A word about the nature of that Hope which nestled in the Apostles' hearts must end my book. If their Master doubted, whether, when He should come at the last, “He should find Faith upon the [pg 471] earth;” what, it may be asked, could this Hope of the Apostles have been? Now, that these words of Christ were not spoken in despondency is clear enough for many reasons, but this one reason, that they caused no despondency to the hearers would, to my mind, be sufficient of itself.
What this saying tells us is, that we are not to look for Christ's Kingdom in the shape of a perfected community existing at the last upon the earth. Science and observation seem to point in the same way. Men are never so selfish and so regardless of others as when they are pushing for place in a crowd. Now this globe can only yield food for a time, it must be exhausted of its stores, and even, it would seem, of its reproductive powers, at last; and a half-regenerated humanity would be apt to degenerate back again when they were struggling for standing room and for bread.
To take another point; though science has not settled the future of this planet of ours, yet opinion leans greatly towards our system's having an end. But, if we accept Christ's teaching, Man need not come to an end together with the fabric of the world. The earth is only the spot upon which he is reared and put to proof. Those who come out of the trial we believe to be removed, perhaps after an interval, to another kind of life elsewhere; so that, though this outer fabric of the world may perish, Man, we may believe, will survive, not in a material but in “a spiritual [pg 472] body”[347] whose nature of course we cannot know. Thus the Human episode in the great Epic of Existence, may, as far as life upon this planet goes, come to an end, but the Humanity for which the Christian labours and for which Christ died, will exist for ever; for the Spirits of just men made perfect will have been garnered from age to age into abodes prepared for them from the first. And though Christ, in His wisdom, be sparing of utterances about that which is winnowed away, yet there are not wanting analogies justifying hope.
The education of human souls to fitness for everlasting spiritual life, is of all God's purposes the one which we can most continuously discern. No reign of peace and bliss upon this earth could be of indefinite continuance; a perfected Humanity could only endure for a time. Consequently, if we limit our Love to a Humanity visibly existing on the earth, we give up our hearts to something which must necessarily come to an end: if we make a Deity of this we shall serve but a temporary God. But—although the earth should be calcined to powder, or fly off into regions of space where the temperature is fatal to life—still that Humanity which has the Son of Man for its central and presiding figure may abide with Him for ever, in some of the many mansions of His Father's House.
Chronological Appendix.
It will be of service to readers to have a summary of the actions and movements of our Lord, in the order in which they are treated of in the Text. Few of the dates can be fixed with any certitude and it remains a matter of opinion in what order many of the events occurred. The only dates which can be historically determined are those of the death of Herod, and of the beginning (a.d. 25) and end (a.d. 36) of the Governorship of Pilate; with these latter I am not now concerned. When St Luke names the fifteenth year of Tiberius (a.d. 28, a.u.c. 781 beginning on August 19), it is not quite certain whether he means to fix the time when John began to preach, or when Jesus was baptised, or when John was cast into prison. The grounds for fixing the dates of our Lord's birth, His appearance in public, and the duration of His Ministry are given in Tischendorf's “Synopsis Evangelica.” I assume, as sufficiently admitted for my working hypothesis, (1) that our Lord was born early in the year b.c. 4, a.u.c. 750, In which, shortly before the passover, as we learn from Josephus, Herod the Great died; and also (2) that the Baptism of our Lord took place in the very beginning of a.d. 28.
I propose to exhibit the order of events, taken month by month, as I suppose them to have occurred. In the greater number of cases I am supported by the authority of Dr Edersheim in his work on the “Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,” and also frequently by Bishop Ellicott, from the Notes to whose Historical Lectures on the Life of our Lord, delivered 1860, I have obtained much help in forming this Appendix.
a.d. 28. January. a.u.c. 781.