Cor. xii. 28, Eph. iv. 11 (cf. ii. 20 émouxodounbévras emi ro

Geperin Trav Gmrocrbhww Kai mpopynTav.
2Cf. 1 Cor. xiv. 26 ff. and 1 Thess. v. 20 mpogyrelas un éfovBevetre.
58 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
Antioch the great decision of the mother-church, on
which the future of Gentile Christendom depended,
were themselves also prophets". To an Ephesian
prophet we owe the priceless Apocalypse of S. John,
and it is clear from his book how great was the
influence of the prophets of his time in the churches
of the great province of Asia. In S. John’s eyes
the Spzrit of prophecy and the ¢estemony of Jesus were
identical? Even in reference to the Corinthian
prophets S. Paul had found himself able to write:
He that prophesteth speaketh unto men edification and
comfort and consolation.... If all prophesy, and there
come in one unbelieving or unlearned, he ts reproved by
all, he ts judged by all, the secrets of his heart are
made manifest ; and so he will fall down on his face
and worship God, declaring that God ts among you
indeed
Such was early Christian prophecy at its best,
Is the gift extinct? In one sense prophecies, as it
seems, are done away ;* the manifestations described
in the letters to Corinth subsided, and after some
fitful recoveries, disappeared. But the Church re-
tains what is essential: not only have we the New
Testament records of first century inspiration, but

TActs xii th, xVeo renee:

2 Apoc. xix. 10 9 yap maprupla ’Inood éorly 7d mvetua ris mpopyrelas.
31 Cor. xiv.03524-
*1 Cor. xiii. 8 al rpopyretar karapynOjoovra..
 THE PROPHET =
the power of the prophetic Spirit makes itself felt in
the great books, the stirring words, the quickening
and uplifting influence of the best Christian teachers,
whether priests or laymen. There have been within
our Own memory writers, preachers, workers, before
whom the secrets of men’s hearts have been made
manifest, whose words and lives have compelled many
to declare that God is among His people indeed.
The prophetic order may have ceased or have been
suspended, but the Spirit of prophecy still bears
witness to the prophetic office of the Ascended Christ
in the teaching of the living Church.
2. But the work of Christ the Prophet extends
far beyond the small circle of teachers who possess
a gift of inspiration. It is carried on continuously
through the whole Church, regarded as the Witness
and Keeper of the word of God, the szMar
and ground of the truth' When he, the Spirit of
truth, ts come (so our Lord has promised), he shall
guide you into all the truth” \t cannot be believed
that this promise was limited to one age or to one
succession of Bishops. Neither the Apostolic age
nor the Roman See was by Christ’s gift invested with
a monopoly of infallible guidance. The gift belongs
to the whole Body of Christ, and it is converted
into actuality by the gradual, age-long leading of the
Spirit of Christ which dwells in the Body. It isa
Capea ibeop ybbe, iy 20. xVie 13;
 60 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

leading by which each age of the Church is brought,

according to its measure, towards the fulness of the
truth. Doubtless the Apostolic age was remarkable
. for the clearness of vision with which it was enabled
to deliver to the Church once for all the essentials of
Christian faith and life. But other ages have worked
out with great success some particular doctrines of
the faith, as the fourth and fifth centuries developed
for all time the Christology of Catholic Christen-
dom, and the sixteenth century endeavoured to
resuscitate S. Paul’s great doctrine of Justification
by faith, Nor need we doubt that our own age is
being led through many hitherto untried ways to the
recovery of lost truths or to the formulation of truths
which have hitherto been recognized or expressed
only in part. We may be assured that no age, no
teacher, has ever grasped all the truth with such
completeness that nothingis left for the Spirit of
Christ to teach, or for the Church to learn. The
work of our Prophet is not ended, and will not be
before His return. J have yet, He tells us, many
things to say unto you. Meanwhile what are the great
contents of the teaching of the Spirit of Christ?
The Lord Himself answers : I shall tell you plainly
of the Father Lord, shew us the Father (said Philip,
speaking for the Eleven), and it sufficeth us;? the
knowledge of the Father, the Source of all life and
1Jo. xvi. 25. 2Jo. xiv. 8.
 THE PROPHET i
love and of the Godhead itself, is the ultimate truth
and the supreme satisfaction of the mind and _heart
of man. The Lord’s answer to Philip is of extra-
ordinary interest. Have I been so long time with
you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou,
Shew us the Father?’ How indeed, if during the
years of the ministry he had come to know Jesus
as He is? But this was what Philip and the rest
had failed to do, and now the Spirit was coming
to give that deeper knowledge which no length of
acquaintance with Christ after the flesh could give.
He shall glorify me, the Lord says later on in the
same discourse, for he shall take of mine, and shall
declare (amayyedel) tt unto you; adding, AU things
whatsoever the Father hath are mine, therefore said
I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare tt unto you.?
The Spirit of Christ thus reveals the Father by
revealing the Son, for to know the Son is to know
the Father also. This process of the revelation of
the Father through the Son can be seen in nearly
all the Epistles of the New Testament, but especially
in the Epistles of S. Paul. S. Paul’s Christ is none
other than the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels and the
Creeds: the human Christ who was Jorn of the seed of
David, and born of a woman, who suffered and died
and was buried, and rose from the dead the third
1Jo. xiv. 9. Von xviee Aut,
62 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

day.! But while the gospel of the Nativity, the Cross,

and the Resurrection was delivered by S. Paul first
of all (€v mpwros) wherever he carried the faith, it
was but the foundation on which he built, and not
the whole or the chief part of the structure. As he
builded, new views of the Lord’s person and offices
presented themselves to his mind, and were worked
into the edifice. He came to know a Christ after
the Spirit who existed before the worlds, who is che
Image of the invisible God, in whom all things were
created and all things consist;? a Christ who, decng
in the form of God, emptied Himself, taking the form
of a servant, becoming obedient unto death, and thus
earning for Himself in His human nature the Name
which is above every name and the homage of the
whole creation.2 Here indeed we see the Spirit
glorifying Jesus by taking of that which is His and
shewing it to the mind of the Apostle, and through
him to the Church of all time. But this glori-
fication of Jesus, it is evident, in no way disturbs
the balance of the Apostle’s monotheistic belief,
on which the Gospel itself is based; zo us, S. Paul
protests, there zs but One God, the Father. On the
contrary, nowhere in the Bible is so large a place
assigned to the Person of the Father as in the Pauline
Epistles. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
?Rom. i. 3, Gal. iv. 4,1 Cor. xv. 3f. %[Link]. *Phil. ii. 6 ff.
 THE PROPHET 63
the Father who made us meet to be partakers of the
inheritance of the saints in light, who hath blessed us
with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in
Christ, the Father of glory; is everywhere presented
as the Supreme Object of Christian faith and love
and hope; and it is precisely in the Epistles of the
Roman Captivity, which are distinguished by S. Paul’s
richest Christology, that the glory of the Father
is most abundantly set forth, The Johannine
writings exhibit the same remarkable connexion
between the glorification of the Son and that of the
Father; the fourth Gospel, with its far higher
doctrine of the Person of Christ, has far more to say
of the Father than the Synoptics, and the first
Epistle of S. John is also singularly full of the
theology of the First Person. Thus in revealing the
Son the Spirit of Christ tells us plainly of the Father;
in shewing us the things of Christ, He shews us the
things of the Person who sent Him. So great is the
mistake of those who minimize the Divine glory of
the Son from a desire to emphasize the supremacy of
the Father. Our conception of the glory of the Father
does not lose but gains in proportion as we realize
the glory of the Son; when men confess Jesus
Christ to be Lord, they do so éo the glory of God the
Father; it is in the face of Jesus Christ, that the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God is given.”
12 Cor. i. 3, Col. i. 12, Eph. I. 3, 17. 2Phil, ii, 11, 2 Cor. iv. 6.
64. THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Christ our Prophet, then, shews us the Father by

revealing Himself through the Spirit. He teaches His
Church continually in the Apostolic writings, in the
consensus of a truly Catholic tradition, in the creeds
and confessions, the hymns and liturgies of Christen-
dom, in the great theological works of Christian
antiquity, in the effort which is made by each
successive age to carry on the developement of
religious thought ; in the voice of the living Church,
even, it may be, in voices which are not of the
Church, but by which the Spirit of truth is guiding
men into unsuspected approaches to the fuller know-
ledge of God.
3. The teaching of the Spirit of Christ is not, how-
ever, to be limited to Scripture and tradition, or
to other channels of truth which are external to the
personal life. If this were so, it could be accepted by
a simple act of submission to authority, and its power
over life would be proportionately small. A purely
external revelation might conceivably serve many
great purposes, but it could not of itself deeply stir
the hearts of men. But the teaching of the Spirit
of Christ is not external only; He enters the inner
man, touches the springs of the moral nature, and
makes it to respond to the external teaching of
Scripture and the Church.
Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, so S.
John writes to the members of the Apostolic Church,—
 THE PROPHET 6s
and ye know all things’ TI have not written unto you
because ye know not the truth, but because ye know tt....
The anointing which ye received of him abideth in you,
and ye need not that any one teach you; but as his
anointing teacheth you concerning all things ... and even
as tt taught you, ye abide in him.” This is perhaps the
locus classticus on the Inner Light, but it does not stand
alone. Throughout the New Testament it is assumed
that every believer is in his own measure taught of
God? Moses, when some feared that his office was
being invaded by an outburst of prophecy in the
camp, exclaimed, Would God that all the Lord's
people were prophets* In the new Israel the wish
of the Lawgiver finds its fulfilment. As all the
members of Christ are by their union with Him
made kings and priests, so a measure of His Spirit
of prophecy has descended on each of them. Not
all Christians, indeed, are ‘ prophets’ in the sense of
possessing a special inspiration, but all have been
made to drink of one Spirit, and all living members
of Christ have learned what man cannot teach.
Few things are more remarkable in the writings of
S. Paul than the ungrudging recognition by so great
an expert in Christian truth of the right inherent in all
1 Or, according to another reading, ye al/ know.
21 John ii. 20, 27.
3 See John vi. 45 f. (citing Isa. liv. 13), vii. 17, 1 Th. iv. 9.
4Num. xi. 29.
AaCe E
66 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

believers to know all that God has revealed through

Christ, and his evident desire that they should rise
to the fulness of their privilege. J myself also am
persuaded of you, my brethren, he writes to the Roman
Christians, whom he knew by report only, that ye
yourselves ave... filled with all knowledge, able also
to admonish one another I bow my knees unto the
Father, he writes again to the churches of Asia, chat
he would grant you... that ye may be strengthened
through his Spirit in the inward man, that Christ
may dwell in your hearts through faith, to the end
that ye... may be strong to apprehend with all the
saints... and to know the love of Christ Personal
gifts differ widely, but a certain capacity for spiritual
truth and apprehension of it belong to all who have
the Spirit of Christ ; a capacity which is sometimes
the more remarkable because of the intellectual
poverty of those who manifest it. Many a parish
priest will thankfully admit that he has learnt from
poor and simple folk among his flock lessons that
no book can teach. Such unconscious teachers are
witnesses to the power of the Spirit of Christ, who
makes the humblest believers not only receptive of
spiritual knowledge, but able in their measure to
impart it.
In such ways as these the Ascended Christ still
fulfils the office of Prophet, and fulfils it far more
1Rom, xv. 14. 2 Eph. iii. 14 ff.
 THE PROPHET 67

effectually and widely than was possible in the days

of His flesh. Then a things were done tn parables,
that seeing, men might see and not perceive, and hear-
ing, they might hear and not understand. To the
Church since the Pentecost zs gzven the mystery of the
kingdom of God; teaching by parables and proverbs
has been exchanged for ‘ plainness of speech.’ It is
the same Christ who speaks, but He speaks now by the
Spirit, and the voice of the Spirit reaches further and
can teach more than the human voice of the greatest
of masters. So the spiritual teaching of our race will
be carried forward, till our Prophet returns, and takes
up again in the ages to come that revelation of the
Father in His own Person which He began when He
dwelt among us in the days before the Cross,

1Mc. iv. 11f.

 V.
Dis iA,

THE Headship of the Ascended Lord is a Pauline

conception which the Apostle works out at length
only from one point of view. Hints are dropped that
it admits of several applications, Christ is Head of
every man, as the man is the head of the wife, and as
God is the Head of Christ! He is the Head of every
principality and authority (maons apxis Kat e€ove las) ;
all the authorities of the unseen world as well as of the
world of men are under His control.2 He is Head
over all things to the Church ; He possesses an universal
sovereignty which is exercised for the good of His
Body.2 It is evident that these suggestive state-
ments open vast fields for speculative thought. But
S. Paul has not entered upon them, and, it may be,
has purposely abstained from the attempt. In one
direction, however, he felt himself at liberty to go
further, for it concerned the highest interests of
Ela Corexias: Col. il, TOs Ch 1)Reto. 22.
8 Eph, i. 223 cf. Mt. xxviii, 18,
 THE HEAD 69
all Christians. The Ascended Christ is in a very
special sense Head of the universal Church. Of this
Headship the Apostle has much to say, and he says
it in several passages which are among the most
profoundly interesting in his great Epistles to the
Ephesians and Colossians.
Two lines of thought are open to us when we
think of Christ as the Head of the Church. The
title may represent either (1) the authority exercised
by Him over the. whole Christian Society, or (2) the
relation in which He stands to the life of the Church,
as a spiritual Body deriving its sustenance from
Him.
1. The first of these aspects of our Lord’s Head-
ship is before the mind of S. Paul in a passage which
deals with Christian marriage and married life? A
husband, he teaches, zs head of his wife, as also the
Christ ts Head of his Church. It follows that, as the
Church lives in subjection (vroTaccera) to the Christ,
so the wives should be in every respect subject to
their husbands. But it also follows that the husbands
should use their authority for the good of their wives,
and in the spirit of love. Christ is the Saviour of the
Body of which He is Head. He loved the Church
and delivered Himself to the death of the Cross for

iEph. i. 22f., iv. 15 f., v. 23f.; Col. i. 18, ii. 19.

2 Eph. v. 22 ff. dvip éoriy Kepadrd ris yuvaikds (cf. I Cor. xi. 3), ws kal
6 xpioros Keparh Tis éxxAyalas.
70 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

her sake, His purpose being to consecrate and cleanse

her by the sacramental bath of Baptism, and in the
end to present her to Himself glorious, not having spot
of defilement or wrinkle of age, or any such thing ;
that, in a word, she should be holy and without
blemish’ in the sight of God His Father, to whose
presence He will bring her. Meanwhile her subordi-
nation is not servile, but the willing submission of
the wife who obeys not only for conscience sake, but
because she loves, reveres, and adores. Thus for
Christians the marriage bond has become a mystery,
and a great one,” for it reveals nothing less than ‘the
mystical union that is betwixt Christ and His Church’;
authority on the part of Christ, subordination on the
part of the Church, love on both sides—love answer-
ing to love, to be crowned by the fulness of joy
when the union is consummated at the coming of
the Lord.
Nothing in early Christianity is more admirable
than this attitude of loving subjection to the Ascended
Christ. /esus 7s Lord was not only the creed of the
Apostolic Church, but its rule of life. His members
were ready to live or to die for Him—it scarcely
seemed to matter which. JVone of us, S. Paul appeals
1Cf, Eph. i. 4.
2Eph. v. 32 7d puornpiov totro péya early (Vulg. hoc sacramentum
magnum est). The ‘heavenly archetype’ of marriage, S. Paul would
say, is ‘the relation of Christ to the Ecclesia.’ See Hort, Zcclesza,
p- 152.
 THE -HEAD 71
to his fellow-Christians, “veth to himself, and none
dieth to himself... whether we live, we live unto the
Lord, or whether we die, we die unto the Lord : whether
we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's: For
himself he can say: My earnest expectation and
hope...is that Christ shall be magnified in my body,
whether by life or by death? Every individual believer
in the first age regarded himself as ¢he Lora’s, and this
thought was the inspiration of a service that was
‘perfect freedom’; even the Christian slave could
account himself tre Lora’s freedman, since he served ©
the Lord Christ3
But it is of a corporate rather than an individual
relation that S. Paul speaks, when he compares the
Headship of Christ to the husband’s authority over
the wife ; for the Spouse [Link] is not in the New
Testament the soul, as in later Christian thought, but
the Church.4 Further, His Church in this connexion
is the whole congregation of baptized believers, not
the particular community of Christians ‘sojourning’ at
Ephesus or Laodicea, Corinth or Rome ;° nor again
the aggregate of such local churches; nor is it a
conception originating in ‘an expansion or extension

