exercise over the souls of men, for the purpose of sanctifying them, and had no idea of the part man himself was to take in the work of regeneration. The sacrifices which they offered to the Lord with ostentatious pomp and ceremony were of no avail, because they were not prompted by motives of love and obedience; and so presumptuous were they that they fancied God would shower His blessings on none but themselves.

2. Filled with such ideas, they looked forward to the promised Messiah as to the coming of some great hero and conqueror, who would appear surrounded with every circumstance of pomp and magnificence, and the object of whose mission would be to raise the Jewish people above all the nations of the earth. There was scarcely a reference made to the prophecies which foretold the Messiah as one who should suffer and die for the sins of the world. These were entirely lost sight of, and this utter want of a proper appreciation of His mission was so general that it became painfully apparent to the mind of Jesus, even when in the company of His twelve Apostles and seventy-two disciples.

3. It was against the Pharisees, who were sensitively jealous of their influence with the people, and whose religion consisted exclusively in the practice of external works, that our Savior hurled His most threatening denunciations. They were excessively irritated because Jesus would not say plainly whether He was or was not the Messiah in the carnal sense in which they understood the term,2 and on this account sought to weaken the faith of the people in both Him and His mission.

4. In this they had an easy task, as the life and teachings of Jesus were entirely opposed to the spirit and maxims of the world, and in no way favored the worldly aspirations and ambitious hopes of men generally, and of the Jews in particular.

Jesus, after three years of active life, during which He

1 Cf. +Reinke, exegesis critica in Jesaiam, c. 52, 13-53, seu de Messia expiatore, passuro et morituro comment. Monast. 1836. Mack, the Messianic expectations and views of the contemporaries of Jesus. (Tübg. Quart. 1836, p. 1–56.)

2 John x. 24.

was on all occasions misrepresented and His motives wrongly interpreted, felt that the supreme hour appointed by divine decree was rapidly approaching. He neither sought death nor shrank from it, and, impelled by a sense of religious duty, went with His Apostles up to Jerusalem to celebrate the last Pasch.' He spoke more explicitly at this time than ever before of His death; foretold that after three days He would rise triumphant from the grave, and wept over the fate of Jerusalem while recounting to His Apostles in prophetic words the disasters that were to come upon that city.”

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§ 41. The Last Supper. Death of Jesus.

As God had graciously deigned to manifest Himself to our first parents in Paradise, and to His chosen people of the Old Testament, by the presence of a cloud hovering over the Ark of the Covenant,3 and over the Holy of Holies in the Temple, so also did Jesus, after having given the most touching proofs of His love and humility, and confident that His death was approaching, and that the work which He had begun would endure, institute the Last Supper, which with desire He had desired to eat with His Apostles, as a perpetual memorial of Himself and token of His abiding presence in the Church to the end of time. This was the feast which was to bring together all His true disciples throughout all ages, and at which He was to give Himself to them both spiritually and corporally, in His divinity and in His humanity. Here, too, the prophetic words that He had spoken to the people were to be fulfilled: "My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed; "5 and the enthusiastic boast of the children of Israel to be realized: "There is not any other nation so great, that hath gods so nigh them, as our God is present to all our petitions.' As in the beginning of His public life, so also at this time

وو

did Jesus sustain a terrible conflict against the infirmities of human nature,1 in the course of which the Pharisees and the High Council of Jerusalem persuaded the people that He was a blasphemer, and, having brought Him before the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, accused Him of high treason.2 Jesus, having been asked by Pilate if He were the Christ and a king, openly and explicitly declared, "I am the Christ and a King."

3

After having been jeered and scoffed at, and pursued with every species of insult and ignominy, He suffered, during the reign of Tiberius, the most painful and disgraceful death upon the Cross,1 praying in the meantime that the sins of His enemies might be forgiven them,5 and they reconciled to their God.

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The sun was darkened at midday; the rocks trembled to their very bases; the grave gave up its dead; the curtain that veiled the Holy of Holies in the Temple was rent from the top even to the bottom, and the very Pagan confessed His God: "Truly, this Man was a just one; He was the Son of God." A mysterious voice, sweeping over the face of the ocean, announced to the Pagan world that the "Great Pan was dead," and groans were heard mingled with shouts of joy. When it is remembered that the work of Christ and the redemption purchased through His death were the common heritage of all mankind, of Jew and Gentile, it will not seem

1 Matt. xxvi. 37 sq.

2 John xix. 12.

3 Matt. xxvi. 63, 64; John xviii. 37.

Tacit. annal. XV. 44: Auctor nominis ejus (sectae Christianorum) Christus, qui Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. The Romans called the death of the cross teterrimum supplicium and extrema culpa.

