familiar conception, but to the Eleven, so far as they understood it, it was the crowning revelation of the Lord's teaching. Not only did it give to the rite of Baptism a meaning which was then entirely new, and which transformed a ceremonial purification into the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, but it gathered up into a single sentence the whole theology of the ministry, and thus laid the basis of the Christian creed as well as of the Christian life. In the Lord's earlier sayings we hear much of the Father; much also, in the fourth Gospel at least, of the Son;2 something again, but this also chiefly in S. John, of the Holy Spirit; but the Three are not named in the same breath, or in close association, except in the last discourse, where it is said that the Father will send the Spirit in the name of Jesus Christ, or that Jesus Christ will send the Spirit from the Father; and there it is matter of inference rather than of direct teaching, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are related in any such manner, that they could be represented as claiming equally and together the whole service of man. It is certainly surprising to find in the first Gospel such an anticipation of the later doctrine of the Holy Trinity; we should have expected it, if anywhere, 2 Cf. however Mt. xi. 27, xxiv. 36.

1 Tit. iii. 5.

3 Jo. xiv. 16 f., 26; xv. 26.

in the fourth. There are, therefore, scholars of undoubted orthodoxy, who suggest that in reporting this saying of the risen Christ S. Matthew has perhaps unconsciously substituted the familiar phraseology of his own generation for the actual words of the Lord.1 But what reason is there

to suppose that the phraseology was familiar at the time when the editor of the first Gospel wrote ? Certainly the actual form of words is not found elsewhere in the New Testament, or in other Christian writings of the first century.2 On the other hand, there are trinitarian passages in the earliest Christian literature which are not easily to be explained, unless we may suppose that the Lord Himself had associated the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in some saying attributed to Him by the tradition of the first generation. Nor can it be held that the saying in Matt. xxviii. 19, is either beyond the competence of the risen Christ to utter, or inconsistent with any of His earlier sayings; on the contrary, it forms a magnificent

3

summary of all His scattered teaching about the Father, the Spirit, and His own relations to

1 The Dean of Westminster seems to incline to this view in Encyclop. Bibl. art. 'Baptism'; and see W. C. Allen, S. Matthew, p. 307.

2 The nearest approach to it, in the received text of 1 Jo. v. 7, is now acknowledged on all hands to be an interpolation.

3e.g. 2 Cor. xiii. 14; Eph. iv. 4, 5; 1 Pet. i. 2; Rev. i. 4, 5; Clem, R, Cor. 46. 6,

.

both. The Lord does not, indeed, in this summary, deliver a dogma to be preached; He communicates a life rather than a creed-a life of fellowship, of consecration, of Divine fulness and strength. Yet, incidentally, His words become a revelation of the nature of God. Our life and our faith are so closely connected that the saying which illuminates the one has become the foundation of the other. All creeds are based on the baptismal words: 'We must believe as we have been baptized.' One fruitful word from the lips of the risen Christ has at once restored to man the life of union with God, and revealed the innermost Being of Him into whose fellowship it admits us.

, 1

The appendix to S. Mark presents the whole of these instructions in a different and probably much later and less accurate form. According to the writer of Mark xvi. 9-20 the Lord said, apparently on this occasion of the meeting among the hills, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned. There is nothing here which is not consistent with S. Matthew's version of the story, or with the general teaching of the New

iS. Basil, Ep. ii. 22 δεῖ ἡμᾶς βαπτίζεσθαι μὲν ὡς παρελάβομεν, πιστεύειν δὲ ὡς βαπτιζόμεθα.

2 πάσῃ τῇ κτίσει.

ὁ δὲ ἀπιστήσας κατακριθήσεται,

Testament. That Baptism is 'generally necessary to salvation' is taught in genuine writings of the early Apostolic age;1 whilst disbelief in Jesus Christ is held to be in itself the surest condemnation of the moral state of a man who, having seen the true light, turns from it. Nevertheless

2

the passage in caution; the words which the writer has added to the Matthaean saying may be merely an inference, although a just inference, from the original tradition, and not an actual part of the saying of Christ.

Mark must be used with

To Baptism the Lord adds another not less necessary part of the process by which the nations of the world are to be made His disciples. Disciple all the nations teaching them to keep all things whatsoever I enjoined upon you. Instruction is to follow baptism, and the instruction of the baptized is to be based on the teaching which the Twelve had themselves received. At first sight this direction seems to contradict the teaching of the last discourse (Jo. xiv.-xvi.); for does not the discourse represent the earlier teaching as elementary and preparatory, and the teaching of the Spirit as that upon which the Apostles were to rely in the time to come? When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth; 1e.g. Acts ii. 38, 40 f., 47; Tit. iii. 5: 1 Pet. iii. 21. 2 Jo. iii. 18 ff., 36.

he shall teach you all things. Yes, but to the words last quoted the Lord immediately adds: and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you. The work of the Spirit was not to supersede the teaching of Jesus, but to interpret and continue it. The Lord's commands, as given to the Apostles and first disciples, and by them transmitted through the Gospels to the Church, remain the basis of Christian living; to keep His commandments is and must ever be the first proof of true discipleship.2 The Spirit has indeed, in the experience of the Church, guided men into manifold ways of fulfilling the Lord's commands; but no principle of action which was laid down by Him has become obsolete or untenable. It is significant of the prominence which belongs to the moral teaching of Jesus that our own age, though ready at times to set aside the teaching of S. Paul or S. John, holds fast by the Sermon on the Mount. Many who regard the Christianity of the Churches as evanescent claim a foremost place in the religion of the future for the Christianity which they suppose to have been taught by Jesus Christ. The Churches may learn from such adversaries; they remind us that our first duty to the world which we desire to baptize into Christ is to enforce by word and 1Jo. xvi. 13, xiv. 26. 2 Jo. xiv. 15, 21, 23.