1 Rom. xiv. 7 f. ZV elouilly th eXoy

31 Cor. vii. 22 dmedevOepos Kuplov, Col. iii. 24.
4Cf. Jo. iii. 29, Apoc. xix. 7, xxi. 2, 9, xxii. 17.
5In 2 Cor. xi. 2 it is the local Church which is ‘espoused’; in
Ephesians, the universal Church is in view.
72 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

of the thought of each local Ecclesia,’ ' nor a heavenly

Ecclesia which does not consist of men on earth;
but the whole number of Christ’s baptized members
on earth, regarded as a visible unity? It is this
great oecumenical society, the ‘Holy Church’ of
the earliest baptismal creed, the ‘Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church’ of somewhat later forms, which
can claim the Ascended Christ as its Head. Although
a visible body, living on earth under visible officers,
and offering a visible worship, its Head is invisible,
and its relations with Him are purely spiritual. On
the part of the Head they are maintained through
the Holy Spirit, by whom as Christ’s Vicar on earth
‘the whole body of the Church is governed and
sanctified.’ On the part of the Body, the Headship
of Christ is recognized by loyalty to His authority
in all things. The Lord’s instructions to the first
m{ssionaries of the Gospel required them not only to
evangelize and baptize the nations,? but also to teach
those whom they baptized to observe all that He
had enjoined upon themselves (dca éverethapny Umi),
But the loyalty which the Church owes to Christ
cannot be restricted to the observance of injunctions
delivered during His life on earth. There are few
1Cf. Hort, Ecclesia, p. 147 f.
? Hort, zézd. : ‘it isa serious misunderstanding of these Epistles [Eph.,
Col.] to suppose, as is sometimes done, that the Ecclesia here spoken of
is an Ecclesia wholly in the heavens, not formed of human beings.’
3 Mt. xxviii. 19 f.
 THE HEAD 73
express commandments left by Christ, beyond the
observance of the Sacraments; the new law is a
law of love, in the spirit and not in the letter.
To obey the law of love, however, to follow the
religion of the Spirit, is in fact a far severer
test of loyalty than the keeping of any code of
external laws. The Church shews her subjection
to Christ in that world-long endeavour to conform
life to the mind of Christ which, amid many short-
comings, characterizes all sincere Christians ; in the
gesta Christe which in all ages have followed the
extension of the Gospel, even when the faith that
was preached has been defective or corrupt, or the
methods employed to propagate it have departed
widely from those of the Apostolic age,
It may be asked whether the spiritual Headship
of Christ can find visible expression on earth. More
than one attempt has been made in the history of
the Church to answer this question in the affirmative.
The Western Church has had its human ‘ Vicar of
Christ’; in our own country the revolt from the
Papacy produced a ‘Supreme Head.’ But it must
be admitted that neither Papalism nor Anglican
Erastianism has borne such fruits as to encourage
the belief that it is good for the Church to be under
a visible Head, whether priestly or monarchical.
Even if such an institution be not in theory incom-
patible with the spiritual Headship of Christ, in
 74 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
practice it certainly tends to obscure and thrust the
latter aside. In a national Church the supremacy of
the sovereign over all persons and in all causes
within his dominions may be inevitable, and perhaps
need not interfere with the spiritual independence
of the Body of Christ, though it must be confessed
that it often seems to do so. In the universal
‘Church the Episcopate possesses a constitutional
authority which we believe to be according to the
mind of Christ, who Himself gave pastors and
teachers, helps and governments. But we give
neither to Bishop nor King the Headship which
Christ has reserved for Himself. The erection of
any human authority into a spiritual autocracy
comes too perilously near to the assumption of
rights and powers which belong to the Supreme
Pastor and Bishop of all Christian souls.
2. But the thought of Christ as the Head of the
Church suggests to S. Paul another line of thought
which is even more fruitful. He is not only the
dominating, directing Power which the Body obeys
and follows, but the source of its vitality and of its
vital energies.
The comparison of the Church to the human body
first appears in the first Epistle to the Corinthians.}
There it is worked out at some length, but without
reference to the head as an organ; and, though hand
11 Cor. xii. 12 ff
 THE HEAD 45

and foot, ear and eye and nostrils, parts comely and
uncomely, are specified, the crown and glory of the
~whole body is passed in silence. Moreover, it is the
local Christian body which the Apostle has in view
and not the whole congregation of the faithful through-
out the world; ye, the Apostle says, ze. you, Corin-
thian believers, are the Body of Christ, and severally
members thereof. \n Romans, written from Corinth
two or three years later, the same metaphor is again
used with similar restrictions. But in Ephesians and
Colossians, the fruit of the undisturbed leisure and
riper thought of the two years’ imprisonment at
Rome, the Body of Christ is seen to be a world-
wide society, and its relation to Christ to be
organically such as that of the human body to the
head. The first of these points may have been
suggested to S. Paul’s mind by his enforced stay in
the centre of the Empire; ‘the unity which com-
prehended both Jew and Gentile under the bond of
subjection to the Emperor of Rome,’* pointed to ‘the
truer unity which bound together in one society
all believers in the Crucified Lord.” It was this
great spiritual unity which, as S. Paul now saw, was
in the fullest sense the Body of Christ; and Christ
stood in the same relation to it as the head to the
members of the body. When the Apostle came to
think of the functions of the brain he found that they
1 Hort, £cclesza, p. 144.
76 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
presented a striking analogy to the functions which
the Ascended Christ fulfils towards the Universal
Church. What these are we learn from two passages
in these Epistles which may be placed in parallel
columns for the convenience of comparison.

The Head, even Christ, The Head, from whom all

from whom all the Body, the Body, being supplied and
being fitly framed and knit kuit together (ertxopnyorvpevov
together (cvvappooyodpevov kat ovvPuBaCopevov) through
kat cvvPuBafouevov) through the ligaments and bands (6.0,
every ligament of the supply Tov adav Kal ovvdérpwv),t
(Sia mdons adpns THs eme- increaseth with the increase of
Xopynytas), according to the God.?
working in the measure of
each several part, maketh tn-
crease of the body unto the
building up of itself in love.

‘The Apostle is using, as. the Dean of West-

minster points out, ‘the physiological terms of the
Greek medical writers, and we can almost see him
turn to the beloved physician... before venturing
to speak in technical language of “every ligament of
the whole apparatus” of the human frame.’* ‘In both
places, he adds, ‘the function assigned to the adal
is that of holding the body together in the unity
'On apy and ctvderuos see Lightfoot on Col. ii. 19, comparing
Robinson on Eph. iv. 16.
* Eph. iv. 15 f., Col. ii. 19.
3 Hphesians, p. 104.
 THE HEAD ti
which is necessary to growth’! But in both the
unity and the growth of the body are regarded as
dependent on the head, the ligaments being only the
means by which the body is kept in communication
with the brain. Of the two passages, the shorter,
which was perhaps the first to be written, represents
this dependence more clearly. The Colossians are
warned against cutting themselves off from the Christ
through the cult of angels, and thus losing the vital
energy which can permeate the members of the Body
only when they are in union with the Head. In
Ephesians the Apostle’s purpose is somewhat different,
as may be seen by glancing at the context (iv. 7 ff.).
Each believer, he teaches, has received from the
Ascended Christ his own measure of grace. It is
the Ascended Christ who has given the Church
Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers,
to prepare the Saints for a life of service, and thus
to build the edifice of the Christian Body, with the
ultimate purpose of bringing all to the maturity, the
spiritual stature, the fulness of life, which characterizes
the completed Christ. For it is this at which, in the
face of many difficulties and perils, we must steadily
aim—to grow up in all things into conformity with
our Head. From Him comes the principle of growth
in the Body, working through the means of union
which connect us with Him in His ascended life, and
1 Ephesians, p. 186,
78 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

operative in each individual member according as he

partakes of the Head’s vital power.
As often in S. Paul, especially in the chief Epistles
of the Roman captivity, the thought is too great for
the words. But the general sense is clear. The
Head of the Ecclesia is in heaven; but although
invisible, He is in the closest union with His Body,
which is on earth. There is a great system of com-
munications between Christ and the Church, which
makes Head and members a living unity. Upon
the use of this system depends the life or growth of
each member, and the ultimate maturity of the whole
Body. [Link] Church is still immature; it has not
come to ‘ perfectness of age in Christ.’ The Head has
been perfected through suffering ; the perfecting of
the members of the Body must be reached through
union with the Head. This is the teaching of the Vine
and the Branches under another figure ; neither the
branches apart from (xwpis) the vine, nor the mem-
bers apart from the head can thrive or even live. But
Nature has provided for vital communication between
root and branches, head and members; and in the
higher nature of the Christian life there is a similar
provision. The knitting and fitting together of men
in the unity of the Church goes forward through
successive generations, and wherever men are thus
vitally united to Christ in His Church, the life of
Christ flows into them, and the process of spiritual
 THE HEAD 79
growth goes forward. As each generation is gathered
into the unseen world, the time draws nearer when
the Body of Christ will be complete, and its maturity
revealed in the perfect life.
A fine note in Bishop Lightfoot’s commentary on
Colossians’ points out how modern knowledge, so far
from wrecking S. Paul’s analogy, has given to it fresh
force and meaning. ‘Any exposition of the ‘nervous
system more especially reads like a commentary on
his image of the relations between the body and
the head.... The volition communicated from the
brain to the limbs, the sensations of the extremities
telegraphed back to the brain, the absolute mutual
sympathy between the head and the members, the
instantaneous paralysis ensuing on the interruption
of continuity, all these add to the completeness and
life of the image.’
If it be asked what are the ligaments or bands by
which we are united to Christ our Head and receive
of His fulness, S. Paul’s silence on this point may be
taken for a warning that no very precise, certainly
no exhaustive, answer can be given. The two great
Sacraments must undoubtedly hold a first place among
them, for in S. Paul’s system Baptism is the initial
rite of corporate union with Christ, and the Euchar-
istic Bread is the communion of the Body of Christ,
by which we are preserved in the unity of the Church.”
1 Colossians [1875], p. 266. 1 Cor. xii. 13, Gal. iii. 27, 1 Cor. x. 16f,
80 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Other sacramental rites, such as the laying on of

hands upon the baptized for imparting the fuller
vifts of the Holy Spirit, may also claim a place.
But all means of grace—prayer, the word of God,
devout meditation, spiritual communion, all religious
acts by which the human spirit lays hold on things
eternal—_seem to come within the range of the
Apostle’s thought. Yet we know far too little of
the secrets of our spiritual life, too little also of the
wealth of Christ’s power of drawing men to Himself,
to dogmatize’on such a point. It is enough to be
sure that means of union with~ Christ exist in
abundance within the Body of the Church, of which
we are members.
In one respect the analogy of the human body
fails us. The [Link] bands of the physical
system work automatically ; our means of communi-
cation with the. Ascended Christ are inoperative
without the concurrence of the individual will. Men
work out their own salvation, although, and even
because, it is God that worketh in them both the
will to work and the work itself in all its stages.)
Thus the Christ lives in His members so far as they
abide in Him, dwelling in their hearts by His Spirit,
as they dwell in Him by their faith? The same
process goes forward corporately in the whole Body
Phil. ii. 13 Oeds ydp éorw 6 évepySv Kal Td Oédrew Kal Td evepyeiv.
2John xv. 3, Eph. iii. 17.
 THE HEAD 81
of the Church. The Church lives and grows as it
reciprocates the action of the Head, suffering loss of
strength and vitality whenever it fails to respond to
His Spirit. Ecclesiastical history is a running com-
ment on this text. It shews periods of spiritual
growth, and periods of decline, of torpor, and almost
of death;* and the former often synchronize with
times of persecution and social loss, whilst the latter
are found in times of outward prosperity. In days
of storm and stress the Church has realized her
- fellowship with her Head, and dependence on Him;
whereas in good days she has said to herself, I Zave
need of nothing, and has forgotten that apart from
Him she is spiritually helpless—userable and poor
and blind and naked?
There is another side to this dependence of
the Body on the Head, which is not to be over-
looked. S. Paul does not hesitate to represent the
Head as on His part depending upon the members
for the full realization of His office and work.
As the head cannot fulfil its functions apart from
the body, so the Christ is incomplete without His
Church. Thus, in the Apostle’s startling words, the
Church is the fulness (TO wArjpopa) of him who
zs. being fulfilled all in all—for so the _ best
interpreters, ancient and modern, bid us. trans-
1 Apoc. iii. I vexpos €?, iil. 15 yAvapds et.
2 Apo. ili. 17.
AGC, Fr
82 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

late! The Ascended Christ still needed, and still

needs, to fulfil Himself in the life of His Body,
the Church: ‘the work which He came to do
on earth was not completed when He passed from
the sight of men.., part by part He was...
fulfilled in the community of His disciples.’?. The
idea of the Christ is incomplete without the
Church; as the ages pass on and the Church
approaches her consummation, the Christ attains
the fulness of His life. We are already complete in
him;* He will in that day at length be complete
in us. Meanwhile, He is relatively imperfect, so
long as His Body has further growth to make. Even
the Lord’s sufferings are in this sense incomplete, for
the sufferings of the Church belong to the predestined
sum of those which the Christ must bear. Zhe cup
that I drink, ye shall drink,s was His answer to the
two who sought the highest honours of His Kingdom ;
and until that cup has been drained by the last
Christian sufferer, the afflictions of the Christ are not
made up. S. Paul, therefore, dares to say that he
himself was helping to reduce this shortage: J fill
up on my part the deficiencies (avravaTAnpO Ta vorTEp}-
pata) of the afflictions of the Christ, on behalf
of his

1Eph. i. 23 7d mAjpwua Too mdvra év maow mdnpovmevov : see West-

cott and Robinson, ad /oc., and Hort, Zcclesza, p. 147 f.
2Hort, Ze. SCol. ii. 9 éoré metAnpwpevoar ev adTa@.
*Mc. x. 39.
 THE HEAD 83
Body, that ts the Church." Deficiencies in the per-
sonal sufferings of Christ there are none, nor in their
atoning worth; deficiencies in the sufferings which
belong to the mystical Christ there were in S. Paul’s
time, and still are. Christ still suffers in His Body;
He hungers and thirsts, is homeless and naked, is
sick or in prison, when any of His members is in
such a case. It is the privilege of the needy, the
toiling, the afflicted in mind, body, or estate, not
only to find the power of the exalted Christ made
perfect in their weakness, but to know that by that
very weakness they bear their part in filling up the
measure of His sufferings.®
Nor is this a theological fiction ; there lies behind
the words a great spiritual fact, which belongs to the
economy of the ascended life—the active sympathy
of the Head with the members of the Body. S. Paul
speaks more than once of the sympathy of the mem-
bers with each other: whether one member suffereth, all
the members suffer with it; or one member ts honoured,
all the members rejoice with tt. Rejoice with them
that rejoice; weep with them that weep.* But it was
reserved for the author of Hebrews to recognize that
the Head has the same fellowship with the members
as the members with one another. He does not,
indeed, speak of Christ as the Head, but as the High
EC OVNI 24. PMG, Seaie. Glstiie
= 2G or, x11... Sy) [Link] 20; Rom. Xi. 15.
84 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Priest ; yet he directs attention to the human nature

which is the ground of the sympathy with men which
qualifies Him alike for the functions of High Priest
and for those of Head. We have not a High Priest
that cannot be touched with the feeling of our in-
firmities (suvraOjca Tats da Oevelats nuov), but one that
hath been tn all points tempted like as we are; and
the same is true of our Head, seeing that High Priest
and Head are one.
The human sympathy which in Jesus Christ joins
hands with Divine compassion is a religious force by
which the Gospel is distinguished from other mono-
theistic religions. The Old Testament has much to
say of the compassions of Jahveh ; they fazl not, they
are new every morning In Islam ‘compassionate’
is a stereotyped title of Allah. But Christianity
alone appeals to a Divine-human sympathy ; only the
Church can pray, ‘By thy Fasting and Temptation, by
thine Agony and Bloody Sweat, by thy Cross and
Passion, by thy precious Death and Burial...in all
time of our tribulation...in the hour of death and
in the day of judgement, Good Lord, deliver us.’ The
sympathy of Christ is, we may be certain, attracted
by all tempted and suffering humanity; but it
finds a special outflow towards the members of
1Heb. iv. 15. 2 Lam. iii. 22 f.
® Thus e.g. the Guide to //appiness, a popular Mohammedan prayer-
book, begins: ‘‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the
Merciful.”
 THE HEAD 8s
His own Body. As when He was on earth His
sympathy with sufferers could become operative only
when their faith opened the door to His healing
power, so it doubtless is now that He is in heaven;
His will to relieve is conditioned by the response
which is made to His sympathy. But within His
Body His fellow-feeling has a free course ; His ability
to succour those who are tempted finds scope for
constant exercise ; and,as His members draw near to
the throne of grace, they rececve mercy and find grace
to help in time of need.
If the Head is in effective sympathy with the
Body, His sympathy is reciprocated by all His true
members. The sympathy of the Church with the
past suffering of her Head is expressed, year by year,
in the solemnities of Lent and Holy Week; that she
rejoices in His present joy is shewn at the great
festivals of Easter and Ascension. The burst of
light and colour which floods our churches at Easter
and Ascensiontide, the festive services and glorious
hymns of the Great Forty days, bear witness to the
joy which thrills all Christian hearts that realize
the resurrection and the exaltation of our Lord.
The disciples who witnessed the Ascension returned
to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in
the temple, blessing God. Sympathy with their Head
sent a flood of joy coursing through their lives, even
PYLcw xiv 52 te
86 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

when they were fresh from the last parting with

Him, and the Holy Spirit, the other Comforter, had
not yet come. To us the Spirit has revealed the
glory of the Ascended Christ, and the stones might
well cry out if, on our parts, there were no answer of
exultation at the crowning of our Head.
 Vi.

