revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven."[#] Immediately that He has been thus spontaneously recognised, He begins to say what He had never said before: "The Son of Man must suffer." The Son of Man is the title of the Messiah in glory, as He was conceived in Daniel's vision and the Apocalyptic writings which drew their inspiration from it. "The Son of Man must suffer;" that is the great Messianic act; that is the way in which the Kingdom of God shall be founded. But it was not what St. Peter meant. "Peter took Him, and began to rebuke Him ... Be it far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be unto Thee." And our Lord recognises the voice of the tempter in the wilderness, who bade Him take thought for self.... "Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou thinkest not God's thoughts, but men's thoughts."[#]

[#] S. Matthew xvi, 17.

[#] S. Matthew xvi, 22, 23.

Just as, when once He was spontaneously recognised, He began to set forth the new conception of the Messiahship, "The Son of Man must suffer;" so too He immediately starts on that last journey to Jerusalem which culminates with the Cross. Arrived at Jerusalem, He arranges the triumphal entry. He carefully fulfils Zechariah's prophecy—thus claiming the Messiahship, and challenging the religious rulers. But the prophecy which He thus selects for deliberate fulfilment is one which represents the Messiah as a civil, not a military authority (for this is the meaning of the ass as distinguished from the horse), and as one who shall speak Peace to the nations.[#] It is the conception of the Messiah which in all the Old Testament has least suggestion of coercion and is therefore the nearest to His own.

[#] Zechariah ix, 9, 10.

But the primary purpose of the triumphal entry is no doubt to make His claim and issue His challenge. On the journey and after the entry itself He declares with increasing emphasis that the Kingdom of God is at hand; those who stood there should see it come with power; and as He stands before Caiaphas, He answers the question "Art Thou the Christ? with the words, I am, and from this time[#] there shall be the Son of Man seated on the right hand of power." Daniel's prophecy is here and now fulfilled. In the moment that love completes its sacrifice in death, the glory of God is fully made known and the power of His Kingdom is come; this is the Lord's own Apocalypse.[#]

[#] Different words in St. Matthew and St. Luke, but agreeing in sense, which sense the authorised version spoils.

[#] See Appendix I.: The Apocalyptic Consciousness.

So He had spoken on that last journey. "Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you; but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister, and whosoever shall be first among you shall be servant of all, for verily the Son of Man came"—(again the title of the Messiah in Glory)—"not to be ministered unto, but to minister; and to give His life a ransom for many."[#]

[#] S. Mark x, 42-45.

So, too, St. John records His saying that in precisely this way he would win His royalty—"I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me."[#] The Cross was foreseen by the Lord to be what, as we look back, we know that it has been—the throne of His glory and His power; and the capacity to realise it as such is for St. Paul the touchstone of character, the test of election—"We preach a Messiah on a Cross—to Jews a scandal and to Gentiles an absurdity, but to the very people who are called, whether Jews or Greeks, a Messiah who is God's power and God's wisdom."[#]

[#] S. John xii, 32.

[#] 1 Cor. i, 23, 24.

Here then is the mode of God's power, and we know that it can be no other; for if God is truly King, He must be King of our hearts and wills, and not only of our conduct. There is only one way to win men's hearts and wills, that is by showing love; and there is only one way to show love, and that is by sacrifice, by doing or suffering what, apart from our love, we should not choose to do or suffer. Sacrifice is the Divine activity; Calvary is the mode of the Divine omnipotence. It is the actual Divine method and the ideal human method.

As we come to consider how far it has become also the actual human method, we are confronted at the outset by the sheer impossibility of our applying this method, just because we have not in ourselves the necessary love.

Our perfection, we are told, is to consist in just that quality which shows the Father's perfection, namely, that He is kind to the unthankful and evil, and makes His sun to rise on the evil and good and sends His rain on the just and on the unjust; and we are to be perfect in the way that He is perfect.[#]

[#] S. Matthew v, 43-48.

But until we reach that perfection we cannot imitate His action; for a man's act is not what He intends; nor is it the mere motion of his body; but it is the whole train of circumstances that he initiates. Christ in His perfect purity may stand before the woman taken in her sin and say, "Neither do I condemn thee," because there is no possibility that she will interpret His mercy as condonation of the sin; but if we said it, people would so interpret it, and usually quite rightly so.

Our problem then is so to guide our conduct that we come as near as we are capable of coming to the divine ideal that is set forth in Christ, and that we come perpetually closer and closer to it.

The Lord in His temptation rejected all use of force and substituted for it the appeal of love expressed in sacrifice, so far as the actual and positive building of His Kingdom is concerned. For us there must always be some use of the lower method, because we are incapable of applying the highest. If any man, when he is confronted with evil which he can prevent by the exercise of force, refrains from doing it, we must immediately put to him the question, "But did you so suffer under that act of evil that there is any hope of your suffering proving to be the redemption of the evil-doer? If so, well and good; but, if not, then you are idle and cowardly, not Christian." No one who is not a Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once the Spirit of Christ has