self. He is talking with the Pharisees about the Christ in a purely impersonal way. He said to them: "What do you think about him? Whose son is the Messiah to be?" And they answer, "The son of David," because this was the popular tradition of the time,- that the Messiah was to come of the line of David, and restore the glory of the old Davidic kingdom. And Jesus argues against that idea, taking those words that he quotes from Psalms as the authentic source of authority, and asks, "If he is the son of David, how does David himself call him lord?" He puts himself, so far as this old Jewish argument is concerned, on the side of those who claim that the Messiah need not be the son of David. I speak of this merely to indicate the outlook and the meaning of those words which I have taken as my text.

Let us now come to the modern explanation of those words. And, in the first place, I wish to run over a little what has been thought of Christ in the past, some phases of that thought, and then come to the position which we occupy here to day.

What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he? What does Mark or the author of the Gospel of Mark think about it? So far as we can find by a careful and critical study of that Gospel, it had never occurred to the author, whoever he may have been, to suppose that Jesus was the son of any one except Joseph and Mary. There is no hint of anything else; and that is the oldest Gospel that we possess. There is no trace of any other thought about him on the part of any of his immediate circle of friends, his disciples, or the apostles. Mary, for example, in the chapter in Luke which I read this morning as my lesson, seems to have heard these words about the wonderful nature of the child in surprise; and, it is said, she took them and pondered over them in her heart. If she had known all about it beforehand, this would hardly seem to be the way in which it would be referred to. The author of the Gospel according to Matthew knew nothing about any father and mother for Jesus except Joseph and Mary; for the cycle of tradition concerning the wonders

of the birth were of later origin, and belong to another time.

Let us trace, then, some of the steps by which the thought about Jesus grew until it culminated in the dreadful conception that dominated the world during the night of ignorance, cruelty and darkness that we are accustomed to call the Middle Age.

The first

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The first thing that people thought about Jesus — and this came late in his ministry-was that he was the Messiah, the Christ. This did not mean that he was to be anything but a man; for the majority of the Jews, when they looked forward for this divinely sent leader, did not expect him to be anything but a man. He was to be born in direct descent from their most illustrious king. He was to sit on David's throne, and rule as his lineal successor. step, then, was Jesus as a Christ or a Messiah. find that they began to think of him as the new head of a new and divinely appointed order of humanity. He is spoken of as the second Adam; and, as Adam was the head of the fallen, the corrupt, the dying, the sinking humanity, Jesus, as Christ, was to be the new spiritual Adam, the second Adam, the head of the new divine and spiritual order of humanity. There was to be a second coming of the Christ, who was to appear as a new Adam, the new head of the kind of humanity that would have peopled this earth if there never had been any fall. The world was to be such as it would have been if the conditions of Eden had been undisturbed. There was to be no more death, no sorrow, no crime, in that new kingdom of which the new Jesus, the new head of humanity, was to be the leader.

Another step by and by in the progress of speculation was taken; and Jesus became the first-born of every creature, that is, he was a supernatural being. He had lived in heaven before he lived on earth. He was the first being that God had ever created, the great archangel, the leader of the angelic hosts in heaven. And this is the conception of him that you will find in many of the teachings of Paul.

He had lived before, and appeared here as an angelic leader. He had put off the glory which he had with the Father before the world was, and come down here to be savior, leader, teacher, of mankind. But you will note- and this is the point I wish you to get clearly in mind — that there is no trace or touch in this conception of him of equality with God. It was inconceivable on the part of the Hebrew race that any one should approach the lone, awful magnificence of the Godhead. However high a creature might be lifted in honor or power or glory, the Infinite must ever be at an infinite remove above and beyond any creature however exalted. It was Gentile speculation out of which the idea of the deity of Jesus sprang. It never could have entered the Hebrew mind.