THE MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, AND

ADVOCATE,

1. THE Old Testament had a Mediator in the person

of Moses. The Law was ordained through Angels
in the hands of a mediator’ That angels were em-
ployed at the giving of the Law was a constant
tradition of the Rabbis, based on Deut. xxxiii. 2, He
- came from ten thousands of holy ones? But it was
from Moses, a man of like passions with themselves,
that Israel actually received the Law; the whole
transaction was mediated by him. Nor was the Law-
giving the only occasion on which Moses came
between God and His people. He is represented as
the intermediary in all Divine communications with
Israel, not as a mere prophet, but as one to whom
God spoke mouth to mouth, even manifestly and not
in dark speeches.’ Similarly, on occasions of national
1Gal. iii. 19: see Lightfoot, ad Joc.
21xx ody pupidow Kddys, x degiav adrod dyyedo mer adrod.
Cf. Driver, ad loc.
3 Exod. xxxiii. 11, Num. xii. 6 ff.
88 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

sin or peril, it is Moses who intercedes with God,

and at his entreaty Jahveh ‘repents.’1 It was, how-
ever, the primary mediation at Sinai which impressed
the Hebrew mind most deeply: the occasion on
which Moses stood between the Lord and Israel
on the holy mount, and God spoke to him out
of the midst of the fire and gave him the Ten
Words. To the intervention of Moses at that
moment the nation owed the Covenant with God
that distinguished Israel from the rest of the nations
of the world. No wonder that from Philo? onwards
the title of mediator was given by Jewish writers
with one consent to the man who had represented
the Hebrew people before God on that greatest day
of their national life.
The New Testament does not deny the media-
torial character of Moses. The Law was given by
Moses. But it places in sharp contrast with him
another Mediator, who has won not for Israel only:
but for the world? a greater gift: grace and truth
came by Jesus Christ. He is (a) mediator of a better
Covenant, which has been enacted upon better promises ;
He is also (6) the one mediator between God and
men?

PE Kod. xxxity Td ties 30th

2 vit. Moys. iii. 19 ofa mectrns Kal diaddaxrhs.
8Jo. i. 17. For another point of contrast see Heb. iii. 3 ff.
4 Heb. viii. 6. Sim sti Set
MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE: 89

(a) It is the first of these views of the mediation of

Christ which is in the mind of the author of Hebrews.
The prophets had spoken of a new covenant which
Jahveh would make... with the House of Israel and
with the House of Judah‘ at a future day. But the
promise of a new covenant implies the supersession of
the first, and the appointment of a new mediator to
take the place of the mediator of the Law.2— Under
the new covenant the mediator is the High Priest;
those two great offices, which under the Law were
represented separately by Moses and Aaron, are both
held by the Ascended Christ.
The conception of the Gospel as a new covenant in
antithesis to the Law had found a place in the Epistles
of S. Paul,? and in our Lord’s words at the giving of
the Eucharistic Cup—TZzhzs zs my blood of the Cove-
nant, or This Cup ts the New Covenant in my blood.*
In both forms of the words reference is doubtless
made to the scene in Exodus xxiv., where after the
Lawgiving Moses, as mediator of the Law, first reads
the Book of the Covenant in the hearing of Israel and
receives their promise of obedience, and then sprinkles
the Book and the people with sacrificial blood, by way
of ratifying the contract between God and the con-
gregation.° Even so our Mediator ratifies the New
eietpxxxte 0 te 2@f, Heb: vii; 7.5 13: 32 Cor. iii. 6.
4Mc. xiv. 24=Mt. xxvi. 28. 1 Cor. xi. 25, Le. xxii. 20.
5 Exod. xxiv. 6-8; cf. Heb. ix. 18 ff.
90 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Covenant by the Cup of blessing, which He identifies

with His own blood shed for the remission of sins.
Our Lord, then, is Mediator of the Covenant of
the Gospel, with its better promises of forgiveness
and grace, and its better sacrifice, the Sacrifice of
Himself. His mediation, based on that one Sacrifice
once offered upon earth, is carried forward within
the veil, whither as High Priest He has gone to
present it before God. On earth He still gives day
by day in His Church the blood of the Covenant in
the Eucharistic Cup, and the whole ministry of re-
conciliation, committed by Him through His Church
to the bishops and presbyters of Christendom, is an
application of His Sacrifice to the wounds of fallen
humanity.’ But behind all this, and the sole cause of
its efficacy, is the direct mediation in heaven, where
the One Mediator stands between God and men.
The Church needs and can have [Link]. We
are come...to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,
and to the blood of sprinkling that cries for mercy
and grace.”
(4) In one of his latest letters S. Paul points out
that the mediation of our Lord is, further, a media-
tion on behalf of the whole race. He exhorts that
supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings, be
made for all men, including kings and all that are
in high place, the heathen emperors and their subor-
12 Cor. v. 18f. Blieh. xe 22. 24e
MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE 91
dinates. God our Saviour, he adds, willeth that all men
should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth.
For there ts one God, one mediator also between God
and men, himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself
a ransom for all. The argument is clear: God, who
is the Saviour of believers, wills also the salvation of
the world; the One God is the God of the whole
human race, and desires the good of all He has made.
In like manner the One Mediator represents all man-
kind; He took their common nature, and He offered
Himself in that nature for all. Therefore the Church
can pray for all men, and all men can partake of the
common salvation through the sacrifice and mediation
of Jesus Christ.
We are reminded of the only passage-in the Old
Testament where the word ‘mediator’ (ueoiTys) is
found in the Greek Bible. Job is complaining of
the vast disadvantage under which he seems to
labour when he, a mortal man, draws near to the
Infinite :
He ts not a man, as I am, that I should answer him,
That we should come together in judgement;
There ts no daysman® betwixt us,
That might lay his hand upon us both

Ute Cim- qin ltt.

2Cf. 1 John ii. 2, where the same truth is taught in other words.
3 Heb. 721), Lxx, peoirns: an umpire, arbiter, mediator (cf. xvi. 21),
4Job ix. 33.
92 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Job is confronted by the greatest problem that

perplexed ancient thinkers: how the insurmountable.
distance between God and man is to be spanned. But
the question is not with him an intellectual puzzle,
as it was with Philo the Alexandrian, and with
the Gnostic teachers who came after Philo, but a
personal. concern. Brought face to face with God,
the soul of the sufferer finds itself helpless to plead
its cause with Infinite Power; feels that it can only
submit and endure; is conscious of the need of a
‘daysman, ze. an umpire who can lay one hand on
God and one on man, and claim to mediate between
them. Such a Mediator, S. Paul teaches, has now
been appointed in the person of the exalted Christ.
Of His relation to God the Apostle has spoken
abundantly elsewhere, and he assumes it here. His
relation to ourselves is emphasized by the one word
‘man’—not ‘the man,’ as in the Authorized Version,
nor ‘a man, but simply ‘man’*—possessing our
common human nature, and therefore capable of
representing humanity, and, as the divinely appointed
Mediator, standing between God and all mankind.
Man sits in Jesus Christ on the Throne of God, and
in Him the race has a ‘daysman’ betwixt itself and
God who can ‘lay his hand on both” Thus the
distance between the Infinite and the finite is
bridged over by the Incarnation and the Ascension.
1’Incods Xpicris, dvOpwros.
MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE 93

But the incarnate and ascended Lord is also ‘the

Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the
world and therefore can mediate not only between
the finite and the Infinite, but between sinners and
the All-holy. Jesus Christ is not only man, but
also the Ransom for all men, and He has ascended
that He may present His Sacrifice. No obstacle
remains in the way of those who come to God by
Him.
2. The One Mediator is also Intercessor and
Advocate. (a) Intercession goes a step further than
mediation. A mediator may fecl that he has done
his work when he has introduced the two parties who
are at issue with each other, and prepared the way
for a discussion of their differences, leaving it to the
parties themselves to settle the matter as they can.
But an intercessor (6 évtvyyavwv) does not stop with
simple mediation, He is one who uses his oppor-
tunity of saying a word on behalf of the person in
whose interests he intervenes. If his word or his
arguments have weight, this is of course.a very
important addition to the service which he has
rendered by bringing the man face to face with the
other party; it may turn the scale in his favour;
whereas without it mediation might have been either
abortive or even disastrous in its effects. Now our
Lord’s mediation passes into intercession in the case
aifo. (ie 20,
94 THE ASCENDED -CHRIST

of all who come to God by Him. Who shall lay

anything to the charge of God's elect?... It ws
Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised
from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who
also maketh intercession for us (0s kat evTuyxaver brep
yuov). The ‘intercession’ of Christ is here made, as
will be seen, the very climax of His saving activities:
death, resurrection, exaltation to the right hand,
all culminate in this. Our hope does not rest on
a dead Christ, but on one who is alzve for ever-
more; nor again on a Christ who merely lives, but
on one who lives and reigns with God; nor, once
more, simply on the fact of His exaltation, but on the
knowledge that this exalted Person uses His oppor-
tunity to lay our case before God. The Rabbis
spoke of Israel having both an Accuser and a
Defender? in the Court of heaven. But the Accuser
of the brethren, or of the Israel of God, as S. Paul
would say, lays charges against them in vain, since
they have the Ascended Christ to speak on their
behalf.
The other passage in the New Testament which
speaks of our Lord as Intercessor is even more
instructive. He hath his priesthood unchangeable;
wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them

1Rom. viii. 33f.

Satan or Sammael (the kar#yopos), and Michael (the cuv7yopos) ; cf.
Dan. xii, 1, Apoc. xii. 7 ff,
MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE 95
that draw near to God through him, seeing he ever
liveth to make intercession (els tO évtvyxavev) for
them.’ The intercession of Christ depends upon His
priesthood, and since He is a priest for ever, His
intercession also is permanent. He can therefore
carry on to its completion (ets To wayteAés) every case
that He undertakes to defend, and thus is able to
guarantee to those who approach God through His
mediation entire restoration to the Divine favour and
blessing. Nay, to do this is the very purpose of His
life in heaven; He ever lives for this end, that He
may intercede with God on their behalf. There can be
no suspension of His intercessory work so long as the
world lasts. He lives to intercede, and intercedes
by the very fact of his High-priestly life.
For the intercession of the Ascended Christ is
not a prayer, but a life. The New Testament does
not represent Him as an orante, standing ever before
the Father, and with outstretched arms, like the
figures in the mosaics of the catacombs, and with
strong crying and tears pleading our cause in the
presence of a reluctant God ; but as a throned Priest-
King, asking what He will from a Father who
always hears and grants His request. Our Lord’s
life in heaven is His prayer. But in the days of His
flesh He prayed as we pray, and one of His prayers
of intercession” remains to help the Church to realize
1 Heb. vii. 24. 2Jo. xvii, 1 ff.
96 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

in some measure the ends which He sets before Him

in His intercessory life.
The Lord had spoken His last word of teaching
and comfort to His disciples: be ofgood cheer; I have
overcome the world. Then He turned from men to
God, His Father in heaven. He lifted up His eyes to
heaven and prayed on that night before the Passion,
first for Himself and then for His own. We learn, as
the prayer proceeds, what it is that He asks for the
Church, and what He does not ask. Holy Father,
keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, that
they may be one, even as we are.... I pray not that
thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou
shouldest keep them from the evil one.... Netther for
these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on
me through thetr word, that they may all be one....
Father, that which thou hast given me, I will that
where I am, they also may be with me, that they may
behold my glory which thou hast given me? The
Lord, it will be seen, desires for His Church not
segregation from the world, but safe-keeping from
the evil power that works in it. He asks for her
such present oneness of faith and love as may con-
vince the world of the Divine mission of the Christ,
and in the life to come the endless vision of the -
glory of God in the face of the Incarnate Son. Such,
then, are the ends which our Lord’s life in heaven has
1Jo. xvi. 33. 2Jo. xvii, 11, 18, 20, 24.
 MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE 97
in view. The words of prayer, which befitted Him
‘on the eve of the Passion, have no place in His
present state. But they witness to the general
purpose to which His intercession is directed and
which it must accomplish.
(4) Cognate to the title of Intercessor is that of
Advocate or Paraclete. The word is used in the
New Testament only by S. John, and applied by
him to our Lord but twice, indirectly in his Gospel
and expressly in his first Epistle. When Christ says,
The Father shall give you another Paraclete; it is
implied that He Himself had been such. The Epistle
adds that He is such still: 2f any man sin, we have an
Advocate (mapaxrnrov) with the Father, Jesus Christ,
who ts righteous.” An advocate or paraclete is in
the most general sense of the word simply one who
is called to the help of a man in any necessity or
distress. It may be merely to administer comfort,
or to give counsel or protection that he is sum-
moned; and this was our Lord’s relation to the
Twelve during His life, and is the present relation
of His Spirit to the Church. But Christ as our
Advocate with the Father appears in a further
light; His advocacy in heaven is concerned with
the problem of sin. As Mediator He gains access
for us into the presence of God; as Intercessor,
He furthers our petitions; as Advocate, He meets
1Jo, xiv. 16. 2] Jo. ii. a.
A.C. G
98 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

the charge that lies against us on the score of

sin. For believers the life of habitual sin is at
an end, as S. John strongly insists elsewhere :
whosoever lives in sin (was 6 cuapravev) hath
not seen Christ, necther knoweth him.’ But isolated
acts of sin are possible in the holiest lives, and
frequent in the lives of most of us; and on such
occasions, whenever a Christian is conscious of
having committed a sin (éay Tis cmapty), the advo-
cacy of the Ascended Christ becomes of supreme
importance to him. Three great facts give to His
advocacy a force which assures the penitent who
trusts to it of acceptance. He is wth the Father,
z7.¢. in the presence of God, and upon God’s very
Throne. He is vzghteous, He has as man fulfilled all
righteousness; in Him, from His birth to His death,
the Father was well pleased. And He is the Pro-
pitiation for our sins—not simply one who has made
propitiation, but one who is Himself the Sacrifice,
the Lamb as it had been slain, whose mere presence
in heaven is an all-prevailing plea for the forgiveness
of the sins of those whom He represents. He is
also, S. John adds, the Propitiation for the whole
world ;* for the efficacy of His great offering is not —
limited to the Church. Even for the world the
Propitiation pleads that it may have time for
repentance: Lord, let zt alone this year also: Father,
ist JO. si. (0; Hill Fos a
uiSay
 MEDIATOR, INTERCESSOR, ADVOCATE 99

forgive them, for they know not what they do But

perhaps the advocacy of which S. John speaks is a
more special and direct plea for pardon than the
unbelieving world can expect: J pray not for the
world, but for those whom thou hast given me, for
they are thine.” The Mediator stands between God
and all mankind; the Intercessor and Advocate
represents before God the universal Church. Yet
there is no limit to the love or power of the
Ascended Christ; and no human being that ap-
proaches God through the One Mediator fails to
engage the Intercessor and Advocate on his behalf.
The ancient collects of the Western Church
remind us many times in our daily services that the
whole fabric of Christian prayer rests on the heavenly
intercession of our Lord. The words, ‘through Jesus
Christ our Lord, or one of the many changes rung
upon this theme, are so constantly upon our lips that
they are apt to be regarded merely as a liturgical form,
the traditional ending of our Church prayers, But
the tradition embodies a vital truth and rests upon
the words of Christ: 7 go unto the Father, the Lord
said, and whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that
will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the
Son.... I chose you and appointed you... that what-
soever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may
give tt you. And afterwards: Verzly, verily, I say
1Lc. xiii. 83 xxiii. 34. 2 VoOwxvile OQ:
100 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father,

he will give it you in my name. Hitherto have ye
asked nothing in my name; ask, and ye shall recewve,
that your joy may be fulfilled) The words, 7x my
Name, though they do not prescribe a formula,
evidently express a new condition under which all
requests must in future be made known to God,
The fulness of joy is only for those who realize
their relation to the ascended Lord, and consciously
approach the Father through the ascended Son.
Our Lord is the One Mediator, the only way
to the Father. Yet there is another Advocate,
another Intercessor. While the Incarnate Son is
our Advocate with the Father and makes interces-
sion at the right hand of God, the Holy Spirit is
our Advocate on earth, and makes intercession for
us in the depths of our hearts.2 So awful and
blessed a thing is Christian prayer that no petition
finds its way from man to God without the co-opera-
tion of two Divine Persons, one working with man
on earth, the other for man in heaven. The Spirit
inspires prayer, or the desire which can as yet find
no full expression in words; and the Son presents it
to the Father, and claims acceptance for it on the
ground of His righteousness, His sacrifice, His exal-
tation of manhood to the Throne of God.
1Jo, xiv. 12f., xv. 16, xvi. 23 f. 2Rom. viii. 26f.
 V TT:

THE FORERUNNER.

