with the whole province of the Christian forgiveness of sin. It can only refer to those sins which destroy a man's position as a Christian, and therefore are inconsistent with Church fellowship, as may be seen from that "thou hast gained thy brother" (that is, preserved him from being lost, cf. Jas. v. 19, 20). But that destroys the supposed connection between the exercise of discipline and absolution or retention (extending to all defects). It is clear, on the other hand, that that judicial procedure of the Church necessarily presupposes a legislative procedure, defining what is consistent and what is inconsistent with its fellowship; and if, in the case of Jesus, the whole idea of the Church rested on the anticipation of a religious separation of His own from Judaism, it is easily conceivable why in both of the above passages He should emphasise this legislative right of His future Church. Not everything that He and His disciples still held of the Mosaic and traditional law and commandments was to be binding on His future Church, though everything was by no means to be given up. Here, therefore, was a new moral legislation; it was necessary to discover what was consistent and what was inconsistent with citizenship in the kingdom of God, and who could discover this but the community of believers? They must determine what was morally permissible or not permissible by the principle of faith in Him and spiritual communion with Him, and thus they would discover thoughts of God which He Himself could not utter beforehand in detail (John xvi. 12); that is, they would bind and loose with heavenly approbation, and this right of binding and loosing must be the presupposition of their exercise of discipline and their essential acts of excommunication.1

§ 4. CHURCH ORDER: (b) LOVE, DISCIPLINE, INFALLIBILITY

Along with faith, however, there prevails in the Church. of Jesus the love that springs from it and unites believers with one another as brethren, as children of one Father and

1 Thus, for example, the apostolic Church loosed, that is, set free the question of circumcision, but bound the opveia, that is, the non-nuptial intercourse of the sexes, that is, declared it forbidden, inconsistent with the Christian profession. Cf. Acts xv. 19, 20.

disciples of one Master.

It begets a mutual interchange of giving and receiving, in which the giving, as being the more unselfish, is more blessed than the receiving (Acts xx. 35), and it works so that "the little ones," the simple and humble, can allow themselves to be ministered to without shame, and the great, the gifted, and the prominent, find their greatness just in serving. Special tasks (offices) could certainly arise here out of the general brotherly task, as, for example, in a household the steward is set over the other servants that he may give to each his portion in due season (Luke xii. 41, 42). But these offices are, as the Greek word Siakoviai means, services, services of love which do not abolish the essential equality of all, and he who is intrusted with them humbles himself as much as he is exalted (Matt. xx. 26, 27). In like manner forgiveness and brotherly discipline proceed from love. Forgiveness must be rendered so freely that if a brother wound a brother seven times a day, and come seven times to say that he is sorry, he must always be forgiven (Luke xvii. 3, 4). Still, no weak indulgence passes here, no overlooking or sheltering of sin in others; for a true and sanctified love desires the brother's good, and therefore it holds his sin before him in order to convert him from the error of his ways; this is a duty especially where the sin is not one of passing thoughtlessness, but clings to him, where it is an error that calls his very position as a child of God in question. And from this spiritual discipline, from this practical care of brother for brother which is exercised in privately winning back to God's way the wanderer, the judicial discipline, the official rebuke, and in extreme cases even excommunication from the Church, may be and is to be developed (Matt. xviii. 15). For the undoubted and obstinate offence against the holy order of the house of God cannot in the end be endured, because it would overturn that order; and therefore Jesus commands that the man who hardens himself in obstinate opposition to the commandments of God be excommunicated from brotherly communion, "if he will not hear the Church."1 This has

1 "Let him be to thee as an heathen and a publican," that is, let him be regarded as the heathen or publican is in the Jewish synagogues from which he is excluded, no doubt means, not merely the repudiation of brotherly

sometimes been regarded as an element foreign to His teaching, a limitation put upon the love that should be unlimited. But this is to overlook the fact that the love of God, though infinite, must, if it is to continue a holy love, set limits to the obstinate and wilful sinner. There must be self-preservation in the Church of God, making it impossible for her to treat the incorrigible as a brother in Christ, or to allow this incorrigibility to appear as still consistent with the Christian profession. Of course it is as evident to Jesus that the seeking and pitying love for heathen and publicans does not cease when the relation of brother in the faith has been repudiated; it now makes a fresh start, for that repudiation meant no unkindness to the sinner, but the only sort of love the circumstances would allow. The truly surprising thing here is the wonderful idealism of that whole Church order of Jesus, in which there breathes not the faintest suspicion that the Church might act from other motives than the inspiration of His holy presence in its midst; there is no hint that the Church could ever be united in asking for what was ungodly, or for what the heavenly Father could not grant, or that it should desire to bind or loose anything that was not bound or loosed in heaven, or finally, that it could ever abuse that authoritative exercise of discipline against an innocent person, an actual child of God. This idealism assures us, at anyrate, of the authenticity of the sayings in question. For if, as many suppose, they were of later ecclesiastical origin, they would have arisen after experience of the difference between idea and reality, and they would have been framed to meet that difference. That idealism is absolutely true to Jesus, and its reservations are already implied in it. Jesus, of course, speaks throughout from a purely ideal point of view. If the Church is met in His name, and as far as it is met in His name, with His memory inspiring and uniting it, so that He can truly be said to be in its midst, all will be as He promises. Where this presupposition fails, the result will also, as a matter of course, fail. Thus, a king gives his

