and open and no man shut." Though expositors generally interpret the symbol of the key with reference to judicial or governing power, yet it is more natural and more correct to think of entrance to the royal house and the king's person, which the mayor of the palace could grant or deny without any person's being able to question his decisions. Accordingly, in the new covenant and in the eternal Father's house this office in relation to God belongs above all to Jesus Himself. He has the key of David it is said in Rev. iii. 7. He opens and no man shuts, He shuts and no man opens. But if we speak of the earthly existence of the kingdom of God in the Church, and think of Jesus Himself as the King, the anointed One, and both of these ideas are contained in our passages, then Jesus can intrust another with that office. He is about to leave the earth (Matt. xvi. 21 ff.), and will soon cease personally to hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven on earth; He needs, therefore, a representative and chief officer such as was in Israel, who shall continue in His name to open the kingdom of heaven to men, or close it as the case requires (therefore the plural λeîdas), and He appoints Peter to this office of bearer of His keys. Now the succession on the ground of which the Roman bishops claim Peter's authority is in all respects very doubtful. But if Jesus did appoint a vicegerent on earth with judicial authority, there must always be a legal succession in this office, and it would be difficult for any other bishop or official of the Church to advance better claims than the bishop of Rome. And if we add, that with the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven is given also the power of binding and loosing, that is, of legislating in the kingdom of God, and declaring what is and what is not permitted in the Church, we seem to have, not merely the Papacy, but an infallible Papacy established by Christ, and for that we have better scriptural proofs than the Vatican Council were able to get hold of. For He whose binding and loosing is always found right in heaven is surely to be called infallible. But this formidable chain of Romish proofs lacks just the first member on which all the rest are to hang, the proof that Jesus there founded an office at all, or conferred a judicial authority and not simply an inward authority depending on

the personal qualities of the man who was invested with it. The more one considers the passage the more impossible it is to hold that He intended to found an office. First, the occasion of the saying is a purely personal one, the confession of Peter. Jesus has disenchanted the Galileans by not fulfilling their sensuous Messianic hopes. They still hold Him to be a great prophet and forerunner, an Elias, but they no longer hold Him to be the Christ, the Messiah, and Son of God, as thousands at first had supposed, for the Baptist had pointed them to a greater who should immediately appear. But He wishes to be recognised as Messiah in a higher and spiritual sense, and His work on His disciples was directed to this end that they, in spite of the want of earthly sensuous glory, might yet recognise Him for what He was. And now that He is about to set out on His last journey to Jerusalem He seeks to discover by conversation with them whether He has reached in them at least that for which He strove, and He has reached it in the most mature among them, viz. Peter. To the question, "Whom say ye that I am?" Peter can answer from his inmost heart, "Thou art the Christ (Messiah), the Son of the living God." That was a very different confession of faith from that which they had made to each other in the first days at the Jordan-" we have found the Messiah” (John i. 45); a man, John the Baptist, had taught it to them, and they had with purely sensuous expectations believed him. That expectation had remained unfulfilled, but an inner experience, a divine testimony of the Spirit, had revealed it in Peter's heart and made him certain of it. He was the first believer, in the New Testament sense, whom Jesus won. He was, in a word, the first Christian, as he was able to utter, not from a communication of flesh and blood, but from a revelation of the heavenly Father, the confession, "Thou art the Christ." And that accounts for the great and unique words Jesus speaks to him. Setting, as it were, recognition against recognition, He replies: "I say unto thee thou art Peter, and on this Térpa will I build my Church"; that is, you have to-day made good the name rock which I gave thee. You are the rock, the first firm stone on which I can further build. And if on leaving the earth I should leave behind me no man with true faith and heart knowledge coming from