THE Ascended Head is the Forerunner of the Body.

The separation which began at the Ascension cannot
be permanent: where J am, the Lord promised, there
shall also my minister (dtaxovos) be; tf any man
minister (dvaxovy) to me, him will the Father honour}
The promise is repeated in another form in the last
of the Apocalyptic messages to the Churches: he that
overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in
my throne.
The title ‘Forerunner’ (apodpouos) is usually
given to the Baptist, who went Jdefore the face of the
Lord to make ready his ways? The New Testament,
however, uses the word but once, and then in reference
to our Lord Himself. As the Baptist prepared the
way of Christ, so the Ascended Christ prepares the
way of His Church. It is to the author of Hebrews
that we owe this view of the ascended life, as we

Ajo.'xi- 26. 2 Apoc. iii. 21.

Sue. 12 701(CE 17):
102 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

owe to him so much else that assists us to form a

true estimate of its importance. He likens ¢he hope
set before us to an anchor of the soul, seeing that
it is doth sure and stedfast and entering into that
which is within the veil, whither, he adds, as a
forerunner Jesus entered for us, having become a high
priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. Like
ships at anchor, the souls of the faithful, though
tossed by the waves of life, have no cause to fear
shipwreck, so long as their hope keeps a firm grip
upon the realities of the unseen world. But this can
only be done by those who bear in mind that
the great High Priest of the Church has gone within
the veil as the Forerunner of His brethren, that they
may follow in due time.
In a sense the Church already follows her High
Priest and Head. It is given to us already to
‘ascend in heart and mind’ to our Lord, and ‘with
Him continually dwell” as the Ascension Day collect
prays that we may. In the words of S. Paul, God
raised us up with Christ, and made us to sit with him
in the heavenly places ;” we are sharers not only in
the risen but the ascended life. Nor do we share
by representation only ; through Christ, as we have
seen, we have the right of personal access to God,
liberty to pass the veil and enter the Holiest
(rappyciay eis Thy etcodov tay ayiwv). To this
1Heb. vi. 18 ff. 2Eph. ii. 6.
 THE FORERUNNER 103

extent the Head of the Body was immediately

followed by the members, and the way into the
Holiest has been open from the Apostolic age to
our own.
But the hope set before us evidently goes further
than this, for it contemplates heights that are above
us yet. We do not hope for access to God through
Christ in prayer and Communion; we have it, it
is ours in this present life. But there is much more
that is not yet ours, and it is for this that we wait and
hope. We feel the chain tugging at the anchor,
and we know that the anchor is sure and stedfast
and firmly planted within the veil: we are conscious
of the attractive power of the Ascended Lord. But
meanwhile the higher world into which He has
passed remains unexplored, even though our treasure
and our heart are there. Some better thing is
reserved! for us; there is to be an ascension, not
of heart and mind only, but of the whole man,
corresponding to the Ascension of Jesus Christ ; an
entrance into the Holiest not only in the way of
prayer and the Sacraments, but of beatific vision
and full satisfaction. The Forerunner will secure
this also for His Church. The New Testament
witnesses to future happy conditions of existence for
which our present life in Christ is preparatory. And
this highest hope of man stands connected with the
1y Pet. i. 4 rernpnuévny.
104 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Ascension and the ascended life of our Lord. It

is this great truth which the author of Hebrews so
felicitously expresses when he gives to the ascended
Head of the Church the title of Forerunner.
In a well-known passage of the fourth Gospel our
Lord, without using the title, describes His own work
as Prodromos. Juz my Father's house are many
mansions (woval); tf tt were not so, I would have told
you; for I go to prepare a place for you, And ffl
go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will
receive (mapaAiuvoua) you unto myself; that where
I am, there ye may be also’ The words are simplicity
itself ; yet as we read them we are perhaps conscious
that it is the form only which is simple and not
the thought. The hope which they inspire, in fact,
transcends thought. But some points are clear.
My Father's House (4 oikia tod matpos mov) is else-
where in S. John our Lord’s name for the Temple ;?
here it clearly is the immaterial, non-localized, Sanc-
tuary of the Divine Presence, into which the humanity
of Jesus was shortly to pass. In that Sanctuary
there are many mansions? as our Authorized Version
translates, following the Vulgate, and followed by
the Revisers of 1881. Yet neither the Greek word

LiKok, slo hieneay

ae.
2Jo. ii. 16 rdv olkov Toh marpds wov. Cf. Le. ii. 49 év rots rod marpés
pov.
3 woval modal, multae mansiones. Cf. Exod. xvii. 1, Num. xxxiii. 1.
 THE FORERUNNER 105
nor the Vulgate Latin equivalent meant what the
English word means in its common acceptation—a
‘great house, or even what the etymology might
suggest, a permanent abode. They speak rather of
‘resting-places,’ havens of refreshment, to be found
here and there along the road that leads to God;
and if so, as Bishop Westcott remarks, ‘ repose and
progress are combined in the vision of the future.’?
Or it may be that the ‘mansions of the Father’s
house’ are intended to recall the chambers of the
Temple-courts, used by the priests in attendance
and for other purposes.? The great Sanctuary of
the eternal world is represented as possessing an
abundance of such chambers for the use of those
who wait upon the heavenly altar. But whichever
of these pictures was in the mind of our Lord, or of
the writer of the Gospel, the general meaning is
clear; in that world where He has gone, there is
room and to spare for all His followers. They will
find no lack of resting-places after the journey of
life, from whence, when they are refreshed, a new
start can be made towards the final goal; abodes
await them within the walls of the courts of the
Lord’s House, where they will evermore be near to
the altar and the Sanctuary, going out thence no
more.* Christ is gone to the Father's House to
15. John (ed. 1908), ii. p. 167. 2See Znc. Bibl. iv. col. 4946.
3 Cf. Apoc. iii. 12 for another image.
106 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

make ready for the great host of the redeemed.

When all is ready, He returns to receive them, not
only to His Father’s House, but to Himself, to
intercourse and closest union with His ascended
life.
All this was yet future on the night before the
Passion, and it is future still, so far at least as we
ourselves are concerned. How is it to be realized?
When and how will the Ascended Christ receive
us to Himself?
1. The New Testament seems to justify the belief
that the individual soul, if faithful unto death, is
received by our Lord at the moment of departure. As
the Incarnate Son committed His human spirit into
the hands of the Father,’ so His first martyr, Stephen,
committed his spirit to the Son.” The same belief
is expressed in S. Paul’s willingness to be absent
(exdnuqoar) Srom the body, and to be at home (évdnunoat)
with the Lord’ and his later desire to break up his
camp here (ava\toa) and go to be with Christ—
‘a very far better thing’ (7oAA@ madAov Kpeiocor) ;*
perhaps also in S. John’s vision ® of the great multi-
tude who are before the throne of God and... serve
him day and night in his temple (vam), while He
who sits on the Throne spreads His Holy Presence
over them, like a heavenly Tent of Meeting (cxyvéce
Vice xxii 46; ? Acts vii. 59. 32 Cor. v. 6 ff.
lily Pee 5 Apoc. vii. 9 ff.
 THE FORERUNNER 107
ex autous), and the Lamb which is in the midst of
the Throne—the once crucified, now glorified Christ—
shall be their Shepherd; and certainly in the words
blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from
henceforth, that they may rest from their labours ; for
their works follow with them, It seems then that
in some true sense the dead in Christ are already
with Him zz Paradise; that is, in the state of the dead
they are conscious of the presence of Christ, and
find rest and joy in it. This is not to deny that
there may be in the intermediate state, as many
have thought, some process of purification corre-
sponding to the needs of individual souls. Unless
the moment of death brings a moral and spiritual
change, which we have no reason to expect from it,
there can be few Christians whom it will find ready
for the full joy of their Lord. But it may well be
that whatever is still necessary for the perfecting”
of the Christian character will come from the purga-
tive power of a closer fellowship with the Holy One.
Meanwhile the soul has reached the first ‘resting-
place’ on its way to God, the first ‘chamber’ prepared
for it in His House ; where it abides in the hands

1 Apoc. xiv. 13.

2 Made perfect in Heb. xii. 23 must be taken, as it seems, to refer to
such relative maturity as the discipline of life has brought, rather than
to absolute completeness. Tedevodv is used in Hebrews in various
senses short of absolute ‘perfection’; cf. e.g. Heb. ii. 10, v. 9, ix. 9,
x. 14, x1. 40.
108 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

of Christ, undergoing such further happy discipline

as its needs may require. ,
2. But however we may represent to ourselves the
state into which our Lord comes at the hour of death
to call the souls of the faithful, it is certain that
He has another coming and another call, and other
mansions into which He will receive the whole Church
at the Parousia. The words, J wll receive you unto
myself may well find a first fulfilment in the welcome
of the individual Christian spirit, but the paramount
thought in them is surely the welcome which the
whole perfected Body will find at the Resurrection.
All the New Testament writers point to this as the
crowning moment of human history—the moment
when the new humanity will be glorified with its
glorious Head. Even in the Gospels we hear the
distant welcome, Come, ye blessed of my Father,
inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world In the Epistles it swells
into the triumphant note of an assured hope: J
reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall
be revealed to usward. For the earnest expectation of
the creation watteth for the revealing of the sons of
God? Or again: As we have borne the image of the
earthy, we shall also bear the image of the Heavenly
.+2 We wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ,
1Mt. xxv. 34. 2Rom. viii. 18 f. PT Conexvaeaos
 THE FORERUNNER © 109

who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation,

that it may be conformed to the body of his glory...
When Christ, who ts our life, shall be manifested, then
shall ye also with him be manifested in glory...2 An
inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that fadeth
not away, reserved tn heaven for you who by the power
of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready
to be revealed at the last time...2 Tt ts not yet made
manifest what we shall be. We know that if he shall be
manifested, we shall be like him, for we shall see him
even as he ts“ Lastly, in the Apocalypse this same
hope becomes a vision;® we see a new heaven and a
new earth; and the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, is described with an
extravagance of language which the Seer knows to
be all too poor to set forth the perfect life. He
who would translate these glowing words into the
sobrietyofmodern speech must allow for their Oriental
richness of colouring. But he will entirely misin-
terpret the preachers and writers of the first age if,
in his desire to drop the apocalyptic symbolism, he
eliminates from his presentation of the primitive
Gospel the glowing hope of a future life with Christ
in heaven.
In my Fathers House are many mansions...I...
will receive you unto myself Little as we can
1 Phil. iti. 20f2. - 2 Col. iii. 4. Seber ter Ade
41 Jo, iii. 2. 5 Apoc, xxi. 1 ff. 8Jo. xiv. 2.
 110 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

apprehend the ways in which this promise will fulfil

~ itself, there are two aspects of the heavenly life which
it clearly reveals. It will be life consciously spent
in the Presence of God, and it will be life in fellow-
ship with Christ.
(a) All life is in the Presence of God ; all creation
is the Father's House. This was recognized by the
prophets of the Old Testament: thus saith the Lord,
The heaven ts my throne, and the earth is my footstool;
what manner of house will ye build unto me?* But if
the fact is acknowledged on all hands, it is realized but
by few, and by these imperfectly. It is the supreme
struggle of faith to live as seeing him who ts invisible?
Death removes the sense-barrier, and there is doubt-
less truth in the conviction which is widely prevalent
that the soul after its departure from the body finds
itself face to face with God, z.e. it becomes conscious
of His presence as it never was conscious of it here. —
But the Christian hope of the Resurrection of the body
opens the prospect of something higher—a vision of
God vouchsafed to the whole being through faculties
unknown to us now; a vision permeating the whole
life with a consciousness of Infinite Love and Light.
The Church can use the words of Job in a sense of
which the writer never dreamed : 2” my flesh shall I see .
God, whom I shall see for myself,and mine eyes shall
behold, and not another® If we add to this belief the
1 Isa. lxvi. 1. 2 Heb. xi. 27. 3 Job xix. 26f.
 THE FORERUNNER I1t

knowledge that such a constant sight of God as He

is will be to a perfected and sinless humanity neither
overpowering nor embarrassing—that it will impose
no strain upon the mind or spirit, inspire no fear that
hath torment, but on the contrary a peace and a joy
which passes understanding, it is clear that the vision
will be ‘beatific’ indeed, leaving no want unsatisfied,
fulfilling in itself the highest destiny of the creature.
Fecistt nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec
requiescat in te: ‘We were made for Thee, and our
hearts find rest nowhere short of Thee.’
(6) It would seem as if nothing could increase the
greatness of this hope. Yet there is more, for the
Lord continues: I w<ll recezve you unto myself, that
wheve I am there ye may be also” The beatific vision
of God is seen in the heavenly life through the
glorified humanity of Jesus Christ. oman hath seen
God at any time. So S. John writes, thinking of the
present life; S. Paul adds, Mor can see, having in
view also that which is to come* In both orders
‘the revelation of the Father is made only in the Son,
who is the image of the Invisible God;> here, through
the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ;°
there, through the direct manifestation of the glorified
humanity. The fuller and permanent sight of God
will come to ¢he saints in light through the perpetual
1 Aug. Confess. i. 1. 2Jo. xiv. 3. ORE Haken
41 Tim. vi. 16. ColjientG. 8 2 Cor. iv. 4.
112 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Presence, visible to the organs of the spiritual body,

of the manifested Lord. Father, I will—so He
prayed on the night before the Passion—that where
I am they also may be with me, that they may
behold my glory which thou hast given me.’ He had
said a little before, Mow, O Father, glorify thou me
with thine own self® with the glory which I had with
thee before the world was. His disciples, then, are
to see the Divine glory of the Father, which was
the Father's eternal gift to the Son, revealed in the
ascended, glorified Christ. But more than this, they
are to see it by being wzthk Christ (mer éuov)—in
company with Him, as in the high life of heaven
He moves in their midst after a manner which recalls
the old days of His ministry in Galilee and at
Jerusalem? In the visions of the Apocalypse this
eternal presence of Christ in the midst of His Church
comes often into view. J w<zll come in to him, and
will sup with him and he with me.... The Lamb...
shall guide them unto fountains of waters of life....
These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever
he goeth..... The lamp of the New Jerusalem zs ¢he
Lamb.... The throne of God and of the Lamb shall
be therein.’
To. xvii. 243 cf. verse 5.
2 rapa ceavT@, z.e. ‘in fellowship with thee’ (Westcott).
3 Cf. Jo. xv. 27 dm’ dpxijs mer’ euod éoré.
4-Apoc. ili. 20, vii. 17, xiv. 4, xxi. 23, xxii. 8.
 THE FORERUNNER 113

How does our Forerunner prepare a place for us

in His Father’s House, where He Himself now is?
It would seem from another saying of Christ
as if preparation had been made by the Father
Himself from eternity: zxherit the kingdom prepared
Jor you from the foundation of the world; and this
accords with all that the Epistles teach us as to the
eternal purpose of God. If further preparation were
needed in time, it was made by the Incarnation, the
Sacrifice, the Resurrection of our Lord; as the Ze
Deum sings: ‘When Thou hadst overcome the
sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom
of Heaven to all believers.’ And if we look more
closely at the words with which the last discourse
begins, we see that our Lord does not prepare
mansions for the elect, but a place for them therein.
The mansions are already lining the courts of the
Father’s House, and they are many—as many as the
great multitude which no man can number of souls that
are passing through the Church on earth on their way
to fill them. What, then, remains for the Ascended
Christ to do? How does He prepare the way of His
Church as its Forerunner to heaven? In the first
place, His own entrance in the completeness of His
humanity into the unseen world is preparatory to our
entrance: where human nature has gone in the
person of the Second Adam, human nature can go
Mt. xxv. 34.
A.C, H
 1T4 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

when it has been perfected in His brethren. And His

presence in heaven keeps the way open until we
are ready to follow. Moreover, the preparation of
.our nature for heaven is entirely dependent on His
glorified person. Neither the Father’s eternal purpose
nor His own life and sufferings on earth are operative
apart from the ascended life, which is the source
of the sanctifying Spirit. On it turns the whole
working out of the destiny of the Church in the
world. Much, indeed, must be done before He can
present the Church to Himself. Death and resurrec-
tion must intervene; ¢hzs corruptible must put on
incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,
and—yet greater change—this sinful, sinlessness. The
predestined course of history must run itself out; the
gospel of the Kingdom must have been preached in
the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations}
and the last generation of the baptized have taken
its place in the Body of Christ. All these vast
movements pertaining to the entrance of the Church
upon her final inheritance belong to the sphere of our
Lord’s present activities, and in all and through all
He is preparing a place for us with Himself. There
is, indeed, a corresponding work belonging to our-
selves as individuals, and to the Churchherin
successive generations: by strenuous Christian effort,
by self-discipline, by devout use of prayer and sacra-
1Mt. xxiv. 14.
 THE FORERUNNER 11S

ments, His Bride makes herself ready.1 But the

authority which controls the whole process, the Hand
which guides it, the grace which animates and sus-
tains, are all His who has gone to prepare a place
for her. The Forerunner is also the Way by which,
after long following, the whole Church will reach
at last the Father’s House.