communion on the part of the man who has vainly admonished him, but a repudiation on the part of the Church as such. For Jesus would never have endured, much less enjoined, individual repudiations of brotherhood within the Church whilst that brotherhood continued to exist in public.

officers and courts of justice authority to act in his name to justify or condemn, and assures them of the royal confirmation and execution of their decisions. But he does so, of course, on the presupposition that they proceed according to his laws and not in contradiction to them. Jesus Jesus gave Himself up to no delusive idealism as to the future of His Church, without any foreboding of error and degeneracy in it. The Parable of the Tares among the Wheat and many other passages attest the contrary. Only, He had the assurance that as His Church should not be mastered by the gates of Hades, so it would never abandon His name; that His image and memory would ever again revive in it, and thus His spirit, even through striving and conflict, would again and again carry the day in it. And, in any case, He knew no other place of His abiding presence, and activity than the Church. What depends on inward conditions, on His own glorified and spiritual presence, must not be bound up with any external institutions or authorities. The matter must ever stand thus; the Church of believers as such, the Church which is brought together and held together by His name, is the instrument of His will, the place of His continuous revelation on earth. And though its authority and infallibility, depending as they do on what is spiritual, and being, therefore, in a measure invisible, can never have a legal definition, yet this Church in its own affairs remains the only rightful and the highest court of appeal on earth, and any outward judicial authority which would display itself in it, or has done so, in order to rule over it and hold it in tutelage, is false, illegal, and condemned by Him in advance.

§ 5. THE AUTHORITY OF PETER, MATT. XVI. 18, 19

All this would indeed fall to the ground if the wellknown Romish interpretation of Matt. xvi. 18, 19 were right. According to it, Jesus must, of course, have given to His Church an outward and perceptible authority, a law and government of as thorough a nature as could be imagined. Before there was an eккλŋσía, and consequently before there was any official authority, He had laid the firm foundation of such an authority in Peter. Peter was the rock on which should

depend the imperishableness of the Church against which the gates of Hades should not prevail; this official power was to devolve upon the Romish bishops as the legal successors of the prince apostle. He constituted Peter His alter ego, His vicegerent on earth, and delivered to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and He only gave the power to bind and loose to the other apostles as the predecessors of the other bishops and priests, in such a way that Peter's authority and Peter's legal successors should always remain the firm basis on which they all with their rights and authorities must rest. We can easily understand how the Papacy, honouring itself, should like to write these words on the dome of St. Peter's in gigantic letters. It is easy to see how an unspiritual interpretation should find here the legal title of the whole Romish. system. Undoubtedly the expositions of Protestants of this text have not been happy. There can be no controversy among reasonable men in view of the words, Σὺ εἶ Πέτρος, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρα οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, that Jesus, by the rock on which he will build His Church, did not mean Himself nor the confession of Peter, nor even the faith which Peter has just confessed, but the man himself to whom He has given the name rock, and to whom He now confirms it as deserved. And the words which immediately follow, καὶ δώσω σοι τὰς κλεῖδας τῆς βασιλείας τῶν oúpavov, certainly appear to establish decisively the idea of a representative and vicegerent of Christ on earth. For the image which lies at the basis of these words cannot be that of a doorkeeper, for that would be one of the least services in the house of God, while Jesus manifestly desires to award to Peter a distinguished position. Nor as we might suppose from Luke xii. 42—is it a picture of a steward in a private house, an upper servant intrusted with the keys of the storeroom. For Jesus applies the same image at other times, in things of the kingdom, not to the giving out of stores, but to the admission or non-admission of persons (cf. Matt. xxiii. 13; Luke xi. 52). It is rather the crown officer of the kingdom of Judah, mentioned in Isa. xxii., to which Jesus here alludes. The office of that mayor of the palace "I will lay upon his shoulder the keys of the house of David, that he may shut and no man open,

of whom it is said: