bour for the cause of God are self-denying service on the one hand, and a goodness of heart on the other, which is not extinguished by the evil it meets with, but burns the brighter. It lies in the nature of the case that Jesus has to commend the first chiefly with regard to the intercourse of the members of the kingdom with one another, and the second especially with regard to the world and enemies. His rule for the mutual intercourse of His friends is that none of them should exalt himself above the other, or wish at all to rule, but that their one ambition should be as to who should perform the greatest service of love (Matt. xx. 26, 27). To those, however, who do not know this spirit of love, it is to be made the more apparent, by rewarding evil with good, cursing with blessing, persecution with beneficence and intercession, for in this way the evil is actually to be overcome by the good; because such conduct is the true divine stamp on a human character which no heart at all susceptible to the divine can in the long run withstand (Matt. v. 38-48; Luke vi. 28-31; cf. Rom. xii. 19–21).

§ 6. LOVE TOWARDS GOD

All these duties of love towards our neighbour must be discharged as a matter of course, in virtue of a love to God, who alone is absolutely worthy of love; as indeed Jesus Himself completed His life's work of love through the love of the Father. Though His formal teaching about the love of God was not as exhaustive as that about the practical love of our neighbour, yet it is the great unspoken presupposition of His whole doctrine of righteousness, and, like it, is treated on many sides in substance if not in form. Although He nowhere gives a general exposition of the love of God, He lets it be seen throughout that He places it not in any special sensibility, but in those features of disposition which correspond to the relation of the child to his heavenly Father. The first of these features is sincerity, truthfulness with respect to God. God sees in secret, looks on the heart, and love is a matter of the heart. All worship of God which does not come from the heart, which is not directed to God from the heart, is vain and hypocritical; and nothing gave

Jesus greater offence in the case of the Pharisees than the want of inward truth in their piety, with all their fancy that it was real (cf. Matt. vi. 1-6, vi. 16-18, xxiii. 13 f.). With this sincerity is further connected humility, in virtue of which the genuine child makes no further claim for himself than the free love and goodness of the Father grants him. It is so important, because on it the full accessibility of the child to the love of the Father wholly depends; "for God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble;" that is, to such as are poor in spirit, who, needing love and susceptible to love, are ever ready to receive it. Jesus delineates this humility as springing from the feeling of deep indebtedness, in contrast with self- complacent righteousness and pride parading before God, in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke xviii. 9-14). But even where there is and can be no such feeling of guilt as that of the publican, humility must spring from the consciousness that we can neither perform anything towards God, nor deserve anything from Him, that when our legal relation towards Him is considered, we are only servants obliged to serve Him, and, moreover, unprofitable servants, who, when they have done all, have only done their duty, and have scarcely repaid that which their Lord has laid out on them (Luke xvii. 7-10 f.). The fear of God, therefore, which indeed is more an Old Testament idea, but has its place also in the new covenant, as a preparatory stage, at least, of the love of God, borders on humility. The true earnest, pious, filial love can only unfold itself on the basis of a holy awe before Him who is our Father, and at the same time our Lord and eternal Judge. Jesus exhorted men to the fear of God on one occasion at least. "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. x. 28). He is there led to this conception by the fear of man and the fear of death, which are to be expelled by the fear of God; elsewhere He prefers to set the more pleasing duty of trust, in opposition to the natural anxiety and care of the human heart. Trust, faith (Tioris Oeoû, trust in God, Mark xi. 22), is indeed the natural expression, not of the slavish, but of the filial relation to God into which He brings His own people. Con

sequently, even in that passage which treats of the fear of God (Matt. x. 29 f.), He at once proceeds to treat of faith, and repeatedly rebukes the little faith of His disciples-as, for instance, in the case in which they feared (Mark iv. 40) that the heavenly Father could permit the little ship which bore them along with Him to be swallowed up by the waves, and cries out to them, Mark xi. 22: exeтe Tίotiv leoû. In this TiσTIS Oεoû, anxious care about earthly things, and even necessary things, disappears; the troubled questions, What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Wherewith shall we be clothed? must be left by the child of God to the heathen, who know not of any heavenly Father. For he has indeed