1 Apoc, xix. 7 4 yuri) avrod hroluacey eavrjy.

 VIII.
THE, PRESENCE IN “tHE Mibpst:

THE Ascended Christ, as we have seen, is in constant

touch and full sympathy with His Body on earth ; all
the sufferings, physical and spiritual, of all her mem-
bers are, in some way unknown to us, telegraphed
to the Head. But there is more. While in heaven,
He is at the same time with the Church on earth,
occupying Himself with the concerns of every ‘con-
gregation of the faithful. Not only is He the Head
and Forerunner of the Church, but a Presence
immanent in her midst.
We begin with our Lord’s own statement of this
truth. J say unto you, that if two of you shall agree
on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, tt
shall be done for them of my Father which ts in
heaven. For where two or three are gathered together
in my name, there am I in the midst of them Even
two or three Christians met for common prayer or
Eucharist constitute for the time being an ecclesia,
1Mt. xviii. 19 f.
 THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST 117

a congregation of Christ’s flock! and may claim

the promise of His presence; in such an assembly
He will make the third or the fourth.2, Our Lord is
clearly speaking of days subsequent to His earthly life.
The building of the ecclesia was still in the future,’
and there is nothing to shew that men met in His
Name to pray during His ministry or until after the
Ascension. So long as He was with His disciples
from day to day, usually living in their midst, there
was no occasion for such meetings, nor for the promise
of His presence. The whole passage is evidently
anticipatory of times when men would desire to see
one of the days of the Son of Man and desire it in
vain, and the presence which is guaranteed to the
Church is intended to take the place of the visible
Christ. This view is confirmed by another passage
in S. Matthew’s Gospel, where the promise of the
Presence is made to the Church as a whole, to hold
good to the end of the present dispensation: Lo, / am
with you all the days, even unto the consummation
of the age (éyw eiut peO imav racas Tas nuépas, Ews
Tis cuvTEAElas TOU at@vos).*
1. We have our Lord’s guarantee. that He is
present wherever Christian men meet in His Name.

gud. 21: ‘ecclesiam dominus in tribus posuit’s cast. 7: ‘ubi

1 Tertullian,
tres ecclesia est.’
2Cf. Dan. ili. 25. 3 Mt. xvi. 18 olxodounow Thy éxkAnolav pov.
4Mt. xxviii. 20.
 118 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

As if to impress this fact by a picture lesson which

those who witnessed it could never forget, on the
night after the Resurrection, while ten of the Apostles |
and their company were assembled within closed and
barred doors, Jesus came and stood in the midst.
This appearance was repeated on the eighth day:
again the disciples were within, their number now
completed by the return of Thomas, and again /esus
cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst.
It was an experience which, under other conditions,
was to repeat itself at the weekly Lord’s Day
assemblies of the Church as long as the world
should last.
From the beginning, or almost from the beginning,
the churches met on the weekly day of the Resur-
rection to break the bread which the Lord Himself
had called His Body.? It was the one visible
memorial of His bodily presence; it was also an
appointed means of union and fellowship with Him.
The bread which we break, ts tt not a communion of
the body of Christ ?* He that eateth my flesh and
drinketh my blood, the Lord had said, abideth in me,
and I in him ;* and this was His own prescribed way
' of eating and drinking His flesh and blood, and thus
retaining His presence in the inner life, and, by
reciprocation, abiding in Him. At the Eucharist, then,
DT Onxxcmt Ou 0; 2 Acts xx. 7.
fr Cor seploe 4Jo. vi. 56.
 THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST 119

if at any time, the Church must have felt that she

might look for the fulfilment of Christ’s promise to
be zz the midst, and the Eucharist, with or without
the attendant Agapé, was from the first the great
act of common worship in which all the baptized
ordinarily took part, and with which were associated
all the prayers and intercessions, the offerings and
devotions of the congregation. It was in the Eucha-
ristic service, and not, as with us, at Morning and
Evening Prayer, that the ancient Church pleaded with
Christ His own promise that where two or three are
gathered together in His Name He would grant their
requests. Not that there is reason to doubt that
the Lord is present at our daily Common Prayer; if
in many churches the bell for Matins and Evensong
brings together literally but two or three, yet His
words have graciously provided for such paucity of
worshippers. But the Eucharist, which brings the
Gift of His Body and Blood, and which by His
command the whole Church does in commemo-
ration of Him, must ever be specially connected in
Christian thought with His promised Presence in the
midst.
In the Eucharist, as we have seen in an earlier
chapter, we have a counterpart of our Lord’s Self-

1The so-called Prayer of S. Chrysostom is the ‘ Prayer of the third

Antiphon’ at the beginning of the liturgy of S. Basil, which is still used
at certain seasons by the Orthodox Church of the East.
120 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

presentation in heaven, It is also our nearest

approach to the worship of heaven; the symbols of
the Body and Blood correspond to the symbolic
Figure of the Lamod as zt had been slain, which is the
centre of the heavenly adoration. In the midst of
the Throne and of the Court of Heaven, the Seer saw
the Lamb standing, and before Him there prostrated
themselves the Living Creatures and the Elders,
representing Nature and the Church; and presently
an outer circle of ten thousand times ten thousand
angels took up the shout of praise, and beyond them
again were heard the voices of all creation saying,
Unto him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the
Lamb, be the blessing and the honour and the glory
and the dominion for ever and ever In this universal
adoration of the Lamb, this conglorification of the
Incarnate, sacrificed, glorified Son with the Eternal
Father, the Church joins, as she kneels before the
earthly symbols of His Presence, worshipping not
an absent Lord, but one who is really and indeed in
the midst of His people. No adoration, of course, is
intended or ought to be done to the symbols—it is
not the symbolic Figure of the Lamb that all heaven
worships—nor to any corporal or localized presence
whatsoever;? the Real Presence is after the manner
of the spiritual life into which the humanity of the
1 Apoc. v. 6ff.
2 See the last rubric after the Order of Holy Communion.
 THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST 121

Lord has passed.’ But where Christ’ is present,

although His presence is not corporal, He is to be
adored.? The Church of England recognizes this
with special solemnity at the Eucharist, both in the
Tersanctus and in the Gloria in excelsis, which last
she has removed to the end of the liturgy? as if
to make the adoration of the Ascended Christ the
crowning act of her Eucharistic sacrifice. ‘Thou
that sittest at the right hand of God the Father,
have mercy upon us. For thou only art holy ; thou
only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the
Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the
Father. No words in the celestial liturgy of the
Apocalypse rise above these, in which, Sunday by
Sunday, we adore the Presence in our midst.
2. The vision with which the Apocalypse opens+

1 Hooker’s phrases (£.P. v. lv. 9), a presence of force and efficiency,’

‘infinite in possibility of application,’ seem not to recognize fully the
powers of the risen and ascended Body of the Lord. On this see
Gore, Body of Christ, p. 124 ff.
2St. Ambrose, de Spzr. s. iii, 11, § 79, writes: ‘caro Christi quam
hodieque in mysteriis adoramus,’ and S. Augustine, evarr. in
Ps. xcvii.: “nemo autem illam carnem manducat nisi prius adora-
verit.” In both passages caro Christi is the Sacred Humanity, which
is adorable because of its hypostatic union with the Word. No one
eats the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist to his soul’s health, in the
sense of Jo. vi. 56 f., who has not first learnt to adore Christ as the
God-Man.
3In the mediaeval office the Gloria stood before the Collect, Epistle,
and Gospel.
4 Apoc. i. Io ff.

BOQUTHERN CALIFORNIA SCHOOS

OF THEOLOGY LIBRARY
122 THE. ASCENDED CHRIST

represents the Ascended Christ as in the midst of

His Church for other and larger purposes than those
of granting prayer and receiving adoration. He
appears as the great Bishop of souls, inspecting the
condition of local churches, and commending or
censuring, rewarding or chastizing, as need may
require. It is not a vision of the Lord as He was
seen in the days of His flesh, nor as He appeared
after His resurrection, but of the glorified Christ as
He now is. The Figure is a symbolical representa-
tion of His present power and functions, which defies
the skill of the artist to depict it upon canvas or
paper, but expresses, after the manner of apocalyptic
prophecy, the deathless life and the unspeakable
majesty of the Ascended Lord. On the whole, the
form is human—ike a son of man, as the Seer
guardedly says—but there are features which are
not human as we know humanity: the snow-white
head and hair, coupled with the strength of an
ageless life, the eyes flashing like fire, the feet
glowing like metal just taken from the furnace, the
right hand bearing in the open palm a wreath of
stars; while from the mouth there issues a sharp
sword, and the face is like the midday sun of the
Levant, and the voice as the roar of a cataract. It
is a vision of glorified, deified, humanity. But it is
not, as some other visions of the Apocalypse, seen in
heaven, or descending from heaven. This glorified
 THE. PRESENCE IN’ THE MIDST 123

Christ appears walking in the midst+ of seven golden

lamp-stands, which are presently interpreted to mean
seven churches of the Province of Asia. He is
arrayed in garments which are sacerdotal, but in
part also regal, the long robe of official dignity, girt
with a golden girdle. It is the Priest-King, visiting
the churches, making a personal examination of
them all, attending to. their several needs. He
holds? in the hollow of His hand their angels—
perhaps guardian angels, perhaps spirits representing
the special genius, temperament, destiny of each;
they are all at His disposal and in His keeping.
He is in the midst, not a stationary Figure, but
moving to and fro; as the Adversary walketh® about,
seeking whom he may devour, so the great Christ,
seeking whom He may save. But as He goes
hither’ and thither, He marks what is passing in
each community; the Eye of flame detects what-
ever is wanting or amiss, the sharp, two-edged Sword
falls heavily on all insincerity, indolence, impurity—
on every error whether of doctrine or of life. The
differentiation of the churches that follows * is marked
by an extraordinary minuteness which reveals inti-
mate knowledge. It may be said that this is due to
the Seer’s personal acquaintance with the Christian

1 Apoc. i. 133 cf. ii. 2 6 mepemaray ev péow Tv Emre exxAnoiay.

2In Apoc. ii. 1 éxwy becomes Kpardy.
37 Pet. v. 8 4 Apoc. ii.-iii.
if. THE VASCENDED CHRIBE

brotherhoods of Asia; but even in that case it is

clearly intended to represent the vigilance of the
all-seeing Christ in their midst. To every church
the Lord addresses the same / know (oid), but no
two churches are painted in precisely the same
colours. While the general character of each church
is given in a few trenchant words, exceptions are
noted with scrupulous care; three’ are praised om
the whole, but with the reservation, J ave this or
that against thee; two” are censured on the whole,
but in one of them, it is remarked, there are a few
names which are worthy to walk with Christ in
white, and the other is still loved and urged to
repent; if the remaining two? are altogether com-
mended, the grounds. of the commendation are
different. Not less remarkable is the adaptation of
the promises with which the messages end to the
circumstances or needs of each several church, and
the precision with which rewards and punishments
are meted out.* The more closely the seven words
of the Spirit of Christ to the churches are studied,
the more will the reader appreciate the fulness of
knowledge and perfect balance of judgement which,
even from the literary or historical point of view,

aa Ephesus, Pergamum, Thyatira. 2 Sardis, Laodicea,

3 Smyrna, Philadelphia.
4 For the details, the student is referred to Sir W. M. Ramsay’s Letters
to the Seven Churches, or to the writer's commentary on the Apocalypse.
 THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST 125

place these little documents among the most fascinat-

ing remains of antiquity.
3. The last words of S. Matthew’s Gospel, already
quoted, justify the Church in expecting a presence of
the Ascended Christ not only at her Eucharists and
common prayers, or even in the general guidance
and discipline of Christendom, but also in all efforts
to fulfil her mission to the world. It is indeed in
connexion with this oecumenical mission that the
larger promise of His presence is given... Go ye...
make disciples of all the nations...and lo, I am with
you alway, even unto the end of the world\—even till
the present order is consummated by My return.
The missionaries of the Gospel never go forth alone ;
where they go, the Presence goes also. If they can
but realize the fact, the Person who has ascended
to heaven and sits on the right hand of God, exer-
cising all authority in heaven and on earth, is
Himself (éy#) with the Church or her solitary
representative in the most distant or hostile of
heathen lands. The Lord, it will be observed, does
not here limit His promise to an assembly of
Christians, however small; it is also for individual
Christians who are charged by His Church with the
carrying out of her work. One of the new Oxy-
rhynchus sayings seems to express this in so many
words: wherever there are two, they are not without
1 Matt. xxviii. 19 f.
126 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

God; and tf anywhere there is but one alone, I am

with him; and whatever may be thought of the
genuineness of these sayings, we have the experience
of S. John in Patmos to confirm the fact; not
even two or three were gathered in Christ’s Name
when the Lord revealed Himself to the Seer of the
Apocalypse. Nor can it be said that such an ex-
perience was limited to the first age. The modern
missionary neither hears the voice, nor sees the
majestic Form; but the Lord’s J am with you holds
good as long as the world lasts for all who give
their lives to the carrying out of His great com-
mission.
Yet while the individual worker may assuredly
claim the promise in his solitude, it belongs properly
to the Church, and to the individual only as he
represents the Body. Our Lord Himself was care-
ful to send out His disciples by two and two! so
that there might never be wanting the smznzmum
of an ecclesia; nor can the sending of a solitary
worker into the heart of a non-Christian people be
approved under any ordinary conditions. It is to
the Body of Christ that the Head pledges His
1Such, at least, is a possible restoration of Zog. 5; see Lock and
Sanday, Zwo Lectures, p. 229. The words are: Orov edy Sow B, ovx
elolv Geo, cat ef mov els early pdvos éyo elul per’ avrod. :
“The presence of the Spirit of Christ in the heart of the individual
believer is another matter.
SINTCHVIAE 7g) Ce SonTe
 THE PRESENCE IN THE MIDST 127

presence. The Presence in the midst belongs to

her in her corporate capacity, and is experienced
in all her corporate activities. Whether the Church
is engaged in worship or in work, the Lord Christ
is with her, not only as the Eternal Word, who,
being one with the Father, shares the Divine
attributes, but as the glorified Son of Man. No
thought can fathom this mystery, and no words
can express it. But it is a fact of Christian ex-
perience, which is realized just in proportion as
Christian men and women, continuing stedfastly in
the unity of the Body of Christ, take their part in
its sacramental life and common work. To such
the Ascended Christ is not an absent but a present
Lord; ‘they speak as those who know that their
Lord hears’;' they work as conscious that He
works with them; they worship, as though they
saw Him in the midst; they live, as though He
lived in them; they die, believing that He is at
hand to receive their spirits. So to generation after
generation the promise fulfils itself in the life of the
Church, and so will it fulfil itself until a the days of
this age ate past, and another world opens on the
perfected Body of Christ, in which the Presence of
its Head will be revealed not to faith only but to
sight, under the new conditions of the risen life.
1Tertullian, aol. 39: ‘ita fabulantur ut qui sciant dominum audire.’
‘Mc.’ xvi, 20 Tod Kupiov auvepyotvros,
 IX.
THE COMING ONE.

