disconnected maxims, but an ethical system, containing a profound and, as we may say, fully thought out philosophy of life, in which the religious and ethical elements are organically united.

The Beatitudes begin with passive virtue, humility, meekness, longing for righteousness; they pass on to the possession of righteousness and purity of heart; ascend to works of active benevolence; and culminate in a character so positive and pronounced in goodness as to excite opposition from the forces of evil. At least one element in the consciousness of Jesus as He spoke these words may be compared with the Christological standpoint of Paul. The impression which His teaching made upon His hearers is summed up in the words: "He taught them as one having authority" (Matt. vii. 29). If we seek to analyze this authority, we find it to be, first, the authority of perfect moral insight. A flaw discovered in the character of a teacher easily neutralizes the force of his moral appeal. The ethic of Jesus is not merely a system of rules, but the blending of a code which has guided human progress and a character in which men have found their supreme ideal of moral excellence. His sureness of touch, His clearness of moral insight, His transparent beauty of character, betray a consciousness unique among men. The verdict of mankind as they have studied the character of Jesus, and studied themselves in the light of it, is that that character is as much a miracle in the moral sphere,—that is, opposed to a uniform experience—as is the birth from a virgin, for example, in the physical sphere. The consciousness of Jesus, at the very least, must have been profoundly influenced by the fact, assuming it to be a fact, that He alone among the children of men did perfectly the will of the Father.

The authority of Jesus, again, was that of a lawgiver from whose words there could be no appeal. His words superseded all previous legislation, in the sense of completing it, and all current interpretation. The imperial "I say unto you" implied the power, not simply of judicial interpretation, but of repealing old laws and enacting new ones. Nor was His teaching in His own conception of it a mere phase, albeit the highest at the time, of moral development. His legislation was final, and never to be superseded; and obedience to it, or neglect of it, was to be the decisive factor in human welfare and destiny (Matt. vii. 24-27).

But the authority of Jesus was not merely that of a lawgiver. He inaugurated the Kingdom whose coming He proclaimed and whose laws He formulated, and He is to be the final judge of the worthiness of its members. These members were not merely pious Jews in general or John's disciples, but were His disciples. They were the light of the world because they were His disciples, and the crowning element in their character was endurance of persecution for His sake (Matt. v. 11, "for my sake"; Luke vi. 22, "for the Son of man's sake"). His teaching instead of pointing away from Himself to God, in the spirit of the other wisest teachers of men, pointed to Himself as the One by whom fully and finally God's will and purpose were to be made known. He plainly taught or clearly implied that men's relations to Himself as Teacher, Lord, Lawgiver and Judge, were supremely important for human destiny (Matt. vii. 21-24).

No words in the ethical-religious message of Jesus are more striking in form and thought, and no others have more deeply impressed the minds of men, than those in which He asserted that the value of the soul outweighs all earthly good: "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" These words, says Eucken, have given the soul a history. In the startling paradox in the context, "He that saveth his life shall lose it," we have the saying of Jesus most often repeated in the Gospels, occurring six times, and assigned to four different occasions (Mark viii. 35; Matt. x. 39; xvi. 25; Luke ix. 24; xvii. 33; John xii. 25).

The study of these sayings in their context (Mark viii. 34-38 and parallels) shows that the thought which was uppermost in the mind of Jesus, and in fact dominated at this point the ethical teaching, was precisely that of His own person and death and resurrection. His question to Peter, "Whom say ye that I am?" (Mark viii. 29) shows that He was dissatisfied with the title of prophet given Him by others, and that He would draw from the disciples a confession that they had come to hold a higher view of His mission. When Peter, according to the accounts in Mark and Matthew, refused to accept the prediction of His death, He showed that it was necessary for all His disciples to take up the cross and follow Him. The goal of life is to be reached only by those who follow Him in spirit in His death and resurrection, and confess Him before men. The losing of the highest in life is for those who are ashamed of Him in this generation. The destiny of men hinges upon their relation to Himself. The connection between the most oft-repeated and self-authenticating maxims of Jesus and His own person, death, and resurrection is as clear and organic as the connection between the ethical and doctrinal, or Christological, teaching of Paul.

It remains to consider the passage (Mark x. 42-45; Matt. xx. 25-28) on true greatness and service. Here we have a characteristic teaching of Jesus cutting athwart the ordinary opinion of mankind. But the maxim, "Whosoever would become great among you," is connected with Himself as the example of true greatness. He, the teacher and example of humility, refers to Himself as the supreme illustration of true greatness. His death is the supreme expression of self-sacrifice for the good of others, and in it by implication is the highest service done to man.[13] Ethics and doctrine about Himself and His death are as inextricably blended in this saying of Jesus as in Paul's statement, "Though he was rich yet for your sakes became poor," or John's, "He laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren" (2 Cor. viii. 9; I John iii. 16). In His deepest ethical teaching Jesus points not away from Himself, as do other moral teachers. His words in the Synoptics are not essentially different from those in John: "If I your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another's feet" (xiii. 14).

The Christology of Jesus finds expression in the familiar words in Matthew xi. 25-30 (Luke x. 21, 22): "All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, etc." These words are often spoken of as the climax of His self-revelation in the Synoptic Gospels, and modern criticism unites with Christian devotion in recognizing their importance. The conviction is growing that the words, as they stand in all the Greek texts, cannot have been the utterance of a merely human Jesus, the pattern of truthfulness and the example of humility.

A few examples will show the trend of recent interpretation. Plummer thinks that the self-revelation of Jesus in the expression, "All things were delivered unto Me, etc.," "contains the whole of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel;"[14] and he believes that the aorist verb "points back to a moment in eternity, and implies the preëxistence of the Messiah."