seriously regarded as a sign of the end, viz. that the gospel has been preached to all nations. Did He confine the accomplishment of that world-wide task to one generation? We have express evidence of the contrary. In the Parable of the Vineyard (Mark xii. 1-12; Matt. xxi. 33-46; Luke xx. 9-18) it is said in conclusion, "The lord of the vineyard will miserably destroy those wicked men, and commit his vineyard to others who will render him the fruits in their season," that is, to the Gentiles, or the Christian Church detached from the Jewish commonwealth. And in the Parable of the Marriage Supper of the King's Son, which immediately follows in Matthew, the rejection of the gospel on the part of the Jewish authorities passing into open hostility, and the divine judgment which that calls forth, are described in words which unmistakably allude to the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. xxii. 7). But after the punishment of the "city of murderers" the end, the judgment of the world does not follow, but messengers are sent forth anew to call in the people from the streets and lanes, that is, the Gentiles, instead of the unworthy guests; and only after this has been done, and the house is full, does the king come in to see his guests and expel the unworthy; that is, only then does the judgment of the world begin. According to this, the spirit of Jesus clearly saw beyond the near judgment of God on Judaism, not the immediate end of the world, but a growing history both of the world and the Church, the greatest fact of which should be the calling of the nations of the world to the kingdom of God. But if that is so, how are we to explain the traditional form of His utterances about the parousia as set forth above, which fix His second coming within one generation? and how are we to explain the view held by the whole apostolic age?

§ 6. THE PAROUSIA AS A HISTORICAL PROCESS

The consideration of this question may perhaps lead us deeper into the understanding of the thoughts of Jesus about His second coming. The synoptic tradition has preserved to us a remarkable saying of Jesus before the Sanhedrim which does not fit into the conception of His second coming as following close upon the destruction of Jerusalem: ἀπ ̓ ἄρτι ὄψεσθε

τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καθημένον ἐκ δεξιῶν τῆς δυνάμεως καὶ ἐρχόμενον ἐπὶ τῶν νεφελῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ (Matt. xxvi. 64; cf. Mark xiv. 62; Luke xxii. 69). In the first place, these words put beyond doubt what we might have supposed from their prophetic style and their derivation from Dan. vii. 13, that the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven is not a visible coming from the visible heavens. The coming in the clouds of heaven would no more be seen with the bodily eye than His sitting at the right hand of power. But as the dπ' aρT (whose meaning is also confirmed by Luke) refers assuredly to both the participles dependent on oveσe, Jesus here describes His coming in the clouds of heaven as something of which His deadly enemies are to become sensible, " henceforth," that is, immediately after His apparent defeat, as something that from the time of His death is to affect the whole history of the world. When His judges and murderers, the authorities of Israel, are compelled to note a few weeks after His death that their victory was but a seeming one, that He who was ignominiously slain by them lives and rules. from heaven, and that He has returned with spiritual power to the world from which they fondly imagined they had expelled Him for ever, then would they see Him coming in the clouds of heaven, and sitting at the right hand of power. This idea of His second coming, so startlingly prominent in this passage, the thought of it as a triumphant return to the world which had expelled Him-a return beginning from His death and advancing from victory to victory-may not, perhaps, have been so clearly and distinctly before the soul of Jesus from the first. The thought of His second coming in glory was called up in His soul by the other thought of His shameful death, and so it may have appeared to Him as belonging to an indefinite but not a remote future, and embracing, though under a veil, all that should come after His death to perfect His work on earth; and many of His prophetic words above alluded to may have been conceived and spoken before this new thought had fully taken shape. But as He revolved this idea in His mind, and the historical fulfilment of it came nearer, it became more fully developed and more distinct, so far as that is possible in a prophetic view; the indefinite point extends into a line in which a beginning and an end

