nations, and in which the creative purpose of God should find its ultimate fulfilment. Thus Israel was not a nation in the ordinary sense so much as a church, and the loss of political independence under the Roman Empire tended still further to accentuate its religious aspect.
Faced by the universalism of the Roman world-power, the spiritual universalism of Israel acquired yet clearer consciousness, and the mind of the people was preoccupied, as never before, by the hope of the coming of a Messianic deliverer who would break the power of the nations and set up the eternal kingdom of prophecy.
It was to those who lived in the expectation of this hope and ” waited for the consolation of Israel ” that the preaching of Jesus was addressed. His gospel consisted essentially in the announcement of the coming of the Kingdom ; and this was not, as so many moderns hold, merely a figurative expression for an abstract ethical ideal ; it was an absolutely realist conception of the coming of a new supernatural order—the culminating event in the history of Israel and of the world. So far the eschato¬
logical school is right; their error consists in their tendency to interpret this teaching in the spirit of the apocryphal apocalypses rather than in that of the prophets, and in their depreciation 80
T H E CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
of its spiritual and universal character. For the Kingdom of the gospels is not a national triumph of Israel over his foes ; it is the mystical and spiritual reign of God in humanity. It is already immanent in the present order, which it is destined to transform and supersede—it is a leaven and a seed and a hidden treasure. It is open not to the Jews as such—the children of Abraham—nor to the Scribes and Pharisees, who observe meticulously all the outward pre-scriptions of the Mosaic law, but to the poor and the meek, the seekers after justice and those who follow the Son of Man in his sufferings and humiliation.
Nevertheless, the spirituality of the Kingdom does not imply that it was purely internal and individual. It retained the objective social character that it possessed in the prophetic tradition. It was to find its realisation in and through a community. But this community was no longer the national church-state of Jewish history; it was a new Messianic society— the ” little flock ” of which the Gospels speak.*
The mission of Jesus consisted essentially in the foundation of this society, not by doctrine alone, but by an act of creative power. Nothing can be further from the colourless Liberal picture of Jesus as a great moral idealist than the figure of * Luke xii. 32.
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CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
the Son of Man in the Gospels, filled with the consciousness of his Messianic office and inaugurat-ing a new supernatural dispensation by the New Covenant of his voluntary sacrifice. All the mythological parallels invoked by rationalist critics from the vegetation cults of primitive peoples and the mystery religions of the Hellenistic world sink into significance by the side of the profound spiritual reality of the words of Jesus, ” I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptised and how am I straitened until it be accomplished ? “, or of that great scene in the Upper Chamber, which only the most arbitrary preconceptions can remove from its place in the most ancient and authenticated documents of primitive Christianity.
Nor is it possible to deny that the actual beginnings of the historic Christian Church were rooted in this doctrine of a new order inaugurated by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus and incorporated in a spiritual society.
The outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost was regarded as the fulfilment of prophecy and of the promises of Jesus to His apostles. For the possession of the Holy Spirit was the essential characteristic of the new society. It was, even more than Israel, a theophoric community, since it was the external organ of the Holy Spirit and enjoyed super-82