tive was sharply set before the disciples on that memorable day at Cæsarea Philippi, when Christ asked them first, "Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am?" and then, "But whom say ye that I am?" There were but two lines open to them. One was the line of popular superstition, which led them back into the past to see in Christ only the ghost of John the Baptist, or Elias, or one of the prophets come to life again. The other was the new line of Christian faith which led them forward to see in Jesus "the Christ, the Son of the living God."1

It is evident that the disciples did not know at first what was meant by the Christhood, the Messiahship, the fulfilment of all ancient prophecy and sacred ritual in Jesus. But they learned the lesson as they kept company with him. They heard him speak with an authority which none of the prophets had ever claimed. Recognizing a divine inspiration in the Old Testament Scriptures, he distinctly set himself above them as the bringer of a new and better revelation. He accomplished, interpreted, and revised them. "Ye have heard

how it hath been said by them of old time❞— by whom? By the lawgivers and prophets and

1 St. Matt. 16:13-16.

psalmists whom Christ recognized as his own forerunners and foretellers. "But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'

Suppose that this were all; suppose that the Sermon on the Mount were the whole of the New Testament, what should we behold in it? Not merely the revelation of a morality more pure and perfect than any other the human heart has conceived, proceeding from the lips of an unlearned Nazarene peasant of the first century, but the absolutely overwhelming sight of a believing Hebrew placing himself above the rule of his own faith, a humble teacher asserting supreme authority over all human conduct, a moral reformer discarding all other foundations, and saying, "Every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man which built his house upon a rock."2 Nine and forty times, in the brief and fragmentary record of the discourses of Jesus, recurs this solemn phrase with which he authenticates the truth: Verily, I say unto you. And every time that the disciples heard it they must have gotten a new idea of what it meant to be the Christ.

1 St. Matt. 5:43, 44.

2 St. Matt. 7:24.

Think also of the significance which the favourite Messianic title used by Jesus to describe himself must have had to their minds. He called himself "the Son of man." Why? Was it merely because he was human? If that was all, surely it would not need to be asserted and emphasised again and again. Imagine any other man, the highest and the holiest, insisting upon the reality of his human life, dwelling upon it, repeating the assertion of it over and over. But this title was, in fact, the claim to a peculiar and supreme relation to the human race. Christ was not a son of man, but the Son of man, one who, in the luminous words of Irenæus, recapitulavit in se ipso longam hominum expositionem. And as such he assumed on earth and in his prevision of heaven a position which no mere man could rightly take. "The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins."2 "The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory; and before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one

1 In St. Matthew, 30 times; in St. Luke, 25 times; in St. Mark, 14 times.

2 St. Matt. 9:6.

St. Mark 2:28.

from another, as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats."1

Consider what this implied. It was a declaration that Jesus expected, and was willing, to take into his own hands the task of discriminating between the good and the bad in the unsearchable confusions and complexities of the human heart, and of determining, without hesitation, without misgiving, without redress, the final destinies of the untold myriads of men; "an office," it has been well said, "involving such spiritual insight, such discernment of the thoughts and intents of the heart of each one of the millions at his feet, such awful, unshared supremacy in the moral world, that the imagination recoils in sheer agony from the task of seriously contemplating the assumption of these duties by any created intelligence." When the disciples heard their Master declare that he would fulfil this office of Judge of the World, they must have begun to feel what it meant to be the Christ.

Nor do I suppose that they realized at first the full intention of that second phrase in which their view of Jesus was expressed. The Son of the living God,-that also was an idea to be gradually apprehended and unfolded. And think

1 St. Matt. 25:31, 32.

what light must have fallen upon it from the conduct of Jesus as they followed him from day to day. The more closely they knew him, the more deeply they felt his sinless purity and sovereign virtue. There was a certainty, an independence, a freedom from all effort and from all restraint in his goodness, such as no other good man has ever shown. He had the deepest knowledge of the evil of sin, yet no shadow or stain of it fell upon his own soul. He was on terms of closest intimacy—an intimacy such as no saint ever dared to assume-with God. He conversed with the Father in a friendship which was utterly without fear or penitence or misgiving.

Now when the disciples saw this, it must have put them upon deep thoughts, and the guidance to these thoughts was given by Christ's own words about himself. He put himself side by side with the Divine activity. "My Father worketh hitherto and I work."1 The Jews who heard him say this, sought to kill him, because he had not only broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God. And if the Jews thought this, what did his own disciples think? He claimed a Divine origin and mission: "I came forth from the Father"; "My Father

1 St. John 5: 17.

2 St. John 16:28.