we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, who are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. Doth a fountain send forth. from the same opening sweet water and bitter?" (iii. 9-11). In another passage he deals with swearing in order to forbid it entirely among Christians, just as Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount; he manifestly regards it as opposed to the Christian duty of truthfulness. "Above all things, my brethren, swear not; neither by heaven, nor by earth, nor by any oath but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation" (v. 12). Again he forbids the speech of arrogance, which claims for itself the future, without thinking of God the Lord of our life. "Go to now, ye that say, To-day, or to-morrow, we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain; ye who know not what shall be on the morrow" (iv. 13, 14). The Christian knows that his life is a fleeting vapour, and that in every hour of it he is in God's hands; if he knows that and does not act accordingly, he sins (iv. 14-17). But it is remarkable that James also dissuades from much discussion of the faith, and from thrusting oneself forward as a teacher of the Church (iii. 1). Manifestly he regards this as encroaching on quiet hearing and then on patient doing of the word by his readers; he saw that the desire for controversy and quarrelling and contention go hand in hand with teaching, and so he looked upon this zeal for teaching as connected with pyn. For just as the quiet and reverent hearing of the divine word, and the quietness of temper, or πрауτηs, are mutually dependent; so, on the other hand, the ambitious desire to become a teacher, the many and thoughtless words generally, are connected with the opyń, the excited and passionate frame of mind, which fails to do that which is right before God (i. 20), because it is not able to give attention to God's word and will. A special wisdom may indeed appear to be shown in speaking and teaching; but if it goes with bitter envying and strife, it is not "the wisdom that cometh from above; but earthly, sensual, devilish." The true wisdom that cometh from above is "first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy" (iii. 17). "And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that

make peace" (iii. 18): in quarrels and contentions it does not thrive. Thus the theme of faith and works returns here in another form, and one understands how James can compare a compassion, which finds utterance in mere words, to faith without works (ii. 16, 17). Not the much and eager discussion of the faith, but the quiet doing of that which flows from it, is the proof of its genuineness and acceptableness with God. "Who is a wise man, and endued with knowledge? let him show out of a good conversation; let him show in the meekness, which is the mark of the true wisdom, his good works" (iii. 13). That is a concise summary of the practical Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount as taught by James.

§ 4. THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

These exhortations to peacefulness show that James in his commendation of silence has no wish to train anchorites. The Christian community is throughout the presupposition of his words, and we get a glimpse of the simplest and most original Church order. The poor believers in Christ form. separate conventicles within the Jewish synagogue: they have their own synagogue (ii. 1), in which they now and then receive a visit from their unbelieving countrymen, rich and poor. The duty, then, is to manifest kindness without distinction, according to the royal law of love to one's neighbour (ii. 8, 9). There are elders who have to care for the suffering and the sick, but what they can do, can and should be done by all for each other (v. 14-16). Teaching in the Church is as yet bound to no official order, but falls to everyone, only everyone should remember the great responsibility it involves (iii. 1). The miraculous gift of healing the sick still continues in the Church; just as the Twelve, when they were sent out by Jesus, were to anoint the sick with oil as a symbol of the miraculous healing which they invoked upon them in His name (Mark vi. 13); so the elders were to anoint the sick with oil, and pray over them, that the Lord may raise them up and forgive their sins (v. 13, 14). But the whole Church has the office of mutual pastoral care and loving service; it is a part of worship to take an interest in the fatherless and widows in their affliction; all are to pray for one another,

especially in cases of sickness, that they may be healed (v. 16). They are to confess their sins one to another, in order to help one another to conversion and forgiveness. For, and this is the great closing exhortation and promise of the Epistle, "He who converteth one of the Church who has erred from the truth, is to know, that he who converteth a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins," that is, shall bring to him the divine forgiveness (v. 20). Thus amid circumstances of decline, which we cannot imagine to have affected the whole Church though the Epistle is exclusively occupied with them, there shines out the apostolic ideal of the true Church of brethren, in which office belongs to all, and the one law is active, protecting, interceding, and saving love for the brethren.