with something lying between may be distinguished. In other words, Jesus comprehended the realisation of the kingdom of God, which is generally represented by the prophets as momentary, like a flash of lightning, rather as a process of growth, a historical development; and according to the same law He consciously viewed also the future completion of His work as a course of history, achieved not in a single act, but in an advancing series of acts. Testimonies to this may be found also in addresses to the disciples only inferior in importance to those last words before the Sanhedrim. The repeated proverbial statement, "Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together," manifestly expresses a general law which is fulfilled in the history of the world, not once but again and again; and the way in which Jesus (Luke xvii. 37) answers the question of the disciples, Tоû, Kúρie, that is, where will Thy coming to judgment be? with this general law, gives the meaning, wherever there is anything ripe for judgment. With that agrees, further, His speaking of the days of the Son of Man in the plural (Luke xvii. 22). The ἡμέραι τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, οἱ which the disciples in their future applications would fain see even one, cannot, according to grammar and context, be the past days of the Messiah on earth, but must be the future judicial nuépa in the plural. And this attests the presentiment of Jesus, that more than one judgment day of God and of His anointed is coming; that the future history of the world. will be filled with such epochs, in which the triumphant glory of the Son of Man, and the impotence and nothingness of all world-powers coming into conflict with Him, will be made clear. Certain main elements of that future course of history must now have stood out prominently in the consciousness of Jesus; the triumphant issuing of His life from death, and its immediate entrance into the life of His Church; further, His triumph in the world, Judaism breaking down before Him on the one hand, and heathendom opening itself to Him on the other; lastly, the final overcoming of all powers opposed to God, of evil and death, and the setting up of God's eternal kingdom. All these essential elements of His triumphant progress, in which, stage after stage, the world opposed to God is judged, were wrapped up as in a seed in Jesus' simplest view of His

coming; all could be conceived and predicted under this one name. But, under the conditions of all prophecy, each stage was not seen as something apart, they were felt and described as so many phases of the whole according to the suggestion of the moment. And this made the description necessarily imperfect, and even the sense of words was not always the

same.

§ 7. THE ORIGINAL STATE OF THINGS AND THE TRADITIONAL FORM

The traces of this state of things may probably be made out step by step; at least this presupposition sets at rest the most pressing difficulties. Those words before the Sanhedrim, ἀπ ̓ ἄρτι ὄψεσθε, κ.τ.λ., permit the conjecture that Jesus already saw the facts of Easter and Pentecost as belonging to His parousia. They were, in fact, the glorious beginning of His triumphant return; not merely a revelation of glory to His own, but a virtual judgment of His enemies, who in the manifest indestructibility of this murdered man must feel that their enmity was vain, and was indeed enmity against God. The farewell discourses in John give notable evidence that the predictions of Easter and Pentecost found a place in His thought of the parousia. But even in the Synoptists a saying such as Matt. xvi. 28, "There be some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom," may have been originally intended simply to assure the disciples, whom He had sunimoned to accompany Him on His way to death, that some of them, at anyrate, should not be entangled in His doom, but should live to see the beginning of His course of victory and triumph.1 The approaching catastrophe of Israel must have been, above all, significant to Jesus as a further element of this victorious and triumphant progress. That the Jewish commonwealth should perish because of the rejection of its Messiah, and that the final judgment of the Old Testament covenant history must follow close upon the outrageous rejection of the last and greatest visitation of God, was a necessity of the moral order of the world which Jesus could not fail to observe, and which 1 Cf. the paraphrase of the words in Mark ix. 1.

The

for the sake of His growing Church He durst not leave unexpressed; for His desire was to detach the Church in spirit from the old national communion, and so to preserve it in the decisive moment from being entangled in the nation's fate. But this fate was also a significant revelation of His glory; the Jewish nation perished because of its rejection of Him as a Saviour, and thus He was its Judge, and His cause came triumphantly out of the flames of that destruction like a phoenix from its ashes. It is not therefore surprising if, in the words of Matt. x. 23, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man come," He described the catastrophe of Jerusalem, which should put an end to all Jewish persecution, as a coming of the Son of Man. He it was, to speak in the style of the prophets, who rode over the perishing Jerusalem in the clouds of heaven. But over these ruins He victoriously entered into the nations of the great Gentile world, and that was the other and fairer side of His triumph in the world. The conquest of the heathen world by the gospel is also presented as a judgment of the world by Him. powers and spirits which hitherto have ruled the world were discovered before Him in their impotence and their opposition to God. And perhaps the magnificent passage which is in Matt. xxiv. 29 brought into close connection by the difficult word eves, with the reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, is, in its original sense, simply a prophetic description of His judicial triumph over the old world. Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heaven shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven: and all tribes of the earth shall mourn, and shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." Has not that already been fulfilled in the history of the world? It has been fulfilled, as all the lights of heaven which formerly shone on humanity have paled before the rising on them of the sign of the cross, as ideas which seemed to stand firm as the stars, and ordinances which had been maintained for centuries as laws of the world, lost their authority, and the knowledge of Jesus as the King of Heaven made its way in the self-accusing hearts of men as a higher power of