message,--to love, obey, and trust.

The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously
affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a
speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom
of truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include striking
utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow
ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower.
Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness.
But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution;
as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the
lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of
humanity,--so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some
swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of
ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.

The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with
this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the
threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early
church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that
modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of
all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from
all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to
attribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modern
Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual
and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke.
This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may
suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if we
are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely
its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the
Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.

Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding
almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the
prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine
kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels
is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the
splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of
teaching and event, the overstrained e