Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him; and there was given him dominion," etc. This is manifestly a prophecy of Christ; yet it may be doubted whether by the expression "like the Son of Man" anything more is meant than that the Messiah, God's anointed King, was to come in the form and likeness of a man, though he came in the clouds of heaven, and came to receive a universal and everlasting kingdom. And in the Revelation (i. 13), when it is said that he who was seen in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks was "like unto the Son of Man," probably it is not intended to say that he looked like Jesus Christ, for this would be only saying that he looked like himself; but that he, Jesus Christ, still appeared in human form, though now clothed with superhuman power and glory.1

After all the analogies that we can discover, then, in the language of the Old Testament and in the Hebrew idiom, we cannot fail to observe the marked peculiarity of our Saviour's appropriation of this title to himself. He does not call himself a son of man, still less a son of a man. He does not call himself in general terms son of man; but "the Son of Man." He is not some indefinite son of some indefinite man. He is not some common son of our common humanity. He is not any ordinary common-place son of man. But he is emphatically, nay, as the exclusive language of Scripture shows, he is exclusively, "the Son of Man." He is in some peculiar sense the Son of mankind, the child of humanity, the son of the race; in the emphatic and unequivocal language of the original Greek, he is ỏ Tiòs Tоû ȧv púπov, in which designation the first article distinguishes him from all other sons, while the second, as every Greek scholar knows, generalizes man, and makes the word comprehensive of the race.2

1 There is the same contrast between the exalted glory and the human form of Jesus as he is seen by the Martyr Stephen; and the explanation of that peculiar passage in the Acts, given on a former page, is confirmed by the analogy of the passages here cited.

2 Just as in English, we say the ox, the horse, when we mean to denote the

O ríos Toû ávрómov, The Son of Man. Let us ana lyze this peculiar expression; and, considering it at once in its own appropriate significance and in the light of scriptural usage, let us endeavor to ascertain its true meaning:

1. In the first place, it implies that Jesus was a man, a real and proper man, possessed of all the attributes and characteristics of our common humanity. This, as we have seen, is the primary import of the phrase "son of man," when interpreted according to the analogy of the Hebrew language. "Son of man," in the peculiar idiom of the Hebrews and the Greek-speaking Jews, is synonymous with man. It differs from man chiefly in that it emphasizes the idea of a human origin and human characteristics. It denotes emphatically one who is a man by birth and a man by nature; one who is born a man, and therefore possesses the characteristics of the race. There is no way in which the Redeemer could convey the idea of his real and proper humanity more clearly and forcibly to the minds of his immediate hearers, who were Jews, than by habitually calling himself "the Son of Man.”

Moreover, aside from any peculiarities in the Hebrew idiom, this is the natural and appropriate signification of the word. A son partakes of the nature of his father. Christ was a man in origin and a man in nature; and, as if for the very purpose of emphasizing that fact and impressing it on the minds of men,- lest this fact should be forgotten in connection with his claim to be also something more than human, and under the overshadowing influence of his superhuman wisdom and power,- he takes pains to call himself "the Son of Man." He was the Redeemer of men, and he would have those whom he came to redeem understand, first of all, that their Redeemer was a man· a loving and sympathizing brother. The atonement was to be made for

species; though by an idiom peculiar to the English, we generalize the word "man" by omitting the article.

1 Dr. Robinson says in his Lexicon under 8 vids тoû åveρwπov: "It would seem to refer not so much to his human nature, as to the fact of his being the

man, and it must be made by man. "By man came death; by man came also the resurrection of the dead." 1

In these days, when the humanity of Christ is seldom or never questioned, and the only question is in regard to his divinity, it is difficult for us to appreciate the necessity which existed in the primitive church of guarding so strenuously the proper humanity of the Redeemer. Then, be it remembered, his proper humanity was as strenuously denied by some (e.g. the Docctae) as his proper deity was by others (e.g. the Ebionites); indeed, at that time, his disciples seem to have found their chief difficulty in admitting and conceiv ing of his real humanity rather than his full divinity.2 Hence the prominence given to his outward, human life in three of the Gospels. Hence the earnestness with which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews insists that " it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren." And hence, in part at least, we think, the frequency with which our Lord calls himself by that name which his disciples and Jewish hearers could not but understand as an emphatic assertion of his real humanity.

