BOOKS.

DR. REYNOLDS'S LECTURES ON JOHN THE BAPTIST.*

Tam is both an extremely learned and a very thoughtful book, which we could have wished to see compressed within more moderate compass. Lectures are sometimes intended for rather fluctuating audiences, and in any case, for audiences which have no sufficient means of referring back to what has been said before ; and hence they almost require an amount of repetition which is a blemish in a published work of permanent value like this, especially _as readers are apt to be deterred by a very large volume who -might be induced to read a smaller one. Nor is it Dr. Reynolds's command of all the ablest German critics which leads him into this repetition. As regards the exposition of the historical criticisms, Dr. Reynolds, while always clear, is succinct enough. It is only in relation to the moral and spiritual aspects of the subject on which he writes that Dr. Reynolds gives us the impression not unfrequently of going again and again over the same ground, under some feeling apparently of dissatisfaction with the results of his previous exposition, and yet often without being able to reach any more definite or more satisfying and adequate .conception of the subject.

Nor do we wonder at the feeling which seems to us almost un- consciously to possess Dr. Reynolds of a certain difficulty in appre- hending the precise relation of John the Baptist to our Lord, and indeed, of apprehending the precise need for John's mission, for we feel and avow it ourselves in a much stronger degree than any in which Dr. Reynolds would be at all likely to admit it. And yet

* John the Baptist. The Congregtrional Union Lecture for 1874. By Henry Robert Reynolds, D.D. London : Hodder and Stoughton.

precisely because we feel this so strongly, we hold that Dr. Rey- nolds has not made enough of the career of John as an evidence of the supernatural character of the anticipation formed of the coming of Christ. Nothing is more remarkable than the expectation formed in the time of the later Jewish prophets that a forerunner of the type of Elijah must precede the expected re- storer of Israel, if taken in relation to the manner of its fulfilment.

There would have been nothing surprising in that fulfilment had there been any room for supposing that the expectation had itself produced the fulfilment,—in other words, that no sooner had a figure appeared which seemed to the Jews at all likely to fulfil their Messianic hopes, than some strenuous follower, penetrated by belief in his master, had stepped forth to discharge the duties of the fore- runner as delineated by Isaiah and Malachi, and so to "prepare his way." But nothing can less resemble such a supposition than the actual facts of John the Baptist's career. It resembled Elijah's in the austerity of its external features, but not only was it clearly not the product of Christ's influence, but it was, as our Lord himself pointed out, in striking contrast to any that could have been the product of that influence. Either, then, John must have had a purely supernatural source of conviction that Christ was at hand, which is what Christians suppose, or else his own career must have first suggested that of the mightier one. he announced, a supposition which is still less like the facts of the case. The extraordinary difference in type between the forerunner, who could neither have been formed by nor have formed the career of Christ, and Christ himself, leaves us the alternative of supposing either that the knowledge of the historic link between those careers was supplied from above, which is the Christian hypothesis, or that their connection was the result of pure coincidence, which would not only be a supposition full of difficulty in itself, but would be hampered by this extra diffi- culty, that John, being what he seems to be in the Synoptic Gospels at all events,—chiefly a vehement moral reformer of fiery zeal, and an ascetic,—would have been utterly unlikely to fix on Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of his dream for Israel, as we know that he did. The very difficulties, therefore, which we feel in de- fining the precise relation of John the Baptist to Christ, actually increase the force of the evidence for a supernatural source of John's announcement, instead of diminishing it.

But the difficulty of rightly conceiving the relation of John to Jesus is implied in what we have said, and the more we have studied and considered Dr. Reynolds's thoughtful book, the more vivid has it become. How did John prepare the way of Jesus ? Is it clear that Jesus would have found less acceptance if John had never appeared at all? The latter's career was so short and so immediately antecedent to that of Christ, that in point of time they almost merge in one. John preached a gospel of repentance and declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Christ preached the same gospel at first, and of course, with an authority much more adapted to inspire conviction. John, no doubt, brought Christ some dis- ciples, but John also, without doubt, made not a few who adhered to him, even after his testimony to Christ had been delivered, and whom he did not refuse to keep ; nay, as Dr. Reynolds points out, the semi-Christian school of John the Baptist spread itself even after the death both of John and of our Lord, so that we find in "The Acts of the Apostles" the clearest traces of a school of half-Christians who knew only "the baptism of John," and yet who had apparently been taught to regard themselves as in some sense believers in Jesus, for St. Paul is made by the author of The Acts' to speak of them distinctly, even in the first instance, as "believers." All this makes it not a little difficult to realise how 'the forerunner' really did 'prepare the way' of the Lord, or what power Christianity would have lost if he had never appeared, if Christ alone had preached the gospel of repentance as well as his own higher teaching.