5 Luke xxiii. 34.

6 Luke xxii. 19; 2 Cor. v. 18; Rom. iv. 25.

"Besides the Evangelists, the Pagan Phlegon, the freedman of Emperor Hadrian, also bears testimony to this fact, in Eusebius' chronicon: anno IV. Olympiadis 202. Sol hora VI. tantopere defecerit, ut stellae in meridie cernerentur. Idem quoque terrae motum adeo vehementem fuisse scribit, ut Nicaeae in Bithynia aedes multae collaberentur. Justin the Martyr and Tertullian, for this appeal to the acta Pilati. See p. 163, note 4.

8 Matt. xxvii. 51 sq. Conf. Luke xxiv. 47 sq.

wonderful that His death should have been thus announced to the Pagans. As the birth of the Savior of the world was a matter of notoriety in the days of Augustus, it was equally impossible to conceal His death from the Pagan world and its oracles.1

Joseph of Arimathea, a distinguished member of the High Council, putting aside all feelings of human respect, went boldly to Pilate, and asked him for the body of Jesus. And thus were fulfilled the words of Isaias: "And He shall give the ungodly for His burial, and the rich for His grave." (33 A. D. or 783 a. U. C.)

The death of Jesus Christ is the great central point on which the apostles hinged the preaching of the Gospel,3 and which has inspired the greatest feast in the Christian Church; and all this, not only because of its objective importance considered as a vicarious reconciliation of man with God, but also because of the lessons it conveyed to the mind and the obligations that rise out of them. For Christ, the God-man, the highest type and perfection of our nature, though pure and spotless, was punished with death, and the recognition of this fact necessarily implies the admission of the heinousness of man's guilt and of the punishment it merits at God's hands. In this way does man arrive at a knowledge of himself the most clear and precise, which naturally fills him with feelings. of humility, a spirit of obedience, and a filial love of God.

§ 42. Christ's Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven.

The narrative of the Four Gospels proves indubitably that Christ rose from the dead. The slight discrepancies and

1According to Plutarch († about 120 A. D., at a very old age), de oraculorum defectu (opp. ed. Reiske, T. VII., p. 651). This remarkable and frequently discussed passage is essentially the same in Tacitus. See above, p. 99, n. 3. Plutarch furthermore states that this event became at once known in Rome, and that the Emperor Tiberius immediately caused a strict inquiry into its truth to be made. Conf. Natal. Alex., hist. eccl. saec. I., cap. I., art. V. Sepp, Paganism, Vol. III., p. 268.

2 Isaias xliii. 9.

31 Cor. xv. 3.

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seeming contradictions in circumstances of minor importance serve to confirm the truth of the Gospel story, for they preclude the possibility of collusion among the Evangelists in its composition. His resurrection is the fulfillment of another prophecy: "His sepulcher shall be glorious, and the nations shall pray to Him." Pope Leo the Great remarks that Thomas, one of the Twelve, persisted in refusing to believe that Jesus had risen, only that his disbelief might be to future generations a convincing proof of the resurrection. The Apostle of the Gentiles says that Christ, having been delivered up for our sins, rose again for our justification, and hence His resurrection was the completion and last act of the work of redemption. And the same Apostle makes the fearless declaration: "If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." 4 A firm belief in the resurrection gave the Apostles an unfaltering courage in preaching the Gospel.

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Christ, after His resurrection, tarried forty days on earth. in the fullness of His glory, during which He gave to His Apostles many signs and evidences of His actual presence among them, and on one occasion appeared to more than five hundred disciples, spoke to the Apostles of the Kingdom of God, and imparted His last instructions relative to the continuance and completion of His work. At the end of this period, assembling them about Him, He went up to Bethania,

1Isaias xi. 10.

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2 Rom. iv. 25; 1 Cor. xv. 4.

3 That saying of the apostle, "Qui traditus est propter delicta nostra, et resurrexit propter justificationem nostram," is in a most simple manner declared by that Easter preface, "Qui (Christus) mortem nostram moriendo destruxit et vitam resurgendo reparavit." St. Paul, indeed, makes the whole economy of salvation turn round two cardinal points: the expiation of sin on the one hand and the purification and sanctification of man on the other. He always attributed the former to the expiating and vicarious death of Christ, and the latter to His resurrection. Conf. 1 Cor. vi. 11; Tit. iii. 5-7.

41 Cor. xv. 14.

5 John xx. 30.

61 Cor. xv. 5-18.

Acts i. 3.