a rich Father, who feeds the fowls of the heaven and clothes the lilies of the field, who knows what His children need before they ask Him (Matt. vi. 25 f.; Luke xii. 22). On the other hand, deeds in the name of God are to spring from this TíσTIS, a holy courage which in His service will remove even mountains, for trust or faith draws down miraculous powers from heaven to earth (Mark xi. 23, 24; Matt. xvii. 20). This carries us onward to prayer, that blessed childlike duty of love to which Jesus so urgently exhorts and encourages His own (Matt. vii. 7-21; Luke xi. 5-13). That is to spring from faith or trust in God (Mark xi. 22, 24), and this trust shall not be deceived: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." But this does not mean that the filial relation and childlike right of prayer should be an encouragement to selfish wishes. If Jesus does not expressly guard His promise of being heard against such a misunderstanding, that is owing to the fact that to Him it is quite a matter of course that filial trust cannot exist without obedience and submission; that it lies in the nature of the childlike converse with the heavenly Father to come to an understanding with Him and meet His thoughts of love; that true prayer is not at all in the first instance an asking for particular finite blessings, but an opening of the heart to the eternal good. And this is the only sense in which His own prayer in Gethsemane was heard (Heb. v. 7),—and in this sense no true prayer remains unanswered. The best proof of this is the model prayer which He Himself taught His disciples (Matt. vi. 9-13;

Luke xi. 1-4).

It, above all, lifts the child of God above the earth and its little cares and needs; makes the human heart forget itself, and rise to the great cares of the heavenly Father's heart, in which, however, its own truest good is hid; it seeks that the name of God, His holy and gracious revelation to the world, be truly appreciated, received, and sanctified even in this world; that, in consequence of this, the kingdom of God, the holy and blessed fellowship with God, may come ever more completely, and so the glorious goal of the union of heaven and earth be brought ever nearer; that the will of God be done on earth as in heaven, done in the praying child of God and through him. Only after the child of God has thus given expression three times to the great eternal concerns, does he come to his own little temporal concerns in a way as truthful as sufficient, and ends with asking for the removal of the hindrances which ever and again seek to thrust themselves between him and his heavenly Father, the indebtedness ever again emerging, the temptation still threatening his weakness, the manifold world-powers of evil. That is everything; it is a kind of paraphrase and embodiment of the great words of the Sermon on the Mount: Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things (the necessary earthly) will be added unto you." And this brings us to what is probably the tersest practical explanation of love to God in the sense of Jesus. It consists in this: to bring together in one all that has been said; that to us God is really the highest good and the only absolute good; that we steadfastly and undividedly resign ourselves to this eternal good, and that in pursuing this aim no finite weal or woe disturbs us.

§ 7. LOVE OF GOD AND APPRAISING OF THE WORLD

It is an old objection, which is ever being repeated, that this spiritual standpoint of Jesus, however its sublimity may be recognised, is onesided, and tends to renunciation of the world. However applicable this objection may be to much in the subsequent history of Christianity, there is no ground for bringing it against Jesus' own doctrine of righteousness. The God and Father of Jesus Christ is too great, too magnanimous,

to rob the earthly things and ordinances of that glory which He Himself, as Creator, has given to them. To Jesus nature is not a thing indifferent or undivine. He lovingly contemplated it, and drank from its cup of blameless joy in a spirit opposed to monasticism. He pointed His disciples to the rain and sunshine, to the fowls of heaven and the lilies of the field, as imaging the goodness of His heavenly Father's heart. The life of man in all its various details, from the labour of the sower and the housewife at her baking, up to the cares of a king waging war, or the feelings of a father's heart swelling towards a son who had been lost, engaged His thoughts. Human life was sometimes to Him a symbol of the laws of the growth of the kingdom of God, and sometimes a mirror of the good or evil ruling in the human heart. It is true that He did not didactically enlarge upon the whole circle of social duties. That was not His mission. His mission was to put right the highest and most inward relation of human life, the relation to God and eternity, not to interfere in the way of remodelling the several finite relations of earth. He could leave that to the new and abiding spirit which He was certain to establish among men. He knew that His kingdom was a leaven mighty enough to leaven the whole life of the world with new powers of development. And He expressly acknowledged the right and honour of the most important relations of the world. Marriage is an arrangement for this earth alone; in that other world they neither marry nor are given in marriage (Mark xii. 25; Matt. xx. 30; Luke xx. 35); yet to Him it was holy as it had never been before Him; He proposed the most ideal view of it, the idea of an indissoluble divine institution. Moses allowed the bill of divorcement only because of the hardness of the hearts of Israel; but from the beginning, that is, from the creation, it was not so, and among those who desire to belong to the kingdom of God it shall not be so henceforth (Matt. v. 32, xix. 16; Mark x. 9). The civil commonweal, the State, came into contact with Him only in the form of the heathen domination of Rome over His people, yet He gave to it what was its own. In His answer to the question about tribute He ended the confusion of religion and politics in the old covenant, due to the theocratic theories of the Jews, and thereby pronounced the State to be a kingdom.