Nay, more ; it is very difficult indeed to understand our Lord's own estimate of the position of John. That John really did point out our Lord as him who was to baptise with the Holy Spirit, as the beloved Son of God in whom God was well pleased,— nay, if we may hold, as Dr. Reynolds, rightly we think, be- lieves, the account of the Fourth Gospel to be equally trustworthy with that of the three first,—as him who came "from above," and who was "above all," and as "the Lamb of God" who was to take away the sin of the world, seems quite clear. But that he fell short, in some emphatic way, of the full standard of Christianity, seems equally clear. Not only does he send from his prison two of his disciples to Christ to ask, "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" a message which, in spite of the contention to that effect, it is difficult to sup- pose was consistent with absolute belief in Jesus; but in giving his

answer, Christ is careful to add the virtual though gentle rebuke, "Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me." Moreover, in passing his high eulogium on the unworldliness, the steadfastness, the inspired life of John, our Lord adds the striking reservation, —" Of men that are born of women, there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ; notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he," implying apparently that even then there was already a society in existence the least of whom was greater than John the Baptist. Now what was that society from which John is thus apparently excluded, and what excluded him from it? It was not original want of faith, at all events, which excluded him, for his publicly expressed faith in Jesus was the first of all public acts of faith; nor apparently was it any deficiency in its nature, even on the most orthodox of theological assumptions, for very early he expressed his faith in him as "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world," i.e., we suppose as one who was "to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows." Ritualists might say, perhaps, that it was because John was never baptised into the Church of Christ, because after saying, "I have need to be baptised of thee, yet comest thou to me ?" he did not act upon his own impulse. But Dr. Reynolds would be the first to repudiate such an account of the matter as a pure superstition, nor, indeed, does it seem clear that at the time Christ's words were spoken any one of his own apostles had been baptised, since we are expressly told that Jesus himself baptised not though his disciples did. Dr. Reynolds makes the explanation even more difficult, we think, by assuming (p. 419) that there was probably no sign of a declining faith in John's message, that that message was "in harmony with the knowledge of the position that had been taken by John up to the time of his incarceration." As far as we can gather, Dr. Reynolds's view on this subject from the many passages in which he gives it with different shades and modifications of meaning, it is something of this kind : John the Baptist was one of the greatest of the prophets, inasmuch as he revived in its fullness the old prophetic conception of righteousness, and of the kingdom of God which should con- ' sist in a righteous reign on a purified earth. He was "more than a prophet" in the same sense in which Moses and others of the pro- phets were more than prophets, in that he had a vision of the chaxacter of the perfect ruler by whom alone the kingdom of God could be established. But he was inferior to any one in the true kingdom of heaven in the inadequacy of his Christian humility and love, and his consequent inability to realise the perfect inward- ness of the Christian method, and the spiritual "tenderness for weakness and pity, for darkness and death" (p. 427) which char- acterised it. John was impatient for the event he had himself predicted,—the time when the divine wrath should "burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire," and though he had partially recog- nised a suffering redeemer in the reference to Isaiah's prophecy of one who should go "like a lamb to the slaughter," his mind was not sufficiently saturated with the spirit of love and humility to be competent to realise that no great external change was intended in which the power of God would be vindicated to the senses of man against the powers of the world,—or to understand fully that the kingdom of God was within man. John, in Dr. Reynolds's concep- tion, sums up the highest spirit of a Judaic and external regime, and even the highest of all previous glimpses into the diviner and more spiritual kingdom which was coming; but the sacerdotal ideas of sacramental purification survived in him ; the purely moral ideas of the prophetic reformer survived in him ; and especially the revolutionary conceptions of an enthusiast who foresaw a great change without entering into the delicate spiritual affections by which that change might be made natural and even gradual, survived in him. Such is, as nearly as we can gather it, Dr. Reynolds's view. If it is correct, there have been, we suspect, exceedingly few in any age who have been in the king- dom of God at all. It may be very true that conceptions of the Johannine kind of the grandeur of spiritual violence, and cravings like his for spiritual crises of a visible and highly impres- sive kind, have marked only the few, because it takes a character of great and rugged power to exhibit such characteristics. ,But if none have ever entered the kingdom of God who did not accept it in the contrasted spirit, the spirit of a little child, the spirit of love and dependence and sympathy with weakness, the number of the subjects of the kingdom must have been infinitesi- mal in every age, and exceedingly small in all ages taken together. And the more strongly this contrast is marked between the teach- ing of the enthusiasts who would take the kingdom of heaven "by violence," and the teaching of our Lord that the kingdom of God " cometh not of observation," the more difficult it becomes to see how the teaching of "the forerunner" was in reality a pre- paration for the teaching of Christ. If you soften the image of the

