of God, a school of self-denial, of sanctification and fidelity. And a view of the world which does not regard the human soul as existing mainly for the purpose of revolving as a useful driving wheel in human society, but in order to develop and perfect itself in the image of God according to its God-given rights, lays the main stress on this very thing. This is the thought in all those parables in which Jesus treats of labour in the service of the kingdom of God-there are a whole series of them for refuting the illusion that an idle faith satisfied Him-the Parable of the Servants who watch far into the night for the return of their Lord from the Marriage (Luke xii. 36-48); or that of their Lord journeying into a far Country, delivering unto them hundredweights or pounds of money (talents or minæ of his goods), wherewith in his absence they might increase his wealth (Matt. xxv. 14-30; Luke xix. 11-27); and not least in that Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, where it manifestly makes no difference to the householder to get so much work done, but to occupy idle people, and apply his beneficence, not to beggars, but to workers. Everywhere here the worth of labour is not measured by the amount of work done,-which is dependent on individual gifts (Matt. xxv. 15), or on outer circumstances (Matt. xx. 6), but by the fidelity displayed in it. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." in this connection also the idea of the reward which is promised to such labour. The reward grows, as it were, naturally out of the labour, in order to crown it at its close. We have already alluded to the idea of reward in so far as it springs out of Jesus' idea of God: here it comes into consideration

ruler over many things: And, lastly, there appears

in its significance for the life of man. It is not necessary to confine it everywhere to the future world. Jesus, in His idea. of the kingdom, does not so separate this world from that which is to come as to make the divine reward everywhere begin only after death. Once, at any rate, He reckons as part of the reward which He promises to His disciples the compensating brotherly love which is to make good to them an hundredfold, though with persecutions (therefore still on earth in the Christian community), for all sacrifices which

they will have to make for God (Mark x. 30; Matt. xix. 29). Eternal life is, however, the prevailing idea of the heavenly reward, and, in this very passage, is characterised as the more essential. The whole gospel of Jesus attests that no Mohammedan paradise is therewith meant, but that perfect communion with God for which the soul is destined, and for which it waits in hope here below, the perfection of the personality in God-not in a blessed idleness, but in an exalted kingly work and activity (Luke xix. 17). How foolish then to take offence at this idea, and prefer a view of the world in which human labour, though done in God, would not be eternally rewarded or have any abiding issue. Is it the standpoint of a lower morality to seek after the perfection of our personality in God, and the standpoint of a higher to fight but not to conquer, to strive but not to reach that for which we were striving? That even in such a representation as the Parable of the Day Labourers there is no mention of merit with God, is clear from the fact that the same reward is given for unequal work. If, elsewhere, mention is made of special and therefore unequal reward (cf. Luke xix. 17-19), that simply means that the blessed perfection shall be for each the individual crowning of individual work, and yet be for all the equally full satisfaction (the whole penny, Matt. xx. 9). But the contract at the beginning of the parable which gives an appearance of legal desert is only stated in order to be confounded, for the meaning of the parable is that there is indeed a divine reward, but that it is not good to ask, with Peter, "What shall we have therefore?" but to leave payment, like those hired late in the day, to the free goodness of the householder's heart. The reward is thus a reward of work, and yet a reward of grace; for if the labour to be crowned in eternity did not stand under the sign-manual of grace, would not the child of God despair of being able to perform such an infinite task as "be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect"? The teaching of Jesus about reward, however, and that is not its least excellence, -gives the promise, the assurance, that, however infinite the task which His doctrine of righteousness imposes, yet with God's help His own shall not fail to gain the victory and the

crown.

BEYSCHLAG.—I.

9

CHAPTER VI

THE MESSIANIC SALVATION

§ 1. THE FACT OF A DOCTRINE OF SALVATION

The closing consideration just offered brings us now to the fact that it was necessary for Jesus to draw from the nature of the eternally Good, whom He calls Father, a further deduction than the demand for holiness; besides His ideal of righteousness He must present a not less exalted and perfect doctrine of grace or salvation. Certainly, in the not distant past, there was a mode of thought which refused to recognise, alongside of the doctrine of righteousness, any independent doctrine of salvation in the Gospels. Rationalism, in turning back from the doctrine of the Church, which was based essentially on Paul, to Jesus' own plainer gospel, received the impression that this gospel is essentially a system of ethics, and so is the highest and purest development of the demand made upon us by the will of God; and that, on the other hand, the awards bestowed by the will of God consist solely in the benefits of creation, the fatherly providence of God, and His recompense in the world to come. Such an impression can be easily understood, inasmuch as there is no such connected development of the doctrine of salvation in the synoptic Gospels as there is of the doctrine of righteousness. in the Sermon on the Mount. For all that, the obliquity and defectiveness of that conception is evident. If it were as this onesidedly ethical mode of thought supposed, then the teaching of Jesus would be no gospel at all, but essentially law; and the higher this law rose above the Old Testament, the more perfect it was in its demands for the purest feelings, and in its penetrating into the inmost depths of the sinful heart, the more cheerless and startling would be a proclamation which connected a share in the kingdom of heaven with this better righteousness (Matt. v. 20). The commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, however admirable as commandments they might be, would, in point of fact, represent "no easy yoke and no light burden" (Matt. xi. 30),