Christ was a man in his earthly origin, because he was born of a woman, and so born into the race. He was a man in nature, because he possessed a human body with all the limbs, features, appetites, and powers of a human body, and gave as good evidence as any other man that he possessed a human soul with all the faculties and susceptibilities of a human soul. The sacred writers, in the Gospels, in the Acts, and in the Epistles, before and after his resurrection and ascension, speak of him as a man, "the Man Christ

Messiah who is described as coming from heaven in a human form;" and he refers to some passages in proof that the words were understood as synonymous with "the Messiah," "the Christ," and even with "the Son of God." It was not, however, these words, but always something asserted of himself in the connection, that was understood to be a claim to be the Messiah and the Son of God; cf. John xii. 23-34; Luke xxii. 69, 70, etc. And it would be strange, indeed, if these words could have lost so entirely the meaning they so manifestly and uniformly had in the Old Testament.

1 Cf. Heb. ii. 2.

2 See Ellicott's Life of Christ.

Jesus" (1 Tim. ii. 5; compare John viii. 40; Acts ii. 22, etc). He was born, brought up, and educated like other men of his class. He was known through the community as "the carpenter's son," and seems to have followed, to some extent, the occupation of his father (Mark vi. 3). His mother and sisters and brothers were well known; and he grew up among them-very unlike them, it is true-in wisdom and piety; but yet so like them, in his birth and edu cation, in his general appearance and manner of life, that, notwithstanding they marvelled at his extraordinary wisdom and supernatural power, his neighbors and early acquaintances were slow to believe that he was anything more than human-anything radically different from the rest of his family and other men around him. He ate and drank and slept like other men. He hungered and thirsted, sorrowed and rejoiced, was weary and refreshed, was pleased and displeased, like other men. Like other men, he loved his friends and wept over their graves; though unlike most men, he loved also all mankind, and wept over the sins and miseries of his bitterest enemies. Like other men he was angry; though it was only at sin: He "looked round about with anger" on the hypocrites who would fain have interposed their sanctimonious keeping of the Sabbath in the way of his healing many, "being grieved at the hardness of their hearts" (Mark iii. 5). It is never said in the scriptures that he hated anything; certainly he never hated any human being; yet we are told that he was "much displeased" with his disciples when they would have kept back those mothers who brought young children to him for his blessing; and he was doubtless very indignant at the hypocrisy and iniquity of the Scribes and Pharisees on whom he denounced such heavy woes. We have no record in the Gospels of his having laughed; but this is no proof that he never did laugh. There was a tradition in the early church that he never smiled; but this we cannot believe. We are sure he smiled benignantly on every kind word and good deed. We know that he was free from selfishness and sin. We

know too that all men are sinners; that every other man who has ever lived was more or less selfish. But selfishness is an excrescence on humanity, and not a part of man's nature as he was originally created. Sin is a disease which has sprung up and spread through the race, and belonged not to man in his normal and healthy state.

On the whole, "never man spake like this man;" never man lived like him; never man died like him. At the same time, he spake and lived and died as a man; sustaining all the essential relations of man; subject to all the infirmities, temptations, and trials of men, and those in the largest measure and the greatest variety of forms; exercising all the attributes of proper humanity, and those in their most emphatic manifestations; and we have no more conclusive evidence that Peter or Paul or John was a real and proper man than that Jesus of Nazareth was such a man.

2. He was not merely a man, but the Man, in the same emphatic sense in which he was "the Son of Man," the only MAN in the fullest and highest sense, as he was in the fullest and highest sense the only SON OF MAN, that has ever lived in our world. He was ó av poros, as the Greeks say, or, as we say, Man-man generic, man universal, man typical and ideal; the living type and realized ideal of humanity. He was not one man or one type of man only, but he combined in himself all that belongs to the idea of humanity; he was, if we may so speak, the whole human race, or the idea and essence of it, embodied in one person.1 As God is, in the fullest and highest sense, the only Father of the human family, so Christ is, in the fullest and highest

1 This idea, or one similar to it, is suggested by those passages of the Old Testament in which the phrase "the Son of Man" occurs. For example, "What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him." In this passage "the son of man" is not any individual man, but mankind in general; man as God made him and placed him in the world; man made a little lower than the angels, and placed in this lower world as God's image and the vicegerent of his government over inferior creatures; man in the rank and condition characteristic of humanity; or, as we might say, man according to the essential type and idea of his being.