THE Ascended Christ is present in our midst, but

He is also yet to come. He is here to-day unseen ;
in the future He will manifest Himself by a new
revelation of His glory which the Church knows
as the Parousia, the Return, or the Second Advent.
~ 1, In the New Testament the title We that cometh
or He that should come (0 épxomuevos) refers in almost
every instance to the Coming in the flesh.’ Of that
first Coming our Lord Himself while on earth seems
constantly to have spoken in the aorist or perfect
tense: J came, or I am come” But He spoke also
of Comings which were future: J come again..
I come to you.... I go away and I come to you?
It would be precarious to restrict these sayings to
a single future Coming; the second, at least, seems
clearly to refer to the Coming of the Spirit, and the
1Mt. xi. 3 (Le. vii. 20), John iii. 31, xi. 27, xii. 13. There are
partial exceptions in Le. xiii. 35, Heb. x. 37.
2 fg. Me. ii. 17 (#AOov), Le. xix. 103 Jo. xvi. 28 (€\jAvOa).
8Jo. xiv. 2, TSs20.
 THE COMING ONE 129
first, as we have seen, may find, at least, one fulfil-
ment at death. But there are passages in the
Gospels, and those not a few, where the Lord’s
words are not exhausted by any Coming of which
the world has had experience. These belong with
hardly an exception to the Synoptic teaching, and
they shew that the Synoptic Christ expected a
further coming which is yet future. The Son of
Man shall come in the glory of his Father with his
angels, They shall see the Son of Man coming on
the clouds of heaven with power and great glory....
Ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand
of power, and coming on (or, with) the clouds of
heaven.' This future Coming presupposes the As-
cension and glorification of the Lord’s humanity, ~
for He is seen seated as the Son of Man on the
Father’s Throne, and coming on the clouds attended
by an angelic bodyguard. It is not necessary for
our present purpose to consider whether our Lord
regarded this future coming as imminent, or whether
He looked for a literal fulfilment of the symbolism
which He was content to adopt from the Book of
Daniel or some other apocalyptic source. It is
enough to say that no reasonable student of the
Gospels can either doubt that the words in question
are substantially those of Christ, or hold that they
1Mt. xvi. 27 (cf. Mc. viii. 38), xxiv. 30 (Mc. xiii. 26), xxvi. 64
(Me. xiv. 62).
A.C. I
130 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

were fulfilled either by the Coming of the Spirit or

the destruction of Jerusalem, or by any other event
which has hitherto taken place. The Coming which
they describe is clearly of another character: one
which would challenge the attention of the world,
and be of crucial importance to the whole human
race.
And what the Master announced, the Apostolic
Church as certainly expected. Christ had come both
in the flesh and in the Spirit, but they looked for yet
another Coming which was to bring the Lord back
to them in the full glory of His exalted manhood.
Even as they gazed up after Him into heaven, they
heard angelic voices declare, Zhzs Jesus... shall so
come in lke manner as ye beheld him going into
heaven. There must some day be a reversal of the
Ascension ; He who went to the Father shall come
back to His Church, and come as He went. This
belief passed at once into the preaching of the
Church, and became a prominent feature in the
primitive Gospel. Repent, the first preachers urged,
... that so there may come seasons of refreshing from the
presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ
who hath been appointed for you, even Jesus: whom the
heaven must receive until the times of restoration of
all things? How largely this hope of another and
more glorious Advent entered into S. Paul’s early
1 Acts i. 11. = Acts iii. 109ff.
 THE COMING ONE 131
teaching of the Gentile churches appears from the
Epistles to the Thessalonians, his first extant letters.
Ye turned, he writes to the Thessalonians, unto God
Srom tdols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait
Sor his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead,
even Jesus, which delivereth us from the wrath to come.
It is clear that the expectation of the coming Saviour
filled a foremost place in the primitive Christianity of
the Pauline character. Already a Greek term had
been found for the expected Advent: four times in
this one Epistle? it is spoken of as the Parousia, a
word which, like the Latin adventus, is used in nearly
contemporary documents for the state-visit of the
Emperor to a province or city in his dominions?
S. Paul’s letter must have added greatly to the
keenness of the interest with which the Thessalonian
Christians regarded the Advent, for it contains an
apocalyptic description of the coming event which
goes beyond the words of Christ recorded in the
Gospels: the Lord himself shall descend from heaven
with a shout of command, with the votce of the
archangel and with the trump of God, and the dead
ap Th. 1.9. iy Thess, ii. 19, 1i., 13, iv. 15, v.23:
3See G. Milligan, 7hessalonians, p. 145 ff.: Deissmann, Light from
the Ancient East, E. tr. p. 372ff. The wide use of the term in other
Christian circles appears. from its occurrence in James v. 7f; I Jo. ii.
28, Mt. xxiv. 3, 27, 37, 39. It occurs, however, also in reference to
the arrival of an ordinary ‘person, e.g. Stephanas (1 Cor. xvi. 17), Titus
(2 Cor. vii. 6 f), S. Paul himself (Phil. i. 26, ii. 12), so that the Im-
perial character of the visit must not be unduly pressed.
132 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

in Christ shall rise first ; then we that are alive,

that are left, shall together with them be caught up
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall
we ever be with the Lord.’ It is scarcely surprising
that the enthusiasm of his converts got the better of
their reason,? especially since they were led to infer
from the Apostle’s words that the day of the Lord had
already begun (€véornxev), The second letter is occu-
pied with the correction of this error: Christ could not
come before Antichrist, and the advent (zapovaia,
v. 9) of Antichrist was at present held back by the
forces of law and order which were represented by
the Roman Empire. Thus the Advent of the Lord
and the gathering to Him of the Church was not
even imminent, and all the duties of life must go
forward in their ordinary course while the Church
was waiting for that day. After this early experi-
ence of the excitable temperament of his Greek
converts, S. Paul perhaps deliberately practised more
reserve when he dealt with the doctrine of the Last
Things. There are, indeed, passages which shew
that he did not go back from his first convictions:
the glowing description in 1 Corinthians of the effect
to be produced on the saints by the Parousia:
we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling
of an eye, at the last trump, for the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we
11 Thess. iv. 16 f. 22 Thess. ii. 2 carevOjvat buds dd Tod vods.
 THE COMING ONE 133
—the living—shall be changed ;1 and the similar, but
briefer, passage in Philippians: our citizenship ts
zn heaven, from whence also we wait for a Saviour,
the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the body
of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the
body of his glory. But the references to the Coming
in S. Paul’s later letters are usually free from apoca-
lyptic detail ; and he is content to speak in a general
way of the revelation (amoxaAvyis) of Christ, or of
His manifestation or epiphany (émidavea).2 Yet if
the symbolism disappears, the hope remains, and the
theological insight becomes even more penetrating.
Everywhere in S. Paul’s Epistles, early or late, the
note of the future Coming is heard. It is the Advent
and not death which is the recognized terminus of
life; umntzl the Lord come, till he come, marks the
limit of the present provisional order; Maran atha,
‘our Lord cometh’? (or, perhaps, ‘come!’) is the
great Christian watchword which, though expressed in
Aramaic—derived, it may be, from the mother church
of Palestine—was intelligible to a church so thoroughly
Lire (Cries ciety Ole 2Phil. iii. 201.
Corti. 71, eebil, i. 16, Coli iii i i> Limsvix 14, -2) Tim siv. 15/8,
Tit. ii. 13. On émupdvera see G. Milligan on Thessalonians, p. 148 f. ; the
history of the word is even more instructive than that of qapovola.
In 2 Thess. ii. 8 the two words are combined (émd. ris mapouclas
avrov).
41 Cor. iv. 5, xi. 26.
5 Cor. xvi. 22; cf. Didache 10, where it occurs, followed by duhv,
as an Eucharistic formula.
134 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

Greek as that of Corinth. In the two great Christo-

logical Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians
there is but little direct mention of the Advent; yet
the great hope sparkles in every reference to the
future inheritance of the Church;! while in the
Pastoral Epistles, which, if they are S. Paul’s, must
belong to his last years, the veteran Apostle finds it
the chief support of his failing strength: J ave
fought the good fight ... henceforth there ts laid up
Jor me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord,
the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day ; and
not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his
appearing. All who shared the Apostle’s faith must
share, he was assured, his longing for the Advent,
looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory
of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ3
Nor is this a Pauline doctrine only. The author
of Hebrews * works it into his teaching on the High-
priesthood of Christ; our High Priest, who is now
within the veil, shall appear a second time (ex devrépov)
to the members of His. Church who wait for
Him in the outer court,? and for these His Return
shall be unto salvation, S. Peter sees in the Coming
an unveiling of the glory which belongs to the person
of Jesus Christ, but hitherto has been hidden from

1See eg. Eph. i. 10, 14, 18, ii. 7, iii, 21, iv. 13, v. 273 Col. i. 12,
iii. 4.
22 [Link].7f. *%Titusii.13. 4Heb. ix. 28. 5Cf£ Lev. xvi. 24.
 THE COMING ONE 135
the sight of the world by the intervening veil of the
flesh.’ S. John, towards the end of the century, falls
back on the old word Pavousia which had been
the favourite of S. Paul: with him the Advent is
the coming of the Lord to visit again the scenes
of His earthly life, and the servants who are charged
to do His work in the world.” The Apocalypse
rings with the voice of Christ Himself testifying,
I come quickly, and its last word is the response
of the Bride, Amen, come, Lord Jesus® Even the
Epistle of James, with its szxtmum of Christian
doctrine, recognizes the coming of the Lord:
2. The New Testament, then, with one consent,
in Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Apocalypse, proclaims a
future Return of the Ascended Lord. There is no
dissentient voice; there is scarcely one which is
wholly silent on the subject. As surely as the Lord
ascended, He will come again. The Creeds are
nowhere on surer ground than when to ascendit tn
caelos they add, Unde venturus est—‘from thence
He shall come.’ Nevertheless, to many minds this
article presents insuperable difficulties. They think
of it as involving a literal fulfilment of the apoca-
lyptic symbolism of the Second Coming which the
New Testament inherits from the Book of Daniel.
They imagine the Ascension literally reversed, and
Hy Pet. 1275135 1V. 12: A romiie2s.
° Apoc. iii. 11, xxii, 12, 20. 4James v. 7.
136 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
the intellectual difficulties of the scene vastly in-
creased. ‘He shall come’ means, they suppose,
that He shall visibly descend in a chariot of clouds,
accompanied by visible hosts of superhuman beings.
These conceptions can of course be justified by an
appeal to the letter of Scripture, but so can also the
vision of the Great White Throne and the Open
Books. Difficulties of this kind would be lessened
if it were remembered that the Coming of the Lord,
according to the New Testament, synchronizes with
the change which is to convert flesh and blood into a
spiritual and incorruptible body. It is clear from this
consideration, that the final Epiphany, will not be
such as to appeal to our present organs of sense; the
descriptions which represent it as such cannot therefore
be interpreted literally. It may indeed be that the
change which will pass over us will itself be the
unveiling or epiphany or advent of the hidden Christ.
He is hidden from us now through the grossness of
our body of humiliation ; at the moment when this is
conformed to the body of his glory the veil will be
taken away, and the eternal opened up to sight.
In any case, the essential truth conveyed by the
symbolical descriptions of the Advent is that a day
is coming when the glory of Jesus Christ shall
be revealed to all mankind. Ye shall see the Son
of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and
1Phil. iii. 20 f.
 THE COMING ONE 137
coming with the clouds of heaven.’ Every eye shall see
him, and they which pierced him? The vision of
the Coming Christ, it is clear, is not to be restricted
to the saints; His bitterest enemies shall share it.
It must be confessed that it is hard to understand
by what means the exalted Christ can be revealed to
the non-Christian world. How shall Caiaphas and
the Sanhedrin, Herod and Pontius Pilate, Nero and
Domitian be made to see the Son of Man in the
glory of the Father? It may be that in that
supreme moment of human history, when all the
dead, great and small, stand before God, the Spirit
of Christ will so convict the whole world of sin,
of righteousness, and of judgement, that all oppo-
sition will be disarmed and all incapacity overcome.
But in whatever way, the revelation, it appears, is
to be made to all: a revelation which, to those who
do not love the Lord, must be one of unspeakable
awe, bringing confusion of face and grief of heart.
All the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him?
whether with the sorrow of the world that worketh
death, or after a Godly sort, working in the end
repentance unto salvation*—if it is not, indeed,
too late for any true turning to Him whom they
pierced.
To the Church the final Advent will not be a
1Me. xiv. 62. 2 Apoceis 7:
3 Apoc. i. 7. 42 Cor. vii. 9 f.
138 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

momentary flash of blinding light, revealing the glory

of the Lord and then dying out into the blackness of
despair, but the lasting consummation of her faith
and hope and labour of love. It will be more than
even this. The Church is not only to see the glory
of the Ascended Christ, but to share it. He and His
are to be glorified together The revealing of the
sons of God, for which the whole creation waits,
will accompany the revelation of the Only Begotten
Son. He comes Zo be glorified in his saints ;* their
spiritual bodies will dear the image of the Heavenly,
being conformed to the body of his glory, and shining
forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father?
The glorification of Christ and the conglorification of
the Saints are related as cause and effect: z2f he shall
be manifested, we shall be like him, for we shall see
him even as he is® Yet, so far as we can judge,
the two processes will, in fact, be simultaneous. As
the whole stupendous scene impressed itself on the
imagination of S. Paul, the dead in Christ, who are
already in some sense with the Lord, zw2ll God bring
weth him; while the living, changed as zz a moment,
shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to
meet the Lord in the air.’ 7 His coming will be theirs ;
they will come with Him.
1Rom. viii. 17 ff. (va cuvdoéacOGpev).
73 AN esvk, KO) 31 Cor. xv. 44 ft. 4Phil. iii. 20.
5Mt. xiii. 43. Gi lo, wt, 2 fq Thrive raft,
 THE COMING ONE 139
The great future belongs to Jesus Christ and to
His Church. This is the ultimate meaning of New
Testament apocalyptic. Our Lord is the Coming
One. When or how He shall come we know not;
generations may have to run their course’ first, and
_ in the end the Advent may be far other than we
anticipate. But of one thing we are assured by our
Christian faith: beyond the furthest limits of human
history there is an age of fuller knowledge, larger
power, more splendid achievements, a more perfect
life, than the existing order can attain to. No
progress of scientific discovery, no changes of social
conditions, no system of education or politics or
ethical principles, can abolish Pain or Death or Sin;
only the faith of Christ can promise that Death
shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor
crying nor pain any more; the first things are
passed away...and there shall in no wise enter...
anything unclean. This painless, deathless, sinless
future comes with the Ascended Christ; He has
already entered it, and He will bring it with Him to
the world. Who that has this hope in Him will not
take up the call of the Spirit and the Bride, and
say Come?* Amen: come, Lord Jesus.
1 Apoc. xxi. 4, 27. 2 Apoc. xxii. 17, 20.
 x.
THE JUDGE.
THE Creeds of Christendom connect the coming of
the Lord with the judgement of mankind. He comes
‘to judge the quick and the dead,’’ that is, all the
generations of the human race, from the first to that
which shall be alive at the time of His coming.
Thus the faith of the Church (a) invests the Ascended
Christ with the office of Judge, and (4) connects His
fulfilment of this office with the Parousia.
1. In His Galilean teaching our Lord appears to
have repeatedly represented Himself as the supreme
arbiter of the destinies of all members of His Church.
His sayings on this subject belong largelyto the
eschatological parables of S. Matthew and S. Luke,
and are clothed in pictorial language borrowed from
the life of the people. Jesus is the husbandman
who, zz the time of harvest... will say to the reapers,
Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to
1S0 the Apostles’ Creed: ‘unde venturus est iudicare vivos et
mortuos.’ The ‘Nicene’ Creed has: rdAw épyduevov pera dbEns Kpivac
FGvras Kal vexpous.
 THE JUDGE 141

burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn Or,

He is the bridegroom who refuses to open the door
to the belated virgins; or the master who takes the
talent from the slothful servant and gives it to the
good and faithful.” Once, according to S. Matthew,
Jesus said plainly, Ze Son of Man shall come tn the
glory of his Father with his angels, and then shall
he render unto every man according to his deeds ;*
and once the judgement is expressly extended to
the whole world: then shall he stt on the throne of
his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the
nations.*
In the fourth Gospel this conception of Christ
as the Judge of men is. developed and interpreted.
The Jocus classicus upon the subject is the great dis-
course which our Lord bases on the text, Wy Father
worketh even until now, and I work? What things
soever the Father doeth, He continues, these the Son
also doeth in like manner. Some things there are
which the Father has given wholly into the hands
of the Son: xezther doth the Father judge any man,
but he hath given all gudgement unto the Son.... He
gave him authority to execute judgement, because he
zs son of man (ott vios avOpwrov écrtiy). It is, then,

1Mt. xiii. 30; cf. v. 41. 2Mt. xxv. 11 f., 28.