The next step is the identification of Jesus with the logos. And what was the logos? We find the logos in Plato as one of his speculations; we find it in Philo of Alexandria as one of his speculations. That is, the logos played a very important part in the theological ideas of the world long before the Gospel of John was written, in which it is declared that Jesus was the word, our English word being simply the translation of the Greek word logos. The logos in this old speculation played this part: God, the Infinite, removed from the thought, from the knowledge of man, could not be approached, could not be known. Any thinking about him must be false and imperfect thinking, because the finite cannot think correctly of the Infinite. The Hebrews went so far as never to speak his name, thinking it a profanation to attempt to utter it. Philo went so far as to say that any words spoken about the infinite God must be so far wrong that silence was the only reverent religious attitude. The logos then came into speculative thought as a means of revelation. It was God's word, God's utterance, God's manifestation to man, so that the Infinite and the Unknowable might be brought into relations with finite creatures. This logos, then, existed long before the Gospel of John. But after a time in Christian speculation they began to say that Jesus

But,

was the logos, that he was the incarnation of this word. you will see and I wish you to note this that this is far, far away from any doctrine of the Trinity, any identification of Jesus with God. God might send the first-born of every creature, send an angel, send any being he pleased as his messenger, his manifestation, the utterance of himself to the world; and yet he should be different from God.

By and by, after the conflicts of ages, Jesus became “the only begotten son" of the Nicene Creed. But the Nicene Creed, which was formulated in the year 325,- that is, in the first part of the fourth century,- was not properly Trinitarian. Jesus was exalted to be the one only begotten son of God; but there was no Trinity yet. Later, in the Athanasian Creed as it is called, but which is nobody knows how many years older than the time of Athanasius, and which Athanasius himself did not write, in that creed we find the full blossomed doctrine of the Trinity, three personalities, each eternal, all equal, all having the same Godhead, the same power, the same glory, all to be equally worshipped. But the progress of human thought in answering the question, "What think ye of Christ?" was not through even then. Jesus became lifted up as pre-eminently the only known God, and the judge, the terrible judge, of all the earth. So terrible did he become, so far removed from human sympathy, from the sympathy of those with whom he used to walk the earth here, that Mary is seized upon by the tender needs of the human heart; and she herself is made divine, and lifted into the heavens, that she may stand with her woman's heart and woman's tears, pleading with her own son on behalf of poor, weak, sinful humanity.

Then he becomes not only this, but throughout the Middle Age he ceased to be the one to imitate, almost ceased, perhaps I would better say, to be the one to love, the one to obey. He is the mighty king, the leader of the carnal, rich, selfish, dominant, tyrannical Church on earth. He is the one in whose name Jew, Moor, and Saracen are to be hated and put to death, the one in whose name the rack and

the thumb-screw and the fagot and all the tortures of the Inquisition are to be brought into play to crush the right to think or to have an opinion. He becomes the horror, the tyrant, the bugbear, of the world; and in his name thousands and thousands are tortured and slain, perhaps more than in the name of any other man who ever lived.

Now I wish to note—and I must do it only in a word the part he has played in Protestant theology. Here, again, the question, "What think ye of Christ?" is the great question. God has been supposed to be angry, and to be willing to forgive men only through the infinite sorrows and sacrifices and death of Christ. A great governmental scheme has been maintained that God was not able to forgive people only, as the theologians said, when justice had been satisfied, when some one had suffered as much as humanity would have suffered in the torments of hell throughout all eternity; and the terms of this were supposed to be accomplished in the death and torture of an infinite being.

As the age softened, under the teaching of men like Dr. Bushnell, they began to have a different thought about Christ. He was the manifestation of God's justice and love. He invites the world to be reconciled to God. Now, on the part of those who are called liberal in the old churches another grand stride has been taken toward the point that we occupy. Jesus, according to Dr. Lyman Abbott, I speak of him as a typical example,- is a revelation to the world of the divine love, who comes to tell us what God is, to show to us what we are ourselves. He manifests the divine love, he is our brother, our spiritual leader and helper; and Dr. Abbott tells us that he is of precisely the same nature as we are, because we are of precisely the same nature as God. He says there is no difference between God and Jesus and man except a difference of degree. Man is God minus infinity: God is man plus infinity. Jesus is only a man with so much of the divine in him as a man is capable of holding and manifesting.

Now I will answer briefly the question, as though addressed