a few years, perhaps many; he did not know exactly how many.1 He spoke of the leaven, whose action is slow; of the grain of mustard seed, which takes a certain time to grow. He did not look for a rapid success; but he was still young, there was time; little by little the seed would grow. He had placed himself in the Father's hands, he was awaiting his hour; he had no preconceived views and no selfdeceptions.

This is how Jesus, while considering the final catastrophe as near at hand, still came as a law-giver and reformer. His moral teaching plainly shows that the proximity of the Judgment was not immediate; but it was near, for his own preoccupation in his moral teachings was to make men better with intent to prepare them to enter the kingdom.

Jesus then saw in the kingdom neither a spiritual deliverance nor the reign of the poor and lowly. To say so is to confound the kingdom itself with the state of mind which would prepare for it.

In fact, to prepare oneself for it, one

1 "None knoweth the day nor the hour, not even the Son" (Mark xiii. 32).

must become poor and lowly, as we shall show in the next chapter; and as to the kingdom it was to be very nearly what Daniel and Enoch had described. Jesus neither criticised nor rejected the apocalyptic beliefs of his people. Let us not forget that never was a critical question put by Jesus. He no more thought of criticising the Messianic hopes of his time than the Pentateuch, and to the end of his life he affirmed that the Messiah would return again upon the clouds of heaven to judge the world.1 He took this place of judge as much in the early days 2 as in the parables of the last week of his life. On this point he never changed. He was to preside over the last Judgment. This was his duty and office as Messiah.

"

Further, and this was the very soul of what we have dared to call his profound and

1 To hold that Jesus took these expressions in a spiritual sense and saw only figures in the expressions, come down from heaven," come in the clouds," is to represent him as saying aside to himself, "I will adopt all the phraseology of my time; I will use the most realistic apocalyptic language, but it shall be in my own mind only figurative and symbolical; and I will tell no one this. They must divine it."

2 Matt. vii. 21 ff.

8 Matt. xxv. 31 ff.

fine genius, though he destroyed none of his people's beliefs, he fulfilled them, he brought out their very life. That which in his eyes was most grand, most sublime, in the coming kingdom was that justice should be established, and that they who now hunger and thirst should be filled.1 It was the righteousness of the kingdom which men must first of all seek.2 The sorrowful should be consoled, the meek should reign. The future kingdom would not be an avenging kingdom, a kingdom of blood; Jesus could not admit that. But he did not reject this aspect of his people's belief as the result of critical reasoning and philosophical examination; his soul refused to believe for a single moment that the kingdom of God, which in his view, as in that of all Jews, would be the domination of God and consequently of the Father who is in heaven, could be anything else than love, peace, joy, pardon, eternal life. All the rest was for him as if it did not exist.

At a later day, in the view of his disciples, the kingdom would be the Christian Church, the society of souls who believed

1 Matt. v. 6.

2 Matt. vi. 33.

s Matt. v.

4 f.

in Jesus. To Jesus it was nothing else than the Messianic era; but (and it is here that he is incomparably great) it was he who prepared for the conception of the disciples by raising high the notion of the kingdom, accepting all that his people taught on the subject, and entirely transforming it.

CHAPTER VII

THE KINGDOM PREPARED FOR BY THE LOWLY AND THE POOR

LE

ET us now see Jesus preparing for the coming of the kingdom.

His first object was to communicate to men that sense of divine sonship which he himself fully possessed; he desired to create it in men's souls. To experience this feeling, one must become "humble," humble in rank, in money, in influence, and humble in happiness. Therefore he declares those happy who weep and who suffer.

Jesus made the most of the fact that the interpretations by his contemporaries of certain passages in Daniel concerning the fifth empire were very diverse, to give another, which was exceedingly spiritual but not at all revolutionary. Everything in Judaism was to be retained, but it was to be transformed, and this transformation