' 3Mt. xvi. 27. S. Mark (viii. 38) has this saying in a simpler and
perhaps earlier form. went? ,
4Mt. xxv. 31. Pjonv..17 ff
142 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

the Son as incarnate who is the appointed Judge;

because, being Son of God, He is also man. His
manhood fits Him to undertake the office of Judge
of mankind, as His unique relation to the Father
makes it possible for Him to do so.
Even during His earthly life the judicial aspect
of our Lord’s mission comes into light. It was not,
indeed, to execute judgement that He came in the
flesh. God sent not the Son into the world to judge
the world, but that the world should be saved through
him. I judge no man, the Lord declares; J came
not to judge the world, but to save the world. Yet
elsewhere He says: for judgement (eis kpiwa) came
I into the world.’ S. John, who records these appa-
rently contradictory sayings, explains how a coming
which was not for the purpose of judging men might
nevertheless be unto judgement; this, he writes, zs the
judgement, that the Light ts come into the world, and
men loved the darkness rather than the Light; for
their deeds were evil. Judgement, as the New Testa-
ment uses the word, is separation between good
and bad—the manifestation, whether by circum-
stances or by an authoritative sentence, of the
inherent, essential incompatibility of the two. Our
English term and its cognates are forensic: they
speak of the court of law, with its rigid formalism,
its externality, its occasional travesties of justice.
1Jo, iii, 17, viii. 15, ix. 39, xii. 47.
 THE JUDGE 143

But the series of Greek words which we translate

by ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’ (kpivew, xpiris, Kpicts, |
kpiwa) strikes another note; it tells of the spiritual
distinctions which exist between man and man, and
must ultimately be brought to light: it has regard to
the moral grounds on which all true judgement rests.
During the Ministry our Lord Himself passed no
judgement, conscious though He was that if He
judged, His judgement would be true! Yet His
presence among the Jewish people did, in fact, bring
to light the true character of every man who heard
His call ; and the attitude of each individual towards
the Christ shewed what manner of man he was, and
- determined his position in the spiritual world. All
who were brought into contact with Jesus thus
passed judgement on themselves, for none who
encountered the Light of the world could remain
neutral; he that ¢s not with me is against me* is a
canon which is absolutely true in principle, though
its application may be precarious in the hands of
those who are no judges of the secrets of the heart.
In the sight of God he who shuns the Light is self-
condemned (#67 xéxpirat): he has pronounced sentence
on himself by his refusal of the Truth. This process
was not limited to the days of our Lord’s visible
presence ; the Gospel and the Church still carry it
forward in the world. The dividing line between
1Jo. viii. 16. *Mt. xii. 30.
 144 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
man and man is drawn in the sight of God by the
attitude which each soul that hears the call of the
Gospel in the Church assumes towards Jesus Christ.
This of course is not in all cases equivalent to
its attitude towards the Church or towards orthodox
belief; invincible prejudice or ignorance may lead a
man to oppose both, while his heart is on the side of
Christ. But the alternative to essential sympathy
with Christ is aversion to Him, and the presence
of one or other of these attitudes determines the
spiritual position of the individual in the sight of God.
The picture drawn by S. John? of our Lord on the
Cross—on either stde one, and Jesus in the midst—
typifies the general result of the preaching of the
Cross, and anticipates the final issue: before him
shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them
one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep
from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right
hand, but the goats on the left2 The Person of Christ
divides men now, and will divide them in the end;
here and hereafter He is the Judge.
2. There may have been, and may be in time to
come, many epochs in the history of individuals, of
nations, and of the world, which are in a special
sense ‘days of judgement’ ;? critical seasons, which
1Jo. xix. 18. 2 Mt. xxv. 31 ff.
° For [i] qudpa [ris] kpicews, see Mt. x. 15, xi. 22, 24, xii. 36; 2 Pet.
ii. 9, ili. 7; I Jo. iv. 17. The phrase occurs also in Enoch xxii. 4,
Psi Sole xyve12-
 THE JUDGE 145

manifest character, and perhaps bring it to its

maturity. But all such days culminate in the ‘ great
day’ or ‘last day,’ the ‘day of the Lord’ or ‘of
Christ, the day of wrath and revelation of the
righteous judgement of God. In a startling phrase
S. Paul once contrasts ‘man’s day’ (avOpw7rivy juépa)
with the Lord’s—the preliminary assize in which men
sit in judgement upon the conduct or motives of their
fellows, with the final issues of life as they will be
made apparent by the coming of Jesus Christ. Judged
by false brethren at Corinth, he reserves himself for
the hearing of the Supreme Arbiter who is ever
at hand: zt zs a very small thing that I should be
judged (avaxp.0a) of you or by man’s day (un
avOpwrimns nuépas)... he that judgeth me is the
Lord. Wherefore judge nothing before the time,
until the Lord come?
The Apostolic age, it cannot be doubted, looked
for a particular day or epoch when all the results of
the present life must be passed under examination,
and judgement be pronounced upon them by the
Ascended Christ. It is also clear that this period
of scrutiny, this ‘summing up of the aeon,’® as it is
1Jude 6 els xplow meyddns tuépas. Jo. vi. 39 f., 44, 54 [ev] TH
éeoxdry MMEpe. y
2 Rom. ii. 5. 31 Cor. iv. 3 ff.
ae Cor iSsva Sse bniled. O, 105 i. 103) 1) 0h, v.. 2402) 0h. i. 2.
5 Mt. xiii. 39 f., 49; xxiv. 3, xxvili. 20 [7] ovvréNeva 70 aldvos; Heb,
ix. 26 has [7] cuvréAeva Tov aidvwv.
A.C. K
146 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

called in the first Gospel, was connected by the first

age with the manifestation of the glorified Son of
Man at the Parousia. Whatever the event or course
of events might be which would fulfil the promise of
the Lord’s coming, it would also bring about the final
Judgement. We may go far wrong in our interpreta-
tion of the details; as to the main point there is no
possibility of error.
It may serve as a warning against the tendency
to press apocalyptic details, if we reflect upon the
great variety of the symbolism employed by our
Lord when He speaks of His own coming. It is
a stormy day in the winter season, when the rains
descend and the floods come and the winds blow,-
and the world, like one of the wadys of Palestine,
is turned into a raging, howling waste of waters, in
which no house without foundation can live.’ It is
the time of harvest, and the wheat is being gathered
into sheaves for garnering; but first the weeds are
bound in bundles for the fire? It is a night of
festivity ; crowds are pouring in to the brilliantly
lighted banqueting hall; at the last moment one of
the invited guests is cast out into the darkness of the
night. It is a day on which the Master of a great
house has suddenly returned from his travels; the
major domo has been surprised in the midst of his
cups, and he is cut asunder with one blow of his
1Mt. vii. 24 ff. ? Mt. xiii. 30, 42. 3Mt, xxii. 11 ff,
 THE JUDGE 147

lord’s great sword.’ It is as when Noah’s flood

burst on a thoughtless, merry-making age, or the rain
of fire and brimstone descended on the cities of the
plain.” These pictures, it is evident, call up incom-
patible scenes; though each in its own way may
reflect some feature in the final catastrophe, not one
of them can be taken to represent it except in the
way of suggestion.
The same must be said of the apocalyptic language,
chiefly borrowed from the Old Testament, in which
more direct descriptions of the Judgement are clothed :
so far as they present to the mind physical phenomena,
they can be but efforts to assist it in conceiving of
spiritual processes which are beyond present experi-
ence and for that reason cannot find direct expression
in human words.
There are, however, certain ideas which are
cominon to all or to most of these representations,
whether parabolic or apocalyptic, and may therefore
be safely regarded as of the essence of our Lord’s
revelation in reference to the future Judgement. It
is certain, for example, that He claims for Himself as
the Son of Man the office of Supreme Judge. He
comes in the glory of the Father, as the Father’s
plenipotentiary ; it is the glorified Christ and not
the invisible God who is to conduct the scrutiny
and pass the sentence; here, as in all dealings of
Nore shy Pete 2Lec. xvii. 26 ff.
148 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

God with man, He is Mediator between God and

man. This, it will be observed, is precisely the
teaching of the fourth Gospel, where it is stated
in direct words: the Son will judge decause he ts
son of man. Again, the Synoptists, equally with
S. John, represent the Judgement as essentially a
process of division, which will strictly follow the
facts of life, so that the work of the Judge is merely
to reveal the true character of each individual, and
thereby to assign to him his place in the new
spiritual order which begins with His appearing.
Once more, the Synoptic parables and apocalyptic
sayings shew us Christendom falling, under the light
of the Coming, into two vast multitudes, in one or
other of which each individual must find his own
place, and within which there will therefore be, as
it seems, as many gradations as there are types of
character or varieties of moral and spiritual con-
dition. The popular view which recognizes no dis-
tinctions in future rewards or punishments is clearly
at variance with our Lord’s Synoptic teaching! As
to the finality of the award, we go perhaps beyond
His words if we assert that it is final in such a sense
as to fix character and destiny irrevocably. The
Lord’s words refer to the new age which His Return
inaugurates: of those far distant aeons which
S. Paul sees coming up one behind the other like
USee, e123 cs Kile Ay fay IRS 17s
 THE JUDGE 149

great ocean waves reaching into the immeasurable

distance of the future,| we can say nothing. Yet,
on the other hand, it is a significant fact that the
whole system of Christ’s mediation seems to come
to an end with the Parousia, nor is there any intima-
tion that God has in store fresh opportunities of
repentance and grace for those who have refused
the Light while it was with them. It is best to
confess our ignorance where Scripture fails us, and
to limit ourselves to the tremendous certainty that
the judgement of Christ will place each man in that
precise relation to the next age of which his con-
duct in this life has made him capable.
So much may be learnt from the teaching of our
Lord Himself as it is reported in the Gospels. The
Apostolic age inherited this teaching and handed it on.
‘Eternal judgement’ was one of the first principles
of Christ which the early missionaries of the Church
delivered to their converts, and it took its place once
for all in the primitive creed of Christendom. To the
heathen it was preached as a fundamental and most
necessary truth; it will be remembered how S. Paul
insisted upon it at Athens, and before Felix.’ His
Epistles dwell more often on the hope set before
the Church than upon the judgement of the world;
but occasional references to the Judgement shew that
1Eph. ii. 7 €v rots aldoww rots émepXouevors. aHiebs vi, 1 ft.
3 Acts xvii. 30f., xxiv. 25.
150 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

believers themselves need to find a place for it in

their thoughts of the Lord’s future coming. He
that judgeth me ts the Lord." We must all be made
manifest before the judgement seat of Christ, that each
one may receive the things done in the body, according
to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad?
God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my
gospel, by Jesus Christ? Christ Jesus... shall judge
the quick and the dead... the righteous judge shall
give to me the crown of righteousness at that day.*
As he writes these passages two scenes from the ex-
perience of his own life in Gentile cities pass before
the Apostle’s eyes. He sees the proconsul seated
on his tribunal (@7ua), administering the law with
the impartial justice that was still characteristic
of Roman judges ;° and the umpire of the races at
the stadium (8paBevs) holding out a wreath of pine
to the successful runner. Quite different from both
conceptions, but perhaps even more impressive, is
the great Judgement scene in the Apocalypse: J
saw a great white throne, and him that sat upon it,
Srom whose face the earth and the heaven fled away;
and there was found no place for them. And TI saw
the dead, the great and the small, standing before the
throne; and books were opened: and another book
17 Cor. av. 3f. 2 2)Cora veil O;
3 Rom. ii. 16. A 2iDimniValee gs
5 Cf. Acts xviii. 12 ff. CmCorvixe 24) Colmiigaiss
 THE JUDGE | 181
was opened, which ts the Book of Life: and the
dead were judged out of the things which were
written tn the books, according to their works.’ Here
there is little which is peculiarly Christian, and even
the mediation of Christ is not hinted at. The
imagery is almost wholly taken from the Old Testa-
ment—the opened books are from Daniel,’ and the
idea of the Book of Life is already found in
Exodus ; both were familiar to the Jewish apocalyptic
writers. It is the Eternal Father who sits on the
throne, and not, as in Christian pictures of the
Judgement, the Incarnate Son.? There is no mention
of the living, or of the change which will pass
over them at the coming of the Lord; His coming
does not enter into the vision. But if in this one
passage the Seer reiterates ideas about the Judge-
ment which Jews shared with Christians, in other
places he gives full expression to those which are
purely Christian. The Reaper of the Harvest of
the Earth who comes seated on a white cloud is one
like unto a son of man. The Holy City of the Saints
is seen coming down out of heaven from God, made
veady as a bride adorned for her husband: the lamp
PApoe. xx. UI ihe
2Dan. vii. 10, Exod. xxxii. 32. Cf. Enoch xlvii. 3, xc. 20; Afoc.
Baruch xxiv. 1. :

3Vet even S. Paul speaks of the Baua tov Geof (Rom. xiv. 10),
as well as Tod xpicrod (2 Cor. v. 10). God will judge in and by
Christ.
152 THE ASCENDED CHRIST
thereof is the Lamb, and its inhabitants are they
which are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Lastly,
Christ is heard to say, in words which remind us
of the first Gospel, Behold, I come quickly ;and my
reward ts with me, to vender to each man according as
his work is.
Thus the whole of the New Testament witnesses
with one voice, although with much variety of
metaphor, to the coming of a Day of Judgement,
which is coincident with the coming of the Lord.
It may be that all the descriptions of the Great Day
are to be interpreted as symbolical pictures which
await their true interpretation when the day arrives ;
it may be that the Day itself is an epoch in human
history rather than a space of time to be measured
by hours. But such considerations do not touch the
central truth, which remains as S. Paul stated it
when he stood in the midst of the Areopagus,
facing the frivolous Athenians of his time. God...
hath appointed a day in the which he will judge
the world in righteousness by the Man whom he
hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance
unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the
dead? The Resurrection and Ascension point with
awful certainty to the coming Judgement of the
world.
1Apoc. xiv. 14ff., xxi. 2, 23, 27, xxil. 12; cf. Matt. xvi. 27.
2 Acts xvii. 30 f.
 THE JUDGE 153
‘We believe that thou shalt come to be our
Judge. We therefore pray thee, help thy servants,
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious
blood. Make them to be numbered with thy
Saints in glory everlasting. O Lord, save thy
people, and bless thine heritage; govern them,
and lift them up for ever.’
 POSTSCRIPT.

IT may be asked, To what purpose is such a study

of the work of the Ascended Christ? Can any
subject which is so transcendent that it cannot be
expressed in the terms of human experience without
calling in the aid of symbolism, be of practical value
to our modern life? May it not safely be left to
mystical theologians, while Christians in general
devote themselves to problems which lie nearer to
the heart of religion and morality?
To many it may not seem sufficient to answer
that in the judgement of the leaders of the Apostolic
age the life of Christ in heaven must have had a
supreme value, seeing that it forms almost the chief
subject of their teaching. Circumstances have changed,
it will be said, and the present age needs to have its
attention directed to, matters of more immediate
interest, such as the intellectual and social problems
which beset us to-day, and clamour for a speedy
solution.
In view of this objection it may be worth while to
count up a few of the religious ends which are to be
 POSTSCRIPT 155
gained in these days by studying the life and functions
of the Exalted Christ.