God except thyself, I should have lived long enough; for I should have laid the foundation on which I could then build my Church from heaven. For the first living believer in Christ is also the born preacher of Christ, who will call into existence a whole community of believers in Christ, as Peter did not in Rome as its mythical bishop, but in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts ii. 14). And that is just what the following words mean: "I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." The keys of the kingdom of heaven are the truths of the gospel, the fact of the coming of the kingdom of God; by these Jesus Himself has hitherto opened the kingdom of heaven to men, or closed it in the case of those who lacked susceptibility. He now desires to bequeath them to the first, and, as yet, the only one who has truly known Him; for He only can use them according to His mind. And the same believing knowledge which will enable Peter to preach Christ, and so to found the Church, will also enable him to distinguish what of the old order in Israel will remain binding in the Church and what will not; that is, it will enable him to bind or loose with heavenly approbation. Thus everything which is there awarded to Peter rests on a personal act of faith, on a spiritual character which cannot be transferred in any legal sense. The legal successors of Peter, so far as we can speak of such, are not bishops or popes as such, but believers in Christ like him, simple believers and all believers in Christ. Thus only do we escape the contradiction that Jesus grants the right to bind and loose in Matt. xviii. 18 to all the disciples, not to the apostles, but to all believers, which in Matt. xvi. 19 He had granted to Peter alone. That which belongs to the first, and, as yet, only believer in Christ, belongs as a matter of course, as soon as there is a Church of believers, to the Church. If, on the contrary, Jesus, in Matt. xvi. 19, had spoken of the authority of an organised office in or rather over the Church, the same could not possibly be awarded in Matt. xviii. 18 to the Church herself. Thus the passage Matt. xvi. 19 rather confirms what we formerly said of the Church, that it is based on no legal or official organisation, but only on a spiritual relation to Him who is its glorified head; and since that relation of faith in Him as the Messiah, which Peter confessed is common to all, the Church

as such must also be the bearer of all the blessings of grace and powers of the kingdom which Jesus bequeaths to His own.

§ 6. OBJECTIVE POINTS OF SUPPORT FOR THE CHURCH LIFE (BAPTISM AND THE LORD'S SUPPER)

The Church certainly needed protection against one danger which lay in her very nature as thus portrayed, viz. the danger of a onesided inwardness into which her free and

spiritual character might allure her. Since His presence in

the Church was spiritual, the enthusiasm of faith and love in men, still weak, was threatened by the temptation to bring in what was alien and arbitrary, and so to produce in themselves a spirit different from that in which He could dwell. A church life wholly without forms would plainly have helped in this tendency, and would perhaps soon have made the identity of the development with the original seem questionable. Therefore we see Jesus taking care, along with the law of the Spirit which He imparts to His own in faith and love, to impress on them at the same time the historical aspect of His life and work. It was not without a purpose that He constituted the Twelve constant witnesses of this life and work. It was not without a purpose that He imparted formal instruction to His disciples (cf. Mark iv. 10 f., iv. 24 f.); and though, with His divine tact, He was careful not to impress on them any enslaving formula, far less to leave behind Him any writing which would forthwith have paralysed the vitality of their faith, He yet reckoned that the image of His person and the memory of His work would continue to live truly in His Church. That is His meaning when He speaks of their gathering in His name, that is, in a living realisation of His personal life and work, and the keys of the kingdom of heaven which He delivers to them speak of the transmission of all that He has taught them (Matt. xxviii. 20); and the intrusted talents and pounds are the capital which He puts in their hands, in order to test their fidelity and increase His possessions on earth through their trading. And His first disciples, in point of fact, did by reflection produce a faithful tradition of Him for all following times. Immediately before His death He

saw good-perhaps with an eye to the indefinite time of the outer separation from Him-to give His Church still more definite points of support which the current of tradition could still less sweep away, the Supper and baptism. It has been questioned without the least reason in our opinion-whether Jesus, in the breaking of bread and the consecration of the cup at the farewell Supper, wished to found a permanent institution for the Church of His disciples. First, the Pauline utterance, 1 Cor. xi. 24, 25, the oldest and most reliable testimony to the event in question, contains the words, TOûTO ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν, as Jesus' own words, and the want of these words in the Gospels may have the less significance as in other respects the traces of liturgical abbreviation of the words of institution may be perceived. And again, I do not know for what end Jesus, unless He had the intention of founding a permanent rite, should on that evening have had recourse to such emblematic expression for His thoughts of death, when He could have put these thoughts in words which would have been not only simpler, but also more intelligible for the moment. Light is thrown upon all He did when we see that He was setting up a memorial to recall His image and His work to their minds when He was gone (cf. the expression, until He come, 1 Cor. xi. 26). From elements of the Old Testament Passover meal, Jesus constructed a holy sacrificial meal of the new covenant in the noblest and simplest form, which realises for all time and puts beyond question what He had willed and done for His own, and what, through His death, He desires to be and to do for their souls to the end of time. In that simple festival He makes known for all time the sum and height of His thoughts of His own work as Saviour; in presence of death, to which He willingly surrendered Himself, He recognised that all His brethren, even those faithful ones who had continued with Him in His temptations, had need both of redemption and forgiveness, whilst He knew that He was the spotless and innocent Lamb of God who gives His life for them to bring in a new covenant, the covenant of grace, forgiveness, and communion with God. He knew that He was giving His life not to destruction, but to be raised higher, so that to the end of the world He might be food and drink for

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