I Baptist, and so weaken the contrast, you make it difficult to I understand the strong saying that in spite of his faith and testi- mony, the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he, ex-

cept under the proviso that the kingdom of Heaven has never included any but a very small portion indeed of all the Christians who have ever lived. If you draw the picture

in all its ruggedness, and emphasize the contrast with our Lord, then you make it very difficult to understand in what special sense John prepared the way for Christ. As far as we can judge by the brief accounts we have, there is far more of Christian tenderness and sympathy with weakness, in the later prophecies of Isaiah than in the stern and terse exhortations of

John the Baptist, at least as these are summarised in the three first gospels. This alternative of difficulties seems to US to

have been imperfectly grasped by Dr. Reynolds. No doubt his. own leaning is to the latter branch of the alternative, for he con- stantly harps on the contrast between the last of the prophet&

and the least in the kingdom of heaven. For our own parts, we should be disposed rather to believe that the synoptic account of John's preaching is imperfect in thus dwelling exclusively on the moral and Elijah-like element in it, to the exclusion of a more spiritual and Christian view ; and that his whole teaching was, as the Fourth Gospel represents it, a much more true preparation for the teaching of Christ, a more real "lowering of the hills" and

"exalting of the valleys" left by the old Judaic teaching than we could possibly have gathered from the three first gospels. And in that case we should suppose that the message sent from the prison indicated—as, we think, Christ's language implies, on the whole, that it did—a real ebb of John's faith at the moment, a real tendency to be " offended " at the acquiescence of our Lord ía his imprisonment, a real recession from the higher teaching of tla.0 forerunner, into the old Jewish craving for a national deliverer.

We have dwelt exclusively hitherto on the main topic of this learned book. But we should not do it justice if we did not call our readers' attention to the very frequently original and always thoughtful side-glimpses which Dr. Reynolds gives us into the rationale of Christian evidence and belief. Not unfre- quently Dr. Reynolds makes his special subject, — John the Baptist,—an excuse for discussing the fundamental difficulties of Christian belief, and he rarely does so without saying something which seems to us even more instructive than his special criti- cism of the particular chapter of Christianity with which he is dealing. The following, for instance, strikes us as a very power-

ful statement of a truth which few people distinctly realise, and which is yet of the greatest moment:— "No revelation so called, however momentous may be its theme, can really be other in its first inception than the invincible conviction of some great thinker. It could not become a thought, or take the form of a communicable idea without conforming, to this condition. By some means or other, that which has been thought or said by Moses, by Isaiah, by Jesus, by Paul, by John, has been believed by others to be the thought of God, but it has come through tho medium of tho minds of these men. There must have been a foutal source for the thought as human thought. Even if the thought has been the gradual impression produced on a generation by a series of wonderful events, those events, which in their relation to one another constitute a history, are not a revelation of divine intention to mankind until some minds have become alive to their significance, have perceived their inner meaning, have discovered the law of their occurrence, and have uttered it to the world."