§ 5. THE CHRISTIAN HOPE

This personal and social Christianity, finally, has its stimulus in the hope of the nearness of the day of the Lord. That looking to the future which prevails in the faith of the earliest period is very strongly marked throughout our Epistle. In the very first chapter there is set before the rich man a picture of his swift and sudden destruction; just as in the Holy Land the flower of the meadow withers under the blaze of the sun, so will he fade away in his ways (i. 10, 11). And in the fifth chapter this announcement of judgment rises to a truly prophetic height. The God-forgotten rich, though they do not belong to the readers, are yet addressed, or rather are thundered at in vivid pictures, just as Tyre and Sidon or Babylon are in the old prophets. Their sins are held up before them as at the judgment day of God, and the frightful destruction that awaits them is pictured as close at hand, or even as if it had already come. "Your riches are corrupted, your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall eat your flesh as it were fire. You have heaped treasure together for the last days. You have nourished your heart, as in a day of slaughter. The coming of the Lord draweth nigh; the Judge standeth at the door" (v. 2, 3, 5, 8, 9). If this announcement of judgment was

not fulfilled in the way James imagined, it still found abundant fulfilment in the fearful days of the Jewish insurrection, with its butcheries, and in the Syrian diaspora. But that which is the day of wrath and terror to the godless rich, is the day of hope and redemption to the pious poor. Their cries have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth; and as the husbandman waits patiently for the early and the latter rain, that it may bless his sowing and produce the precious fruits of the earth, so should they wait for the day of the Lord, which will reward their sufferings and patience (v. 7, 8). These consolations show that James had before him among his readers not merely a declining and degenerate Christianity, notwithstanding that he finds it necessary, as Jesus did once in the case of His disciples, to bridle the impatient expectations of the pious among his readers, and prevent the danger of discouragement. Take, he cries to them, the prophets who have spoken in the name of the Lord for an example of suffering and affliction and of patiencea word of comfort which reminds us of Jesus' own words (Matt. v. 12): "Beloved, we count them happy which endure : ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy" (v. 11). "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation for when he hath been tried, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him" (i. 12). That, then, is the teaching of James, whom we have learned to know above as a pillar of the primitive Church, and the representative of an evangelical Jewish Christianity, as contrasted with the Pauline Gentile Christianity. Along with the sketches of Peter's gospel preaching which we have in the Book of Acts, it illustrates for us how the Church of that time was taught in gospel and in duty. Certainly James had to drop many Old Testament views which veiled the truth, and to look more deeply into the New Testament mystery of salvation. But no one can dispute that even from his point of view he was able to produce and to establish a true and full Christianity. And so the Epistle of James has its providential place in our New Testament, in illustrating to us how the full vigour of Christian life may be united with elementary dogmatic perceptions, and in reminding us

that full rights of citizenship in the Christian Church belong not only to a Pauline Christianity, but also to one formed after the manner of James.

III. THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

§ 1. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO EPISTLES OF PETER

Next to the Epistle of James, there are two Epistles of Peter in the New Testament which, if they could be regarded as genuine, would supplement our view of the original apostolic mode of teaching, and especially would give evidence of a freer development of it, such as the Acts of the Apostles would lead us to expect from Peter in comparison with James. The second of these two Epistles has been much disputed even in Christian antiquity, and in point of fact, as will be shown later on, it bears all the marks of a spurious writing. In the first, however, Christian antiquity unanimously saw a genuine work of the Apostle Peter, and even the more recent criticism up to Baur was not on the whole unfavourable to it. The criticism of the present, which regards every traditional view with so much scepticism, and every negative hypothesis with so much credulity, seeks to disprove its genuineness also. We may be allowed to indicate briefly why this judgment cannot satisfy us, and cannot hinder us from treating the Epistle here as a genuine Petrine monument in the course of our historical considerations.

§ 2. MARKS OF GENUINENESS IN THE FIRST EPISTLE

The First Epistle of Peter presents itself as a letter of comfort and advice to a circle of Churches specially oppressed at the time (i. 6, iii. 14 f., iv. 1, 12, 16, 19, v. 8-10).