1. The Ascension and Ascended Life bear witness

against the materialistic spirit which threatens in
some quarters to overpower those higher interests
that have their seat in the region of the spiritual
and eternal. They are as a Sursum corda—‘lift up
your hearts’—which comes down from the High
Priest of the Church who stands at the heavenly
altar, and draws forth from the kneeling Church
the answer Habemus ad Dominum—‘we lift them
up unto the Lord.’ Faith in the Ascended Christ
was S. Paul’s remedy for the sensuality which
he encountered in the Greek cities of Asia Minor:
seck the things that ave above, where Christ ts, seated
on the vight hand of God. Set your mind on the
things that are above, not on the things that are
upon the earth; for your life is hid with Christ in
God; mortify therefore your members which are
upon the earth. Wow strong a motive this appeal
supplied is evident from the history of the primitive
Church. The grosser vices of paganism have less
attraction for our age, but the downward pressure
of external things remains; at a time when life
is being reduced to a complex machinery for the
production of wealth, there is ample room for a
doctrine which points men persistently to an order
156 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

of realities which are at once present and eternal, a

world which already surrounds us and waits only
for the coming of the Lord to be manifested in
overwhelming power.
2. The faith of the Ascended Life is not less
necessary as a safeguard against minimizing esti-
mates of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. To
judge of His position in the universe by the records
of His earthly life alone is to take into account but
one of the two great factors on which the Church
has based her creed, and the one which is the less
decisive. The Christ of the New Testament is a
person who not only lived and died on the earth,
but who rose again, and in His risen humanity
ascended to heaven, and from that day to the
present hour lives and reigns there. If we choose
to limit ourselves to the Jesus of history, and
proceed to tear away from the records of His life
the supernatural element which was woven into the
texture of the primitive gospel, it is doubtless within
our power to maintain a purely humanitarian view
of the Person of our Lord; or, if we prefer it,
to decline to examine the question of His relation
to God, as one that does not call for an answer.
But no such position is possible for those who
frankly accept the teaching of the New Testament
as a whole. The glorified Christ of the Epistles
and Apocalypse is not ‘mere man.’ As we gaze
 POSTSCRIPT 157
at the heavenly vision, we see that, if it represents
a reality, S. Paul must have been right when he
said that Jesus pre-existed im the form of God,
and S. John, when he identified Him with the Word
who was with God and was God. And as it is
with the Person, so it is also with the Work of
Christ; the Ascension has lifted it to a plane
immeasurably higher than that of the earthly life,
high as that stands above the lives of other men,
and has extended it to far wider fields of energy.
The Gospels reveal our Lord as Teacher, Healer,
‘Master, Pastor pastorum ; and in all these relations,
He is incomparable. Again, they shew Him tempted,
suffering, dying, and victorious over temptation, pain,
and death; and these aspects of the Christ-life are
beyond price. But how much remains of His work,
at which the Gospels hardly hint? His mediation
and intercession, His high-priestly life of perpetual
self-presentation, His reign, His exercise of universal
authority, His certainty of complete victory; His
gift of the Spirit, His Headship of the Church,
His office of universal Judge :—this is the contribu-
tion which is made by the second half of the New
Testament to our knowledge of Christ. When all
this is left out of sight, can we wonder that men
do not get beyond a humanitarian view of His
Person, and an equally defective conception of
His Mission? To the Christian who is content to
158 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

follow the teaching of the Apostolic age there is no

such alternative as ‘Jesus or Christ’; the Jesus of
the Gospels is the Christ of the Epistles, and he
cannot even in thought dissociate the Exalted
Being portrayed in the latter from the Son of Mary
who was crucified ; the two pictures are those of one
person in two stages of His history, and both stages
belong equally to the human life of the Word made
flesh.
* 3. The New Testament doctrine of the Ascension
is also necessary to a right understanding of the
office and powers of the Catholic Church. The
estimate which men form of the Church, and their
sense of the privilege and responsibility of member-
ship in that great Body, vary according to the
vividness or the dimness of vision with which they
realize the ascension of the Church’s Head. It is
not strange that persons who take little interest in
the heavenly life of Jesus Christ, regard the Church
as a merely human society, or a department of the
State—a force to be respected and supported as
it makes for good order and public morality, but
possessing no supernatural powers or authority,
and, apart from the law of the land, or the obliga-
tion of a voluntary compact, no claim upon the
submission of the human mind and will. Nor is it
matter for surprise that men of this type ignore
the corporate life of the Church, contending that
 POSTSCRIPT 159
personal religion is sufficient for their spiritual
needs. Such an attitude, common as it is among
modern Christians, was perhaps altogether unknown
to primitive Christianity. In the first days the
Christian Society bulked larger than the individual
member, not that the religion of the individual life
was undervalued, but that the life of the Body was
felt to be something greater and more precious.
The language which S. Paul uses in reference to
the Church may seem at times to be extravagant:
the Church, he says, is the fulness of Christ, the
Body of Christ, the city of the Saints, the household
of God; through the Church is made known to the
heavenly powers the manifold wisdom of God; the
Church is hereafter to be presented by Christ to
Himself glorious, without spot or blemish; even now
it is the pillar and ground of the truth. If it be
asked how an association of mortal and sinful men
can support these astounding claims, the answer
is to be found in her intimate relation to the
Ascended Christ. All His power, all His life, is hers.
The Church, alone among human societies, has a
Head in heaven, and thus is linked to the eternal
and infinite. She has, it is true, an earthly side and
an outward life, which place her in relation with the
world; and allowance must be made for these in her
attitude towards society and the State. So long as
the State recognizes the Church, and secures to
160 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

her the enjoyment of the property and dignities

which she inherits from the piety of older genera-
tions, we use it gladly; but no one who believes
in the Church’s relation to the glorified Lord would
esteem her less highly if she were despoiled and
degraded, or even, as in the first days, compelled
to flee into the wilderness from the face of the
Dragon. She would still be the Body, the Bride of
Christ; and Christ lives and reigns at the right hand
of God.
4. Faith in the Ascended Christ dictates the
attitude which the Church should maintain towards
the world. Two mistakes have been made in refer-
ence to this matter. There have been times in the
life of the Church when she has been tempted to
make common cause with the world, or to meet it’
halfway ; and times, again, when she has gone to the
opposite extreme of retiring from the world alto-
gether. Neither of these attitudes is Apostolic or
primitive, for in the early days of the faith, when
men lived in full view of the Ascended Life, they
knew how to live in the world without being of it.
There is a familiar passage in a second century
Apology which puts this into words, and must be
quoted here once again. ‘Christians,’ the writer
says, ‘are not distinguished from the rest of man-
kind either by country or speech or customs. They
neither inhabit cities of their own, nor use a
 POSTSCRIPT 161
different language, nor practise a manner of life
which is out of the common.... But. while in-
habiting cities Greek or foreign, as the lot of each
determines, and following the customs of the country
both in regard to dress and food and life in general,
they shew themselves to be possessed of a citizen-
ship which is all their own, and the nature of it
is a paradox. They dwell in their native lands, but
as sojourners ; they share all things as citizens and
endure all things as strangers; every foreign country
is their fatherland, and every fatherland a foreign
country to them.... They are in the flesh, but do
not live after the flesh; they pass their time on
earth, but they live their lives as citizens in heaven.’!
This is a healthier and truer type of ‘other-
worldliness’ than that which was adopted by the
ascetic ages that followed, and it rests on the con-
viction that, while our Master who is in heaven
has given us a status there, and will come again
to receive us to Himself, our place and work are
meanwhile by His appointment on this earth, and
among our fellowmen. The life of the Church has,
in fact, a twofold character: it is Azd with Christ
im God, and yet and at the same time is to shine
as a guiding light before men. Any age that over-
looks either of these sides of the Christian life, or
exaggerates one of them at the expense of the
17p. ad Diognetum, 5.
A.C, L
162 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

other, suffers spiritual loss; and it suffers because it has

failed to realize the full significance of the Ascension
and the Return in their relation to the present duty
of the Church as representing Christ in the world.
5. To realize the work of our Lord in heaven is
essential to any right appreciation of the worship of
the Church. If many persons who. profess to be
Christians forsake the assembling of themselves
together for common prayer and praise and Eucha-
rist, it is because the vision of the High Priest who
is within the veil, and yet in the midst of every
assembly of His Church, has taken no real hold
upon their faith. Apart from the High-priestly life
in heaven, prayer is a venture, with no assurance
of success; apart from the real presence of the
Ascended Christ in our assemblies, common prayer
has no special value. To those who take little or no
account of the Ascended Life, the Sacraments may
well seem to be empty ceremonies, which are to be
observed as a matter of convention or at most as an
act of obedience to a positive command. Such per-
sons can see in Baptism only a symbol of spiritual
regeneration, and in the Eucharist, the memorial
of a dead or absent Christ. Confirmation, in like
manner, is in their eyes no more than a renewal of
the Baptismal promises, and Absolution a mere
declaration of God’s readiness to forgive the peni-
tent. All this is changed so soon as the fruits of
 POSTSCRIPT 163

the Ascension are apprehended; the Ascended

Christ is seen to be present and operative in His
Church, Himself by His Spirit regenerating His
members in Baptism, and strengthening the young
life in Confirmation; giving His own Body and
Blood in Holy Communion; remitting the sins of
the’ penitent in Absolution. The sacramental life
of the Church is henceforth not a theory, but an
experience, and one which ripens as life advances,
and in countless instances has endured the supreme
test of the approach of death.
6. Belief in the Ascended Christ inspires a deep
sense of personal responsibility. Few things are more
necessary at the present time. In a self-pleasing, seif- :
asserting age responsibility is apt to sit very lightly
on many, or to be wholly ignored. Men and women,
nay, even children, claim the right to be arbiters of
their own conduct. This is so not only with the
very rich, but with the poor and dependent; in all
classes of society the question which men put to
themselves is not, ‘What is my duty?’ but, ‘ How
can I get the greatest amount of enjoyment out of
“my life? how can I best succeed in evading its
burdens?’ The same irresponsible selfishness pre-
vailed in the Greek society of the first century, and
the Church met it not with a mere system of ethics,
but by preaching the ascended and coming Christ.
None of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself.
164 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

For whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; or whether

we die, we die unto the Lord We make tt our aim,
whether at home in the body or absent from the
body, to be well-pleasing unto him ; for we must all be
made manifest before the judgement seat of Christ So
S. Paul taught, and so he lived. _ The constant thought —
of the Master behind the veil, who might any day
appear and take account of His servants, inspired him
with enthusiasm and kept him stedfast to the end.
This sense of responsibility to a Master in heaven
is one of the most pressing needs of our own time.
Men and women and children must be made to
realize their relation to a Christ who lives and sees
and hears; who is the appointed Judge of all men,
but especially of the household of God. The semi-
pagan life of the baptized masses who regard them-
selves as their own masters, needs to be startled by
the trumpet note of judgement to come which S. Paul
sounded in the ears of heathen Athens. The doctrine
of the Ascension and the Return must be presented
afresh to our generation, in the sternness of its
imperious call to a recognition of the claim of Christ
over the individual life.
7. With the acceptance of personal responsibility
to the Ascended and Returning Christ there comes
the stay and joy of a personal hope. This hope is
not less personal than the service: where [ am, our
>Rom. xiv. 7 f. Zo Coxve Oks
 POSTSCRIPT 165
Lord has said, there shall also my servant be; wf any
man serve me, him will the Father honour;+ even
the messages to the churches in the Apocalypse end
in each instance with a promise to the individual
conqueror. And it is a hope which beyond all other
human hopes has power both to uplift and to steady
the life on which it has laid hold. It uplifts the life
of man to the highest level of which it is capable,
giving to each individual a citizenship in heaven,
a permanent footing and permanent-rights in the
greatest of all communities, the New Jerusalem, the
City of God. And as it uplifts, so it is a steadying
power in the midst of the tempests of life—an anchor
of the soul by which we weather the storm, tossed
like others who are not so anchored, but escaping
serious harm.
There is perhaps no feature of early Christianity
which is so seldom reproduced in the Christian life
of our own time. We are busy with the social or
the ecclesiastical questions of the hour, with the
work of charitable or religious associations, with
the side of the religious life which is concerned
with the present order. When our thoughts turn to
our Lord, it is of the Christ of the Gospels that we
usually think ; the Ascension has taken Him out of
our sphere, and we scarcely try to follow; the great
hope of the future, which was ever before the minds
1Jo. xii. 26.
166 THE ASCENDED CHRIST

of the first generation, has little power over us in the

hurry of life. This change of attitude must bring
some corresponding loss of spiritual strength, for
which even the work of faith and the labour of
Jove do not compensate; the patience of hope,’ that
reserve of invincible courage, which, helmet-like,
protects the seat of the vital powers from injury,
is no less needful to the soldier of Christ than the
zeal which is ready to spend and be spent in His
service. If it .be asked how the primitive hope is
to be revived in a generation which no _ longer
regards His coming as imminent, the answer is, By
the endeavour to follow our Lord in heart and mind
into the invisible world ; to realize His life there;
to accustom ourselves to’ the thought that it is the
life for which each member of His Body is destined;
to bring all the engrossing occupations of the
present, not excluding our religious energies, into
relation with the Ascended Christ and with the
great future which His Return will reveal.

The grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation

to all men, instructing us, to the intent that, denying
ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly
and vighteously and godly in this present world;
looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the
glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ2
Ped tet ih Bh ach Aiton i it
 INDEX
Accuser, the, 94. ‘ecclesia,’ 116 f.
adventus, 131. Epiphany, the final, 133 ff.
Advocate, 97 f., 100. Eucharist, the, 46 ff., 118 ff, 162.
Ambrose, S., 121.
anammnests, 47. Father, the revelation of the,
‘anchor of the soul,’ 102 f. Gonke TNT t:
‘ascend,’ 6 f. Forerunner, Christ the, 1or ff.
Ascended Christ, vision of the,
a2 te Gloria in excelsts, 121.
Ascended life, doctrine of the, Gospels, their attitude towards
Soyeaitie the Ascension, xi f., 2.
Ascension, the, xi f., 1 ff. ; doc-
trine of, xv, 3 ff.; practical Head, Christ the, 68 ff.; no
teaching of, 154 ff. visible head of the Church,
Ascension Day, Ascension-tide, . 73 f.
vill, 7, 85. Hebrews, Epistle to the, teach-
‘Assumption,’ 6 f. ing of the, 4f., 36 ff, 95, ror f.
Atonement, the day of, 42 ff. Hierarchies, good and evil, 22 ff.
Augustine, S., 111, 121. Holy Spirit, the, 54 ff., 100.
authority of Christ, the, 21 ff. hope, 102 ff., 164 ff.

Body of Christ,’ the, 74 ff. Incarnate life, the two parts of

the, xi ff.
Caesar-cult, the, 19 f. Intercession, 93 ff., 100.
Christ, Person and work of, intermediate state, the, 106 ff.
156 ff. Irenaeus, 1 f.
Chrysostom, Prayer of S., 119.
Church, the Catholic, 71 ff. Josephus, 41.
158 ff.; worship of, 162 f. Judge, Christ the, 140 ff.
Coming, the future, 129 ff. judgement, 142 f.; day of, 14a f.;
Creeds, the, xiv f., 1, 6 f., 10, 72, representations of the, 146 f.
135, 140.
King, Christ the, 16 ff.
‘daysman,’ 91 f.
Diognetus, letter to, 160 f. life after the Parousia, 108 ff.
168 INDEX
‘ligaments,’ 76 ff. Reign of Christ, time limit of
‘Lives of Jesus,’ x1. thes.32 fi:
responsibility, personal, 163 f.
‘mansions, many,’ 104 f.
maran atha, 133. Session of Christ, 1, 10 ff.
Mediator, Moses as, 87 f. ; Cheat spouse of Christ, the, 71.
as, 88 ff. WOUpLeIMe lead aits
Sursum corda, 155.
Nature, relation of, to Christ, symbolism, xiii f., 135 f., 146 f.
26ff. sympathy of Christ with the
Church, 81 ff. ; of the Church
‘paraclete,’ 97. with Christ, 85 f.
parousia, 131.
‘perfect, to,’ 107. Tabernacle, symbolism of the,
Philo, 41, 88, 92. 4o ff.
preparation, our Lord’s work of, EST ONSITE IIB Sees
113 f. ‘Tent of Meeting,’ 4o f.
presence of Christ, 116 ff., 121 ff., Ter sanctus, 121.
125 ff. Tertullian, 2, 56, 117, 127.
Priest, Christ the, 34 ff.
priesthood of Christians, 45 f. ‘Vicar of Christ,’ 72 ff.
prodromos, 10% ff.
Prophet, Christ the, 53 ff. World, the, attitude of the
Prophets, the Christian, 57 ff. Church towards, 160 ff.
prophetic office of the Church, Worship of the Church, 162 f.
64 ff.

School of Theology
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500 The ascended Christ: a study in the earhest Christian teach-
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“Pirst edition, December, 1910. Reprinted, March, 1911."

“A sequel to Appearances of Our Lord ufter the paasion.”

1. Jesus Christ— Ascension. 1. Title.

ca 12-597 p
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