And here, again, later in the book, there is a fine comment on the same text :—

" Whatever has the power to evoke community of sentiment in regions where neither scientific method, nor historic verification, nor deductive process, nor human testimony can reach, takes the place of proof. We hear of old associations probing the heart of an unbeliever ; of the words of simple men touching the consciences of their fellows ; of the contagion of religious earnestness ; of the overwhelming effect of certain ceremonial rites ; of the semi- miraculous results which follow the preaching of the old gospel. What does all this show but that there are regions of the human soul where the vivid intuition of spiritual realities takes a higher place than all the other faculties, in securing what at least has the effect of truth upon the understanding : it has the power of filling the mind, of securing real assent,' and supplying ample direction and stimulus to the wilL But what is the part which this faculty of the human mind has taken in the foundation of religious systems ? Many of these systezns present & complexity of influences and traditions, involve the misapprehension of physical facts, and reveal the morbid activity of the religious sentiment. Every so-called religion is like a river into which numberless tributaries are falling, which is swollen by rains and the upbursting of deep springs. of water from below. But while a superficial estimate of the full and final effect of such a river upon the country through which it flows apparently ignores the thousandfold origin of its many waters, yet every drop of the Nile or the Ganges has been in the first instance lifted by the sunbeam to the height, the fall from which gives the momentum of its onward passage to the sea. So all the essential characteristics of every religious system have taken their rise in the troubled guesses, the vivid intuitions, and restless questionings of men touching the spiritual universe in which they find themselves. It is not intellectual proof, nor historical fact, nor deduction from first principles, but the gazing on unseen and-eternal realities, and the intense convictions consequent thereupon, which make up the mystery of the Orphic frag- ments, the songs of the Rig-Veda, the motive force of Buddha's laws, the pith of the words of Mahomet, and which, piece by piece, produced the complicated religious ceremonial of India, Egypt, and Greece. It is the poet rather than the logician, the artist rather than the philosopher, the prophet rather than the legislator, to whom the world has been indebted for its religious faith. There is, moreover, in the deepest experiences of the Divine life, in the daily growth of the moral and spiritual sense of beauty, truth, and righteousness, that which provides the nearest analogues to the extraordinary condition of mind out of which the religious ideas of great nations and communities have sprung. We are accustomed to pray to God to 'cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Him.' Thus, though there is a vast and legitimate influence exerted on devout minds by the normal action of truth, though the realities of the Divine kingdom impress the heart and arouse the torpid will, yet in so making known the quality of the Divine Name as to induce a perfect moral surrender to the will of God, we look for the inspirations of the Holy

Spirit."

'That seems to us absolutely true, but it really amounts to an appeal from every intellectual test of truth to vaguer moral and spiritual tests of truth, whose elements we are not able to assign. It is an appeal, in fact, from evidence to trust. Of course, every- one knows the danger of that appeal. In the mouths of earnest 'but narrow men like Messrs. Moody and Sankey it is made an excuse for putting aside contemptuously all the questionings of the intellect, and taking the letter of the Bible, interpreted at haphazard by uninstructed piety, as final. Nor do we deny that there are persons for whom that submission may be a justifiable and legitimate act of mind. They may have so little intellectual power to criticise, and so keen a sense that in the greater things of life they can find their most adequate guidance in a literal Biblicism, that such a submission of the intellect is right. But clearly, when once we get out of the region in which we can test the authority which commands our belief, we have at least, no right to demand the assent of others to our proceedure. We admit, in that case, that what we do we do only for ourselves, and because we are guided by the highest spirit within us to do it, and that is no reason at all why somebody else who lives in a different world of moral and intellectual data, and recognises a different guidance in relation to them, should follow us. We agree with Dr. Reynolds that we do not lose hold of divine guidance directly we lose our hold of the criterion of assignable evidence. But we do think that at that point all argument, and all expectation of common agreement should cease, and that each must thereafter recognise that he is acting on an individual principle which is not necessarily applicable to any one but himself. So soon as you cease to be able to explain your faith, you must cease to reproach those who do not share it. Yet there is in all Churches a great deal too much disposition to complain that others do not feel the same unanalysable and inexplicable spiritual obligations as the members of those Churches,—just as if where the principles of your action cease to be principles which you can make good to others, they did not also so far cease to be binding on any but yourself. While admiring the uniform candour and the learning of Dr. Reynolds's book, we must say that it is in the occasional criticism of what we may call the metaphysics ef belief, that we ourselves discern its strongest qualities.