public mind a sufficient amount of Messianic sentiment to make this announcement attract attention and excite enthusiasm. At first everyone would interpret it according to his own ideas of the expected kingdom; and so the rumour of the preaching of John and Jesus rang through the land, and all men were in expectation as to the shape in which the promised kingdom would appear.
As soon, however, as Jesus began to explain Himself, it became manifest that the majority of His countrymen and He were expecting the fulfilment of the promise in totally different forms. Both employed the same phrase — " the kingdom of God " — but His countrymen laid the emphasis on the first half of it — "the kingdom" — while He laid it on the second — "of God." They were thinking of the external benefits and glories of a kingdom, such as political emancipation, a throne, a court, a capital and tributary provinces, while He was thinking of the character of the subjects of the anticipated realm and of the doing in it of the will of God as it is done in heaven.
Browning, in the opening pages of The Ring and the Book, compares the poet's art to that of the goldsmith, who, when he is working with the finest gold, has to make use of an alloy, in order to give the precious metal sufficient consistency to enable it to stand the action of his tools and assume the shapes which he desires. But, when the form is complete, he applies an acid, which evaporates the alloy and leaves nothing but the pure gold of the perfect ring. The popular conception of the kingdom of God was the alloy with which Jesus had to mix His teaching, in order to make it fit to mingle with the actual life of the world of His day. Without it His thought would have been too ethereal and too remote from the living hopes of men. He had to take men where He found them, and lead them step by step to the full appreciation of His sublime purpose for the world. He was not to be the king of the Jews, but King of an infinitely diviner realm ; yet it was by aiming at the throne which He missed that He reached the throne which He now occupies.1
2. Again, His sorrow was the clue to His loneliness. See Him looking from afar over the city of David, the home of His race, the centre of its history and of its religion, the city and the temple that He loved. His soul is melted to tears, as He thinks of her bygone works and of the destiny that awaits her.
1 J. Stalker, The Christology of Jems, 146, 163.
170 THE PERFECTION OF SORROW
"How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! " Eejected in Galilee, despised in Jerusalem, He stands of all men the Man of Sorrows. He had friends and followers, it is true, who had left all to be His disciples. Yet even here He knew the sorrow of contact with egotism, self-interest, perversity of understanding, unbelief, even treachery. How many of those who thronged Him sought Him not for His own sake, not for love of Him, but for the loaves and the fishes ! And He knew it. His closest companions were occupied with hopes and ambitions which centred in an earthly and visible kingdom. Yet these were the men to whom His soul turned at a time when many forsook Him, yearning for the solace of human sympathy, with the pathetic appeal: "Will ye also go away?" At last, the time came when all forsook Him and fled. Alone, hated of men, forsaken and betrayed, He went to His bitter passion and death, the death of the cross. Over much of His life that cross had cast its dark shadow. He knew that the path He was treading led to Calvary, and " he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem." Even in the hour of that mystic glorifying, when He talked on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, what He spoke of was " his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." That certainty was all along present to His mind. And then the anticipated hour came at last, the hour of darkness and of the transient triumph of the powers of evil, the hour of betrayal, of mocking, of torture, of bodily ex- haustion, of spiritual depression, when God Himself seemed to have forsaken Him, the hour of supreme anguish and of death.
^| The severest of all the limitations of Jesus lay in the isolation of His life, both actual and spiritual. It is recorded that He was homeless, but the absence of a dwelling-place — sufficient privation in itself — was a symbol of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual homelessness such as, in its last rigours, passes our comprehension. No man has ever been so lonely as was Jesus. None has ever experienced so entire a disappointment of the social instinct. It is true that He had the attachment of His disciples, but these men were inaccessible to the ideas and motives which formed His constant theme. With infinite patience He strove to make them partakers of what was the inspiration of His own life, but to the close they misunderstood Him.