but burdens to be borne by sinful men, far heavier than the commandments of Moses and the scribes. But there is nothing more certain than that Jesus had no wish to be another and a stricter Moses, but a consoler of the weary and heavy laden, a saviour of the poor in spirit, a deliverer of the lost. His preaching from beginning to end is a gospel, a glad message, a proclamation of salvation; and therefore His doctrine of righteousness, however large the space it occupies, can only be conceived as part of a doctrine of grace and salvation, which underlies and pervades it throughout. Even the Sermon on the Mount, this great summary of the doctrine of righteousness, rests on the basis of a preaching of salvation; for those are called blessed who are poor in spirit, or mourners, or hungering for righteousness, and to them the kingdom of heaven, with its gifts, is promised. Nay, the very first preaching of Jesus presents in living unity the divine demands and offers of salvation. For if the call, "Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," might perhaps mean, in the mind. of the Baptist, repent: for the day of judgment, the day of separating the chaff from the wheat, is near, it did mean, in the case of Jesus at anyrate, repent: for the Father's arms are open to receive all His lost children, and draw them to His heart. And therefore we can only ascribe it to a onesided and imperfect understanding of Jesus' thoughts of the kingdom of heaven, if the wood has not been seen here for the trees. The whole of Jesus' preaching of the kingdom of heaven is a proclamation of grace, a doctrine of salvation, and it is united with the doctrine of righteousness in the manner of the Augustinian "Domine, da quod jubes, et jube quod vis." Not as though Jesus had deprived man of moral freedom. On the contrary, and the ethical conception of His doctrine just rejected is quite right in this, the presupposition that man is incapable of doing the will of God on account of sin is unknown to Jesus. He demands of men throughout the doing of His commandments, the doing of the divine will. He credits them throughout with the power to repent, that is, to change their mind, and become of that mind, in virtue of which one can only truly do the commandments of God in detail. And He not only credits them with this freedom, on the authority of His word and gospel, but also on the authority

of the words of the Old Testament, the law and the prophets. It is by no means meant ironically when He directs the scribes to the two great commandments (Luke x. 23 f.), “Do this, and you will live"; or the rich young man (Matt. xix. 17), "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." It is said of the brethren of the rich man, Luke xvi. 29: "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them" (viz. in the interest of their own conversion). The poor Lazarus, in the same parable, has heard Moses and the prophets, and in their school has developed an inner life which could bear him at death on angel's wings into paradise; and Abraham, the patriarchs, the prophets, according to Luke xvi. 22, Matt. viii. 12, have arrived there. But we would completely misunderstand Jesus if, because of this judgment, we put Him in contradiction with the knowledge and experience of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, that no man is justified by the works of the law, that is, if we would credit Him with the idea that any man can convert himself to God, or fulfil His commandments of his own power, in the Judaic-Pharisaic sense, so that he should earn merit in the sight of God. The idea that anyone can come to God except through God, that anyone can love God without first knowing that he was loved by God-this genuinely Pharisaic idea is so repugnant to a true religious standpoint, that Jesus did not even find it necessary to reject it. He could only ascribe to an Old Testament man the power of turning to God and of keeping His commandments, because even in the old covenant there was for him a saving grace which drew men to itself from pure goodness;1 because He undoubtedly did not contemplate the law from the point of view of a power which merely exacts and judges, but as the outflow of the divine goodness of the Father (cf. Mark ii. 27),-how much more would He find everywhere in the history of Israel and the predictions of the prophets, the gracious and merciful, the good and faithful One, who, with His prevenient love, knocks for an entrance at the human heart, and leads it from the way of death to that of life. If He found the utterance of this eternal love itself in nature, in God's making the sun to shine, and the Even Paul has admitted such an Old Testament grace, at least for Abraham (Rom. iv.).